EDE 1.0.4 is a new version of EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) which brings full FreeBSD support, various bugfixes and new features. The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small desktop environment, built to be simple, to have a familiar look and feel and to be reasonably fast.
I have to say that while it’s a little rough around the edges, this definitely looks slick. It’s no OS X, but I’m really liking the clean lines and simple design.
The congested UI bloat in KDE/GNOME makes me sick.
It’s not bloat, it’s refinement. I can just see you now, hurling all over your keyboard at the mere sight of KDE or Gnome – LOL. This thing looks so dated it’s not even funny. Clean lines? It’s Windows 95 UI, ported to *nix. Ugly as hell, amateurish at best. They can certainly do better than this.
Nice try, but the first sentence in your post doesn’t it make it any less obvious that you’re just a sad little troll.
Consider that this might be great for some older hardware that can’t handle KDE, Gnome, or even XFCE. Yes, there are others, but they are mearly windows managers. This seems to give a nice desktop to users that might still have an old computer laying around.
It might even be a reason to install Linux on an older machine that can be donated to someone who might not have one. Things to consider…
Thank you. At least one person here sees it. 😐
KDE/GNOME are poo. This is pretty slick. Low memory usage, looks clean, still provides a desktop environment — win, win, win.
Thank you. At least one person here sees it. 😐
KDE/GNOME are poo. This is pretty slick. Low memory usage, looks clean, still provides a desktop environment — win, win, win.
What is with you and poo??? Do you enjoy the smell or taste of it??? Do you like playing with your poo??? Or are you just not smart enough to come up with a more intelligent term than “I hate this so it is poo”???
Just curious is all.
(EDE’s window manager use less memory than xterm).
chris@brittney:~/ejourn$ cat /proc/`pidof xterm`/status
Name: xterm
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
Tgid: 6986
Pid: 6986
PPid: 1
TracerPid: 0
Uid: 1000 1000 1000 1000
Gid: 1000 43 43 43
FDSize: 256
Groups: 4 20 24 25 29 30 44 46 107 108 109 1000
VmSize: 8828 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmRSS: 3708 kB
VmData: 1732 kB
VmStk: 84 kB
That just says it all….
was the best OS ever..
…looks great.
This is the only wm I’ve ever seen specifically mention freebsd support. What exactly does that mean? Did it not build on freebsd before? I’m confused. I’ve tried many window managers on both freebsd and linux (and openbsd, actually). I’ve never seen a need for specific OS support. Could someone give me a clue?
Essentially, there were some bugs in the EDE code that slipped past unnoticed on Linux, but were problematic on other platforms. Those bugs have now been squashed, so it [apparently] now works well on FreeBSD.
Looks alot like Ice wm which is also lightweight…anyone have experience with both and clues as to what features would differentiate?
IceWM (which is my preferred WM) is really just a WM (which isn’t a bad thing, in my book). Equinox is a desktop environment with desktop icon support, configuration windows, control panel, package manager, and so forth.
I haven’t tried Equinox in a while (several years), but when I last used it, it felt very limited and kludgy. I’ve never had that problem with IceWM (or Fluxbox, my other WM of choice).
It may very well have greatly improved since.
the themes aren’t that that bad either. the flat theme looks cool. i’ve never seen anything like that before. it kinda reminds me of icewm.
Win98 was a great GUI — not too pretty but lightweight and functional. From there on the Microsoft GUI’s have gone downhill all the way…
The xfe file manager is a perfect fit for Equinox Desktop Environment.
Why does “familiar look and feel” always tends to mean “Explorer rip off”?
Why does “familiar look and feel” always tends to mean “Explorer rip off”?
Possibly because familiar means something people are used too, and pretty much everyone has used the Explorer shell for Windows??? I don’t think there is much innovation here, but the reasoning behind the term couldn’t be anymore obvious.
As lame as it may seem to some (kde/gnome/etc users) I think it has a place if its as light and usable as it is made out to be. It could be a contender on the girlfriends PII PC as a MS replacement. If it runs firefox/thunderbird/Ooo/skype, has freedesktop tray icon support, a clipboard and a resonably integrated file manager then its a winner – not for my desktop though.
YAWM … (Yet Another Window Manager)
When are we going to start innovating ?
Do we have to keep playing the “can work on cheaper hardware” tagline over and over again until we
melt into some psychotic insanity.
Come on people lets grow up for a moment. The industry is moving on, so is technology. Downward scalabity is important but lets start aiming up. KDE and Gnome are stepping in the right direction. Lets not dogg these efforts
Well, I doubt the existence of Equinox Desktop Environment is going to inhibit the efforts of the Gnome and KDE developers attempting to push out new high-end desktop concepts.
