I think there's a typo in the original code, since it has for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++), while the post goes on to say there's no iteration limit.
vbernat
I had no idea that some people were still using E16. I have also used for quite a long time, but I eventually switched to FVWM, which was more programmable.
madaxe_again
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
malux85
Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!
pjc50
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
_3u10
I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16
mrweasel
> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
drooopy
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
zeruch
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
angled
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
robinsonb5
It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.
unwind
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just
for (;;)
That was confusing me a bit.
isaacfrond
In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
pjmlp
Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
sgt
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
mhd
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
pjc50
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
UncleSlacky
Moksha (a fork of e17) is the main desktop for Bodhi Linux, an unofficial Ubuntu-based distro:
I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
jimbosis
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
UncleSlacky
They're up to e27 now, it even supports Wayland.
sqbic
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
shevy-java
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised
that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation
at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3
but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated
smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix
bugs must also be small.
wvh
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
avereveard
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
pino83
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
ZoomZoomZoom
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
ho_schi
I wonder about the sadly.
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
prmoustache
Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!
ChrisGreenHeur
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
jhbadger
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
kkaske
Things change. The tab in Brave that I'm using to view this comment section is coming in at 95MBs!
chriswarbo
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
sandos
"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
rasterman
when it's your window manager you are using right now... you tend to debug differently :) yes yes - xephyr and what not. i know...
exitb
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
PunchyHamster
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about invalid objects.
consomida
[dead]
porknbeans00
Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.
hartror
Wow I haven't used enlightenment since the 90s! So cool!
manbash
I always appreciated how you can simply attach to the enlightenment process at any point, and also upon a crash.
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
pvtmert
I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
mghackerlady
I really wish there was more EFL software :(
Sanskarverma_08
[dead]
lateralux
e16 was truly unique... honestly the best Linux desktop ever made !
somat
"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"
No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.
I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.
breton
> because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed.
And where is fun in that? Where are now the nights in trying to reproduce it? Where are the doubts in the moments of rest "have i really fixed it, or is it still there"? Boring.
azalemeth
The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby.
It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!
kdhaskjdhadjk
But it is light weight. Fabulously so. The "bling" just comes from the ability to write theme files to customize the appearance of window decorations and menus. IIRC it was a form of fvwm from way back in the day and is still similar in some ways. I use it on everything including old 32-bit systems, and it's snappy and responsive everywhere.
kogasa240p
Oh wow didn't expect someone my age to try out Enlightenment. Every so often I try to use Enlightenment (either e16/moksha or the latest version) but I always leave because it requires Connman and setting it up properly is a pain imo. Might try it again because of this blogpost.
smm11
Good thread.
I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.
lnicola
I think there's a typo in the original code, since it has for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++), while the post goes on to say there's no iteration limit.
vbernat
I had no idea that some people were still using E16. I have also used for quite a long time, but I eventually switched to FVWM, which was more programmable.
madaxe_again
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
malux85
Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!
pjc50
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
_3u10
I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16
mrweasel
> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
drooopy
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
zeruch
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
angled
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
robinsonb5
It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.
unwind
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just
for (;;)
That was confusing me a bit.
isaacfrond
In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
pjmlp
Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
sgt
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
mhd
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
pjc50
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
UncleSlacky
Moksha (a fork of e17) is the main desktop for Bodhi Linux, an unofficial Ubuntu-based distro:
I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
jimbosis
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
UncleSlacky
They're up to e27 now, it even supports Wayland.
sqbic
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
shevy-java
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised
that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation
at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3
but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated
smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix
bugs must also be small.
wvh
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
avereveard
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
pino83
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
ZoomZoomZoom
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
ho_schi
I wonder about the sadly.
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
prmoustache
Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!
ChrisGreenHeur
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
jhbadger
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
kkaske
Things change. The tab in Brave that I'm using to view this comment section is coming in at 95MBs!
chriswarbo
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
sandos
"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
rasterman
when it's your window manager you are using right now... you tend to debug differently :) yes yes - xephyr and what not. i know...
exitb
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
PunchyHamster
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about invalid objects.
consomida
[dead]
porknbeans00
Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.
hartror
Wow I haven't used enlightenment since the 90s! So cool!
manbash
I always appreciated how you can simply attach to the enlightenment process at any point, and also upon a crash.
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
pvtmert
I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
mghackerlady
I really wish there was more EFL software :(
Sanskarverma_08
[dead]
lateralux
e16 was truly unique... honestly the best Linux desktop ever made !
somat
"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"
No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.
I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.
breton
> because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed.
And where is fun in that? Where are now the nights in trying to reproduce it? Where are the doubts in the moments of rest "have i really fixed it, or is it still there"? Boring.
azalemeth
The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby.
It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!
kdhaskjdhadjk
But it is light weight. Fabulously so. The "bling" just comes from the ability to write theme files to customize the appearance of window decorations and menus. IIRC it was a form of fvwm from way back in the day and is still similar in some ways. I use it on everything including old 32-bit systems, and it's snappy and responsive everywhere.
kogasa240p
Oh wow didn't expect someone my age to try out Enlightenment. Every so often I try to use Enlightenment (either e16/moksha or the latest version) but I always leave because it requires Connman and setting it up properly is a pain imo. Might try it again because of this blogpost.
smm11
Good thread.
I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.
I think there's a typo in the original code, since it has
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++), while the post goes on to say there's no iteration limit.I had no idea that some people were still using E16. I have also used for quite a long time, but I eventually switched to FVWM, which was more programmable.
