Story: Seek Enlightenment for an easy-to-use Linux GUI
Enlightenment could have been the best
I have been using E17 for at least a year now, and before that I was using E16 for many years.
I think Enlightenment represents the true window manager. True in a sense that it allows you to control every detail of your windows. E.g.: why is it up to an application to decide if you can use it on-top - that's the message to windows users.
But what's the message to Linux users? E16 is the best, but ugly. E17 could have been the best and beautiful. I strongly believe that E17 should have been published at least a year ago. Then there would be more chance that someone created a new gadget for it, some new functionality perhaps.
Now, it is in beta. RPMs are for only a limited number of platforms, and you definately don't want to compile it. I know, I compiled it. I also had to correct errors in the source to be able to compile. It's just as user-unfriendly as user-friendly the working E17 is. But still without themes, gagdets, eyecandies.
Gnome... i'm not a fan of gnome. As for KDE. KDE is just fine if we only take functionality into consideration. But KDE is as ugly as hell, no matter what theme you might find on kde-looks.org. But at least functioning.
On E17 you cannot use kwifimanager (or at least i couldn't, and I always reserve the right to be wrong). Without it, it's kind of a pain in the ass, or takes some scripting knowledge to use wifi. So again: the user-friendliness of E17 meets with the user-unfriendliness of E17.
At last but not least the ever-continuing changes in E17 drive me crazy. First I compiled it, it used a menu-system like E16 that is in ascii config files. The next version used some not functioning properly menu-editor. The first time I compiled it, alt-tab never brought up minimized applications. In the next version, alt-tab have popped up minimized applications as well, which also drives me crazy. No option (found) to turn it off. And I'm not willing to display the full list.
I don't think they should be creating filemanagers and picture viewers like they do. I know what they have in mind is a "desktop shell", but they should stick to what they can do best: a window manager. And they should publish it, and encourage the creation of awesome themes, animated background pictures and gadgets and let themselves focus on functionality and be innovative. Right now they are slowing down innovation IMHO.
- kid not kidding (kidnotkidding and there's the google mail domain with the traditional LTD attached to it and with @ and dot inbetween.)
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