Call for Questions: Rasterman, Founder of the Enlightenment Project 124
Since before all other
interfaces, Enlightenment has been making computers look and feel like
they're from the future. On December 21, the decade long effort to
rewrite Enlightenment will see
the first officially stable release. With e17 a few days away, project
founder and master of X11 graphics hacking Carsten Haitzler (the Rasterman)
has agreed to answer your questions. Ask as many questions as you
like, but only one
per post please.
What keeps you motivated (Score:2, Interesting)
What keeps you motivated? You had a long release cycle, a few dubious quality releases, all the while an abysmally small fraction of linux machines actually run your software.
Who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
Enlightenment is always "about" to achieve something great but it never quite manages to actually do it. Why should I care about a point release of a WM that will probably be obsolete by the time its finished?
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I thought it was pretty damn cool ... back in 1998.
Its interesting there's still cycles being spent on it. Good for them.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
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I never got it to work sensibly. And, yes, it looked like the distant future, but out of a cheesy eighties movie.
Like this: http://www.erat.org/files/bluesteel/screenshot.jpg [erat.org]
Perhaps what sank it was that it promoted ricer aesthetics [freewebs.com].
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I think Enlightenment is one of the nicest "alternative" desktops. Too bad it always seems to be one of the "alternative" ones instead of a default. It works very well with GNOME. Unfortunately I spent a bit too much time getting my "Enlightenome" environment set up, but it would make a slick default if more distros provided it.
Give the http://www.bodhilinux.com/ [bodhilinux.com] LiveCD a spin to see what it can do... I love the aesthetic (esp. the zenlike Japanese theme ... hard to get any more ricer than that!). U
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Give the http://www.bodhilinux.com/ [bodhilinux.com] LiveCD a spin to see what it can do... I love the aesthetic (esp. the zenlike Japanese theme ... hard to get any more ricer than that!). Unfortunately, like KNOPPIX LiveCD is a great showcase of KDE , it's not so smooth getting it running on a standard Debian- or Fedora- based distro without some finagling.
I know this isn't what you meant, but you appear to be conflating two different things. Let me clear this up. Yes, compiling/configuring E on pretty much any distro can be a pain.
NO, absolutely not is this true of installing and setting up Bodhi Linux [bodhilinux.com]. Installing and using Bodhi is a breeze. And they have the most welcoming community I've ever come across (take a look at my UID and realize I've never browsed /. on anything but Linux to put that in perspective)
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And, yes, it looked like the distant future, but out of a cheesy eighties movie.
Before anyone takes this knuckle dragger too seriously have a look [bodhilinux.com] at how beautiful E really is.
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Well, at least those desktop background PNGs are beautiful. What about the window manager?
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The good news is that E17 is not only pretty, it is very configurable. Which means, it can be very usable, or extremely tough, to use. It all depends on how its configured. Every keystroke, every mouse click (and mouse/key combos), even the behaviour when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, it can all be tweaked to behave in a large variety of ways. I maintain that E17 is one of the nicest WM systems to use, especially if you prefer to use the keyboard for most actions. That makes it better f
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Enlightenment / EFL is the window manager widget set for Tizen. Its likely to end up in a 100m+ devices.
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I don't think so. By 2015 we may be looking at 1b phones / yr, a majority of them on the low end. Samsung is already a huge player in the market.... 20m units for 5 years is not even very aggressive.
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I used .15 and .16 for quite a long time. Both were very stable and beautiful and worked very well.
Culture (Score:1)
Are you really a Rasterferian or a covert Vectoritron?
Re:Integrate Gnome-Shell philosophies to E please (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's inappropriate to bring up death penalty arguments in a technical thread, but do NOT remove settings from software I use.
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Muerte is the noun, death. You want the second person singular affirmative imperative of morir, which I think would be muere.
10 FOOT UI (Score:2)
Can we get a 10 FOOT UI? After setting up my first HTPC last week I'm really surprised no one has a 10 FOOT UI desktop. Yah KDE has the Notebook Plasma but its just not good.
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I'm going to say I don't really need a 10 foot UI but it would be nice with something a bit more like it than ordinary desktop UIs. Slightly larger widgets, text that defaults to a slightly larger size, just enough to make it easy to use from the couch. It's not that I can't see what's on the screen, it's that when I'm on the couch and I leave XBMC to check out some website or whatever I don't want to have to be as precise with the mouse as I am when I'm at my desktop machine.
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I was hoping http://kylo.tv/ [kylo.tv] Kylo browser would fix the browser issue for me but its pretty flaky on my Linux Mint 14 Mate HTPC. Opera Mobile looked but but that too was crashing and just didn't feel like debugging it.
Design philosophy (Score:5, Interesting)
As a longtime Enlightenment user (since 0.9 I think!) I have seen a lot of changes to it's look and feel over the years. Has your design philosphy changed over time or is it more a matter of changes in technology?
