Enlightenment (was Re: [NBLUG/talk] Mepis mini-mini review)

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Thu Mar 24 15:06:19 PST 2005


On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 02:54:50PM -0800, S. Saunders wrote:
> 
> > As for enlightenment, don't forget that it is lighter, and faster
> > than either KDE or Gnome. I've used it exclusively for about 18
> > months now on a modern full horsepowered desktop. Once you've
> > configured it for your needs, going back to KDE or Gnome feels
> > like having to crank start your car for every trip.
> 
> So, how long did you spend configuring?  I last *seriously* saw
> Enlightenment on a cow orker's desktop... some of the time.  A
> *lot* of the time (1-4 hours daily) he was "under the hood" --
> compiling, d/l'ing libraries, etc; or, tweaking the GUI settings.
> 
> He was *MONTHS* at the project of getting E working on his desktop,
> though IIRC that *did* include an OS-upgrade.
> 
> Frankly, I'm just not avid enough to go there...  For me, the whole
> appeal of *nix is that ol' "always works" schtick, and "always takes
> work" is kinda antithetical to that (not so bad as the BSOD & its
> "always crashes" paradigm, but that's another rant).
> 
> 
> - Steve S.
> 

For what it's worth, I've been using Enlightenment for years and years.
While when you first use it, the sheer number of options you find yourself
having that you didn't with other window managers might lead you to spend a
lot of time tweaking, that cools down. I find it's a lot like mutt or vim,
you mold it around your use, and apart from some small corrections here or
there, you just use it from that point on.

Recently, though, I've started looking at some other window managers,
specifically fluxbox, because it has started supporting fine-grained window
memory (so you can control specific settings such as geometry, desktop,
sticky state, etc. on a per-application basis). Unfortunately both fluxbox
and wmctrl (which I talk about here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6014) have a few bugs in their support of
Extended Window Manager Hints so I can't completely do all of the window
scripting with wmctrl that I can with eesh. Once that problem is patched
though (someone I know submitted a patch recently) I'll likely switch over
to it on all of my machines, instead of just a few, since the tabbed
windows is a nice feature.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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