It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
ZoomZoomZoom 1 hours ago [-]
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
ho_schi 45 minutes ago [-]
I wonder about the sadly.
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
nickcw 44 minutes ago [-]
Sadly as in "Oh dear, I better start debugging this" I think.
sandos 10 minutes ago [-]
"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
wvh 1 hours ago [-]
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
avereveard 26 minutes ago [-]
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
unwind 4 hours ago [-]
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just
for (;;)
That was confusing me a bit.
isaacfrond 3 hours ago [-]
In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
mhd 1 hours ago [-]
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
pjmlp 34 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I got introduced to it via some friends that were former Amiga users.
pjc50 44 minutes ago [-]
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
pjmlp 35 minutes ago [-]
Win 11 has some niceties, however many of those could have been provided on Windows 10 as well, for example the security stuff like VBS and secured kernel were already available, even if disabled by default.
fragmede 14 minutes ago [-]
Oh man, that takes me back.
Shell=wmaker.exe
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
pjmlp 39 minutes ago [-]
Kind of similar story, eventually I ended up on GNOME, as I favoured Gtkmm over how KDE was at the time, but then GNOME 3.0 happened, and my travel netbook got migrated into Unity, and when it went away, XFCE.
Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.
zeruch 4 hours ago [-]
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
angled 3 hours ago [-]
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
dolmen 2 hours ago [-]
I remember fondly of a raster talk at FOSDEM about 20 years ago: playing videos inside a terminal. Amazing!
dspillett 51 minutes ago [-]
> tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!
sneak 36 minutes ago [-]
it’s not a valid enlightenment screenshot without a digital blasphemy wallpaper.
(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)
robinsonb5 1 hours ago [-]
It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.
sqbic 3 hours ago [-]
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
BozeWolf 4 hours ago [-]
I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
chriswarbo 43 minutes ago [-]
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
50 minutes ago [-]
mrweasel 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
drooopy 3 hours ago [-]
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
prmoustache 1 hours ago [-]
Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!
jhbadger 58 minutes ago [-]
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
ChrisGreenHeur 1 hours ago [-]
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
pjc50 46 minutes ago [-]
> because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows
As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.
The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.
It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?
ChrisGreenHeur 40 minutes ago [-]
eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
the gpu simply has buffers that it compsits, the cpu can do that as well. with the benefit of less complexity leading to not needing to worry about driver crashes.
on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
pjc50 35 minutes ago [-]
> eh, there is nothing a gpu can do here within the concept of composition that a cpu could not also do.
True, but which is more efficient?
> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.
madaxe_again 4 hours ago [-]
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
pjc50 41 minutes ago [-]
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
malux85 4 hours ago [-]
Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!
torh 4 hours ago [-]
Same for me. Slackware (I guess 4.0) and E16 was my first proper Linux installation. Learned so much during that time.
oldge 4 hours ago [-]
Same for me. He definitely contributed to my fondness and wonder of Linux back then.
madaxe_again 3 hours ago [-]
SuSE 5.1 for me, as it was what I could easily get the CD-ROMs for, as bandwidth was just a single 64k ISDN at school.
_3u10 4 hours ago [-]
I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised
that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation
at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3
but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated
smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix
bugs must also be small.
Rendered at 10:11:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Coincidence, or collateral hug?
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just That was confusing me a bit.The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!
(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.
The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.
It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?
True, but which is more efficient?
> on sane architectures its all the same ram anyway
Opinions differ. The main benefit of splitting RAM is not having to share the bus. As I said, this lets you use the CPU for CPU things without having to spend precious DRAM bandwidth shovelling pixels.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.