That said, I do wonder why Equinox Desktop has to look just like Windows Explorer. Clean? Maybe. Do they need to include gray menus and simulated 3D-ness? I guess I define clean as clearly demarcated buttons and options, with as little other distracting visual information- you know, the flat background or large pattern, the buttons that change color/brightness when you mouse over them…
Mac OS X, XFCE, KDE and Gnome have all got nice clean interfaces where things look flat, and the button bars and menus need not have all the trimmings to make them look 3D, or make them look gray and thus less contrast. Even Windows XP Classic mode defaults to a lighter, higher contrast gray.
http://www.xpde.com/
No sorry…
> [xpde] tries to make easier for Windows XP users to use a
> Linux box. Nothing more, no clipboard compatibility
> between Gtk and Qt applications, no emulation of
> Windows applications, no unification on the widgets of
> X applications, just a desktop environment.
If their goal is making life easier for XP-to-Linux movers then the second sentence means they’re failing right at the beginning.
– Morin
“xpde anyone?”
Oh but whats the point? XPDE aims at providing a very close to Windows XP style GUI for users who just can’t get used to anything different.
EDI is not really trying to be as close to win9x as possible. It maintains similiarities in its taskbar, menu style and some functionality, but what it really aims for is to provide a complete desktop environment for people with old computers. Its actually quite nice and usable.
Anything that tries to make a low resource enviroment is a good thing, I DON’T CARE how it looks (not too much) the less clutter and bells the better.
But it also has to be VERY use-able.
Resource saving is important even in these days of big hard drives and ram, simply because now we can do larger jobs like video editing…
…or we would be able to do so without a hitch, if our OS’s were not wasting all of our newly aquired resources.
So … how about
EDE
SIAG Office (http://siag.nu/)
Light Web Browser (http://www.ne.jp/asahi/linux/timecop/)
Amulet Explorer (http://www.amuletexplorer.com/)
I have run this all on a K6-2 350 under IceWM instead of EDE, but I think EDE would be the kicker to tie it all together, no more playing with deskmenu for icons.
Win9x was actually decent, when WinME & 2k i gave it up for Linux, i still dualboot Win9x & Slackware…
I didn’t try EDE yet but it “looks” promising. They worked alot on a 2.0 version this summer (google summer of code) according to the guys blogs.
I don’t understand why some people are bitching against new WM/DE. There’s place for more of em (DE). Gnome and KDE are both ressource hugs and some people can’t live with that. It’s not all about old hardware trust me.
Anyway, to me the worst thing that happened to Linux was the arrival of GTK and QT because so much people started to use em exclusively. And of course, both are ressource hugs. Look at EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library), it produces way better output than GTK and QT and it uses way less ressources. Lesson? People should look at alternatives sometimes.
I think anyone who is using Linux is looking at the alternatives. But one can only go so far in picking alternatives before you become the only user of that particular system configuration.
I agree: GTK and QT get all the attention, and aren’t all that some people jazz them up to be. Both have innovative features, both have lots of good general support, but neither one is blazing fast. My friend and I were just lamenting how lame it is that gedit takes 3 or 4 seconds to start up on a 1.6Ghz machine. We were even more depressed when Leafpad, which is essentially a GtkTextView in a window, took about a second (according to “time”).
We understand that these applications, gedit in particular, are actually pretty powerful, but we can’t possibly blame all this startup time on the actual allocation of data structures gedit uses, etc. It has to be that a huge overhead is incurred just by creating that darn window and drawing it to the screen.
Even I wrote a really simple PyGTK application that reads rfc8222 email files, and it ended up being about 150 lines of PyGTK code, but still takes ~2 secs to load up and display the email message.
The libraries (either GTK or lower down at Xlib) aren’t optimized. That’s the bottom line.
I, personally, am gonna get started profiling the code and seeing where the bottlenecks are, using my spare time in the upcoming weeks. One of my friends lent me Optimizing Linux Performance, which will hopefully point me in the right direction. Anyone want to help out?
There was some profiling done recently on this very issue (I forget the link but a bit of Googling should reveal it). AFAICR the problem is not anything Gtk or X does per se but that Gtk uses a lot of X calls at startup which are synchronous – i.e. the app must wait the round-trip time from app to X-server before proceeding. The conclusion was to either reduce the number of synchronous calls or to shedule the calls in their own thread where possible so that they don’t impact on launch performance.
This is similar, in principle, to the efforts to reduce boot time on Linux machines by a) reducing the number of init scripts called at boot and b) running those which do not depend on one another in parallel. The latest OS X tiger uses approach b) I think which results in a far shorter ‘loading OS X’ progress bar display in my case.
I’m a bit confused about the Desktop Environment on Linux.
We have GNOME and KDE which are also DEs right?
OK, so there are applications which only run on one or the other (or have I mistaken this), because of coding a GNOME v a KDE app?
So, this DE will not be able to run any GNOME or KDE apps right? Or just a few or all?
they require a “toolkit” qt or gtk, to use apps from the other DE you have to have it’s toolkit.
so if you have gtk and qt installed on your computer then you can run any apps with this thing. (although some only come packaged in larger base files requiring you to download the entire DE anyway (see Konqueror)
Not that this should really make anyone try Gentoo, but Gentoo has broken up the KDE ebuilds so now you CAN install *just* Konqueror (and kdelibs and Qt3, but you’d kinda need them to run a KDE program). I’ve seen it done (did it myself on a computer I sorta “administrate”) and it works, though you miss all the integration with kioslaves and other KDE applications.
