What are the key features? Why should I wanna try use it? Where is it better then other window managers? I cant find these information on the website. Just that it is "lean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager" which tells me nothing. I see that it is also for Mac and Windows. What does it have that these OSes dont have? What would be the benefint of using E17 ond windows 7?
You appear to be have come across a cultural conflict since you are approaching this as if it were a product when in actuality it is an OSS project. There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you, hence the lack of marketing. Marketing is generally a non-term in this culture. Good ideas spread through word of mouth here. Outside of the world of business, the responsibility for learning about new things is placed squarely on the side of the end user (this includes end users promoting projects to each other), not the developers.
But to answer your question, this project is an incredible engineering feat. E17 is built on top of a set of libraries which provide lightening fast rendering even on the CPU. The previous incarnation of Enlightenment, E16, was considered to be one of the most advanced window managers for it's time due to the rich eye candy it provided (and this was back in the days of KDE 1 when everything else looked grey and boring). E17 has been in development for a very long time much to the dismay of many a geek. It is the Duke Nukem Forever of window managers. It's not as impressive in this era of compositing window managers (though it can do that too), but if you ever find yourself wanting to use a slick WM on a Pentium 2 then this will run as smooth as silk.
> It is the Duke Nukem Forever of window managers.
To be fair, though, E17 has been quite usable for years. I was doing daily SVN pulls in college (so, pre-2007) without stability issues. There are occasionally very minor bugs, but I can't remember it ever being as buggy/disrupting to my workflow as Unity currently is.
He's asking valid questions. I'd ask a succint question: what features can make it more productive to me in comparison with, say, Windows 7 desktop?
> There is no motivation or desire on the part of the developers to sell anything to you,
This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
These points have already been addressed by others but I'll elaborate further.
This is simply a different culture and perspective. I know that in business we primarily tend to think of things in terms of the value they provide. The motivation behind OSS projects rarely has anything to do with personal profit. They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need and decides to share their solution with the world, or they just want to create something cool for the sake of it or they're trying to learn a new technology and need something to practice on. It's like charity - you don't advertise the fact that you do it, you just help out and hope that it makes a difference. Personally, I think that people only really try to sell things when there is an expectation of exchange - when something is being given away for free, what is the motivation for marketing it? Why would you waste time talking about the result of doing the things you love to do instead of doing them?
I think that this is where the notion of marketing being a force of evil comes from - if something is being sold, it's because someone is trying to convince you to give up something you have. It is inherently selfish. OSS is the opposite - it's selfless - you give without the expectation of getting (yet in real terms you get many orders of magnitude more than you put in - something which just doesn't happen in the business world). It's like a pyramid scheme which actually works.
> They tend to happen because someone is trying to address a personal need
This I understand and do not contend.
> and decides to share their solution with the world
This is marketing, not necessarily for the money. It may be for recognition (yeah, I too know the "high" feeling when somebody comes to you and says you're doing something cool); for the hope that more people will join in so you get to be the leader; for having a non-trivial (hopefully) successful project to put on the CV; to feel yourself useful to the community, etc, etc.
Bottom line: when you make something publicly available, you're marketing it. You're "selling" your product in exchange for some of the immaterial goods (see above) that you can get only from other people.
> This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
Speaking as someone who has developed and released open source software, I can tell you why: because it's damn cool when other people find your code useful. An added bonus is that they sometimes send patches. I'm certainly not getting rich from it (in the form of job offers or other things).
Plug: I'm a committer on a tiling WM written in python which is also gearing up for release soon: http://qtile.org
This I disagree with. Why else would they made it available for download? (They might not be marketing the software, but they are marketing something -- e.g., their coding skills.)
I highly doubt that marketing their coding skills is why the Enlightenment developer(s) started writing OSS.
EDIT: for you, urza, there are probably no benefits in using E17 - or any other environment you're not familiar with. That being said, I'm explaining what benefits it gives me.
> I see that it is also for Mac and Windows
Seriously? Don't know about Mac, but do you really consider Windows to be "extensible" or customizable? Out of the box, Enlightenment supports full scripting capabilities (think AutoHotKey - everything you do can be done by sending a command to E17 server from terminal) and theming with which you can make it look as you wish (http://e17-stuff.org/). It's built-in. On Windows you need expensive Stardock Window Blinds (IIRC) and clumsy AutoHotKey to get the same functionality - and then it gets slow, while E17 remains lightning fast.
As for "fast"... Well, take a look at this quote:
"For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs)" (http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en)
Now try and use Windows 7 on a machine with 64MB of RAM :)
I actually use E17 as my only WM at work (on FreeBSD at that). I almost never touch the mouse for WM related tasks; combine with VIM as an editor and Vrome in Chromium and I almost never touch the mouse, period. It's fast (starts up in 3-4 seconds), responsive (changing virtual desktops while CPU is being fully used by gcc is as fast as on standby) and in the past year I didn't encounter even a single bug (I remember in the past when something went wrong and E crashed, it used to display a message in the console: "Bad programmer! Naughty programmer! SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! Now go and fix your code!" - but I didn't have a chance to see if it's still the case). Customizable to ridiculous extent and looks quite a lot better than ratpoison.
The only thing I'd like to see is a smart tiling manager extension. Preferably turned on/off on per virtual desktop basis. It probably will be done in the future. In the meantime E17 remains the only WM that is both fast and pretty, and which goes out of your way without imposing anything on you while providing sane defaults.
Ok, that's just my opinion; fans of XFCE, Black/Busy/etcbox, Xmonad and others can argue. Fans of Gnome and KDE, Windows and Mac - please don't bother :)
The key features have to be seen to be believed. Really, it is (actually, in my experience, used to be) astounding and lightning fast (the best desktop by far for a Pentium).
