E17 the DE thats not a DE or is it hmmmm

kwebb1 · 2009-10-17 03:28:41

Ok the title is goofy. But I wanted to show some E17 love man. I tried gnome ,kde and xfce . I have to say E17 is way faster . Definitely not as fast as openbox, but faster than those three. BTW E17 is stable! I did drop gdm for entrance just simpler that way. I am glad i could finally get to my happy place . A little bling with some zing. Anybody else care to share thier experience with E17. Come on show the love .........or not .

P.S. I just love these animated backgrounds( some can rock your cpu so becarefull) Cheers!

.:B:. · 2009-10-17 05:55:20

Entrance is pretty pimp . Overall I find E17 to be a bit overdone though... But I've heard a lot of people say it's faster than GTK+ environments. The obsession to find names for apps that start with E - similar to KDE's mental problem - scares the hell out of me.

* B is so not trying to start a flamewar

Dusty · 2009-10-17 06:59:50

B wrote:

Entrance is pretty pimp . Overall I find E17 to be a bit overdone though... But I've heard a lot of people say it's faster than GTK+ environments. The obsession to find names for apps that start with E - similar to KDE's mental problem - scares the hell out of me.
* B is so not trying to start a flamewar

* B probably wishes all those products started with B.

Dusty

Rasi · 2009-10-17 07:59:29

btw... the e17 ppl are working on a library called ecomorph, which is basically compiz without a WM, means they forked compiz and worked on it to be able to use its effects in any Window Manager. Great stuff! Right now it only works with a patched version of e17, but in future it should work everywhere.

b9anders · 2009-10-17 11:52:37

entrance is working again?

woot! so long gdm and all the troubles the new version has given me.

(also installs e17 again to play)

.:B:. · 2009-10-17 11:53:29

Dusty wrote:

B wrote:
Entrance is pretty pimp . Overall I find E17 to be a bit overdone though... But I've heard a lot of people say it's faster than GTK+ environments. The obsession to find names for apps that start with E - similar to KDE's mental problem - scares the hell out of me.
* B is so not trying to start a flamewar
* B probably wishes all those products started with B.
Dusty

Well, now that I think of it... Sounds like a brilliant idea .

kwebb1 · 2009-10-17 13:23:04

Yeah I tried ecomorph from AUR it just does not seem to run for me which is ok by me. I just love the fact that i found something that I like and is light as well as pretty. Pretty sweet that is!!

Well, now that I think of it... Sounds like a brilliant idea big_smile.

Haha yeah never get the whole naming thing either. To each thier own i guess.

As long as ecomorph doesn't become any heavier than E17 I'll try it out. Compiz is bloated . With my experience usefullness should come before bling. If it was me I would take out the bling and just have the aplication switchers and the acessibilty plugins. I mean lets face it people with disabilities would benefit greatly. The application switchers are great too cuase it extends your desktop. Other than that I feel the bling is just bloat. Not wanting a flame war here just sharing my opinion and hoping when Ecomorph comes out that it just extends E17 and they leave the bling out. E17 without ecomorph has enough bling with it.

Ok enough of my rant but for those of you still looking for something lighter than the three I mentioned give E17 a try.

Cheers!

ASOM · 2009-10-17 15:06:49

I use e17, it's been pretty good to me. I installed a while back because I was short on time and just didn't feel like configuring anything to get a WM up and running the way I wanted. Gnome, KDE and Xfce weren't options, so after a little research I tried e17. It gives me what I need, a clock, pager, tiling module and it looks good as well. There are some decent themes already available, but there seems to always be something in each theme I don't like so at some point I will have to learn to modify them.

I tend to stay away from the effects though, tried bling once and then unloaded it right away. Just not my thing..

mythus · 2009-10-17 15:07:24

E17 is awesome. I play with it along with pekwm, and it is up there on my top 3 favorite wm/de list. However I think E17 falls under the DE category now because it does provide a file manager, desktop icons and back grounds, and several other things that you would find in a DE but not in a WM.

