Carsten "The Rasterman" Haitzler, the man behind Enlightenment (E), the extremely configurable window manager for X, speaks about the new, highly anticipated, version 0.17. Already more than a year of development, the new E, will not just be a window manager, but a desktop shell, battling for its place to our desktops, between KDE, Gnome and WindowMaker. The team developing E17 are using some technically interesting methods, while they assure us that speed will be present, plus a visually stunning GUI for the X Window System. Read on for the interview and 3 exclusive screenshots of E17.
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Claims of superior speed are very nice, and its good to see that it is so high on priorities list. But should not one first perform some comprehensive benchmarking in real life applications, before claiming that E17 is faster then everything else under the moon? Isn't that the kind of behaviour that is most hated in the way Microsoft conducts its bussiness ? Oh, yes I forget, Its E we are talking about, its different - no complaints here.
For me apps run as fast no matter what WM I use... KDE and Gnome slows apps up because they use alot of resources.. but I've never seen any remarkable diff btw WMs. For window operations E17 is the fastest I've seen. I'm on a PII 300, 160 mb ram, TNT2
Hardware acceleration in the GUI front provides many new exciting possibilities when it comes to GUI eye-candy© No longer will the CPU have to choke on high quality windowing graphics© As far as the previous speed-related comments are concerned, I think Enlightenment has a definent edge over every open-source x86 GUI system out there-- Even Windows© The Windows GUI is boring, uncustomizable, clumsy, constraining, and most definently not hardware accelerated© All-in-all, even comparing Enlightenment with commercially available OS/GUI systems, the Enlightenment team has created a program that rivals most GUIs in sheer technological coolness©
Hey Raster, will you be present in Brussel in february 2002 for next OSDEM. Last edition (in fact the first), you presented Evas and the amazing job you did. You may present us E17 ... if finished ;-)
Three cheers to Raster on a bloody good job. I have been using E16.5 and have tried it on a number of systems and it is still tops. Can't WAIT for E17 ...get it out there man... Linux South Africa is Alive and Waiting...
i've tried almost every window manager out there and ended up with blackbox because its the fastest. i've got an amd 700mhz but still... i like blackbox. i'm looking forward to trying out e17 though. the one thing i long for in e over the years is feature completion though. kinda drives me nuts when stuff is half finished. guess i shouldn't complain though since i never contribute....
My first linux GUI was E-15. I've been running E-16.x forever now, and it rocks! I've also been watching the development of E-17 through CVS, and I can vouch for the speed claims - it's lightning fast. This is both on my old TNT2 (yuck) and my new Radeon 64MB DDR. For those who haven't tried E-17 / Evas yet - there are 3 rendering methods: hardware accelerated rendering, software rendering, and basic X-11 rendering. All of these are quite impressive. Obviously hardware is best, but software on my 500Mhz Athlon pulls around 60 fps from memory! Crank on!
Sorry about that double-post. When I clicked 'submit comment', nothing seemed to happen. No flashing lights. No loading screen. So I clicked it again, and what do you know - there are 2 comments. Need some code to clear out the comment box after the 'submit comment' button is clicked...
we (people using XFree86) dont have a transparent window rendering protocol so none of this matters. i dont want fake alpha transparency. even with evas, you still cant render transparent windows. we wont have anything near osX till those people at XFree86 make us a transparent window protocol (which wont be for a LONG LONG time).
I think evas is quite revloutionary and an awesome library to have in linux, bsd. I think it has many great applications even though its intended to do a lot of work for e. I am currently trying to do some slpine and scrolling work with it, but evas just rules, one of the greatest features is its fallback capabilities. And about blackbox rules, if you want a limited window manager ok. You can't compare that to e, e does a lot more than draw simple gradients and rectangles... Why do I even bother responding to these posts... Peace
Thanks for the article Eugenia. =) To those wondering about "real benchmarks" - E17's evas component includes a test program for you to benchmark your own system. Download, compile, and see for yourself! The highest frame rates so far have been reported from users with XFree86v4 with nVidia drivers (on IA32 with an nVidia graphics card, obviously). Said frame rates have been well into the regions of the ridiculous, >100fps. =) Other fast video cards (eg Matrox G400) are also worked pretty hard. If your video card isn't able to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL then things won't be quite so gob-smacking for you but you should still be impressed with the software's speed. Good to see that the comments here are generally a bit nicer - hell, even just a bit more intelligent - than the rabble on Slashdot. Thanks folks. Andrew. (one of the E support team)
Are there any plans to run E17 on the berlin windowing system? http://www.berlin-consortium.org/ AFAIK they got real alpha and OpenGL and so on ...
Berlin is different. You can't just run a window manager into Berlin. Berlin uses vertecs instead of pixmaps, E17 doesn't. It's a whole new concept, Berlin brings it's own window management and GUI. I never tried it though, but I was told that it's still VERY slow. That was some months ago, don't know if something major has changed. Berlin is mostly supposed to be a design studie of an interesting new concepts (vectorbased GUI which for example doesn't change size when increasing the reolution, it just becomes more sharpen) instead of beeing a real alternative to Xfree (yet). I don't know if I like this vector thing though... could be a first step into the direction of really virtual desktops of the future (in three dimensions).
That was a very good interview! I enjoyed that alot. You should do some more interviews...
Thank you for your kind words Kevin.
I will be doing lots of interviews the next 2 weeks, so make sure everyone is coming back! 
As mentioned before Berlin is different. Everything is distributed over the network, is device (and thus, resolution) independent, is centralizing policy (all apps look/behave thesame way - but you can still customize it for personal preferences or particular hardware) etc etc It's all about doing things "right". That also means the developers have to solve problems noone had to deal with before, which might explain the current slow pace of berlin's development. But of all the GUI systems i'm familiar with, including MacOS X, i'm convinced that Berlin has the most potential. I met Rasterman at LinuxTag this year, and i have to say, i was very impressed with E17 - the speed of the thing, even in software-only mode was extremely impressive. If you tried to do thesame things in berlin at the moment... - there just isn't any comparison. Berlin _can_ however take alot of advantage of optimization and hw-acceleration too though. For instance, we have a openGL drawingkit, that renders everything in openGL, instead of pixels, and if you have an underlying layer (the console) that supports hw opengl, then everything will be hardware accelerated. (There's work being done on the SDLconsole atm). There's also going to be a Postscript drawing kit that renders everything in (you guessed it) postscript, so every program, even the most dimwitted texteditor, can get wysiwyg printing if it wants. Check it out. It really is cool too.