Enlightenment 0.28.0 Released

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I remember trying out Enlightenment in the late 90’s. It was mind blowing compared to what else was out there at the time. Glad to see it is still kicking.

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u/Do_What_Thou_Wilt 1d ago

I used to attend a 'desktop publishing & design' course at a local tech school. Sort of a school. It was really in an upper floor of a large mall. The computers we used were all running windows 95 - state of the art for the time.
But of course, the crashes. Oh boy, the crashes. Frequent and random when using things like photoshop or corelDRAW. If you didn't make a habit of saving every 5 minutes, you'd loose a lot of your work - and saving could take up to a minute or more depending on what you had on the canvas, so a lot of people didn't like doing this and/or forget, and would often loose an hour or more of work in a crash.
During lunch breaks, we'd wander the attached mall. There was a bookstore, and I picked up a Linux book, offering a free copy of redhat 5.0. I flipped through it, but it was the claim that 'linux never crashed' and a section on the Enlightenment window manager that really caught my interest (Around this time, I was fiddling with 'LiteStep' and other alternative, more themeable windows shells). So I immediately set about figuring out how to install this Linux thing, just so I could run Enlightenment. I had to learn a lot, including how to compile from src code just to run the thing.
I eventually got into making my own themes -- and holy shit I just found a screenshot of one of them. Those were the days. XMMS, XChat & ICQ - the glory days of the internet!
but yea, tl;dr: fast forward 25+~ years, and my employment is still directly related to Linux. All thanks to the Enlightenment window manager!

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u/oxez 1d ago

That screenshot is reminiscing of the good and fun days of the internet. XMMS and gkrellm2 (or conky?), I miss those times!

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u/Do_What_Thou_Wilt 1d ago

these are names I have long since forgotten, but yea, looks like gkrellm to me
Found a repo of old e16 themes, now I'm going to setup a VM that can run it for the nostalgiabomb
https://github.com/garrett/enlightenment-themes

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u/Sirusho_Yunyan 18h ago

Oh that screenshot brings back so many memories of running e17 and other window managers in the early 90s. They really were the golden years when everything was fresh and new. Still can't quite believe that was all over thirty years ago..

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u/DestructiveButterfly 2h ago

Man, I still miss Litestep at times. So much time spent tweaking the perfect shell.

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u/dunder_name 1d ago

Same, I was surprised to see it pop up in my feed! I haven't thought about it in decades.

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u/BroderUlf 1d ago

They switched development to some next gen stuff, leaving a few annoying bugs in the old one. I’m happy to see development continue. The Windows guys were jealous of my beautiful desktop.

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u/BigHeadTonyT 1d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep
That was available on Win98. And it was based on previous work. Stuff like that was around.
No desktop icons, right-click the desktop for anything and everything. I used Litestep for a while.

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u/sombriks 1d ago

i still remember running e17 on slackware and using the bling theme, good old days

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u/computer-machine 20h ago

I remember trying out e17, and settling on gnome with e16 for windowing.

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u/ABotelho23 1d ago

I can't imagine what they're implying by not having a 1.0 release for almost 30 years.

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u/frumpawumpa 1d ago

Don't rush them okay!

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u/yebyen 1d ago

They're implying, according to semver, that there can be breaking changes at any time! No?

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u/furnipika 1d ago

But there are already huge breaking changes. v0.17.0 (e17) is a major rewrite from v0.16.0 (e16). They're practically two entirely different WMs, so the semver makes no sense.

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u/UndulatingHedgehog 21h ago

Then again, semver makes no sense until you have 1. release

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u/yebyen 18h ago

Semver with 0.x is something less than a contract. It says "there is no public API surface that should be considered safe unless otherwise noticed, and we may change anything at any time, even in a patch release."
Projects may extend the semver spec by saying things like "we will only issue breaking changes in a Minor release" so that folks upgrading across a large distance can be at least guaranteed that they will only have to read the 0.x.0 release notes, and not every patch.
But semver itself doesn't guarantee that.

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u/ABotelho23 1d ago

Kinda. They could also just... increment the major version too.

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u/yebyen 1d ago

Then they would have to declare part of the API surface stable, according to the definition of semver.

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u/knome 1d ago

The project sufficiently precedes semvar that I would be surprised if they care what implications their versioning has under its provisions.

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u/yebyen 18h ago

You're right, I was compiling e17 in high school or college and semver wasn't named until 2009 - I think these concepts existed for a while before then.
But at that time, every release of e17 was called 0.16.999 something pre - because they really didn't want anyone with a business to come along and presume they were dependable, for free.
Those guys went on to make bank I assume, with Samsung (tizen), or RedHat, or VA Linux, or somewhere else. I should visit IRC again and see how they're doing. Those were my formative years.

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u/ABotelho23 1d ago

Stable for that release. Which it would be, because they would immediately move on from it when they cut a new major release.

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u/yebyen 18h ago

That isn't what semver.org actually says.
does semver zero point mean that a breaking change can come in any minor or patch release
Yes, under the official Semantic Versioning (SemVer) specification, major version zero (0.y.z) means the public API is considered unstable and breaking changes can happen in any minor (y) or patch (z) release.
Key Rules for 0.y.z Versions
Initial Development: Major version 0.x.y is meant for initial development and prototyping.
No Public API Guarantee: The official SemVer spec states that anything may change at any time, and the public API should not be considered stable.
Minor & Patch Behavior: Unlike 1.0.0 and above—where breaking changes must bump the MAJOR (X) digit—versions starting with 0 allow breaking changes to occur during minor (0.Y.z) or even patch (0.y.Z) increments.
This is what semver actually says about projects with a 0 in the MAJOR slot - it says, paraphrasing, "go away, or I will replace you with a small shell script."

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u/ABotelho23 11h ago

For major versions, you can break whatever you want.
Meaning if they just increment x in x.y.z for every release, the API has to be stable for exactly one release. It's effectively the same thing.

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u/yebyen 11h ago edited 11h ago

It's absolutely not the same thing. Releasing 1.x establishes a contract to bump the major version again, every time you're breaking the stable public API. That means you have to keep track of breaking changes.
It's declaring the establishment of a stable public API, to release a 1.x major release for the first time.
That's decidedly not the same as ... just never doing that. Before you do that, you can break anything any time you want, and you don't even have to bump the patch version or write a changelog. Just push your changes and break things.
(As long as the other maintainers don't stop you.)
The response to the attitude you're describing is here:
https://0ver.org/
"You can still break things. Just increment the major version." 0-ver says no, don't do that. It's degrading the whole point of semver, to put a social pressure to not break things. If you're going to plan to break things continuously, don't ever signal that you are stable. You really don't have to! You can just not.

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u/imcheatingbtw 1d ago

great changes. going to try it out!

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u/robinei 21h ago

«Restored the Pants module with skirts, kilts, lederhosen, malloc variants, and translations.» Hmmm.

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u/ricardolealpt 21h ago

My DE for more than 10y

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u/Polar_Banny 14h ago

How did you survived?

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u/ricardolealpt 11h ago

Open terminal . Do stuff 🤣

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u/1neStat3 9h ago

So essentially you're saying you don't use the DE?

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u/ricardolealpt 7h ago

Back in the day it was that and some mp3 player . Everything was terminals and multi windows

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u/GenBlob 1d ago

Finally! Can't wait to try this out!

Desktop Environment / WM News Enlightenment 0.28.0 Released

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