It is faster than the other 3 big DE's. I am not sure if it is faster than the LXDE environment yet or not... but since I am not fond of the minimalist environment of open box (i am not a minimalist... I desire nice looking windows with decent speed...) I haven't tried to compare the two. I love the fact that E17 gives me the visual effects I want, with the speed that my backup pc that I am forced to run now needs. Compiz, Kde, and such would slow down this old machine... but E17 gives me the great visuals even without the bling module being loaded, and runs nice and fast. I love it's window memory and it's focus where it brings the mouse up to the next window (i love that for everything except for when working with gimp). I do find E17 nice and stable, and I have tried Entrance and it works fine for loading E17... but wouldn't load right by default my other environments. But that is no big deal because I prefer using bash right now anyways, it keeps xorg resources lower or at least seems to make the computer run faster/better without any display manager.

The only problem I have with E17 is that I can't find a theme that I like that works well. One theme that I do like leaves the tool tip displays for weather and calendar gadgets white with their text white. None of the other themes seem to sit right with me.

But yeah E17 needs more users. With more users more themes would come. ETK works well with GTK but I'd so love to see more ETK programs. ETK is just so much lighter than GTK while looking better than GTK. E17 IMO is ready for the prime time, and competes easily IMO with KDE4 on visuals while being insanely useful and much much lighter and faster.

Anikom15 · 2009-10-17 15:50:07

I've always wanted a WM that was really like an office desktop, with ugly fluorescent lighting and the like.

kwebb1 · 2009-10-17 17:00:41

I've always wanted a WM that was really like an office desktop, with ugly fluorescent lighting and the like.

Yeah but without the nagging boss

mythus · 2009-10-17 17:25:24

kwebb1 wrote:

I've always wanted a WM that was really like an office desktop, with ugly fluorescent lighting and the like.
Yeah but without the nagging boss

Haha yes.. wasn't there projects out before that tried to set up the desktop so that it looked more like a real desktop?

You know, using the term Desktop for your computer workspace is really an incorrect term, unless of course you actually lay your monitor down flat and use it as a desktop, which is just silly. I think it would be more correct to call it something like a work space, and instead of Desktop Environments it would be Workspace Environments with Window Managers and such. I mean, when someone coined it being a desktop did they ever think of how silly that sounded? "I have a window manager for my desktop.... yessss. I have several windows on my desktop!" Be careful not to open those windows, your papers might just blow/fall out. But I suppose calling them desktops is now so ingrained into us that it is pointless to change the name now.

Amiga used Workbench for their environment and even that isn't accurate.

But oh well. Yeah, back on topic... E17 is great! Use it, love it, make more themes for it.

fsckd · 2009-10-17 18:25:04

A good site to find themes is http://www.e17-stuff.org/ . I used A-SBlack-Esp1 as my theme (well most of it) and Darkness Clock as my wallpaper ...

... until I switched to xmonad.

Fans of e16 might be happy to know 23 Oz. of Glass was ported to e17 with several variants.

skottish · 2009-10-18 01:14:54

E17 is a very nice set of software that I used for something like a year and half. I think that it probably would have gone way farther in the world had development not been so slow. If it was what it is today five years ago, it may have been a very popular DE. I do feel that it's brilliant for mobile devices though. I wish the best of luck to OpenMoko.

One of the biggest troubles that I had with E17 is that it didn't integrate well with any other toolkits, and writing themes for it was a gigantic pain-in-the-ass. If memory serves me correctly, there are far more lines of code in the default E17 theme than there are in Xmonad. That's a huge turn off.

ilembitov · 2009-10-18 10:59:21

Basically, I really liked E17. The only thing I don't get: they worked so hard on their library foundation: graphical toolkits and what's not, yet they don't really put any effort into developing any native apps (even the networkmanager clone is not really active). As soon as they develop a word processing solution (a spreadsheet app would also be nice), an IM (with Jabber and IRC support - preferably without any other protocols, since a multiprotocol IM is bloated by design) and a browser (it could be Webkit, but even better is a C port of TkHtml3, it is faster and more lightweight, yet supports most needed things, JavaScript included - via SEE) - I'll definetly switch to E17. Especially since I am about to buy a TabletPC laptop (so I need a DE that can work nice with stylus). But that's only dreams - they are still working on 1.0 release, Duke-Nukem-Forever style.

fsckd · 2009-10-18 17:57:24

ilembitov wrote:

But that's only dreams - they are still working on 1.0 release, Duke-Nukem-Forever style.

