www-content/pages/about-enlightenment.txt

~~Title: About Enlightenment~~
==== Enlightenment ====

[[download|Download Enlightenment Here]]

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//Note - the above screenshots are user submitted and not filtered or approved. They are submitted to share using the Enlightenment screenshot feature after clicking on "Share". If there is private or inappropriate content, we are not responsible. If you find content objectionable, click on the image and click on the "Alert content" at the top of the page.//

{{:icon-enlightenment.png?nolink |}}

Enlightenment (0.17+) (a.k.a E17) is the next generation of
graphical desktop shell from the Enlightenment project. When you first
run it and get past the initial setup wizard, you should end up with a
desktop not unlike the above. It is a very traditional UNIX/X11 style
desktop, because that is what E primarily is and attempts to be, **BUT**
with a bunch of bells, whistles and modernities that were never there,
as well as a different core design philosophy. There seems to be some
obsession with Window Manager vs. Desktop Environment debates. It
doesn't much matter what you call it. It manages windows. It does
compositing. It manages files. It launches applications. It handles UI
and system settings.

This information assumes you will download and compile Enlightenment
and its necessities beyond what your current OS does or can provide.
If Enlightenment is provided already as packages, you may want to
check them out first, see if they are actually up to date, as opposed
to compiling it all yourself. If not, then this information will help
you get it set up yourself and take your first few steps. There are a
few things you will need to use Enlightenment. Firstly you will need
to [[download]] Enlightenment and EFL library components. You will need to
provide the appropriate system dependencies too. The details will be
further on.

=== Misconceptions and assumptions ===

Before we go any further, it is time to clean up some common
misconceptions. First, Enlightenment is not new. It is OLD. It
predates larger desktop environments like GNOME or XFCE. It is just
barely younger than KDE. It never started life as an attempt to "be a
full desktop environment". It started life as simply a window manager.
This was back towards the latter part of 1996, and its first 0.1
release came in the first part of 1997. It was a window manager with
some extras to scratch the itch that "everything was gray bevels and
UIs had to be plain to be functional or useful, and that computers/X11
were not capable of more". It handily proved that to be wrong. It
could manage function AND form more flexibly than anything else, and
to this date is still in an enviable position of flexibility in both
behavior features and in terms of visuals. In fact, its Achilles heel
simply may be that it has too many options and too much flexibility.
Some of the extras filled in the gaps, like setting wallpaper, that
was always done by 3rd party tools and not the window manager at the
time. If you are after a constrained and simple UI, then Enlightenment
(E) is not for you. It can be configured to be plain and simple if you
try, or to be buzzing with activity and complexity, but this is up to
you. Its default is somewhere in between these to give you a taste of
what it can do on both ends of the spectrum.

You aren't stuck with the default theme. Enlightenment was the
first Window Manager (WM) to introduce themes in X11 (pre-packaged
sets of data that you just grab and select, providing you with a vast
new look and feel). Today in Enlightenment, these themes come as
"Edje" files (.edj), and are pre-packaged data files containing all
images, layout, animation etc. that you may need. They never get
"unpacked". They are used "live as-is", and only the data needed from
the file is sourced and decoded, so even if the theme is massive, only
the pieces needed at any one time are decoded into memory, which is
normally a fraction of the actual file size. They are also live data
and need to be there while E17 runs as it is forever digging bits of
data out of these files as it needs it. It is an accepted fact that
the default look will not be for everyone. It tries to strike a
balance of being unique (not mimicking some other desktop look), yet
still being stylish. It is meant to echo some of the past from where
Enlightenment comes from, and yet roll in modern effects and feels. It
sacrifices some "usability" for looks, yet tries to keep a balance and
still be functional. It will not be for everyone, but it is hoped that
it keeps you mostly happy until you find other themes that exactly
meet your visual needs. You will find this as an on-going philosophy
in Enlightenment. One size does NOT fit all. That's what options are
for. That's why we have themes. Do not assume that what
you see is what you are stuck with. You are expected to experiment and
discover what is good for you. Maybe the default is fine. Maybe it is
not. That's why we pioneered themes and spent immense amounts of time
making them nicely packaged, efficient and powerful enough to
fine-tune almost any aspect of the UI.

