Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

"Sadly, the hang was deterministic"

No, no, you rejoice, a deterministic bug is the best sort of bug. because now you have a test case and a solid method to know when it is fixed. The sad bugs are the ones you can't find a test case for.

I also got a bittersweet chuckle out of how the author considers it a lightweight environment, I mean, they are not wrong, but think of how far we have fallen when e, the ultimate bling desktop environment is considered lightweight.

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.

I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.

I liked the author's pragmatic take on the stability. Indeed that running bleeding edge now has implications to greater attack surface as the supply-chain attacks getting more and more common.

A nice and sincere excerpt from the recent past...

> Back when the XZ backdoor was introduced, I was scrolling through news on my Debian Sid laptop with some code compiling in the background. I learned of a backdoor in XZ Utils, potentially introduced by a state actor in version v5.6.0. Thinking back to the fact that I do, indeed, run a bleeding edge distro and update often, I immediately ran apt list --upgradable | grep xz-utils. Sure enough, the stains on my laptop from the coffee I spat out through the nose2 were pretty tough to deal with.

It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.

> Sadly, the hang was deterministic:

Huh, someone's in it for the thrill of the hunt, I see...

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.

Funnily, E16 was considered a rather eye candy but heavy WM/environment back in the i486 / early pentium days, now it is considered lightweight!

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.

> 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.

I love Enlightenment still, even the new ones. The most important component of it to me is Terminology. What a gorgeous and functional Terminal emulator.

I always appreciated how you can simply attach to the enlightenment process at any point, and also upon a crash.

The documentation is there: https://www.enlightenment.org/contrib/enlightenment-debug

https://www.enlightenment.org/ Seems down at the moment.

Coincidence, or collateral hug?

I really wish there was more EFL software :(

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.

These are exactly the kinds of posts I love. It seems technical posts like this are less and less on the internet. Is this a result of "vibe coding"? We don't feel like writing up posts like this when a machine did the work? Maybe it's a result of fewer and fewer people blogging. Maybe I'm just old and yelling about things changing.

Oh wow didn't expect someone my age to try out Enlightenment. Every so often I try to use Enlightenment (either e16/moksha or the latest version) but I always leave because it requires Connman and setting it up properly is a pain imo. Might try it again because of this blogpost.

Whenever I try something else, I always seem to keep going back to E16. Back in the day, it worked well in Gnome 2.x; these days I tend to use it in XFCE, but it feels a bit less integrated.

"Re-attaching repeatedly showed the program was not deadlocked."

Why re-attaching and not just resume then ctrl+c ? Is this some kind of clever hack I dont know about.

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

Wow I haven't used enlightenment since the 90s! So cool!

e16 was truly unique... honestly the best Linux desktop ever made !

Good thread.

I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.

Still the best window manager ever made. Nothing has beaten it to date.

Enlightenment is pretty cool. Some years ago though I realised that I just want the computer to be a fast and simple workstation at all times. That's when I kind of stopped using KDE (and GNOME3 but I did not use it to begin with, it always felt like an opinionated smartphone-UI pushed onto the desktop).

I think only few people use Enlightenment, so the resources to fix bugs must also be small.

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