[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.

[antisol]

Nah, e is great! It works just fine - it's better at a lot of things because it's fairly low-spec and doesn't require a terabyte of ram and 47 quintillion floating point operations just to open a menu. And if you're using a current version they're responsive to bug reports and whatnot. It does most everything you could want. And it looks damn fine while it's doing it.

Someone showed me the kitty terminal emulator a while ago. They made a big deal about how it can display images! Right there in the terminal! Wow! I was compelled to point out that terminology has had that (and video playback, too) for a LONG time.

One of my favourite features of enlightenment is that it has this thing from back in the day called "configurability", where behaviours tend to be optional and you can decide for yourself whether you want them enabled or not. I know it's not fashionable anymore and maybe not for everyone but personally I think it's a better approach than the gnome-style "You'll take what we give you and be happy about it" approach which is in vogue these days.

[pino83]

In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. So you could turn it on and live with its defects, or you turned it off and live without the feature. Linux Desktop was always full of that.

But yeah, I also do not like Gnome, because they more and more just removed the switches, but without spending effort to make things fine for everyone.

Plasma is so configurable, I've never seen anything more configurable. On any OS that I've seen.

My personal experience: Yes, you can also build your own environment out of blocks. And then you configure a lot. But not in order to customize it better, but in order to somehow glue these components together in a way that somehow remotely makes sense. :-/

And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that? E is a graphical desktop, no? Based on X11 or Wayland. There are actual media players!! A lot. Not a single one is really great, but most will be better than the terminal, I guess. VLC is that bad?

[rasterman]

well why video in a terminal? 1. it's "free" because the toolkit already offers video objects - feature is there... why not expose it. you just call 2 lines of code or so and and tell it to play. it's similar amount of code for an image, so it's basically free really. why do still images and NOT video? why stop there when video is only a little more code. sure. if you want a movie as a background: probably a bad choice, but if it's one of those zen videos with just trees swaying in the breeze as a background or a mountain lake rippling in the wind with very little motion but enough to make it "come to life", why not? but ok - for real usability? example: you're browsing through your dirs. cd ~/xxx/yyy; ls; cd zz; ls ... oh there's cat-sunning.mp4 there... i have 87 videos of cats sunning themselves.. which was that? tycat cat-sunning.jpg -> boom. video appears in terminal - you cat'd it.. it plays (tycat is just a tiny cmdline tool that emits the right escapes to terminology. you could make it a shell alias or script too and not use tycat. escapes are documented in the readme. this works even in a dumb framebuffer without wayland or x display systems (because the toolkit handles auto-detecting its environment and if in just a tty/vt it'll fall back to fbcon or kms/drm and render there). so you get a mouse and a full-screen graphical terminal that can do splits/tiles/tabs and so on with no windowing system and you can happily still explore all your files there even if they are videos... you aren't forced to use the feature... but it's there if you need it or want it.

[BeetleB]

For those who don't know, rasterman was the original creator of Enlightenment.

His last comment before today was in 2016. And he came on today just to comment.

Thanks for making Enlightenment! I really enjoyed it for the brief time I used it!

[pino83]

Oh, thanks for the hint! Last time this happened to me was with one of the Gnome or GTK guys. And it felt a little bit less bad, because I really hated their decisions. Here, I feel now a bit bad because my wording was very direct. Let's say: Implementing all that was probably quite an achievement, even if I didn't like all the visual decisions. ;)

[mech422]

Hey! Thanks for E! It was my daily driver back in the day :-) Pretty cool to see it could run on cell phones as well! Thats some pretty tight code! :-D

[pino83]

I have absolutely no doubt that this is possible to do, particularly if you assume that you already have all kinds of libraries available, and if you don't care at all about the terminal ecosystem in general.

And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. So there is finally a usable text editor available in a Unix terminal! Email clients that don't make you sad! You can finally navigate your files in a less lousy way!