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16
> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just That was confusing me a bit.In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
Moksha (a fork of e17) is the main desktop for Bodhi Linux, an unofficial Ubuntu-based distro:
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha
I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
https://www.bandshed.net/
Latest Version Release Announcement:
https://www.bandshed.net/2026/03/01/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
A few more details from and older release announcement:
"Both ISO’s are built on an MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base with Liquorix kernels."
https://www.bandshed.net/2025/11/27/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
They're up to e27 now, it even supports Wayland.
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3 but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
I wonder about the sadly.
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
Things change. The tab in Brave that I'm using to view this comment section is coming in at 95MBs!
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
when it's your window manager you are using right now... you tend to debug differently :) yes yes - xephyr and what not. i know...
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
https://www.enlightenment.org/ Seems down at the moment.
Coincidence, or collateral hug?
It was a load-bearing bug you reckon?
that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about invalid objects.
[dead]
Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.
Wow I haven't used enlightenment since the 90s! So cool!
I always appreciated how you can simply attach to the enlightenment process at any point, and also upon a crash.
The documentation is there: https://www.enlightenment.org/contrib/enlightenment-debug
[dead]
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
I really wish there was more EFL software :(
[dead]
e16 was truly unique... honestly the best Linux desktop ever made !
"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"
No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.
I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.
> because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed.
And where is fun in that? Where are now the nights in trying to reproduce it? Where are the doubts in the moments of rest "have i really fixed it, or is it still there"? Boring.
The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby.
It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!
But it is light weight. Fabulously so. The "bling" just comes from the ability to write theme files to customize the appearance of window decorations and menus. IIRC it was a form of fvwm from way back in the day and is still similar in some ways. I use it on everything including old 32-bit systems, and it's snappy and responsive everywhere.
Oh wow didn't expect someone my age to try out Enlightenment. Every so often I try to use Enlightenment (either e16/moksha or the latest version) but I always leave because it requires Connman and setting it up properly is a pain imo. Might try it again because of this blogpost.
Good thread.
I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.
I think there's a typo in the original code, since it has
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++), while the post goes on to say there's no iteration limit.I had no idea that some people were still using E16. I have also used for quite a long time, but I eventually switched to FVWM, which was more programmable.
E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.
I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.
Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!
Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.
I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16
> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight
Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)
I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.
No kidding. Last time I used Enlightenment back in the late 90s, both KDE 1.x and GNOME 1.x were orders of magnitude more usable on my lowly Pentium MMX 166 with 16 MB of RAM.
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.
Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just That was confusing me a bit.In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged:
Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
Moksha (a fork of e17) is the main desktop for Bodhi Linux, an unofficial Ubuntu-based distro:
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha
I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
https://www.bandshed.net/
Latest Version Release Announcement:
https://www.bandshed.net/2026/03/01/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
A few more details from and older release announcement:
"Both ISO’s are built on an MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base with Liquorix kernels."
https://www.bandshed.net/2025/11/27/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.
I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.
To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.
They're up to e27 now, it even supports Wayland.
I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.
Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3 but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).
I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.
I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.
same, especially compiz era after good drivers and accelerated compositing became ubiquitous was wild
Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots (compared to Win XP or even earlier ones)? I love desktop environments that look nice, I love effects and animations, if done well, and I love to be able to customize things (KDE/Plasma is doing a really good job in that regard imho). But Enlighenment? Whenever some screenshots excited me, I gave it another try for some hours, and then went back to KDE or Gnome.
It's what you call "ricing" today? You need it for some nice screenshots (or screencasts nowadays), you post them, and then you log off and use something else (i.e. the smartphone, the gaming console, Windows, KDE/Gnome, ...) because that just actually works.
> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:
Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...
I wonder about the sadly.
Luckily the hang was deterministic.
Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!
one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....
Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.
And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.
Things change. The tab in Brave that I'm using to view this comment section is coming in at 95MBs!
Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.
"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."
Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.
when it's your window manager you are using right now... you tend to debug differently :) yes yes - xephyr and what not. i know...
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
https://www.enlightenment.org/ Seems down at the moment.
Coincidence, or collateral hug?
It was a load-bearing bug you reckon?
that was literally me... i stopped it because... well.. short version - chasing bug in efl that blurted out an invalid object stdout errors when http requests for the forecasts module failed - the module relies on a caching proxy service on e.org to get weather forecasts. i simulated it a bit brute-force by temporarily taking down apache :) it's back and bug is fixed in git. it's silent now not complaining about invalid objects.
[dead]
Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.
Wow I haven't used enlightenment since the 90s! So cool!
I always appreciated how you can simply attach to the enlightenment process at any point, and also upon a crash.
The documentation is there: https://www.enlightenment.org/contrib/enlightenment-debug
[dead]
These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.
I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.
A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...
> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.
I really wish there was more EFL software :(
[dead]
e16 was truly unique... honestly the best Linux desktop ever made !
"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"
No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.
I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.
> because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed.
And where is fun in that? Where are now the nights in trying to reproduce it? Where are the doubts in the moments of rest "have i really fixed it, or is it still there"? Boring.
The author is 21 (which I find incredibly impressive) and is using a DE that was written when they were a baby.
It _is_ lightweight in that context. I also love the fact that XaoS knowledge is useful in the context of "real software" programming!
But it is light weight. Fabulously so. The "bling" just comes from the ability to write theme files to customize the appearance of window decorations and menus. IIRC it was a form of fvwm from way back in the day and is still similar in some ways. I use it on everything including old 32-bit systems, and it's snappy and responsive everywhere.
Oh wow didn't expect someone my age to try out Enlightenment. Every so often I try to use Enlightenment (either e16/moksha or the latest version) but I always leave because it requires Connman and setting it up properly is a pain imo. Might try it again because of this blogpost.
Good thread.
I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.