window manager frustration - kde v enlightenment

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cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 9:52 pm

Scroll to the bottom to skip the ranting.

Well, I'm not really _that_ frustrated, but I am a bit annoyed. Since I started running linux, I have used enlightenment as a window manager on top of gnome. It worked great before gtk2. gnome-panel worked perfectly with enlightenment, and life was good. I even held onto redhat 7.3 for an extra couple of months, until I bought a new hard drive and decided a different distro was the best way to go.

I'm now running kde, and I am somewhat happy with it. I have really only one qualm, but it is very annoying nonetheless: I can't specify the dimensions of my virtual desktops. I hate that. To me, this feature alone would make enlightenment worth using again, if it only had certain features.

Enlightenment and the newer version of Gnome don't work together very well. Enlightenment uses 'Physical' Desktops vs Virtual desktops, which is very nice for grouping things, and if you have a wheel mouse, you can scroll to switch physical desktops. The new version of Gnome, as far as I can tell, completely ignore enlightenment's virtual desktops. If you use gnome-panel to bring a window to the front, it will take you to the correct physical desktop, but will go no further. Without Gnome, as far as I can tell by googling, etc, enlightenment is totally lacking of a taskbar, or a dock from which you can launch applications. I did find the toolbox epplet, but it sucks. It segfaults ever 2 seconds and is the biggest pain in my ass to configure.

Thats the end of the ranting.

Is there, in fact, a way to tell KDE how to arrange the desktops?

or

Does anyone know of a (stable) taskbar or launch bar epplet for enlightenment, or short of that, one that is not window manager dependant?

Mr. Atoz · Post by **Mr. Atoz** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 9:59 pm

Well, I don't have an answer for either of your questions. However...

I used to use Enlightenment (E16) standalone for the longest time, and just customized my menus in place of a launcher. Like you, I found this lacking, so I switched to XFCE4 (after a tour of various other WM's) a while back, and haven't looked back since. I will probably look at E17 once it is finished, but I am VERY satisfied with XFCE4.

shm · Post by **shm** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 10:42 pm

The newest version of Enlightenment 16 should work fine with recent versions of KDE and GNOME. Earlier versions of Enlightenment used the KDE and GNOME window manager hints, and KDE hasn't used it's own hints for three years (since kde 1.1), and GNOME hasn't used it's own for more than a year and half (since gnome 1.4). They both use the EWMH standard, which since E16 was dead, wasn't updated for until recently.

cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 10:49 pm

allright. i'll give it another shot. i emerged it about 2 weeks ago, and it still wasn't working, though.

cartpullerjack · Post by **cartpullerjack** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 11:05 pm

bah. no luck. mebbe i'll try xfce