Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

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.

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.

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.

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).

That’s the point the OP is trying to make about the advantage of open source

People made CDE to work on modern systems and IIRC CDE wasn't even compatible with Linux when the code was first released.

(digital blasphemy is still around and still selling art.)

Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!

Certainly the determinism made it easier to fix, but the determinism also meant that she had to stop what she was doing and fix it right now, which is... "sadly".

Back in the day before security was the biggest driver of updating software most people stayed a version or two back to ensure they weren't getting the last corruption bug of the day or whatever other insect was coded in.

But modern internet connected systems have pushed customers into more of an issue. It switched from, stay a version behind to see what bugs are there to, if you don't update now you're going to get hacked.

So this is the situation at hand.

If you don't update you're going to get hacked.

If you update you're going to get hacked.

shell=C:\LiteStep\litestep.exe

Due to similar realisation, my main working devices became Window 7 with Virtual Box/VMWare Worstation, nowadays WSL.

I used (and still use) Window Maker for almost a decade before learning what NeXTSTEP actually was (i heard about the name occasionally but never looked into it), then for several years before even trying one. I remember having a heavy sense of uncanny valley because the thing in front of me looked almost exactly like what i was using for years but it behaved in very odd ways (and lacked most of the window management features i came to expect) :-P. It made me realize what people who were used to Mac OS X felt when they tried the various Aqua GNOME/KDE themes that were popular on Linux desktops some years ago.

As screens get larger, the amount of pixels you need to push to composite windows gets larger-squared. It makes sense to move the pixel pushing away from the CPU and more importantly away from CPU-RAM and on to a separate RAM bus.

The "single buffer with invalidation" model of Win16 (I cannot remember how it works in X) saves memory at the cost of more redraws. The composition model allows you to do things like drag window A over window B without forcing a repaint of window B every frame.

It also allows for better process isolation. I think in both Win16 and X11 you could just get a handle to the "root window" and draw wherever you wanted?