Re: [gentoo-user] enlightenment experience

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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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 *-9999 packages for 2-3 years 
non-stop.  It was more stable than any other *-9999 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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