They have changed the versioning. e16 and e17 are now separate projects (rather than two versions of the same project) with e16 at version 1.0.

It's probably more HURD-style development had HURD not made architectural blunders and poor design decisions. One difference is the e17 team has a very specific set of goals they are working towards. They seem to know what they want and are making progress, albeit slowly. I first tried e17 in 2005 and it was a very different system then. It has improved in many, many ways.

skottish · 2009-10-18 19:31:41

ilembitov wrote:

Basically, I really liked E17. The only thing I don't get: they worked so hard on their library foundation: graphical toolkits and what's not, yet they don't really put any effort into developing any native apps (even the networkmanager clone is not really active). As soon as they develop a word processing solution (a spreadsheet app would also be nice), an IM (with Jabber and IRC support - preferably without any other protocols, since a multiprotocol IM is bloated by design) and a browser (it could be Webkit, but even better is a C port of TkHtml3, it is faster and more lightweight, yet supports most needed things, JavaScript included - via SEE) - I'll definetly switch to E17. Especially since I am about to buy a TabletPC laptop (so I need a DE that can work nice with stylus). But that's only dreams - they are still working on 1.0 release, Duke-Nukem-Forever style.

They never intended E17 to be a DE; They intended it to be a "desktop shell". There are almost no apps that are officially supported by E17. Most of them are third party add-ons, with the only exception that I can think of is EFM.

jceasless · 2009-10-19 09:36:13

E17 was the first WM I put on my Arch install, and I did enjoy it quite a bit. It felt fast, and the animated icons in my taskbar were fun for 5 or 6 minutes. But from there, it was difficult to tell where to go. The installation procedure, including using easy_e17.sh , was not exactly smooth, but it wasn't entirely painful either. However, even with my environment variables properly set (though in terms of documentation, the E project doesn't make a whole lot clear about anything) I was unable to compile any of the edge stuff like the new dockbar, etc.

To top it off, there is no full list of E applications that also describes their purposes. This means you are choosing amongst generally arbitrarily named 'e*' applications wondering what purpose each has, and with little to tell you which of the audio players, for instance, are still evolving and which are stagnate. For such a confusing amalgam of names, the E project suffers from not having developed a better map of where everything fits.

Though they did reboot the website a little while ago. And the elementary library does seem to allow easy creation of applications in C. Things continually happen on the inside but they take forever, don't leave the codebase if they fail (in terms of apps), and are not generally documented to the outside world. The lack of documentation immediately cuts off the pool of new users using Linux (and thus their computer ) for the first time from going too far.

In the end I think it boils down to whether ETK apps run significantly faster on low-power embedded systems, we may well see e17 gaining traction after all.

mythus · 2009-10-19 13:18:40

But see jceasless, it is just as skottish says, E17 is not meant to be a full fledged DE. That was never their purpose. They are more like an enhanced WM. They provide certain things like EFM, but really that is about it.

I would love to see more ETK apps, like an ETK web browser and an ETK instant messenger. However I am not expecting such from E17 developers. Such would be like expecting Fluxbox or Pekwm to give me a file manager and such. E17 is just not that kind of product.

That doesn't mean that others out there can't take the ETK library and make applications. They can, they just won't be supported as 'official' applications. Until then you'd simply do what you'd do with other WM's, you'd supplement your own favorite browsers and applications. Many ETK themes can be closely pared to GTK themes if you put the work into finding them. Just go look at the screenshot thread and see how I paired the etk theme I have with the nano gtk theme, that gives it a very similar feel.

