Hi lemmy So i was curious why Enlightenment didn’t recieve much adoption in the Linux Desktop. (especially for a fully featured lightweight wayland DE)
Ik Bodhi Linux uses Enlightenment, but it’s more of Moksha rather then using Enlightenment

Cause

  • Lighter then LXQT
  • Somewhat customizable

But I can see people not liking it cause.

  • the ui(especially for windows users)
  • Hard to find themes due to it using its own toolkit
  • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Enlightenment has been around for decades, and it was quite a bit more popular in its early days because things like KDE/Gnome/etc weren’t the de facto DEs pretty much everyone used like they are now. I used it back when I had a linux box like 25 years ago and it was great, it was very slick and pretty, but now so much is written for KDE/Gnome that it feels like using anything else is just asking for trouble.

    • nixFREAK@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      10 months ago

      Just look at Tizan from Samsung all built on EFL (enlightenment foundation libs), EFL does not have many bindings with other languages and it’s “100% written in C”. The enlightenment OS is super customizable and written in its own component library based on OpenGL they call EGL. It’s a fantastic WM and hopefully Wayland version gets better.

      • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Not disputing that it’s good, it’s just so much stuff is built to work with KDE or Gnome that I think you’d miss out on using E.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
    0·
    10 months ago

    Enlightenment has been around for 28 years. This means there is enough adoption for it to keep going on.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I mean, to my knowledge, it’s still Rasterman keeping most of the development together. You don’t need a ton of adoption when one guy tirelessly works on it.

      Although I’m guessing Samsung probably sponsors him, so that’s probably quite crucial for him to be able to put that much time into it.

  • non_burglar@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    Enlightenment is SO configurable that it almost doesn’t have a look, and therefore doesn’t really have "brand’ per se. Take a look at galleries and collections of enlightenment setups: they’re all massively different in look and behaviour.

    I remember in my early days of Linux (late 90s) it was too much for me.

    • zod000@lemmy.ml
      1·
      10 months ago

      I was lured to use it during those days as well because of all the cool and wildly different screenshots I had seen. I did manage to get it working and looking super cool, but it was fragile and complex. It was so easy to fully break it in my experience. I tried to use it again about 8-10 years ago and while it was easier than the 90s, it was more trouble than I was willing to put up with for a DE these days. Especially since Gnome (with extension) and KDE could trivially look nice.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

    But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

    For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

    Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

    And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.