E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
I still use Windowmaker in places like VNC desktops where GDM gets grumpy and breaks a lot of the functionality. It also works much better over X displays on high latency networks like the Internet, where it is using the X drawing primitives as intended instead of constantly doing client side rendering and blitting the results over.
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised
that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation
at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3
but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated
smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix
bugs must also be small.
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
To put a finer point on it: running bleeding edge does not just now have implications of a greater attack surface, it always has had such implications.
It's just that a tiny fragment of people are suddenly becoming aware of this fact (the masses always remain clueless), whereas others have known it for some time. These people are referred to as "crazy tinfoil hat nutters."
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] threadI wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just That was confusing me a bit.My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
Coincidence, or collateral hug?
The documentation is there: https://www.enlightenment.org/contrib/enlightenment-debug
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
It's just that a tiny fragment of people are suddenly becoming aware of this fact (the masses always remain clueless), whereas others have known it for some time. These people are referred to as "crazy tinfoil hat nutters."