There are many good tools in AUR for E17, however as far as docks go, I find that simply making another self and putting the taks launcher gadget on it works wonderfully. I can set the self wherever, make it transparent, and the effects of the icons when hovered over give it a dock-like appearance. I haven't ever had the need to mess around with the third party docks made for E17.

As far as the embedded technologies are going, E17 is showing strong footing in that department. E17 itself is much lighter than KDE and GNOME, and I feel that they will do wonderfully there.

iza · 2009-10-19 14:48:14

I used E17 for a while and quite liked it for the most part.

What really turns me off is that there just aren't any good themes. Honestly I've tried every single one out there and can't stand any of them; they're just plain ugly. And forget about trying to make your own, or even customize an existing theme -- now that is a headache, especially since there's absolutely no documentation anywhere.

Last edited by iza (2009-10-19 14:48:50)

olovram · 2009-10-19 22:38:47

There indeed is a tk im c:

jceasless · 2009-10-21 10:08:46

mythus-

I understand it is not a DE. But I am talking about the e* apps in the main e17 repository--these are the equivalent of "official" apps, in that they are what the e17 team develops/uses. On top of that, some are simply libraries that are required for compiling "third-party" apps--all without any indication of what they actually do, and whether the code is dead or not.

Like I said, this is a documentation issue, primarily. Anyway, I don't think my complaint lies in expecting them to be a DE, but either way I don't think you can quite claim that code sitting in [i]the project's main code repository[i] is somehow "third-party."

mythus · 2009-10-21 14:38:42

mythus-
I understand it is not a DE. But I am talking about the e* apps in the main e17 repository--these are the equivalent of "official" apps, in that they are what the e17 team develops/uses. On top of that, some are simply libraries that are required for compiling "third-party" apps--all without any indication of what they actually do, and whether the code is dead or not.
Like I said, this is a documentation issue, primarily. Anyway, I don't think my complaint lies in expecting them to be a DE, but either way I don't think you can quite claim that code sitting in [i]the project's main code repository[i] is somehow "third-party."

Alright, I completely understand that. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

The only thing I can think to add is that e17 is not reported to be stable, though I do find it stable for my uses. I don't recall a new dockbar in any official e17 repositories in Arch Linux repository-land, so that confuses me some. The only new dockbar I can think of the the itask and itask-ng ones in AUR, and while these things are mentioned over at E17 and used in screenshots, I am led to believe that they are third party apps. Perhaps I am wrong on that though. But that doesn't matter so much because my previous remark was thinking you were talking about other things that were notably not E17 official items, which I was mistaken.

E17 definetly is suffering in it's documentation. I have no doubt that the lack of good documentation is what is hindering theme developers and application developers to do good work for E17. This is something I hope that will be improved upon, but it does look like they are too thinly stretched out as is. Working on E17 and embedded E17 and it's apps... I wish they'd focuses first on E17 but I supposed embedded devices is where the future is.

pogeymanz · 2009-10-21 14:44:29

As much as I like e17, it has never been stable for me. I installed it again a few days ago and it was much better than it had been, but it still crashed on me once so far, which is a lot better than the crash-every-ten-minutes state it was in for me a few months ago.

And window focusing is still buggy for me. It always has a hard time when switching workspaces then clicking on a window. I use a more "traditional" focus set-up than the default.

smartboyathome · 2009-10-21 21:14:02

I have used E17 for a while now (except for some brief experimental moments with other DEs/WMs). I love it, especially when combined with my easy-e17 package (which, admittedly, keeps breaking due to changes in the E17 codebase, and so isn't approved for non-masochists). It just works for me, and provides a decent amount of eye candy to boot. I haven't found another DE/WM yet which can replace it for me. To top it off, here are some screenshots of my E17 setup (yes, they're old, but my setup hasn't really changed at all): dirty and clean.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-17 03:28:41

E17 the DE thats not a DE or is it hmmmm

#2 2009-10-17 05:55:20

Re: E17 the DE thats not a DE or is it hmmmm

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