And, of course, we can then also port these E libraries, so we can start their terminal app inside their terminal app inside their terminal app!

But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? So what's the point of this indirection? I just don't get it...

Yes... Let's imagine I regularly look through my files. And these files aren't plain text (otherwise it would just be cat or mcedit) and aren't ODT files, kdenlive projects, Gimp files, ..., ..., but they are particularly png or jpeg or mpeg (or whatever the tycat thingy understands). And I want to do that via ssh. And I always have this E terminal in range. Then this is one valid option to do so imho. Still a very weird, freaky, odd one. But it would somehow make some sense to me...

[rasterman]

there are in fact ways of drawing raw bitmap data in terminals - look up sixel for starters...

but that's not what this is about. the escapes to do images and video are very simple and very lean in terms of i/o from pty to terminal - unlike sixel.

i added this because it's useful. to me. and apparently to quite a few other people. as i've explained. a quick tycat file.mp4 or typop file.jpg or tybg file.mpg etc. - or even roll these escapes with echo's into your shell rc files... like you might change prompt colors with escapes when you su/sudo as root or you ssh into another machine and change the terminal title to alert you - you can use images and video to do this too.

you can just not use the feature. fine. up to you. why should your lack of desire for it mean no one else gets a useful feature for them? it was not like adding the support was drastically difficult and i had to write an entire video codec engine. i re-used existing support that already wrapped it up in a nice little bow (i also wrote most of that support code in efl btw so i know what it can do, what it does and how it does it).

i can ALSO use my gui in the normal way. i wrote a video player too: rage. plays video (and music too - snarfs album art for music if you have none too). i wrote a file manager or 2 or 3... they show thumbnails of files... can even pop up a video and play it in a tooltip popup... same libraries behind terminology do all the hard work. i can choose whatever workflow works for me at the time. i'm not limited to one way only. this softens the boundaries between workflows and brings some features of of workflow into another. it creates less of an abrupt "i have to switch" and more of a "i can just keep going for a while doing what i was doing". my new rewrite of efm (e's built-in filemanagger) also has a terminal-like worklflow. i can literally in the efm window type "ls ./dir" and it will liteally change to that dir and list/show it. same with "cd .." or "rm a.jpg b.txt *.png" and it will delete those files. you can even just run apps like "gimp file.png" .... and it knows gimp is a command and there is a desktop file for it and will let you know by putting an icon next to it.. and it'll just run the command with those arguments... this is the inverse of terminology - it's bringing some terminal workflow into a gui filemanager. it softens the boundaries. it allows you to use muscle memory you already have for more things. that's the point.

terminology has other handy features that piggyback off the same extended escapes. tysend will do a zmodem-like transfer of a file via the terminal. and btw - the libraries that deal with images and video.. they can also load xls files... and pdf too - as images. it's how the filemangager can generate thumbnails for them... they can actually access arbitrary pages in a pdf - it's just a feature of the image loader. so a little wrapper and you can flip through rendered pages of a pdf... i just didn't do a "paged interface" in terminology like i did a video/audio one with play/pause etc. controls... i could pretty easily. :) easy enough to add though... but i'm busy with the filemanager work at the moment.

[em-bee]

this softens the boundaries between workflows and brings some features of of workflow into another. it creates less of an abrupt "i have to switch" and more of a "i can just keep going for a while doing what i was doing".

some time last year i tried out that terminal plugin for the nautilus/nemo filemanagers, and it has changed how i work quite a lot. i always love doing things within a greater context. that's why i use tmux with a dozen sessions and half a dozen terminals in each. because instead of changing directories, each terminal is in a specific context and used for a specific purpose.

combining a graphical filemanager with a terminal likewise puts that terminal into a context.

unfortunately the integration is not great. the terminal keeps track of the directory if i use the filemanager to switch, but the filemanager does not track the directory of the terminal if i use the cd command to switch there.

