I've been trying out Enlightenment again and I'm impressed by it's speed on modest hardware, quality and organization. There are plenty of places to get screen shots on the web, so I'm not going to put any of mine up today but I will share what I liked here.
My first exposure to the Enlightenment desktop was through Red Hat 5.x on 150 MHz MediaGX with 64MB of RAM and no third mouse button. My screen resolution was a dismal 800x600 too. It was not very useful to me that way, though enjoyed eterm for years. I just tried it again with Sarge on a 233MHz PII laptop with 196MB of ram and was very impressed. A little extra screen real estate, memory, processor speed and patience go a long way towards usability. The default burshed metal is still a little clumsy looking but Blue Metal, Ganymede and Shiny Metal are beautiful and don't take up much screen. WM, KDE and Gnome applications play well with it, though konsole's transparency did not work for me. One of things I liked best is the pager and desktop/workspace configuration. You can expand your workspace to multiple screens within each desktop and edge flip though each screen. You switch between desktops by clicking on the pager or the bar on top. The pagers, which are not always on top, show this as one huge workspace with a box around the current space. The pagers also show a nice thumbnail of the application and you can move the application from one screen to another by drag and drop. Enlightenment will work well for organizing multiple projects the way I do it. I've typically dedicated single desktops to specific computers and projects. For instance, I'll have a ssh -X session to my wife's computer on a desktop called "pooh", her computer's name and a desktop called 7530 for my shielding class. If there's an application I need for shielding from another computer, I call it up and move it to the shielding desktop. Sometimes, I start to feel crowded and that's where Enlightenment's multiple screens will come in handy. I'm not going to feel crowded with six desktops. To get the same effect with other window managers, I might have to make the virtual desktop larger than the screen size. Enlightenment does this out of the box and it's edge flipping and pager controls make getting to the other desktop faster. Getting more desktops is easy with the GUI configuration tools. I'm going to be working with it on the laptop for a few weeks to see how it goes.
