Enlightenment—the Next Generation of Linux Desktops

I was introduced to Linux as a way to recycle and sustain old hardware. I was excited at the thought of a Linux Desktop. FVWM and TWM won me for the speed. KDE and Gnome were slow and unstable by comparison.

All I want is a stable, snappy platform. I don't even care for icons. In OSX th e control panel is two clicks through the menu (one if you place it on the dock). Sub menus in my book are a no no. With Gnome, I have to click around menus while waiting for some naff effect. Hate it.

Drop shadows. How crude.

If you are using old hardware, and I think that means 450 MHZ < 128 MB Ram, you won't get on that well (believe me) with Linux distros (bar Damn Small and Puppy), I've tried. Opera is the lightest full blown browser. Firefox is huge, Openoffice is Massive.

What have fast cpus and massive GFX cards given us? All that computational power for not alot in my opinion(though you can rebuild a system fast.)

How about a fast terminal based environment to work in instead? Could we not build Ncurses apps and style them, like you dress a webpage with CSS?

We don't want eye candy at the expense of usability. I only have Compiz on in Gnome for the inverse screen feature and zoom. Most websites I invert the colours because the white blinds me. And in Opera, I just turn it all off, and go for high contrast, it's much nicer.

The great thing about the early window managers, is that they offered the chance for something different, something innovative. Gates talked about a 3d Desktop as a concept early on. Games, Phones and PDAs offer decent, different, intuitive desktops - or should I say launchers?

OSX gets it right with it's subtlety. I want to be able to launch an app and switch between programs with speed. I want to be able to rotate and add and remove displays quickly. I can't help thinking the mouse is useless compared with typed text and keyboard shortcuts (Many new GUI based programs forget to even add them.)

Don't get me wrong E17 sounds good, but why is it faster, could Gnome or KDE learn some of these tricks? How fast is the CPU in an iphone, how fast does it render? What is so different between Gnome and FVWM? Is the bloat and lag hidden in Multi Processing, SVG graphics, XML Parsing, Unicode and i18n?

2D effects sound like a CPU killer, isn't it better to use GFX cards for transparency and scaling if they are there?

It annoys me that the Linux desktop appears to play catch up in some areas, while Windows just appears to edge itself towards a cliff. For example you can't even cut and paste, drag and drop consistently between apps in Linux (though it's got better). Win98 you could do all that, and there was also the web based (active) desktop. Yes you laugh, but watch as Google re-imagines that.

Good UI is the art of making a usable / intuitive system. A Sprinkle of eye candy on top is fine. Gnome is great, as it's stable and no frills, though they could steal a few ideas from Apple. If the admin programs in Windows were all grouped together into a panel (like Win 3.1) and I could get to notepad quickly, I might use it.

I know you can tailor XYZ desktop and distro to do what you like. Those of us without much time, who hop between, and maintain computers, would probably rather a great Desktop that just worked out the box. I guess that needs to suit everyman: the power user, the noob and the ones who like shiny things.