The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase. Surprisingly, the issue has roots in a faulty implementation of Newton’s algorithm.
↫ Kamila Szewczyk
I’m not going to pretend to understand any of this, but I know you people do. Enjoy.
The bug is one thing, but reading more into the website, there’s a CV. The accomplishments of this person are astounding, especially at their age. I feel truly old and useless now.
can anyone speak to why E16 is preferable to E17? the author says they are in the minority in using the old version but not why.
E17 is much more complicated.
E16 is basically a traditional UNIX WM that you could use either on its own or in e.g. Gnome (instead of Sawfish) or KDE (instead of KWM) — think something like Blackbox, but more customizable. Like most WMs of that era, it’s built using a simple, purpose-specific toolkit.
E17 is much more complicated. The development of e17 took about 12 years because, for whatever reason, the developers decided to develop what they thought of as a versatile set of graphical libraries (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) as part of their Window Manager. The most generous thing I can say about the EFL is that its components are not widely adopted; I think early versions of Samsung’s Tizen OS may have used them.
During its development and for some time after, e17 had a reputation for being buggy and the e17 maintainers developed a reputation for being uncooperative. I don’t know whether either reputation is deserved, but e17 has been forked at least a couple times (most notably by Bhodi linux, which was basically Ubuntu with an Enlightenment desktop).
Whatever you think of e17, e16 was in the late 90s and early 2000s (up until OSX or Compiz) probably the most visually-impressive desktop environment on any platform. It was capable of detailed textures, smooth (and extensive) desktop effects, and had some striking themes; if you were rocking e16/GTK+/XMMS with the Blueheart theme in like 1998, that was as close as a computer could get to being sexy without being a NeXT Cube.
Hi,
your description is accurate but your missing the point that Samsung has been funding the development of the EFL library extensively over the years. They’re the basis of their Tizen OS app framework.
https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/index