Simon Lees composed on 2015-10-29 20:43 (UTC+1030):
Sorry for the late reply i'm the openSUSE maintainer in my spare time and some weeks I don't get to checking this list that quickly and the high volume of traffic in the last week hasn't helped. I am not a regular enlightenment developer although I do submit occasional patches. Given alot of enlightenment developers are in similar enough timezones to me I spend a reasonable amount of time chatting to them on IRC so I can answer most of your questions.
I guess I should start by confirming your running the enlightenment package rather then e17, given you mentioned Leap I will presume so. Firstly I would recommend trying the software renderer which in enlightenment is exceptionally good, it runs well on the well over 5yo Athlon Turion X2 i'm writing this email from it also runs pretty reasonably on my ODroid C1 (rpi clone) to enable it "Settings -> Composite->Rendering" In that dialog you can also disable effects which may help. Unfortunately there has always been performance issues with that Card / driver combo.
The comment that compositors are slow is a common misconception brought about firstly by compiz and possibly added to by kde and gnome, benchmarking was done when enlightenment went compositor only and it found that the compositor didn't add significant performance decreases. By making the compositor a hard requirement a lot of code paths were rewritten to be much simpler which reduced alot of bugs. But the key driver was wayland, e20 which will be released in the next couple of months will ship with full wayland support including xwayland, in order to work with wayland you need to have a compositor and the enlightenment devs believe that wayland will be the future hence there focus here.
It is well known that the enlightenment configuration dialogs are a mess they have slowly evolved over 15 years without a huge amount of thought, now that wayland support is there rewriting all the config dialogs is the main aim for e21 which will hopefully be around for openSUSE Leap 42.2
Bad config dialogs amount to a blocker for me. I'm too old to deal with this kind of usability obstacle. Functionality is far more important than visual appeal here.
As for themes the enlightenment theme engine is incredibly powerful and flexible unfortunately that also makes it incredibly complex it would probably take atleast a month full time work to develop a completely new theme, given that the widget set in enlightenment has only really been stable for the last 2 years themers are only just starting to catch up. Jeff Hoogland from the bodhi Linux team has just got a couple of themes mostly complete and a couple of others are starting to spring up so expect 42.2 to have a much better theme selection, thats going to be my aim for the next release. The main thing I spent time on last release was backporting app indicator systray support into the version of nm-applet that ships with openSUSE so that for the first time openSUSE users have some form of network manager integration in enlightenment.
I've nearly always managed to be content with default upstream theming. Ignoring DOS and vtty shells, I don't recall ever encountering a dark upstream default before. I strongly favor things being workable out of the box. For me, light on dark does not work.
If you would like a lighter theme try installing enlightenment-theme-openSUSE-ice it does still have the 13.2 branding which is mostly because I couldn't make a light theme look good against a wallpaper thats almost all black. I also have some scripts for customising themes if you want to try http://simotek.net/tech/projects/opensuse-e/darkmod-enlightenment-theme-conv... Personally I am working on a new theme https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CCO3pKdUkAAs_sQ.jpg:large
Both of those URLs are typical examples of why some people hate using computers and/or the web. Everything is painfully tiny by default. It causes the proverbial chicken/egg situation. Tools may or may not exist to undo tiny, but because even when they exist they're tiny, they're unusable in solving the too-tiny problem. Taking the dialog on first open of E as example, it's good in that it wants to make it easy to correct to sizing problem, bad in the starting base being smallest possible selection. It's far easier for a user who wants smaller to downsize than it is for a user who needs larger to upsize. The developer population is obviously thinly populated by those who have worse than average vision. People with trouble seeing tend to be drawn to occupations where sitting in front of a computer screen most of the time is not part of the job description. Thus, developer vision overall is better than average, and more than just a little bit, leading to smaller being OK or even standard, which in turn leads to more objects fitting into any given design space. That in turn leads to trouble for those who need bigger objects. Spaces become too busy, crowded, not uncommonly to the point of total obstacle to usability.
As for resizing windows the easiest way is holding down the Win key and using left click and drag you can also grab the bottom corners of the windows and click and drag but the bottom window border is rather small, something i've never liked.
Dependance on Win keys amounts to another killer for me. I've not found a satisfactory keyboard to have been made in over two decades.[1] Every satisfactory keyboard I've ever seen was made before Win keys first appeared.
If you need any more help I tend to get to reading this list eventually and am generally on irc during my business hours and some evenings GMT +10:30 otherwise there is very helpful people in #e, #opensuse-e and enlightenment-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Thanks for the feedback
It appears there's no point in my pursuing E. Had I seen this little bit from Wikipedia Enlightenment developers have referred to it as "the original eye-candy window manager". I wouldn't even have tried it. I do appreciate the time you took to reply. [1] Examples of satisfactory keyboards can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_Computers#/media/File:Omnikey102p324... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ErgoLogicFlexProKB2652.jpg -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org