I mentioned a few days ago that I had installed Enlightenment, a Linux window manager, on my computer. Right now it’s on both my desktop PC and my Laptop, though I’ve done far more customization on the desktop PC’s instance. It’s an extremely nice desktop environment, but I don’t know that it’s one that will catch on en masse, no matter how good it is.
The reason? Critical mass. Gnome and KDE have it, and in North America it seems that Gnome is in front over KDE, also.
I was using Gnome before I tried out Enlightenment, and I have to say that I’m impressed enough that I plan to go on using Enlightenment for the forseeable future, though I may not upgrade to e17 (the newest version, still in development) until it’s stable. However, if I was planning a Linux distribution, or setting up a Linux PC for someone else, I think I’d still choose Gnome as the default….
Gnome has enormous community and corporate support. It’s the default on Red Hat Linux, Fedora, Ubunto, Sun’s Java Desktop, and probably some others, as well. GTK is a fantastic toolkit for GUI creation, Mono is promising to make C# applications easily portable to Linux, and Gnome is just plain easy to use.
Enlightenment, on the other hand, while it does seem to have a devoted following (having used it for a few days now, I can see why — it rocks!), does not have the same sort of corporate sponsorship that both KDE and Gnome have. There is not nearly as much documentation or easy to find how-to articles for Enlightenment as most of the other Linux apps now enjoy. And while it isn’t hard to set up and customize Enlightenment, it’s not necessarily intuitive, either; most of the configuration you can do to it requires that you shuffle files around into your (hidden) .enlightenment directory, or edit text files to tweak settings. None of that bothers me, I think it’s sort of fun, actually — and you can do things with Enlightenment that you just can’t do (yet, at least) with most other window managers I’ve seen.
After a few days reflection, then; the Enlightenment Linux desktop. Cool? Powerful? Eye catching? Unique? Absolutely all of the above. Coming soon to a default Linux installation near you? I doubt it.
But for those who find it and are willing to mess around to get it customized, it sure is cool.