i can select files in the filemanager and drag them into the terminal to use as arguments to a command. but i'd also like the opposite: type a wildcard in the terminal to select files in the filemanager. the filemanager has that as an independent feature, but that's not convenient. how about i run a command that lists some files, and then have those files shown in the graphical filemanager. these things could all be better integrated.

i have been looking for other filemanagers to offer terminal support, but i could only find dolphin, which unfortunately only shares one terminal between tabs. that doesn't work for me. i need a separate terminal per tab.

the efm feature is cool. i just tried it by running e in a nested X server (Xephyr). but it doesn't go far enough. i'd like that combined with a real terminal so i can do any commandline action with the selected files.

[antisol]

  > my new rewrite of efm (e's built-in filemanagger) also has a terminal-like worklflow. i can literally in the efm window type "ls ./dir" and it will liteally change to that dir and list/show it. same with "cd .." or "rm a.jpg b.txt *.png" and it will delete those files. you can even just run apps like "gimp file.png" .... and it knows gimp is a command and there is a desktop file for it and will let you know by putting an icon next to it.. and it'll just run the command with those arguments

Oh, damn, that sounds cool. I might have to give that a try.

[antisol]

  > or whatever the tycat thingy understands

You're missing the point, which is that the EFL library just has media playback built into it - for a lot of different formats. Like Carsten mentioned, tycat doesn't do anything special, it just emits the right escape sequences to tell the terminal "display file X". And then terminology just says "hey media library, give me a player for file X". tycat doesn't need to know or care about file formats, nor does terminology.

  > And then you only need access to the mouse position in pixel granularity, and you basically have the foundation for a graphical environment. We can implement Qt and GTK for that new thingy. 

You (rightly) say this sarcastically. But people have done things like this. I was playing around a while back with embedding GUI elements like buttons inside terminology. I've got a library (which I should finish) to display gorgeous GUI-style progressbars in terminology. This also works for things like buttons - it's possible to display an actual GUI button inside the terminal, and to have it emit events that you can respond to. Limited real-world practical value, perhaps, but interesting IMO.

  > But: What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? 

Rasterman and I have both given examples of how this improves the terminal experience. Being able to preview media files in your terminal is a direct, measurable enhancement to usability: it removes the context switch and time of having to fire up a media player to preview a file, and the need to move your hand from keyboard to mouse and back.

  > What is it for? Why not use your graphical environment in a direct way? The existence of terminal emulators is the proof for it being at least as strong (or stronger) as your terminal can ever get. Right? 

I'm not sure what you mean by "at least as strong as your terminal can ever get"?

We do also use our graphical environment. It's just that our terminal also happens to not be stuck in the 1970s and pretending it's running on a teletype. Decades ago someone could have made a very similar argument to the one you're making that we shouldn't have added colours to terminals because real dumb terminals are all green or amber screen.

It's at least partially about pushing the envelope, not accepting the status quo, and trying to improve things. Terminal emulators tend to have a fixed feature set and there's a bunch of things they can't do that would be nice to have.

I mentioned the kitty terminal emulator before. It's doing similar things. And it's quite popular with the kids. These enhancements to terminals are a good thing! I'm glad these people are experimenting with things even if they turn out to not be very useful (and many terminology improvements are great!)

Another great example of this type of thing is the tysend command, which lets you download files without starting a new ssh session: you're ssh'd into some remote machine and you want a file. You can switch to another terminal and scp, or (as long as the host you're logged into has tysend), you can just do 'tysend /path/to/file'. Terminology pops up a (very pretty) save dialog asking where you want to save the file, and then displays a (very pretty) progress bar while the transfer happens.

I think maybe you need to try terminology to understand the many, many ways it's superior to a more conventional terminal emulator. For me, terminology is definitely enlightenment's "killer app". You can try it just by installing it, btw - you don't need to be running enlightenment :)

[pino83]

> You're missing the point, which is that the EFL library just has media playback built into it - for a lot of different formats.

