Enlightenment was a particular favourite for me! But Rasterman is, as far as I know, still coding like crazy on new versions of Enlightenment: https://www.enlightenment.org/

It's evolved into more of a desktop now that plain window managers aren't something people usually think of. It's still got great eye candy, though I miss some of the old themes I used to use.

The Enlightenment libraries were used in Samsung's Tizen OS too - hopefully they got some consultancy money out of that (or similar).

It's a hellscape of misery and suffering.

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

You left out the best part-- the enlightenment developer starts replying in page five of the comments and gets caught up in a flame war!

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened/243?lan...

It really does seem like the author of the article didn't read the docs, though. E.g., he states that Genlist "in essence is a list widget with some items." But according to the docs the "simple list" widget is the tool that fits that definition. Genlist is way more complex and apparently meant to handle situations with a large number of total items. Whether reallocation is an appropriate approach to get that complexity I don't know. But if it's the wrong tool for the job, who cares?

That article is wrong on several levels and the author just doesn't seem to understand what is going on. The whole part about how to set up windows is him not understanding that he's working with a retained mode scene graph - something the documentation[0] makes that clear.

Ironically you are more likely to see such an approach in modern GUI toolkits than when EFL was written.

[0] https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/grap...

Tizen is practically dead.

Don’t forget the dark arts of configuring the Modeline in your X config to get that rock solid, flicker free screen of ridiculous resolution. And when you would push the limits and hear your crt scream in protest or start tumbling, tearing or just tapping out.

Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore.

The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

The closest I have to those is painstakingly trying every single VESA driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that would work with whatever off-brand video card the 386 happened to have (it was an Oak driver, though I think the card just happened to be compatible with it).

> Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore.

> The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

> Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one).

Now everything is so easy...

Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer, but I do remember having to download the driver for my sound card (Aureal Vortex<$something>) and compile an out-of-tree-module to get sound.

For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details.

And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs.

In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.

The Enlightenment that has always been 17 and we were waiting for it to finally turn to 18? The one that had transparent windows through some plugins or whatever? Hell yeah! I installed it on Gentoo and when I made the windows transparent, I felt like I could do anything! I had Beryl, too, at some point.

Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so.

I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!

He worked on OpenMoko for a while when they chose enlightenment libs for the UI.

I still use last.fm lol

I started using it when it still was called AudioScrobbler... I miss "the old internet" so much!

I do too, but I wish they'd do something with it instead of letting it languish. Scrobbling keeps breaking. How hard could it be to keep a scrobbling site up in 2022?

I spent a few minutes a day over a couple of weeks tweaking my i3 desktop. It's still a thing :)