On Friday, 16 August 2019 12:58:33 BST Raffaele Belardi wrote:
> I'm considering switching from Gnome to Enlightenment. Looks very nice but
> has very few native applications, I was wondering why since it's been
> around since '97. Then I found this [1] and, as a sw programmer, got a
> little bit scared...
LOL! I take it the author is not in favour of the efl coding then!
My knowledge of coding is non-existent, but as a plain user I have been using
enlightenment since the e17 days and can confirm it does not have many native
applications. Last time I looked I found around a dozen apps in various
stages of development, plus its file manager & desktop gadgets.
> Are there any Gentoo enlightenment users who could share their experience
> with this DE? Some native (EFL) applications are available only via the
> enlightenment-live overlay, how stable is this?
It is not a heavy-weight full-fat desktop environment, like Gnome, or KDE. It
is light, fast and flexible. I selected it among others because it was very
light weight, fast and compared to say fluxbox rather beautiful. I also
selected it because it allowed me to choose what applications I wanted to
install and use, rather than come preloaded with a tonne of fully integrated
applications I do not need/want. Also, if you use more than one monitor
you'll probably find very useful the way it allows you to use each monitor
independently, with different virtual desktops.
I've used e with a small selection of KDE applications, but obviously not the
full Plasma DE. For most of the time it worked fine. No crashes, no lost
data, no drama. It just did what I needed from a desktop, efficiently,
without eating up resources, without buggy indexers, getting out of the way
and letting me get on with work. I had to improvise to get some Qt
environment variables loading at start up, so that KDE apps look good with
oxygen icons, but other than that I do not recall having any problems with it
until a year or so ago - see below.
Most e devs use Gnome apps and nvidia/intel graphics. They do not seem to use
KDE or radeon graphics to know intimately their particular quirks and this is
the reason I no longer use it as a primary DE. When the monitor goes to sleep
on two different laptops of mine, both with radeon graphics, the CPU starts
racing up and down for a few seconds at a time, non-stop, until I move the
mouse to wake up the monitor again. A problem related to radeon drivers and
mesa I believe. I found this annoying/wasteful and without time to
troubleshoot and debug it further I moved on to using Plasma as my day to day
DE, while keeping e as a back up.
I have used the enlightenment-live overlay and *- packages for 2-3 years
non-stop. It was more stable than any other *- package I have ever used
with Gentoo, although there might have been a couple of days every few months,
of some package failing to emerge. I moved on to using the ebuilds in portage
once e17 was included in the stable tree and have had no problem installing
ebuilds since. In my experience over the years, bugs reported in the e bug
tracker with debugging information are welcomed by the devs, looked into and
usually resolved promptly.
I still use e as the main DE on older hardware with intel graphics and it
works fine there.
> I need a session manager to temporarily switch user without logging out,
> suggestions? I'd go with openRC, non-wayland if possible. I never got
> accustomed to systemd.
As far as I know enlightenment does not offer the functionality of switching
login sessions between users.
I have used it with lightdm and sddm DMs and both work fine with it. There is
also entrance, a DM written for e17 I believe, but this was always buggy and
had only cursory development over the years.
> thanks,
>
> raffaele
>
> [1] https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
If you need particular help with developing apps or debugging you can post on
the devs' mailing list and also chat with them on IRC. I have found them to
be a helpful lot.
--
Regards,
Mick
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