As far as I understand, you're missing the point. Every format that someone now wants to handle on terminal, needs to be supported by the EFL library?! Does it support LO spreadsheets? PDFs? Audacity projects? Raw camera images? HTML? Yes? And now I want to switch away from LO to some very new office tools, and I cannot, because EFL doesn't support it yet?

And all that just in order to show some previews in a terminal emulator instead of the graphical environment around it that is perfectly capable to do so since half a century? Where all the applications already exist?

> tycat doesn't need to know or care about file formats, nor does terminology

Fine. Just replace tycat with EFL in what I wrote before.

> I was playing around a while back with embedding GUI elements like buttons inside terminology. [...] Limited real-world practical value, perhaps, but interesting IMO.

Yes, it sounds like an interesting puzzle. But it's artificial. It solves a problem that just doesn't exist at all, and it doesn't actually improve anything, as long as it's not universally supported (at least in an actual Linux virtual terminal outside of X11/Wayland).

> Rasterman and I have both given examples of how this improves the terminal experience.

But why are you trying to improve the horse riding experience, if you actually have a car that is just artificially stripped down to feel like a horse? Just use the car as a car instead! ;)

What context switch are you talking about? Your eyes moving to where the new window opened? srsly?

Why can't the same folks not improve keyboard support in e.g. VLC? If it's actually so bad... Is it? I rarely feel the desire to keyboard control a media player, admittedly... But I would be surprised if VLC is worse in that regard than some terminal thingy that is a niche inside a niche inside a niche... A terminal media player needs the same explicit development work to get it right. It's not magically keyboard-friendly just because it involves antiquated technology for displaying.

> and time of having to fire up a media player to preview a file

You fire up a new tycat instance instead. What's the difference? Here VLC takes, idk, 500ms?! Half of it is the window animation that I could turn off, if I would dislike it (I don't).

> I mentioned the kitty terminal emulator before. It's doing similar things. And it's quite popular with the kids. These enhancements to terminals are a good thing!

Yeah, make them universally work on any virtual terminals, and then it'd be at least an interesting discussion whether this was an actual improvement or not. As long as I need some E terminal, or a particular terminal that is "popular with the kids", I really don't see at all why this is a good idea to spend any efforts for. Just use the car as a car, instead of disabling the engine, pretending it to be a horse, and then find clever ways to make it feel more like a car again. It already _is_ a car. Don't make up artificial restrictions that do not exist, just in order to find mediocre ways to somehow patch parts of them away a bit.

Give Dolphin a chance! It's like the kids' vi setup, just with slightly different shortcuts, and without all the weaknesses. It even can render actual icons without a patched terminal font! And if keyboard support is weak, then this is not because it's not a terminal application. Make them a bug report. Or, if appropriately skilled, send them a patch! Then we all profit from it.

Bonus: It can display emojis, without breaking alignment in half of the terminal emulators, because the actual glyph width differs from what the "API" (i.e. dancing some escape sequences and somehow intercept the answers from somewhere) tells you.

[antisol]

hey Carsten! o/

Haha, you beat me to it. Basically the same example.

[pino83]

This is maybe because it's quite hard to find some?! ^^

[antisol]

more "just the best, first example that springs to mind" - Great minds something something.

[hulitu]

> that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'.

Just like today. But we lost the option to make it work.

[antisol]

  > In a lot of cases, configurability is just a workaround for the issue that devs were unable to implement sth that just works 'fine'. 

No - You're making the assumption that everyone wants everything to be the same. Which is the same faulty assumption responsible for so many horrible horrible user interface choices made since smartphones became a thing.

For instance, there's a setting in enlightenment to allow you to choose how scrollbars work - you can:

a) Have sensible scrollbars like graphical applications have had for 40+ years, or

b) Have 'hover at the right to show the scrollbar and make it virtually impossible to select the last item in a list' behaviour, like the gtk-bros insist you want, or

c) Have no scrollbars at all if you prefer. Maybe you've got a touchscreen or a wheel mouse and a tiny screen, or whatever.

