Desktops on a diet - old pants back on!
In the race to gain desktop acceptance (and mimick as much as possible from
the "big" desktops out there - Windows, MacOS-X, etc.), The main desktop
players (GNOME and KDE) have also gained weight. A lot of it. In many cases
they no longer fit in the pants people used to wear, and the pants people in
developing nations can afford. In that rush and enthusiasm a lot of people
have overlooked the alternatives - Desktop environments, shells and window
managers that consume significantly less resoruces, and may give sufficient
functionality, such as Xfce and Enlightenment.
This will focus on the upcoming release of Enlightenment 0.17 and its
featureset, efficiencies, subsystems, and related projects. What it can do
and scale down to, as well as scale up to, what kind of people might have an
interest in using it (those without the latest top-of-the-line systems with
modern closed graphics drivers, those in developing nations or those simply
with better things to do with their hardware resources). To get more
efficient use of your system does not require the environment to be minimal
and austere - it just requires making the right choices in design and
implementation.
This will cover:
* Eye candy - without closed drivers and mega-fast systems
* State engines & X latencies & design
* Fast rendering engines & canvases in X and other display targets
* XRender, XComposite etc. extensions
* Why open X drivers are better
* File manager and application management basics
* What libraries are behind Enlightenment that can help create efficient
custom UI's
* Pants