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As someone who remembers E making the rounds among the BSD and Linux users in my college dorm when it first came out, there's no way he's only 21 if he was a baby in the late '90s.

GP means that 25 years ago, it was definitely not lightweight compared to many of the alternatives (GNOME and KDE being notable exceptions; I wouldn't have called them "light" back then either). Toady it's certainly light.

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.

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

E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.

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.

You can always fork it if you don’t like the choices they make

That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source

There are forks though. The only version i don't think that has a fork is GNOME 1 but... the code is out there (and there is an actively maintained GTK1-based toolkit that was posted here not too long ago, though you may need to make some modifications to the GNOME 1 code to work with it as IIRC it isn't backwards compatible).

People made CDE to work on modern systems and IIRC CDE wasn't even compatible with Linux when the code was first released.

But you can also use MATE still to this day, or even Cinnamon.

Hey! Someone sneaked into my brain and wrote down my exact comment!

Eh, there are two competing drives occurring here.

Back in the day before security was the biggest driver of updating software most people stayed a version or two back to ensure they weren't getting the last corruption bug of the day or whatever other insect was coded in.

But modern internet connected systems have pushed customers into more of an issue. It switched from, stay a version behind to see what bugs are there to, if you don't update now you're going to get hacked.

So this is the situation at hand.

If you don't update you're going to get hacked.

If you update you're going to get hacked.

I think the author meant that she was just trying to work on her slides, and was hoping that by quitting/restarting, the bug would temporarily go away, so she could continue working on what she actually wanted to work on, and not go down a debugging rabbit hole.

Certainly the determinism made it easier to fix, but the determinism also meant that she had to stop what she was doing and fix it right now, which is... "sadly".

Sadly as in "Oh dear, I better start debugging this" I think.

it’s not a valid enlightenment screenshot without a digital blasphemy wallpaper.

(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)

I remember fondly of a raster talk at FOSDEM about 20 years ago: playing videos inside a terminal. Amazing!

> 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!

Yeah, I got introduced to it via some friends that were former Amiga users.

MacOS definitely lets you put the dock wherever you prefer.

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.

Oh man, that takes me back.

shell=C:\LiteStep\litestep.exe

> At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.

I used (and still use) Window Maker for almost a decade before learning what NeXTSTEP actually was (i heard about the name occasionally but never looked into it), then for several years before even trying one. I remember having a heavy sense of uncanny valley because the thing in front of me looked almost exactly like what i was using for years but it behaved in very odd ways (and lacked most of the window management features i came to expect) :-P. It made me realize what people who were used to Mac OS X felt when they tried the various Aqua GNOME/KDE themes that were popular on Linux desktops some years 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.

> 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?

The dbus requirement is a hard pass from me.

Same for me. Slackware (I guess 4.0) and E16 was my first proper Linux installation. Learned so much during that time.

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.

Thank you for all your work on e, still my daily driver after all these years