In e, this is just a setting where the user gets to choose what their computer does.

I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.

I haven't played with KDE seriously since the days of Corel Linux. I tried KDE4 back when it was a new thing, observed my desktop running at <1fps for the 10 minutes it took me to exit, and never tried it again. I've since heard good things about plasma. One day maybe I'll try it.

  > And what's the point of video clips in the terminal? What weakness are you trying to workaround with that?

Aha, I can tell you haven't tried it! :)

It's a fantastic way to preview videos. You type "ls", and it gives you a list of files. And you say to yourself "Huh, I don't remember what 'video_clip_1280p.mp4' is. So you right-click on the filename and choose 'preview', and the video pops up in your terminal window and starts playing. And once I know what the file is I press escape and I'm back to where I was. It's marvellous! The only way I could think of improving this would be if there was some way to do it without any mouse interaction... like for example by typing 'typop video_clip_1280p.mp4'.

I do watch my movies in either vlc or mpv, usually - nobody is actually sitting around watching movies in their terminal (I hope!). For that, you use a media player. But for quickly previewing videos / images / audio (yes, audio too!), it's :chef-kiss:

I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list I've built up (things like picard facepalming and people shaking their heads), along with a nice ascii art message in the vein of "You suck!" when I type an invalid command [1]. The reason I have that is........................................because it's fun!

[1] https://imgur.com/a/tL9h8Xs

[pino83]

Well, I explicitly said that I dislike Gnome for that. Sure, there are switches that are fine for actual customization, in order to actually adapt to personal preferences instead of work around technical weaknesses. I love how configurable Plasma is.

When I read further, about your scrollbar example, I wasn't sure if I would consider that a good example for your point or for my point... ^^ Anyways... Maybe it's a corner case. Fine. Not the worst one I've ever seen.

> I know, it's a pretty revolutionary idea. So I'll just say it again: the user is the one who chooses what their computer does.

That's obviously just the 2nd part of the story. At least so far. In some years, sure, every user (of FOSS software at least) can vibecode her own creepy set of features...

> It's a fantastic way to preview videos.

What you describe sounds exactly like what I would do, but I would start Dolphin instead. It's another shortcut for closing it. That's it. On the other hand: Here I can start arbitrary applications. For a LO-spreadsheet, LO would start! For a Blender model, Blender would start! VLC starts so quickly, and can read any remotely valid video file. I still don't really understand what I'm missing tbh...

> I also have a custom command_not_found_handle which displays a randomly-chosen animated gif from a list

Well, okay, that's far away from my taste how a system should behave... Maybe I'm just too old... ^^

[antisol]

  > personal preferences instead of work around technical weaknesses

These are the same thing. Your personal preference is my technical weakness. Everybody has different requirements. The scrollbar is a great example: There might be a use-case for the (absolutely abysmal IMO) disappearing scrollbar pattern gnome wants to push on people. Maybe it's screen real estate. Having a scrollbar on a tiny screen could be argued as a technical weakness (and the mobile UI crowd did just that). But I don't have a screen real estate shortage on my 5760x1080 workspace. And people with certain mobility or perhaps vision issues might find the disappearing scrollbar to be completely unusable. It's actually an excellent example of my point. - there's no way to implement something as simple as scrollbars that will make everyone happy. AND THIS IS FINE! and good! as long as the user can choose.

  > What you describe sounds exactly like what I would do, but I would start Dolphin instead

Then it's not "exactly like" what I would do at all - you'd take your hand off your keyboard and switch to your mouse to use a graphical file manager tool. And you'd wait for however long dolphin takes to start and enumerate the thousand files in that directory, and you'd watch your disk spin and your ram usage shoot up while it previews all the image files and videos in the directory, and counts items in the subdirectories. And then you'd wait while vlc starts up and click around to control that. Meanwhile I've already done 'typop cat_s<tab><enter>' in the software I already had running and am half way through viewing the video without my hand leaving my keyboard.

