Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] enlightenment experience
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2019 15:28:10
Message-Id: 8202949.hHYbJ55hsS@localhost
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] enlightenment experience by Raffaele Belardi
1 On Friday, 16 August 2019 12:58:33 BST Raffaele Belardi wrote:
2 > I'm considering switching from Gnome to Enlightenment. Looks very nice but
3 > has very few native applications, I was wondering why since it's been
4 > around since '97. Then I found this [1] and, as a sw programmer, got a
5 > little bit scared...
6
7 LOL! I take it the author is not in favour of the efl coding then!
8
9 My knowledge of coding is non-existent, but as a plain user I have been using
10 enlightenment since the e17 days and can confirm it does not have many native
11 applications. Last time I looked I found around a dozen apps in various
12 stages of development, plus its file manager & desktop gadgets.
13
14
15 > Are there any Gentoo enlightenment users who could share their experience
16 > with this DE? Some native (EFL) applications are available only via the
17 > enlightenment-live overlay, how stable is this?
18
19 It is not a heavy-weight full-fat desktop environment, like Gnome, or KDE. It
20 is light, fast and flexible. I selected it among others because it was very
21 light weight, fast and compared to say fluxbox rather beautiful. I also
22 selected it because it allowed me to choose what applications I wanted to
23 install and use, rather than come preloaded with a tonne of fully integrated
24 applications I do not need/want. Also, if you use more than one monitor
25 you'll probably find very useful the way it allows you to use each monitor
26 independently, with different virtual desktops.
27
28 I've used e with a small selection of KDE applications, but obviously not the
29 full Plasma DE. For most of the time it worked fine. No crashes, no lost
30 data, no drama. It just did what I needed from a desktop, efficiently,
31 without eating up resources, without buggy indexers, getting out of the way
32 and letting me get on with work. I had to improvise to get some Qt
33 environment variables loading at start up, so that KDE apps look good with
34 oxygen icons, but other than that I do not recall having any problems with it
35 until a year or so ago - see below.
36
37 Most e devs use Gnome apps and nvidia/intel graphics. They do not seem to use
38 KDE or radeon graphics to know intimately their particular quirks and this is
39 the reason I no longer use it as a primary DE. When the monitor goes to sleep
40 on two different laptops of mine, both with radeon graphics, the CPU starts
41 racing up and down for a few seconds at a time, non-stop, until I move the
42 mouse to wake up the monitor again. A problem related to radeon drivers and
43 mesa I believe. I found this annoying/wasteful and without time to
44 troubleshoot and debug it further I moved on to using Plasma as my day to day
45 DE, while keeping e as a back up.
46
47 I have used the enlightenment-live overlay and *-9999 packages for 2-3 years
48 non-stop. It was more stable than any other *-9999 package I have ever used
49 with Gentoo, although there might have been a couple of days every few months,
50 of some package failing to emerge. I moved on to using the ebuilds in portage
51 once e17 was included in the stable tree and have had no problem installing
52 ebuilds since. In my experience over the years, bugs reported in the e bug
53 tracker with debugging information are welcomed by the devs, looked into and
54 usually resolved promptly.
55
56 I still use e as the main DE on older hardware with intel graphics and it
57 works fine there.
58
59
60 > I need a session manager to temporarily switch user without logging out,
61 > suggestions? I'd go with openRC, non-wayland if possible. I never got
62 > accustomed to systemd.
63
64 As far as I know enlightenment does not offer the functionality of switching
65 login sessions between users.
66
67 I have used it with lightdm and sddm DMs and both work fine with it. There is
68 also entrance, a DM written for e17 I believe, but this was always buggy and
69 had only cursory development over the years.
70
71
72 > thanks,
73 >
74 > raffaele
75 >
76 > [1] https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
77
78 If you need particular help with developing apps or debugging you can post on
79 the devs' mailing list and also chat with them on IRC. I have found them to
80 be a helpful lot.
81
82 --
83 Regards,
84
85 Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] enlightenment experience Raffaele Belardi <raffaele.belardi@××.com>