Could you (or someone) remind me what the big selling points are? I remember a LUG meeting back in the day where someone had fire on the bottom of their screen. But that's about it.
That was kind of the selling point, IMO. Enlightenment was the WM that focused on pure eye candy even at the expense of practicality. You had random graphical effects just because it looks cool, all sorts of overblown themes to emulate hacker movies, and a few actually useful features (like the virtual desktop display showing what windows were present on other virtual desktops)
If you wanted to have a normal, usable desktop there were the typical choices like Gnome, KDE or IceWM. But if you wanted to show off, Enlightenment was hard to beat.
Hilariously, as time went by hardware got so much better that it went from ridiculously wasteful to really lightweight.
> If you wanted to have a normal, usable desktop there were the typical choices like Gnome, KDE or IceWM. But if you wanted to show off, Enlightenment was hard to beat.
Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature.
For example, Hyprland has very good animations and optimizations, so I can run all my windows fullscreen, without a titlebar, on several desktops. It's something I did before on Windows, but that was painful on Linux when the "eye candy" wasn't on par.
Moving between desktops is done with just one key. I configure it to take about 200ms (so it's not intrusive) and I mapped it the ろ (ro) key, which is next to the right shift key on my 106 keys keyboard): the visual feedback helps me keep the context.
Doing the same with Gnome was painful: slow, ugly and hard to get right (if working at all)
> Hilariously, as time went by hardware got so much better that it went from ridiculously wasteful to really lightweight.
I don't think it's hilarous but sad because Gnome is both slow, looks ugly and can't be configured
> Many people say the same thing about Hyprland. I think they don't understand that what you call eyecandy allows important usability feature.
Bingo. Mac has had (crude, by today's standards) animations from very early on, because an animation helped convey the idea that e.g. a window opens "from" an icon you've clicked.
You don't need the effects to be fancy, but a tiny bit of animation helps you orient yourself. No naturally occurring object (except lightning) can change as abruptly as the contents of a screen.
There was a time (around 1999-2005 iirc) when Enlightenment’s graphics library Imlib was the tool for fast CPU raster ops, and was adopted by everyone else. Then accelerated graphics (and eventually GPUs) became the focus and the norm, and Imlib was mostly abandoned.
I've run Enlightenment (E) since the 90's. Never had flames or any other BS like that. By default there are some animations (for things like desktop switching), but these are easy to turn off, and I always do.
E maintains separate virtual desktops per physical monitor. This allows you to independently switch between L virtual desktops on monitor 1, M virtual desktops on monitor 2, and N virtual desktops on monitor 3... Once you have tried this, it is really hard accepting the limitations of a single virtual desktop space across all physical monitors.
E supports window shading. In some circumstances, I will minimize applications, in others, shading is nicer (e.g., to keep a window associated with a particular virtual desktop).
It can be run in floating window, or tiling mode.
You can decide if focus raises windows or not. Not raising windows on focus is IMO much nicer than the way most environments operate.
You can turn off all the crap like task bar etc., and have a traditional X environment where clicking the mouse on the root window brings up your menu (my preferred setup), or you can make it look/act like Mac/Windows, if that is your thing. You can do most things with the keyboard (setting up custom key/mouse/edge of screen/etc. bindings is trivial). If you hand edit '.e/e/applications/menu/favorite.menu', you can have submenus etc. in your right-click "favorites" menu (using the gui to add menu entries to "favorites" only supports a flat structure). Left click brings up the default menu. Middle click brings up a list of open windows (separate list per physical monitor) to quickly switch.
E is still lightweight compared to alternatives, but it used to be the case that one of the primary devs would test against an ancient machine to ensure it worked well even on box without much memory, and an ancient processor.
I don't use gui stuff for network, filemanager, etc., but I have heard complaints about the default included stuff for this, but you can always just use something else with E, if you like to use gui for these.
Wayland support is WIP. Not recommended.
If you try the E25 package in Debian Bookworm, there may be a missing dependency in the package. It often abruptly exited without an error when clicking on the root window (which I do a lot of for menus). In frustration, I decided to try to build the Moksha E17 fork, but got errors in the build. I didn't have time to track them down, so just continued using debian's packaged E25. Time passed, and I noticed that I hadn't had a crash (abrupt exit without error) since installing the build dependencies for E/Moksha.
> By default there are some animations (for things like desktop switching), but these are easy to turn off, and I always do.
Why?
> It can be run in floating window, or tiling mode.
> Wayland support is WIP. Not recommended.
What you describe looks to me like Hyprland. You should try it if you want to keep the same workflow on wayland!
> clicking the mouse on the root window brings up your menu (my preferred setup),
This seems slow. I have the windows key mapped to drun, to open floating menus. You can run many floating menus, with type ahead (like fzf or fzy)
> You can turn off all the crap like task bar etc
Same on hyprland, but a good taskbar is one that doesn't go against your workflow but with it: mine is very thin and mostly shows the virtual desktop, if the screensaver is forcefully disabled, the name and signal of the network, the volume, temperature, free ram, cpu, battery charge.
It can be toggled off with a shortcut. There's no need to list the individual running apps if each one has its own desktop and run in fullscreen mode.
Likewise, no need to waste space on titlebars if the title can go in the taskbar.
The theming was the main feature. It was like winamp for your entire computer. The other thing that was rather remarkable was how fast it was despite all the bling. After the initial novelty wore off, I used it with toned-down themes for quite a while simply because of how responsive it was.
