First a disclaimer: I Love Enlightenment and use it as my main workstation OS. While I only started using it full-time last year, I have been following it's development since 1997. As things stand, I would not want to use another system.
The ugly and awful truth from my perspective: yes, Enlightenment is ugly. However, ugly is misinterpreted as awful. Compounding the problem is that Enlightenment is extraordinarily complex. I would venture to guess that easily 99% of people who try Enlightenment give up on it after less than two-hours. As all distros\WMs\DEs have a strong tendency to troll one another to different degrees, users in all groups universally troll against Enlightenment. I see it almost everyday. What is the difference with me? I could not possibly care less about the aesthetics of a user interface. It is what I can do with it that counts - how I can arrange my workflow. In that respect, Enlightenment is the most powerful environment available. My most favorite features is the ability to tell one of my displays to be a tiling WM. It is not merely the ability but the incredibly well thought out way it is designed. Of course, if you are a new user, you may never know the functionality exists since one must (comparatively) dig through a mountain of settings to find it. There are numerous other interface features to Enlightenment that I love, and when made to work together simply cannot be found anywhere else - not even close. But the settings are another barrier to entry. If you are not immediately turned off by Enlightenment's looks, browsing through the settings will send most running. When everything is approached at once through the settings panel, for many it is like trying to chisel a tunnel through the moon with a hammer. Some of the best settings are labeled in non-intuitive ways, and so are never explored. To this day, there are settings that even I don't know what they do. I fully appreciate why that may not be apparent to developers and long time users. I have long played with the thought that perhaps there should be a secondary, not so super-scary version of Enlightenment for "regular Linux users". This would have to have a default interface with highly refined aesthetics and functional defaults. It would also have to utterly gut the settings panel, of... most things. Basically a stupid version of Enlightenment. I think it could actually be popular, but I do not feel it is my place to champion such an idea. Further, it would double the complexity of development, and I want to make sure *MY* ugly, super-complicated, ultra-functional version of Enlightenment continues to exist. I LOVE it the way it is. So I suppose I am actually against the idea. Just the other day, I was on the elementary OS (polar opposite of Enlightenment) Google+ board where I am very active since that's the distro I put on other peoples computers. We were discussing the upcoming tiling windows manager plugin for elementary OS. I mentioned that I use Bodhi and briefly discussed its tiling feature. Of course, the hate descended. My next to the last post on the matter reads as follows and I think is most poignant: "This is true. However, I care absolutely nothing about aesthetics. ( I was desensitized after working with mainframes a long time ago) So in my case, ugliness does not interfere with my user experience as it does with others, and I don't mind extreme configuration. If elementary OS was extremely ugly but otherwise had the interface features I like about it, I would still love it just as much. Although I would not recommend it, let only install it on other peoples computers as I otherwise do. Much the same, I never ever recommend Bodhi or Enlightenment in general to anyone under any circumstances." You asked, William On 06/10/2014 09:38 AM, Jeff Hoogland wrote: > Is basically the feedback I get from non-E users most times. Thoughts on > this? > > Recent example -> > http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/27qt7k/bodhi_linux_300_rc1_released_ubuntu_1404_base/ > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HPCC Systems Open Source Big Data Platform from LexisNexis Risk Solutions Find What Matters Most in Your Big Data with HPCC Systems Open Source. Fast. Scalable. Simple. Ideal for Dirty Data. Leverages Graph Analysis for Fast Processing & Easy Data Exploration http://p.sf.net/sfu/hpccsystems _______________________________________________ enlightenment-users mailing list enlightenment-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-users