That leads onto the next thing you may find quickly. Enlightenment has
so many options, because we believe that **CHOICE** is important. If you
don't believe that your preferences matter, then maybe another project
is better for you, but we firmly believe that they do. We also believe
that there are others who have different preferences to you and that
they matter too. We may not have accounted for every single option out
there. We may not have presented it to you in a way that makes it
childs play to find and use, but we have tried. Over time options will
be cleaned up and accessibility to them improved. A lot of them are
there simply because they needed to be and not a lot of time was spent
fine-tuning how to present them in a fool-proof manner. This will
improve over time and with input, suggestions, patches etc. we hope to
still offer all the options you need or want, but in a much more
accessible form.

Not everything is perfect, polished and "finished". This is not the
end of a path. It is the start of a whole new one. If you find
something you think could be better, please don't just complain and
vanish. [[contact|Contact us]] and open up a dialogue. Maybe we agree.
Maybe we disagree. Maybe we are already working on it. Maybe you can
help out and provide patches too.

----

=== Philosophy ===

We have certain things that are important to us and how we work. They
will often show immediately to users, and it is good to explain this
here. They will lurk behind our decisions and responses, so instead of
having to explain them each time, setting the tone here is a good idea.

== CHOICE IS GOOD ==

A user should be given as much control as is feasible. There is often
a trade-off in maintainability by the programmers of some code,
current and future development, as well as available time to do the
work. It is always best to make any feature "just work" without
options for everyone if possible, but the effort may be immense, or
the "what does "just work" really mean may not be as clear to some as
to others, and so options are provided to allow the fine-tuning to be
done by users. Sometimes options are dangerous, but necessary for some
people. Sometimes they are so dangerous that they are buried under
layers of complex systems to try and keep them from being mis-used.
Sometimes they are just, by nature, complex, and that's life. In the
end, choice is good. That means that options and configuration are
important. We'd love to streamline how they are presented, and make it
easier for the "Average Joe", but never shall we do this at the
expense of the power user.

== VANILLA VS. STRAWBERRY VS. CHOCOLATE ==

Like with choice of options, the actual aesthetics are something that
is highly subjective and personal. What is beautiful for one person
can be ugly for another. Otherwise we'd all still be driving black
Ford model-T's and all be happy about it. Some desktops and OSs
provide vanilla looks. Some are strawberry. Some can never be changed.
We have chosen chocolate by default. Mostly because it means we stand
out by default. You can change this if you want. You can even create
your own flavors of look in gory detail if you spend the time on the
artwork and layout. Take advantage of the choice.

== EFFICIENCY MATTERS ==

We want Enlightenment to be as efficient as possible. We don't want to
sacrifice looks or functionality either, so we have spent a lot of
effort making a lot of libraries that help this happen. Our theme
files are binary blobs. They may appear opaque at first, but they are
dissectable, given tools we provide like edje_decc. The same for our
configuration files (eet). We value runtime speed and efficiency over
giving the user encouragement to go hack their configuration files
with a text editor. We spent a lot of time providing a GUI for almost
every option that exists in Enlightenment. It manages this for you.
It's to ensure maximum efficiency at runtime. If you need to, on the
odd occasion, dig into the bowels of these files we have tools that
can export and import text files that you can edit, so for the real
tinkerer, hacker and developer you can do what you need to, BUT the
regular user is discouraged from messing at this level, as this is
where you can get yourself into more trouble if you get it wrong. We
have also chosen a much more process-lean model with fewer processes
and more rolled into a single one. This gives better opportunities for
efficiency, but makes things a little more fragile. To solve the
fragility we have made error recovery very good with enlightenment
catching its own errors and offering the ability to debug or just
restart from where you left off and move on without losing any work. E17
leaves a crash log file (~/.e-crashdump.txt) if you have gdb installed
and you have debug symbols on.

