Enlightenment 0.20 Arrives With Full Wayland Support & Better FreeBSD Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Enlightenment 0.20 Arrives With Full Wayland Support & Better FreeBSD Support

Today marks the surprise release of Enlightenment 0.20! The E20 development cycle has taken more than a year and saw more than 1,890 patches merged...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Enlightenment-0.20-Released

[simotek]

Well Surprising to some not paying close attention :-P I've had the release candidate running on my machines for a couple of weeks and the RC announcement said that the release was only 2-3 weeks away. Working well so far.

[kaprikawn]

Is there a specific display manager that's recommended for use and/or people tend to use with Enlightenment? And can you launch a display manager and then use that to launch the desktop without touching X at all yet?

[Brane215]

Does it really work with Wayland as main protocol - I mean compositor ?

[simotek]

Brane215, Yes it will run as a wayland compositor with support for things such as xwayland. kaprikawn currently i'm using sddm and lightdm on various machines. Most people i've spoken to using wayland launch from a terminal but maybe its possible with gdm I believe fedora does this for gnome but personally I haven't tried it (waiting for nvidia drivers) Theres more enlightenment wayland info in its readme https://git.enlightenment.org/core/e...README.wayland

[klapaucius]

Why this odd version numbering? 0.xx makes it look like a perpetual beta/unstable project

[simotek]

klapaucius according to the author because it isn't done yet. There are still more features and things he wants to add. As a fun fact in a nightmare for packagers e16 went from 0.16.X to 1.0.0 I believe its at 1.0.16 now. There libraries are currently at 1.16.0 with plans somewhere along the way for 2.0.0.

Having said that they have a amazing knack for keeping there git branches very usable, I've run directly from git at times on my work PC's and not really had issues. Maybe thats something that comes with the 10+ years between e16 and e17 :-)

[raster]

klapaucius according to the author because it isn't done yet. There are still more features and things he wants to add. As a fun fact in a nightmare for packagers e16 went from 0.16.X to 1.0.0 I believe its at 1.0.16 now. There libraries are currently at 1.16.0 with plans somewhere along the way for 2.0.0.

Yeah - e16 forked basically. so packages should treat it as such. And yes - E gets 1.0 "when it's done". It's getting closer.

Having said that they have a amazing knack for keeping there git branches very usable, I've run directly from git at times on my work PC's and not really had issues. Maybe thats something that comes with the 10+ years between e16 and e17 :-)

Just a general FYI to everyone - our stable branches only get bugfix patches into them - almost all cherry-picked from master. So they only pick up what absolutely is only a fix. That's why they are pretty stable. As for master - that's where development happens. It's a bit of chaos there until release freeze. That's the intent. It's meant to be the messy workbench we all share while preparing the next release, but as we all share it and use it every single day, issues that are added are caught quickly as when one developer dumps in something, other developers quickly get stung by it if it creates issues. This generally means there is more QA happening earlier with changes, rather than the model where a change lives in a branch "forever" until it drops in one big hit and then everything is broken for days or weeks. This branch merging does happen - it's just not the normal method. Small little changes happening very often, getting continually used and fixed until freeze time.

[rabcor]

Why this odd version numbering? 0.xx makes it look like a perpetual beta/unstable project

In essence that's because it is an unstable project, and not a beta one, an alpha one (e.g. there are still major planned features that are yet to be added)

That said, it's fully functional and usable as a desktop with only some stability issues and some half-functional features (that may be completely absent from other environments)

But I don't see how it has full wayland support if it's wayland support is on the same level as Gnome's... I tried Gnome on Wayland the other day, and it was usable, but nowhere near ready much less full (aren't they saying about now that gnome 3.20 will have full wayland support? as they used to say 3.18 would?) a few core compositing functionalities (like transparency were missing) and XWayland support was a mess(a little better than Weston, but it was not in a usable state, for example running google chrome from Xwayland I often found my cursor disappearing within the XWayland window, that is a completely breaking bug). I have to see how Enlightenment works in wayland though. Knowing Enlightenment on X, I'd be surprised if it won't work just as well (or better) than it does on X11.

But in my opinion "full wayland support" should never be stated unless that also includes "full xwayland support" for now because most applications still depend on X11, but for the future also because it is essentially backwards compatibility/legacy application support, something that has been ignored far too much in Linux over the years (but not at all on Windows, it has backwards compatability for Windows 95 even now 20 years later, that's almost the same as it would be for Linux to have backwards compatibility with some of it's first stable relases, like 1.0, there's also the MAJOR issue of lack of cross-distro compatibility, Linux needs a common build platform, a linux target, so that a binary can be compiled on any distro (save for maybe specialized ones such as gentoo that manipulate the compiler settings based on the hardware) and run on any other distro (this includes specialized distros like Gentoo))

That said, I am excited to try Enlightenment on Wayland now, I'll have to do it sometime soon.

[jason.oliveira]

Why this odd version numbering? 0.xx makes it look like a perpetual beta/unstable project

That's actually the point. if you're waiting for a 1.0 release, you're gonna be disappointed. Raster has always told whoever asked that 1.0 is for codebases that aren't changing. E has been fully rewritten at least 6 times now from my counting (started using in the 0.13 days).