Tetsuo Time

I was just reading something about Enlightement, specifically E17. Way back in the day it used to represent the bleeding edge of theming and with that came the fact that it took more resources than other UI's back then. Nowadays articles like at Wikipedia are saying that it's a desktop for those computers not fast enough for a "full DE" and they think it's about features without sacrificing speed. My how things have changed. Back in the day the feature list it had was considered overkill and bleeding edge and features over speed and perhaps even stability (they where developers releases for a reason). Also today you can get most of the effects and perhaps more in commercial operating systems. In my opinion E16 is stagnant.. not "focusing on speed*. It's just that computers have long since outstripped its resource demands.

Well anyway Rasterman was talking about working on E17 and getting it out the door. Along with that comes redoing the theming system and making a new default theme. I just wanted to say that I would like to see it get more of the features it lost like live screeshot desktop pagers, thumbnails for minimized windows... and it should also have features it never had like 32-bit borders for the windows. They have 32-bit for practically everything else. Not having it makes E seem out of date in my opinion. I would also like to see more of the old but with new graphics. It should have the ability to recreate all the old themes but with better high DPI, 32-bit, what have you graphics. It also needs OpenGL compositing perhaps by making use of compiz like beryl has. I mean.. it can't even overlap it's shadows over the windows as it is right now! I do like the newish bar they made though for docking plugins.

The focus may be on speed and portability now but I would like to see it come back to the glory it once had. That may be harder nowadays because of how everyone seems to be doing bling but it's still something I would like to see. Show me something that would make one long for it again and make me want to make desktops based on it. =P

The Linux GUI hasn't impressed me much lately. They need cleaner looking toolkits when it comes to layout. Like a lot of them have too many lines separating areas causing visual clutter... something that windows has suffered a lot of as well. Buttons and widgets are fine but I don't think it needs boxes containing other boxes containing other boxes... if you know what I mean. That and better skin metrics. A lot of the themes on there right now are ruined by bad skin metrics... not to mention bad fonts. I also don't like how they underline certain letters in the menubars\menus... that too is visual clutter in my opinion. That's one area where I generally praise Apple although I wish they would do more to support the themer.

Oh yeah I almost forgot about the Nintendo part. I just read that Nintendo has just ended support for repairing the NES recently. That's 24 years of support. Talk about dedication! I would have thought they ended support for the NES years ago.

I was just reading something about Enlightement, specifically E17. Way back in the day it used to represent the bleeding edge of theming and with that came the fact that it took more resources than other UI's back then. Nowadays articles like at Wikipedia are saying that it's a desktop for those computers not fast enough for a "full DE" and they think it's about features without sacrificing speed. My how things have changed. Back in the day the feature list it had was considered overkill and bleeding edge and features over speed and perhaps even stability (they where developers releases for a reason). Also today you can get most of the effects and perhaps more in commercial operating systems. In my opinion E16 is stagnant.. not "focusing on speed*. It's just that computers have long since outstripped its resource demands.

Well anyway Rasterman was talking about working on E17 and getting it out the door. Along with that comes redoing the theming system and making a new default theme. I just wanted to say that I would like to see it get more of the features it lost like live screeshot desktop pagers, thumbnails for minimized windows... and it should also have features it never had like 32-bit borders for the windows. They have 32-bit for practically everything else. Not having it makes E seem out of date in my opinion. I would also like to see more of the old but with new graphics. It should have the ability to recreate all the old themes but with better high DPI, 32-bit, what have you graphics. It also needs OpenGL compositing perhaps by making use of compiz like beryl has. I mean.. it can't even overlap it's shadows over the windows as it is right now! I do like the newish bar they made though for docking plugins.

The focus may be on speed and portability now but I would like to see it come back to the glory it once had. That may be harder nowadays because of how everyone seems to be doing bling but it's still something I would like to see. Show me something that would make one long for it again and make me want to make desktops based on it. =P

The Linux GUI hasn't impressed me much lately. They need cleaner looking toolkits when it comes to layout. Like a lot of them have too many lines separating areas causing visual clutter... something that windows has suffered a lot of as well. Buttons and widgets are fine but I don't think it needs boxes containing other boxes containing other boxes... if you know what I mean. That and better skin metrics. A lot of the themes on there right now are ruined by bad skin metrics... not to mention bad fonts. I also don't like how they underline certain letters in the menubars\menus... that too is visual clutter in my opinion. That's one area where I generally praise Apple although I wish they would do more to support the themer.

Oh yeah I almost forgot about the Nintendo part. I just read that Nintendo has just ended support for repairing the NES recently. That's 24 years of support. Talk about dedication! I would have thought they ended support for the NES years ago.

Here is a screenshot of what I am playing with right at this moment, Elive CD Linux with Enlightenment, Blueheart and matching Blueheart GTK2 and 1 theme and matching old Blueheart xmms skin since I can't find the newer one.

click here to view

It's old school goodness!

I tried out the Elive cd today. Those of you who know me the longest know that I used to be a big fan of the Enlightenment desktop on linux. Well thanks to Elive I was able to try it again after a couple of years having just tried it on Mandrake.

Well, the CD had issues. It tries to load the Linux 2.4 kernel which should be ok but on my PC it spat out a lot of errors and they set it up to load up a spanish keymap by default so I have to hit F3 or F4 during startup and put in options to boot with the Linux 2.7 kernel and with US as the language.

But there is a problem. It doesn't seem to support USB keyboards which is what I have my old keyboards are PS/2 but they are my families broken ones I really should throw away. So I'm unable to do much and I wasn't able to get it to load E17 only good ol' E16 that I used to try to emulate on Windows.

Since my mouse worked I did muck around a bit launching things and what not and I find that Enlightenment just doesn't have as much polish and solidness as Mac OS X has. They also have replaced the default theme "Brushed Metal" with a theme that has titlebars that sort of Ape Aqua a little but the titlebar buttons and rest of the theme are just so blah. I mean just look at it. What where they thinking? They need a theme to impress and show what E can do loading by default. Yeah I know you can easily change it but still an alternative desktop needs to make good first impressions.

Maybe if the next version of Elive has USB keyboard support I might be able to get it to load E17 which is the cutting edge E that I am wanting to try out.

Ok I got the keyboard to work and I found "Entrance" which is the E17 login window but no other thing of E17 that relates to it's desktop shell seemed to be present.