== NOT EVERYONE DRIVES A F1 ==

Not just being efficient, but realizing that not everyone has the
latest and greatest hardware to run Enlightenment is what we are
about. It's also not just one architecture. They may be stuck on
something quite old (some 486), or want Enlightenment to work on
something quite bizarre. We have gone to a lot of effort to make
Enlightenment scale from anything like a 200MHz ARM phone with 32M RAM
all the way up to the latest multi-core, 64bit multi-GHz and 16GB+
desktop beasts with 2 or more screens. We keep in mind the puny end of
the spectrum all the way up to the beastly end. When we make decisions
they try and ensure every part of this spectrum gets a fair go, and
preferably leaves as few people behind as possible. This also means
sometimes raising the bar in order not to hold back future things, but
also means sometimes holding back until a better way is found. You'll
find evidence of this in the fact that out-of-the-box we have made
compositing fast and usable even without a GPU, and yet we can fully
push your GPU if you have one and it has solid drivers. We care.

== EYE CANDY MATTERS ==

If you want a minimal interface, you can configure Enlightenment to be
quite minimal, but it takes effort. Enlightenment leans towards
providing eye candy where it can, and often comes by default that way.
This is how we roll. We always have. Haters gonna hate. That's how we
roll. Bring on the lollipops!

== WE MAKE LIBRARIES MUCH MORE THAN WM'S ==

One thing over the years that has happened, is that the project has
morphed into a library project much more than a Window Manager or
Desktop project. Of our released code something like 80% of it is
stand-alone libraries. This is why there was no apparent progress in
the Window Manager for many years. The progress was sunk all into
building libraries and a toolkit, in order to make the WM and much
more besides. A lot of effort was spent on abstractions to ensure we
have many years of smooth sailing into the future. When we do things
we often go and build libraries first, and then try and make them
applicable to much more than just the simple problem being solved in
Enlightenment, which adds overhead, but provides valuable resources
for developers other than us who wish to re-use that effort in their
own creations.

== PORTING MATTERS ==

We, as a group, primarily work on Linux systems. We have developers
who use and focus on others like MacOS-X, Windows, the BSD's even PS3.
We care about porting, and that often adds overhead and complexity,
but we don't have build and development farms set up for each OS out
there, so often you'll find Linux gets the support first and foremost,
and then it's improved for other targets. Sometimes we shortcut that
and do it "the Linux way" only as we have problems to solve and can
worry about other target systems later. We are always open to ways of
making that better and more portable. We welcome patches and input and
anyone willing to do the hard yards of supporting their OS.

== WE HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR ==

We are not always that serious a bunch. We have a sense of Humor. We
exercise it regularly. You may call it "unprofessional". We call it
"having a life". :)

== THE WORLD IS NOT ENGLISH ==

Whilst most of our website is in English, as is the default language
for Enlightenment (until you change it), and it's the common language
of communication amongst developers and even a lot of users. Even so,
we realize and are fully aware that people speak other languages.
Many, in fact most of our developers are not native English speakers.
We have tried to support "the rest of the world" as much as we can and
hope to continue in future. It is an ongoing process to provide
translations and such support. Help out. We do care. We are busy. Very
busy. But we care. It should be hopefully evident in the large list of
languages Enlightenment is already translated to, partially or
completely, and the fact we support selection of keyboard layouts and
input methods as well. We are all UTF-8 through and through and
support right-to-left text too as well as complex composition as is
found in some languages (if you provide the right dependencies). Many
of our developers do not live in their own native languages and
countries, so we are fully aware of the challenges people face with
another language environment.

