alt Hacker NewsWasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
Replies
People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y).
I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things.
And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.
> Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots
Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).
I actually use my riced setups. Part of a good rice (at least for me) is it being ergonomic and usable. It should, of course, look good
Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it.
Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time.
One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.
E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.
I used E17 for a while and the killer feature for me were independent virtual desktops accross monitors, meaning switching virtual desktop would only switch it on the monitor your focus was on.
I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.