I keep seeings announcements for E17... (Score:3)
but my calendar doesn't say the April 1 yet, what gives?
In all seriousness, you've been working on e17 since you were what? 25? How did you go from "I want to make a window manager" to "Everyone is doing this horribly wrong and I'm tired of being everyone" at that age?
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No, look at the press-release carefully; it says that E will be released Dec 21st, 2012
They're just hoping the world ends before users are disappointed. That way they can go out on a high note.
File Manager (Score:1)
What can you say about e17 File Manager, one of the most undervalued assets of having a GUI?
The Future (Score:3, Interesting)
When KDE made their big transition from 3->4, most of the followup releases were on stability and minor improvements on the paradigm.
With E17, it seems that the amount of time taken was to ensure that the 'final' release of E17 would be bug free.
Assuming that E17 release is stable and solid, where do you see the enlightenment project going from here?
Tizen and EFL (Score:5, Interesting)
Your work at Samsung involves making EFL a great library for designing touch-based interfaces for use in a future Linux-based smartphone platform, presumably Tizen. But every time I've heard about Tizen in the press Samsung has made a big deal about HTML5 being the development platform. How do these two development platforms play together? Also can you provide any information about when we can expect to see the first Tizen phones hitting the US?
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Please mod this question up - I wanted to ask it also.
Usability vs beauty (Score:5, Interesting)
Your thoughts on usability vs beauty... Must they always be opposed?
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that almost never happens, and the question gets interesting when you start talking about the tradeoffs.
Will you be improving the artwork? (Score:4, Interesting)
Back when i first heard about enlightenment - late 90's early 00's it was totally the best looking Window Manager / UI around.
I've just checked out some screenshots from e17 and I can help but think it looks really dated. Enlightenment used to stand out from the crowd
but now it seems to lag behind in this department.
What will you be doing to ensure that the new Enlightenment will once again showcase how slick and awesome a Desktop UI can look?
N.
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Enlightenment was always best when used with a user-developed theme -- E was the ultimate theme-able WM before themes were really a "thing". The "default" themes were best considered examples of what you could do.
So assuming E17 didn't ditch the #1 best part of E, then the answer is -- as soon as someone makes a theme for it that matches your aesthetic sensibilities.
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Agreed completely. I had a half dozen themes I really loved in DR15/16 back when e.themes.org existed that made my desktop look incredible.
Also, Eterm.
Wayland? (Score:5, Interesting)
As one of the few non-minimal DE projects out there, what do you guys think of Wayland? From a leader's standpoint, is it relevant? From a designer standpoint, are you looking forward to working with a newer API? From a user standpoint, do you think it will be better enough than X to be justified?
Wayland? (Score:1)
How does Enlightenment relate to the Wayland replacement for x11?
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It doesn't?
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Wayland window manager are built in. Most of the Enlightenment code couldn't be used. On the other hand the EFL probably could be ported.
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From the FAQ:
KDE (Score:2, Interesting)
A long term project... (Score:4)
How difficult has it been to keep working on the Enlightenment environment all this time and has the opensource community been supportive?
Plan to move away from X11? (Score:1, Redundant)
compliment (Score:1)
no question but a compliment. You always made very fast and useable libraries, thanks.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think I can field this one. E17 was developed openly. Some people have been using it for years. The stable release is simply that--it's now considered feature-complete and solid enough to be a 1.0 release instead of a 0.x release.
Elementary & cross-platform (Score:1)
First off, congratulations on getting Enlightenment (nearly) out ! In this dark times of Gnome, KDE and Unity horrors, E17 and the EFL look like divine intervention :D
What I was wondering is, to what extent has Samsung involvement changed the project if at all ?
What can EFL offer me as a cross platform GUI-centric developer ? Is Android supported ? What about iOS \ iPhone ? I remember seeing some early attempts at getting the GUI tool kit - Elementary was it ? - to play nice under Windows. Was the w32 path
Meh? (Score:1, Funny)
After looking at the screenshots [enlightenment.org], I don't understand what the fuss is all about. If that's supposed to represent the future I need to remind you that we're in 2012.
From the screenshots, I'd say it looks a bit better than Windows 98, but not any better than current GUIs from all three major operating systems.
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I don't really care about how screenshots look like - most of that appearance can be changed to your liking with themes. What I care about is how it handles, how it can be tweaked to my workflow, so that it enables me to do my stuff and gets out of my way.
And that is something each user will have to determine for themselves, since it is very subjective.