  > On the other hand: Here I can start arbitrary applications. For a LO-spreadsheet, LO would start! For a Blender model, Blender would start! 

Um........... wow! I guess. That's pretty revolutionary! Starting programs! Gee, I guess it must not have been possible to start programs from a terminal since before GUIs were a thing! and xdg-open is not a thing, either. This seems like a bizarro-world argument to me.

  > VLC starts so quickly

VLC absolutely does not start as quickly as terminology can pop up a preview. And it especially can't do it as seamlessly as terminology. Notice how you're starting a thousand different things in your examples? Yeah, I'm just doing all that from a single program. One that I already had running. It's fantastic. The only time I need to start a different program is if EFL doesn't support that filetype. And then it's trivial to do what you would do with xdg-open or libreoffice or blender.

  > that's far away from my taste how a system should behave... Maybe I'm just too old

No, I feel you - it is (intentionally!) a bit obnoxious. But it's also a fun, makes me chuckle all the time. To each their own. Sort of like the user preferences thing: You might not like it, but that doesn't mean nobody could ever want it.

[pino83]

> Then it's not "exactly like" what I would do at all - you'd take your hand off your keyboard and switch to your mouse to use a graphical file manager tool.

Definitely yes. That's what I'd definitely do. But there is no inherent reason for that. It just feels superior to me. Why should graphical applications be fundamentally worse (e.g. in terms of keyboard support) than terminal applications when terminal emulators are a graphical application?

> And you'd wait for however long dolphin takes

Yes. All these 800ms! Every single day!

> And you'd wait for however long dolphin takes to start and enumerate the thousand files in that directory, and you'd watch your disk spin and your ram usage shoot up while it previews all the image files and videos in the directory, and counts items in the subdirectories.

Yeah, well, technically, of course. It just never felt like "waiting". It's a matter of milliseconds. And while it enumerates the thousands of files, I can already start working with the first ones. I don't have to wait for some software from the 80s that blocks user input meanwhile. BTW, terminal applications don't need to enumerate directories when they deal with it? How does that work? Even if you just press "tab" in your shell, it will probably do exactly that, no? I really don't see why terminal applications should be fundamentally faster than graphical applications in that regard (again: your terminal emulator is a graphical application, right?). If you know the file name starts with "cat_s", then you can also find it this way in Dolphin.

There are corner cases where I really search in a trickier, more dynamic way. Maybe with "find". Or five lines of Python scripting. But not hundred times a day. Definitely it's not worth rewriting every application now as a terminal app (that tries to be a graphical app via niche-in-niche technologies).

> Notice how you're starting a thousand different things in your examples? Yeah, I'm just doing all that from a single program.

Yes, that's one of the things that I feel so spooky with that approach. It cannot work... Not in general. Maybe for a handful of persons that constantly search for jpeg/png/mpeg files, in bulk mode, and need quick previews. For whatever actual job they are doing there...

[pino83]

PS: When can terminal apps get mouse coordinates in pixel granularity?

Then Qt and GTK can have backends for terminal( emulator)s and I can finally run a graphical terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator? tmux and screen will be dead!!! :D

And when do the terminal hacks for AR glasses start to appear? I still cannot walk through vimacs? Doing ":q!" with just some head gesture? Why not??

SCNR

[prmoustache]

I used E17 for a while and the killer feature for me were independent virtual desktops accross monitors, meaning switching virtual desktop would only switch it on the monitor your focus was on.

I ultimately switched back to KDE despite that ergonomic advantage because it crashed too often and then to Gnome because KDE also crashed too often. Gnome has been rock solid ever since.

