Hi lemmy So i was curious why Enlightenment didn’t recieve much adoption in the Linux Desktop. (especially for a fully featured lightweight wayland DE)
Ik Bodhi Linux uses Enlightenment, but it’s more of Moksha rather then using Enlightenment

Cause

  • Lighter then LXQT
  • Somewhat customizable

But I can see people not liking it cause.

  • the ui(especially for windows users)
  • Hard to find themes due to it using its own toolkit
  • Libra00 ( Libra@lemmy.ml ) English
    23·
    1 year ago

    Enlightenment has been around for decades, and it was quite a bit more popular in its early days because things like KDE/Gnome/etc weren’t the de facto DEs pretty much everyone used like they are now. I used it back when I had a linux box like 25 years ago and it was great, it was very slick and pretty, but now so much is written for KDE/Gnome that it feels like using anything else is just asking for trouble.

    • Mwa ( Mwa@thelemmy.club ) OPEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      alr thank you this makes soo much sense Now

      KDE/Gnome that it feels like using anything else is just asking for trouble.

      I agree espically for stuff like Good Wayland Support,VRR,etc

    • nixFREAK ( nixfreak@sopuli.xyz ) 
      4·
      1 year ago

      Just look at Tizan from Samsung all built on EFL (enlightenment foundation libs), EFL does not have many bindings with other languages and it’s “100% written in C”. The enlightenment OS is super customizable and written in its own component library based on OpenGL they call EGL. It’s a fantastic WM and hopefully Wayland version gets better.

      • Libra00 ( Libra@lemmy.ml ) English
        2·
        1 year ago

        Not disputing that it’s good, it’s just so much stuff is built to work with KDE or Gnome that I think you’d miss out on using E.

    • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) English
      5·
      1 year ago

      I mean, to my knowledge, it’s still Rasterman keeping most of the development together. You don’t need a ton of adoption when one guy tirelessly works on it.

      Although I’m guessing Samsung probably sponsors him, so that’s probably quite crucial for him to be able to put that much time into it.

    • jherazob ( jherazob@beehaw.org ) English
      3·
      1 year ago

      As someone who loved it, this was it. We waited forever for the next release which promised a full desktop environment, it never happened, we moved on to stuff that actually existed. I understand there IS ongoing development and even forks, but i frankly have no idea how is it these days. If i found out you can just apt-get a full E-based DE tomorrow i would definitely consider dedicating time to test it, specially if it’s still considered to be among the lightest, because man, when it was at it’s best it was very much the promise of a Hollywood Hacker style desktop, it was awesome and you could do nearly everything on the keyboard, plus it had a gazillion themes.

  • mmmm ( mmmm@sopuli.xyz ) 
    5·
    1 year ago

    My bet is that this happened because they do develop both the Enlightenment desktop and the E libraries, which is a tremendous amount of work. Add to that that if they are a small team, they’re not going to go relatively fast (afaik E17 took years…). Maybe it was the reason GNOME/GTK(+) and KDE (which began with an already developed GUI library) caught up.

    But as I always say in this kind of posts, both Enlightenment and E are amazing and I so wish they were more rich featured and popular and, if I were the XFCE mouse and got fed up with the bullshit of the GNOME-ization/libadwaita-zion of GTK, I’d consider porting all my shit to E - it would be awesome if those two merged into one. GTK and E are both written in C, XFCE has a robust set of apps and a seemingly bigger team behind it…

  • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) English
    5·
    1 year ago

    I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

    But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

    For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

    Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

    And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 ( sxan@midwest.social ) 
      3·
      1 year ago

      If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too.

      I used it for a while trying to wean myself off NetworkManager, which has a lot of optional dependencies that distributions tend to link in. So, you don’t want Gnome on your system, but you want NM? Too bad, you got Gnome.

      Anyway, connman is pretty fussy and not very intuitive. I think it’s better for systems that are always on the same network; it’s a pain to travel and connect to open networks with.

    • Patch ( Patch@feddit.uk ) 
      3·
      1 year ago

      I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is.

      Maybe a controversial opinion here, but the one thing that everyone says about it is that it looks gorgeous, and I really don’t see it. Never have.

      Even back when I first tried it out, maybe 15 years ago, I thought it looked strangely retro. Nowadays, compared to the eye candy that is completely standard in GNOME, KDE, MacOS, Windows etc., it looks incredibly dated.

      It’s all hard edges, low res icons, ugly fonts, and eccentric design choices. Yeah, it can make window elements transparent, but you can’t dine out on that one trick for ever.

    • MonkderVierte ( MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ) 
      2·
      1 year ago

      I vastly prefer connman/iwd, always had weird issues with NM. Currently running connman-gtk on XFCE.

      And tweaking to your needs, isn’t that expected for a new desktop setup? One hour isn’t even that much.
      I’m amazed again and again how stuck even technical people can be in their habits.

      • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) English
        3·
        1 year ago

        Well, it didn’t feel like I’m tweaking to my needs (that came afterwards on top), it rather felt like I’m just undoing design decisions that someone made to cater to their specific needs.

        And I named the time mainly to give an idea of how much there was to tweak. My main problems were:

        • That I could not undo some of those unusual design decisions.
        • That it doesn’t exactly make the system more robust when you need lots of non-default settings.
    • dil ( dil@lemmy.zip ) 
      1·
      1 year ago

      pip? Gnome extension for that is pretty great, works like the browser pip but for any window, justa video you can’t click on, but useful for stremio and other stuff you need a preview of, still high quality

      • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) English
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, that was just kind of one example to illustrate that it isn’t just a static screenshot, you actually see what’s going on in real-time. It’s also useful when you’re running a longer operation, like OS updates or encoding a video, and want to see when it’s done or that it hasn’t failed. You can just tell when the command output has stopped moving or a popup has appeared…

        But thanks for the recommendation anyways!

  • pedz ( pedz@lemmy.ca ) 
    3·
    1 year ago

    I was using E16 years ago and liked it but eventually switched to Gnome (2, I think), after waiting for E17 for too long.

    What made me quit was the wait. All the other DEs at the time were releasing new versions frequently but Enlightenment took forever.

  • wewbull ( wewbull@feddit.uk ) English
    2·
    1 year ago

    When it was first developed it was too heavyweight and too customisable. The effort needed to theme it was huge and a lot of the popular themes were poor from a UX point of view.

    Still E16 was usable, and then the development of E17 started about 24 years ago. People are still on E16 you say?