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Bodhi Linux (the best E17 implementation IMHO) has a short video on their site: http://www.bodhilinux.com/ [bodhilinux.com]
Has fragmented licensing impacted adoption? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noted that while Enlightenment is BSD licensed, but some of the foundational libraries are licensed under *various* versions of the GPL. What gives? This would be confusing to most people who are looking to repackage E for use on various devices. Is there going to be a resolution for the licensing mess, or will development continue with multiple licenses that have to be negotiated by vendors and others interested in using this with their products? The issue isn't free beer vs free speech, the issue is how does one decide which license takes greatest precedence. Is the project going to go forward as GPLv3, v2, v1, or 2 clause BSD, or what?
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When GPL code is intermixed with BSD the rule is either:
a) Treat it all like GPL
b) Be very careful and don't be confused about what is being used where.
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There is no license mess.
The older libraries started by Rasterman and e17 are BSD 2-Clause licensed, newer libs started by other people (often working at Profusion) are LGPL-2.1 licensed.
This is very specific, it is NO GPL, only LGPL, and only one specific LGPL version.
So for any user of the libraries it has no impact on their code, for anyone contributing to the E libraries, you'll have to take a quick glance at the license file or documentation to determine if you're contributing under BSD-2 or LGPL-2.1.
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My apologies, you are correct in regard to the licensing versions. I went through and downloaded all of the available packages, opened them, and found that was the case.
My initial search was for the string "license" through Enlightenment's wiki's search tool, which brought up pretty much every GPL license version imaginable- however I did not vette my own results correctly, because items not part of their project were displaying results for GPLv3, etc.
That still leaves open the question of whether having p
Share the strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to know how you managed to convince Intel and Samsung to build yet another mobile framework on a technology that has been really difficult to use, and has a very small share of the UI framework "market?" Is it that Enlightenment is providing UIs of the future, or is everything better encumbered by their ownership or stakeholders?
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On one of my previous projects, I recall throwing a little party (in my own mind) the day I was finally able to eradicate the last "Q" from the codebase. Since then, I've sworn an oath to the universe to never again use a C++ library that has to have their own string class. It's almost 2013. If your C++ library doesn't play seamlessly with STL strings and containers, please do the world a favor and erase your repository.
Any things you would change? (Score:1)
I really like the way E does many things (I've been using e17 for almost 10yrs now), but was wondering if in hind-sight there are things you would rather change. E.g. perhaps sandboxing modules to prevent module issues affecting the WM generally; restarting pulseaudio will crash sound mixer module will cause E to have to restart.
Desktop trends (Score:3, Interesting)
ESD / PulseAudio / etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
When Enlightenment came out, it also included ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon. Window events could cause sounds, which was nice, but ESD was also a sound multiplexing and remote sound protocol that was way ahead of its time. Now, there are PulseAudio, Jack, Yiff, Phonon, etc. and many people say the whole thing's a big mess. What's your opinion on the current state of sound / mixing on Linux desktops.
eye candy and such (Score:2)
Biggest X11 design error ? (Score:4, Interesting)
You've done a lot of X programming, so as a user of that API, you must have strong opinions about it. What are the worst design decisions in X11? (The toughest things to get around/fix) What are the best? (Timesavers)
innovation (Score:2)
Do you think there is any substantially new feature to be added to desktop environments? In particular, do you think the desktop environment in 20 years will be different than those of today?
FOSDEM'13 ? (Score:1)
Book? (Score:2)
In the small-ish world of open-source & embedded graphics, toolkits, and SW / HW rendering implementors, there are few who have been at it as long and have such a breadth / depth of experience in so many areas as yourself.
As someone who has done a fair bit of searching for resources on the theory and practical design of such systems, I must say, that there are few books out there that concisely describe the "how" and "why" in a design-patterns kind of way tie in with immediately relevant topics (e.g. fb
Wayland (Score:1)
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Anything like Suspended Mode? (Score:1)
How does E17 relate to the KDE KWin Suspended Compositing? The benchmarks at phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210beta_desktops indicate it's very beneficial for games. Thanks!
Git (Score:1)
Re:Why does your website use unreadable blue text (Score:5, Informative)
Every now and then I check out the enlightenment.org website, because I want to see screenshots of it in action. /anywhere/ to the screenshots. /are/ screenshots on the website; they are here:
For some reason, I don't think there is a link
In case anyone else is interested, there
http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/
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*** SPANK SPANK SPANK!!!
Enlightenment server is over capacity
Please wait a moment and try again later.
For more information, take a look at #e.fr on Freenode.
Well, that's hardly a professional error page...
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Unfortunately, most of those screenshots look nothing like the default install. I just installed it on my Pi to see what it looked like, as it's been years since I ran it. It looks nice, but it's hard to get a good feel for what it's really like on such a weak system.
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You can enlighten yourself by googling. Of course, the question then becomes "what does Enlightenment bring that other desktops are lacking?" and "Why would having a desktop bigger than my monitor(s) be a good thing?"
Re: e16 wins (Score:1)