== OPEN IS BEST ==

Enlightenment and its libraries are all open source (BSD 2 clause,
LGPL or GPL for some executable binaries only). It is a mix because
the person who founded each library chose the license, or a license is
inherited from some original source. We respect that choice and
license. We believe open is best because it simply is the best way to
propagate knowledge, gain feedback and input and build a community
beyond your small borders. It gets your software onto more devices and
operating systems. It allows developers to poke and prod and find out
what is really happening. It's the most detailed documentation ever
made. It simply is better. But your "brand" of open and someone else's
may differ. That's not for us to promote or debate. There are no other
political aspirations for this project beyond that. Open is best. This
also goes for our communication. Warts and all we discuss in the open.

=== Why oh why use E? ===

So if you've managed to read this far, you're rather patient and
willing to invest more than 7 seconds on Enlightenment, but you're
probably wondering "Why on earth should I use this Enlightenment
thing? I don't want people to know I use E! They might think I do
drugs or something?". Well wonder no more! You shall now be assaulted
by our marketing blurb!

E is smaller, lighter, faster, nicer and more flexible that your
current WM, and it's old school with a new-school twist. It's trendy
and fashionable. You will simply be totally un-cool if you don't use
it. Its farts smell of roses and world peace has been known to be
solved by E. OK. Just kidding (though really... they do smell of
roses!).

In all seriousness Enlightenment is fairly lean. Considering how much
you get in return. It isn't a minimalist WM or desktop, but it is a
massively long cry from the full desktop beasts that are its peers,
even the ones that claim to be minimalist/lean. Enlightenment uses
EFL. EFL was designed to provide the core of Enlightenment, and then
some. But it was targeted at scaling down to things like mobile phones
and embedded devices. This has meant that there was a large focus on
being lean, and getting a lot of "return on investment" from the very
core that sits under E17. This of course has paid off for
Enlightenment itself rather nicely.

It only loads what it needs to, when it needs to. It caches what it no
longer needs to avoid always re-fetching it, but these caches
eventually get flushed or expire, so long-term it won't just grow
without bound in memory footprint. Rendering can be done with the CPU
and/or GPU. It's up to you. (though at the moment we don't give you
any UI controls over the rendering engine for UI content, but the
compositor allows the choice - the core toolkit is capable of it).

An E17 install on the exact same system as Unity on Ubuntu, simply
replacing unity can save you 200M of RAM. Not to mention be snappier
and more responsive. You will never know until you try, so why not at
least give it a go? You run fewer processes since E17 now handles
being the panel, filemanager, window manager and compositor (and more)
all at once. It amortizes the cost of all these common components into
a single process. You start quickly and you are now just a really cool
person.

Enlightenment and EFL provide over-the-top power when it comes to
re-skinning or theme changes. You can change not just colors and
background images, but entire animations, multiple layers of imagery
scaled, aligned and laid out to please. It's like Photoshop or The
GIMP, but on steroids riding a train of rabid camels. If anything it
may be an Achilles heel given how much power is exposed, but hey,
that's what we have. If you are an artist, designer or skinner, you
could hardly do much worse than E17. Wallpapers don't just have to be
images. They can be complete interactive animations. You can provide
multiple resolutions of your imagery all in-line in the same file and
have the "best one chosen automatically" based on size. It's all like
layers that are sized, scaled, aligned and arranged relative to
each-other and every UI element is a collection of these. You can have
it animate base on input events, or time. And not just the wallpaper.
Anything in E17 can do this. Fade layers in and out, change their
sizes, image content and more. Make your art come to life.

And for the tweaker heads amongst you, there is an option for every
occasion. We don't go quietly into the night and remove options when
no one is looking. None of those new big version releases with fanfare
and "Hey look! Now with half the options you used to have!". We sneak
in when you least expect it and plant a whole forest of new option
seeds, watching them spring to life. We nail new options to walls on a
regular basis. We bake options-cakes and hand them out at parties.
Options are good. Options are awesome. We have lots of them. Spend
some quality time getting to know your new garden of options in E17.
It may just finally give you the control you have been pining for.