[TD-Linux]

Funnily enough, KDE got this feature yesterday: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8602

[prmoustache]

Awesome! I might try it again, tbh I have KDE on one computer but I don't use it much as my muscle memory is very gnomy and I haven't taken the time to tried to switch back in long term and I admit until hearing about that very little strong incentive to do so.

[zouhair]

The one I really miss is WindowMaker[0], missed its powerful simplicity

[0]: https://www.windowmaker.org/

[pino83]

I know that people never want to hear such remarks... At least I never want... But I risk being the idiot anyways: KDE/Plasma doesn't crash here so often. I've seen it actually happening in the last years. Unfortunately!!!! Maybe two or three times... And then, it just restarted in a matter of a second. It did not affect anything. No running apps crashed. Just the task bar and the desktop went away for a second.

How long have you tried, and how long are you now trying Gnome?

[prmoustache]

That experience was almost 20years ago, between 2006 and 2009 (I had to check linkedin because I only remember which employer I was working for) so based on wikipedia it was still KDE 4 wich was very unstable.

I tried a few times KDE 5 over the years out of curiosity then more recently KDE6. I have it on one computer but I rarely use it as it is the gaming machine and I very rarely play videogames. The thing is I got so used to the ergonomy and shortcuts of gnome and i3/sway that whenever I use KDE I need either a lot of time to get used to the default keyboard shortcuts and layout and/or I need to take time to modify/configure it. But since I have been fairly happy with gnome and sway I don't really have much insentive to switch again. No hater really.

[pino83]

KDE 4 was indeed a huge mess... All 4.x version. Even if every changelog had the sound of "Now the glitches are fixed; you can now start using it". It never was...

[wink]

People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y).

I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things.

And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.

[pino83]

> KDE 1?

Yeah, compared to Win 95 at least, it looked interesting in a positive way...

Problem was: Whenever you clicked on something, some message box appeared, with some one-line error message that contained the word "unknown" or "unexpected"... :)

[badsectoracula]

With KDE1 is was most likely "Not yet implemented" :-)

I never used KDE2, KDE3.x was rock solid though. It wasn't until KDE4 where things took a massive nosedive and everything was crashing if you looked at it wrong - something that lasted until most of KDE5's lifetime, though by late KDE5 and now KDE6 it seems to be fine.

Well, "fine", for some reason Wayland sessions crash and restart the entire session whenever i press any key (doesn't happen with Xorg sessions), so i guess there are still some minor bugs to be fixed :-P

[pino83]

No no, it always tried to do something, with a lot of self-confidence, but then constantly failed.

I can spontaneously remember k3b (CD burning tool) constantly failing because the CLI tools behind it (cdrecord, mkisofs, ...) replied in some way that k3b hasn't expected (e.g. because the locale was non-english, or the CLI tool devs changed the strings slightly, or there was a pointless warning text that k3b did not expect, ..., ...).

Admittedly, k3b was later... KDE3 era? But this is exactly how KDE1 felt... And in very bad days it still does today... You click on something, the developers assumed that the file manager can deal with it, but instead you just see the file manager saying "Unknown protocol" or similar. All the problems that arise when your system is very modular, but every module is a separate hobby project with no coordination.

I definitely loved KDE3 and was sooo excited about KDE4. And it was a pretty terrible disappointment. Nowadays I'm again fine with Plasma. Since mid KDE5 days.

> for some reason Wayland sessions crash

That's definitely a mess, too. I'm not fundamentally against Wayland. I'm using it right now. Even if it is still slightly broken today (yes, Wayland is a protocol; here I mean: the biggest implementations). But the entire Wayland story is very very sad. It took ages before it was at least usable for five minutes. And then everywhere the X11 support already gets disabled, while Wayland is still in a somewhat immature state. Sure, I somewhat understand what the devs say, and I can't force them anyways. But it's really not a success story for the Linux desktop.

[robinsonb5]

KDE1 had some very nice themes! I remember using one that drew inspiration from the visuals of Bryce on the Mac. Dark mode theme - and animated window titles which would scroll gently if the window title was too long to fit.

