Yet another Hacker News

Enlightenment 0.28 Released with Many Improvements

25 points mikece 2 hours ago 12 comments

Kevin_Flynn 2 hours ago | parent

Nice to see this project moving forward.

Enlightment is the most complete ( although not complete ) UI ecosystem in C that I've seen.

LeFantome 1 hour ago | parent

More than GNOME?

Kevin_Flynn 1 hour ago | parent

You got me there.

I forgot about GNOME/gtk+

Which is odd, because I've written a bit of gtk 3 code.

I don't know, I don't want to say anything negative, only that I'm looking forward to using enlightenment again. :|

Much like physicists who spend their careers searching for a "grand unified theory of everything," I'm a software engineer searching for the UI toolkit that runs on everything.

I wanted it to be enlightenment, way back in the day,

Before becomming enthralled with the widgets of gtk,

Gave both IUP and Agar a try, but much to my dismay,

There were quirks to be found, so I tossed them away.

TFNA 6 minutes ago | parent

Yet not without its detractors. I still remember this brutal roast of its C API from over a decade ago.[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150308153847/http://what.theda...

sgt 1 hour ago | parent

In the late 90s our desktops on Linux literally looked like this [1]. Of course, that seems to have become lost to history. I bet E is still themable but you have to go back to 1999 when it was super exciting.

[1] https://i.redd.it/fravza9fzie31.jpg

(In fact, it's kind of funny and sad that the state of the Linux desktop and the ambition level hasn't really changed much in 25 years)

I_am_tiberius 38 minutes ago | parent

> the Linux desktop and the ambition level hasn't really changed much in 25 years

I find that totally wrong. Look at niri - I can imagine MS and Apple will introduce scrollable wm features in the coming years.

kergonath 16 minutes ago | parent

Strong Kaleidoscope vibes. I love it!

onli 10 minutes ago | parent

Sadly enlightenment broke backwards compatibility with old themes so often basically nothing works anymore. You have to search for themes specifically made for the new versions, of which there are very few.

Quite a problem since the default theme (of the prior version at least) was a mess.

Dwedit 46 minutes ago | parent

Funny how Enlightment was "too heavyweight" at the time it was released, and is now considered lightweight.

Gualdrapo 40 minutes ago | parent

Day #1277 of wishing xfce rewrited all their stuff in the E libraries so they and Enlightenment did a dragon-ball-style fusion and became the one lightweight desktop environment to rule them all.

xenospn 19 minutes ago | parent

I remember trying to compile it on my 486DX2 with 16MB of ram. I ran out of swap at some point.

steelframe 6 minutes ago | parent

Totally. I don't even know why we're still talking about that obscene glob of bloatware. Now excuse me while I get back to hacking up some Lisp in ed on my 80x25 text console.