Guest post by With Enlightment 0.17 released, it’s no surprise the Linux distribution that uses E17 for its desktop is rushing to release a new version that uses it. Look for Bodhi 2.2.0 in January, featuring the stable E17 desktop. If you’ve never experienced it, Bodhi is a Ubuntu derivative, and it offers more configurabality than you can imagine. Have you been complaining about Unity and Gnome3 taking away your options? Bodhi and E17 bring them back – and many more, too.
Have been using Bodhi Linux for about 18 months and the first time I booted it and used E17 I was hooked. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but something about E17 just oozes the wow factor and makes it a pleasure to use. I still use KDE and Cinnamon based distro’s on occasion but I find them bloated and slow in comparison to E17. Tastes may vary though. Bodhi 2.2.0 is in testing at the moment and looking very good, will be a nice New Years present.
What I like about it is that, though it’s full of flashy eye candy, the eye candy is often useful and not just flash for flash’s sake. I’m still figuring it out. I’d given E16 a try back in the day and never really connected with it. But E17 is not only easy to use, it’s easy to tinker with and customize, and that’s what I look for in a desktop. I truly don’t get the new fascination with reducing options and configuration. For me, the more, the better!
I completely agree with what your saying, the other desktop environments could learn quite a bit from E17 I think.
Anyway thought I had better type it now, while my eyeballs still work and my fingers can find the keys.
HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all.
My favorite thing about the (admittedly sometimes excessive) eye candy is the way it makes you hyper-aware of where window focus is. I always use a “focus follows mouse, click to raise window” setup whenever possible, and only in E17 is it immediately clear where focus is without trying to look for the mouse cursor. This is due to the impossible to ignore animations that catch the corner of my vision just as well as if I’m looking right at the object in question.
I know this can be achieved with Compiz, but I’m not always working on a system with a fast GPU, or even accelerated X for that matter. Even on my “lowly” Raspberry Pi, Enlightenment’s eye candy is fast and fluid, and very useful, not to mention great for showing off the power of the tiny PC.
I’m told you can even run E17 on a Pentium III with 128M of memory. Since that was my very first computer, back in 2000, I think that’s amazing. I’ve still got a huge amount of nostalgia for that old box, as it was my entry into the world of computing and into Linux/BSD particularly, so to think if it were still around I could perhaps put E17 on it amazes me.
I think you’d find it would work quite well even on that old PIII. One of the boxes I have it installed on is a old Athlon XP 1800 with 512MB ram and a Nvidia Geforce 4. It still runs well on that old box without problems. I also have a old Athlon 1.1 setup running BeOSMAX but haven’t tried it on that one yet, New Years resolution there methinks.
I’ve done it. I have a PIII class computer I keep for classic gaming and native BeOS, actually an AMD Duron 800MHz, and I’ve run Bodhi on it with 128MB though it is a bit sluggish. I maxed that machine out to 768MB and it flies with Bodhi, relatively speaking. BeOS and Windows 98 are slightly more responsive of course, but just the fact that I can run a 2012/13 OS on a ~2000 machine and have useable performance is amazing!
Yeah, it’s always bothered me to hear people complain “it’s sluggish, but what do you want … that old machine only has a gig of RAM.” 1G has always seemed like a lot of memory to me, since I started at 128M (and only 4G on the harddrive).
You’re making me feel old.
While my first few computers could count their memory in tens of kilobytes, my first x86 machine was a high school graduation gift in 1995, a Texas Instruments 4000M laptop with a whopping 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive, with a 486SX CPU.
Believe it or not, I wish I still had that beast. It was my introduction to “modern” PC gaming with Doom and Myst, as well as my first DOS/Windows machine. I know it would be about as useful as a pet rock today, but it would be fun to dig out and play around with every now and then.
Yeah, at work back in those days I was running AutoCAD on a machine like that. Amazing what we were able to do – the office had a 386 for smaller drawings and a 486 for the big stuff. Imagine considering the 486 your “big” machine these days.
The Bodhi team didn’t waste any time. Version 2.2 is here, with E17 fully loaded. Very cool. Off to apt-get dist-upgrade!