[ptx]

Wasn't it KDE 2 that introduced themes? I remember early versions of KDE and Qt only offering a choice between Windows and Motif look-and-feel.

[robinsonb5]

My memory wasn't playing tricks on me after all - Suse Linux 6.3 had KDE 1.1.2 with several nice themes [1] - I'm pretty sure the version I used back in the day was SuSE 7 (a boxed copy, bought from Staples!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/1m3vkba/kde_th...

[ptx]

Ah, perhaps I should have said "styles" rather than "themes"! I was thinking of the look-and-feel of the widgets, not the colors and window decorations. The widgets in all those screenshots seem to use Qt's Windows style.

Here's an example of the Motif style in KDE 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Screenshots_of_K...

KDE 2 introduced customizable styles for the widgets, I'm pretty sure, e.g. this somewhat gaudy one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Screenshots_of_K...

...or this BeOS-inspired one: https://timeline.kde.org/images/kde2b3_6.png

The release notes for 2.0 [1] say:

> KDE's sophisticated theme support starts with Qt's style engine, which permits developers and artists to create their own widget designs. KDE 2.0 ships with over 14 of these styles, some of which emulate the look of various operating systems, and additionally does an excellent job of importing themes from GTK and GNOME.

[1] https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/2.0/

[robinsonb5]

I'm sure it was version 1.something that had the Bryce theme - I remember being annoyed that the scrolling title feature had disappeared when KDE2 came out.

But it's always possible that my memory's playing tricks on me.

[ryandrake]

> Wasn't Enlightenment something that just looked good in screenshots

Yea, this was my memory of it, too. I remember installing it, and making a theme that looked all "elite" and cool. I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time. Took a few screenshots, basked in how cool I was, and then just switched back to whatever I was using before (I think Gnome).

[slater]

> I added an anime character desktop background, as was required at the time

i always thought that "stone hand on desert island" was the #1 requirement for Linux desktop backgrounds of the time? ofc i can't find a pic of it now

edit: found it https://i.ibb.co/bgpRF6Y7/image.png

[pino83]

Ohh, I've never seen that wallpaper before... Looks so year 2000-ish... :)

And then you start some actual (non-E) applications...

Which look completely different (i.e. not like something that MS Frontpage has desperately assembled out of Java Applets and weird color choices)...

And then, even if you liked the original look, you'll not be satisfied at all anymore, will you?

Yeah, okay, on the other hand, you could probably find Qt and GTK themes that somehow looked similar enough...

[jasomill]

It worked, at least 25+ years ago when I last used it; early versions weren't a model of stability, but that wasn't nearly as important as an X server or a Wayland compositor not crashing, since you can simply restart an X window manager when it crashes (from a terminal window, virtual terminal, automatically from a script, etc.).

[kdhaskjdhadjk]

Lots of teenagers were using it back then judging by the old themes, 95% of which suck. As an adult I made a simple, attractive theme, enabled only the most basic and useful eye candy, and just use it. None of the other alternatives interest me, and I've tried them all.

[mghackerlady]

I actually use my riced setups. Part of a good rice (at least for me) is it being ergonomic and usable. It should, of course, look good

[mackman]

E13 was a great, simple, good looking WM I used for years. Eventually moved to Fluxbox then back to macOS when it went Unixy.

[pino83]

In my personal experience - as far as I can remember - it always stopped to be good looking when it wasn't a screenshot anymore but a running process on my machine. In motion, all the eye-candy became ugly and foolish and visibly hobbyist, and as soon as I began using some applications outside of the E-ecosystem, the last sparks of fanciness went away anyways.

But that was... idk... E16 or so?! I really cannot remember. Maybe it had better times earlier, or maybe (surely) people are different and have different criteria for choosing such things.

Was E13 before they started trying to be a klingon starship UI?