Elementary OS going full speed ahead, but Parachutist Parakeet considers a new, post-Enlightenment glide path

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/415302

We met project lead David “Fossfreedom” Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane from the Ubuntu Budgie team in Rīga, and they passed on news of a rift – and indeed possible divorce – between Budgie and Enlightenment… and it’s caused by Wayland.

While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project’s own words this is “still considered experimental and not for regular end users.”

Thus, the Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing – a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    There is general consensus now that the future of graphical desktops on Linux lies in Wayland rather than X11, but the path is still not a smooth and easy one.

    In January, we covered their plans to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment, and in that story, we also noted that “Xfce is very mature, quite slow-moving, and the project doesn’t put out new releases very often.”

    While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project’s own words this is “still considered experimental and not for regular end users.”

    Ubuntu’s Unity desktop happened in part because, as Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth put it, Canonical “took a divergent view on some key design issues”, but the GNOME folks didn’t agree and made choices that Canonical “found it difficult aligning to.”

    The Reg has long been quite impressed with Elementary OS, which as we noted when checking out the latest version 7.1 does use some GNOME tech and tools.

    The latest Raspberry Pi OS, version 5, has a Wayland-based desktop that for our money works better than either of the big-name Wayland environments.

    The original article contains 644 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Knusper@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I still remember when the Budgie lead dev announced moving to EFL and my gut reaction from having used Enlightenment was just “Are you sure about this?”.

    Like, I kind of love Enlightenment. It’s weird and flashy. It has this quality of a mad genius just pouring their soul into it. But it also does crash a lot. The individual components of it, that is. I guess, the linked EFL rant explains that one.

    But yeah, the Budgie lead dev explained that they don’t want to continue working with the GNOME devs, nor want to use Qt, so there weren’t that many mature frameworks left to pick from.
    It’s unfortunate that they feel forced to continue working with the GNOME devs…