e16.8 is out!

[jhu]

ok it's a little old, but now it has its own composite manager. so far it seems better than using xcompmgr.

 

[jhu]

 

[sigs3gv]

Looks nice, but GIMP's GTK makes it look odd :disgust:

 

[Nothinman]

I still use E16 on both of my Linux workstations, but I'm a little surprised that anyone would spend time writing a composting manager for it instead of working on E17.

 

[jhu]

e17 is still pre-alpha. i've tried it, and it does work. e16 still seems a lot cleaner. plus, i don't really like all those .edj files.

 

[Nothinman]

Hell E16 is still alpha if you go by their release numbering and naming =)

 

[jhu]

yes, but it's more beta than e17. and now with built in compositing, i can throw away that crash-prone xcompmgr.

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Hell E16 is still alpha if you go by their release numbering and naming =)

Without marketting, version numbers mean nothing. Some high quality stuff is out there that will never hit 1.0...because versions aren't used to represent 'done-ness' for the whole of it, like commercial applications. OTOH, without goals for a version, many a great project stays in development indefinitely. KDE seems to have a mix of the two.

BTW, I really like E17. Never could get used to E16, mainly the draggable VWMs tended to be more annoying than useful.

 

[Nothinman]

Without marketting, version numbers mean nothing. Some high quality stuff is out there that will never hit 1.0...because versions aren't used to represent 'done-ness' for the whole of it, like commercial applications.

But even so, E is nowhere near complete. I'm not even sure if it could ever be complete, it was started as a project to teach the developers about X development, image processing, etc so there were never any official design goals that I know of.

BTW, I really like E17. Never could get used to E16, mainly the draggable VWMs tended to be more annoying than useful.

I never use them either, I just hit ALT+FX to switch desktops.

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Without marketting, version numbers mean nothing. Some high quality stuff is out there that will never hit 1.0...because versions aren't used to represent 'done-ness' for the whole of it, like commercial applications.

But even so, E is nowhere near complete. I'm not even sure if it could ever be complete, it was started as a project to teach the developers about X development, image processing, etc so there were never any official design goals that I know of.

E17 has some, but I dunno if 16 really did. E16, though, was definitely above the competition, and is good even now, in comparison.

However, a versioning system was made, and is being stuck to. My Windows shell has a version 0.24.7, and is 'final'. For tracking what's newer, it works well to keep up the versioning that it was using before. With non-open projects, or commercial open products, complete just means there were features they decided not to add. There are always new features, and a real open project allows them to be added on. So you could have it be complete by the initial dev team's definition, and still get worked on. One of the aspects that makes FOSS fantastic, and keeps it from being massively adopted--it's hard to get people who haven't been part of things that worked that way to understand it.

BTW, I really like E17. Never could get used to E16, mainly the draggable VWMs tended to be more annoying than useful.

I never use them either, I just hit ALT+FX to switch desktops.

I'm faster using the mouse for that sort of thing (I'll menus for web browsing, FI, but use keybaord shortcuts when text editing), except every now than then I'd drag the VWM around or shade it.

 

[Seeruk]

I love the elive cd's as a demo of what is possible... but as you say I never see a future for it as noone (in terms of bigger distros) seems to take it on to give it a platform and focus for development.

The closest I have come to usable and useful e17 environment is installing it within Ubuntu but it was flakier than Kellogs

 

[Nothinman]

I love the elive cd's as a demo of what is possible... but as you say I never see a future for it as noone (in terms of bigger distros) seems to take it on to give it a platform and focus for development.

Who cares if no bigger distros endorse it? E16 was the same way and it's good enough for people to use and still fix bugs 6 years later. E16 has lasted longer than any single Gnome or KDE release. =)

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
I love the elive cd's as a demo of what is possible... but as you say I never see a future for it as noone (in terms of bigger distros) seems to take it on to give it a platform and focus for development.

The closest I have come to usable and useful e17 environment is installing it within Ubuntu but it was flakier than Kellogs

AH, but see, there are plain old Debian, and Ubuntu, packages. Easy to use. Nobody pushes Fluxbox, either, and somehow it remains available for most major distros. IceWM, too...

I found the newer CVS versions to be a bit flakier than what the older Elive had, too (I never got it crashing, but some of the utils segfaulted a lot). It will get worked out. Remember than E17 is heavily under development, and will likely get released as 0.17.0 later this year. Also note that it is being made as something to last a long time, and it's very possible chunks of it will become part of Gnome or KDE's libraries, or even get put into X.