E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.

I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.

I used that same theme back in 2003. Makes me want to reinstall E16

> It’s themable, hackable, lightweight

Certainly wasn't considered lightweight back then :-)

I never saw the appeal of Enlightenment, but a very nice write-up regardless.

The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.

I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.

There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:

    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)

But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just

    for (;;)

That was confusing me a bit.

Oh, people are still using Enlightenment.

My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.

In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.

Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.

I am still waiting for e17. I stuck to e16 for a long time until ubuntu got a thing which was much more convenient than gentoo.

I had the classic setup with the apache helicopter on the background and virtual desktops with preview. On MacOS however.

To this day i am still using a single screen, with virtual desktops ordered the same way.