Like almost everyone here I only recall this DE/WM with nostalgia. It’s interesting to see how minimal it is now. It felt like the height of maximalism back then. And on very weak hardware had compositing.
I would say in the old days (2001-2002) it was more like a "minimax". It was maximal minimalist. It had really fancy visuals that worked on fairly slow hardware. I was blown away.
I was recently randomly thinking of Cyrix. I never had one but in retrospect I think they were better than their reputation. A lot of people thought of it as a cheap knock-off, so lesser quality. I think I thought that way until I got one of the earlier generations of AMD Athlon a few years later, in the 1 GHz era.
Remembering e17 makes me extremely nostalgic - in fact, if anyone has a screenshot of the clock circuit-board background with the working 7-segment clock on it, I'd be eternally grateful.
It was lovely to use in the very early days of amd64 as a window manager (along side gtk and kde libs). My absolute favourite was the virtual-desktop handling with multiple physical monitors in that you can switch between virtual desktops in a screen-independent way. Nothing else I've used has hit the same seamless ease.
i3 does this well. Switching to a virt. desktop on another screen switches to that screen by default but you can also move virtual desktops from screen to screen, e.g. "move this desktop with all windows to the screen to the right".
It should also be possible to configure a shortcut for "move desktop x to current screen". Personally, I find explicitly moving desktops more intuitive.
I remember when this came out. It was so cool to see all effects and nice graphics. I did not even know it still existed. Either way great work and nice to see it back.
This is the greatest window manager I never really used.
Back in the days it looked very futuristic, a lot of promises but in the end not really fit for daily driving purposes.
Came back quite a few times to it but never a real competitor.
That was always my experience as well. I commend the effort, but I have never been able to use it as a daily driver. Gave up like 10 years ago or more.
I started trying like 10 years ago , it looks good but never managed to get it to stable. But forgivable because all the WMs , including gnome (was stable at that time to some point) , and KDE , same as crash heavy as that .
But then KDE become stable so switch to it.
Then Last time i tried to give it a chance was 2022 STILL Same broken WM with looks good stuff and they are trying to build it like KDE at that point including multiple apps.
At that point Enlightenment no longer looks good , KDE had caught up all the compositor effects and looking cool , can configure as much as we want. Elightment at that point still crashy as hell and never looked back.
the screenshots make me want to fire it up, I miss linux UIs when the sun/BeOS influences were still apparent. " First off, we need a nice big clock, then we'll go from there."
Most of these were probably not very usable, but this feels a bit like all these winamp skins, passion obviously went into these things and that's freaking cool.
reply