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On Friday, 16 August 2019 12:58:33 BST Raffaele Belardi wrote: |
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> I'm considering switching from Gnome to Enlightenment. Looks very nice but |
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> has very few native applications, I was wondering why since it's been |
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> around since '97. Then I found this [1] and, as a sw programmer, got a |
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> little bit scared... |
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LOL! I take it the author is not in favour of the efl coding then! |
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My knowledge of coding is non-existent, but as a plain user I have been using |
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enlightenment since the e17 days and can confirm it does not have many native |
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applications. Last time I looked I found around a dozen apps in various |
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stages of development, plus its file manager & desktop gadgets. |
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> Are there any Gentoo enlightenment users who could share their experience |
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> with this DE? Some native (EFL) applications are available only via the |
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> enlightenment-live overlay, how stable is this? |
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It is not a heavy-weight full-fat desktop environment, like Gnome, or KDE. It |
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is light, fast and flexible. I selected it among others because it was very |
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light weight, fast and compared to say fluxbox rather beautiful. I also |
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selected it because it allowed me to choose what applications I wanted to |
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install and use, rather than come preloaded with a tonne of fully integrated |
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applications I do not need/want. Also, if you use more than one monitor |
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you'll probably find very useful the way it allows you to use each monitor |
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independently, with different virtual desktops. |
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I've used e with a small selection of KDE applications, but obviously not the |
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full Plasma DE. For most of the time it worked fine. No crashes, no lost |
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data, no drama. It just did what I needed from a desktop, efficiently, |
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without eating up resources, without buggy indexers, getting out of the way |
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and letting me get on with work. I had to improvise to get some Qt |
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environment variables loading at start up, so that KDE apps look good with |
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oxygen icons, but other than that I do not recall having any problems with it |
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until a year or so ago - see below. |
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Most e devs use Gnome apps and nvidia/intel graphics. They do not seem to use |
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KDE or radeon graphics to know intimately their particular quirks and this is |
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the reason I no longer use it as a primary DE. When the monitor goes to sleep |
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on two different laptops of mine, both with radeon graphics, the CPU starts |
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racing up and down for a few seconds at a time, non-stop, until I move the |
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mouse to wake up the monitor again. A problem related to radeon drivers and |
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mesa I believe. I found this annoying/wasteful and without time to |
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troubleshoot and debug it further I moved on to using Plasma as my day to day |
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DE, while keeping e as a back up. |
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I have used the enlightenment-live overlay and *-9999 packages for 2-3 years |
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non-stop. It was more stable than any other *-9999 package I have ever used |
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with Gentoo, although there might have been a couple of days every few months, |
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of some package failing to emerge. I moved on to using the ebuilds in portage |
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once e17 was included in the stable tree and have had no problem installing |
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ebuilds since. In my experience over the years, bugs reported in the e bug |
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tracker with debugging information are welcomed by the devs, looked into and |
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usually resolved promptly. |
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I still use e as the main DE on older hardware with intel graphics and it |
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works fine there. |
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> I need a session manager to temporarily switch user without logging out, |
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> suggestions? I'd go with openRC, non-wayland if possible. I never got |
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> accustomed to systemd. |
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As far as I know enlightenment does not offer the functionality of switching |
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login sessions between users. |
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I have used it with lightdm and sddm DMs and both work fine with it. There is |
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also entrance, a DM written for e17 I believe, but this was always buggy and |
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had only cursory development over the years. |
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> thanks, |
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> |
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> raffaele |
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> |
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> [1] https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened |
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If you need particular help with developing apps or debugging you can post on |
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the devs' mailing list and also chat with them on IRC. I have found them to |
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be a helpful lot. |
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|
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-- |
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Regards, |
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|
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Mick |