Looks cool. Nice to see so many choices are available for people using Linux/Unix. I didnt even know that Window Manager called EDE exists! I dont want to get into fight of how useable it is. I’m just happy to see one more choice, after all GUN = freedom to choose right?
I need to ask this guy to add the EDE to the list. http://xwinman.org/
I Love Xwinman.org…
Click on Others under Desktops. The full name (in the article) is Equinox Desktop Environment.
It’s been there for years.
What’s with Open Source projects and animal names? Is this a “furry” thing? I’m really disgusted by the “furry community” and would like to keep it disjoint from the Open Source community.
Equinox? I’m an astronomy major, and I’m pretty sure the term is an astronomical term (like ‘Zenith’, namesake of that TV company).
As I know the term, ‘Equinox’ is “Equi Nox”, which translates from Latin(?) to “Equal Night” and refers to the two days a year when the length of night is equal to the length of day. These occur famously around March 21 (start of spring) and September 21 (start of fall); and they change slightly from year.
If it refers to animals or angry people I’m not aware of it.
Oh, haha, I was thinking Equine (horse). Thanks for the good response.
Very fast and beautiful. Perfect on old hardware. Indeed, FLTK is a great C++ GUI toolkit.
I suppose this would be nice for someone who is used to windows 2000 pro…
All it needs is a distro behind it, unless there’s already one I’m unaware of.
There is a distro in developement called STX:
http://linux.mikeasoft.com/stxcc/
http://vljubovic.members.epn.ba/stxcc.png
EDE its a great proyect but thankful in OSS movement not only exist GNOME or KDE or XFCE, we already have some greats Lightweight enviorenment.
My favorite who I use daily is Wmaker, its small and fast fast fast. Combined with a lightweight file manager and some cool utils like fuse with netsmb and sshfs you get all the power.
Could be great see a DE with all this integrated and with frontend config tools for average users.
It is sad to see as great projects like wmaker don’t have all the attention that would have.
I believe EDE is the preferred desktop environment for an upcoming Ubuntu Lite release:
http://www.ubuntulite.org/
http://ubuntulite.org/wiki/index.php/Desktop_environment
Personally I think EDE is a _great_ effort. It’s awsome with the familiar simplicity found in the win9x environment, and while IceWM, XPDE and the likes are ok, they just don’t cut it.
Us geeks can use “innovation” on our own workstations, but try pushing linux with kde/gnome onto 500 windows users who normally call support in panic when one of their icons have changed place on the windows desktop.
I can’t live without Fluxbox myself, but I wouldn’t dream of forcing it on a regular user.
I’m watching EDE with great interest for our organization.
Before you comment, why don’t you go to the site, find out the state of the project, the purpose of the project, and the goals of the project? Dolts.
Many comments here are so off base it’s embarassing.
any others that can recreate the win9x feel?
Windows has set a UI standard that most users start on. This UI is not bad at all. Im all for familiarity since it eases transitions. Besides KDE 1 was not all that sexy compared to E and Windowmaker now look at it. I cant help but think that this WM will do great things.
-nX
You know, it’s just not that big a deal to recreate the look of Windows. Icons in the upper left corner of the screen, taskbar and icon tray along the bottom, and a pull-up menu in the lower-left hand corner. A nice, sky-blue background or wallpaper just enhances the illusion. Any number of Window Managers or GUIs can do that. Heck, it doesn’t take but a minute to make BeOS have that “familiar look”.
More important than the look, though, is its usability. Windows generally offers two or three different ways of doing things, from the menu, to Mac-Style window browsing to the icon tray to simply browsing through the file manager. However one may dislike Microsoft, their desktop does offer interesting, usable, and easily-customizable features. “Merely” duplicating the MS desktop is still an impressive feat, and not to be sneered at.
Still, I’ve really been impressed by the XFCE desktop.
In the course of trying out various window managers and desktop environments, I’ve been wondering why it isn’t easier to just set up your own environment. Choose a basic window manager, a desktop menu, a taskbar, an icon tray, a dockbar or app launcher, pager, and a file manager. Or not include any of those things that you don’t want or use.
Alas, it doesn’t seem to be that easy. Some programs and managers just don’t mesh very well.
Oh yeah, exactly what I’ve been thinking.
However, it would require a lot of standards, not yet in exsistence. And several compatibiliy-layers. We would need a WSAL (Widget Set Abstraction Layer) and a DEAL (Desktop Environment Abstraction Layer). Unfortunately, this is far from trivial, due to major differences between widget sets and between DE-libraries. And not to forget all other kinds of low-level libraries.
At the moment, you’re constricted to the DE you choose and its following widget set (or tool kit, if you like that term better). Within this DE you can choose whatever WM you’d like, and the same goes for taskbar, systray and so on.
dylansmrjones
kristian AT herkild DOT dk
I still feel, that adopting better GUI for graphical things would be right to linux and key to success. And I think it should be BeOS (that means Haiku, of course). It’s very clean, easy to use, fun for developers and not bloated at all.