this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I did daily drive it for a couple of years sometime around then.
It was so beautiful, yet still performant on basic hardware because it was written relatively low-level iirc. It was like having the flashy UI that they used in movies (anybody remember the 3D filesystem browsers?), but for real and actually usable. And the aesthetics were in contrast to the other major DE of the time which were all kind of drab tbh.
But that was the main use case imo: nice UI for low-end hardware. Once other DE started looking nicer, partly due to leveraging GPUs, the niche nature of Enlightenment became more of a hindrance.
I haven't looked at it in quite a while and don't know what their current philosophy or design is but, if it's still the same, I think it might still be an interesting alternative to XFCE or LXDE for somebody with older hardware that wants to experience a unique UI from a passionate team.
That 3D file system browser (I presume you're talking about Jurassic Park) was totally real.
It was a tech demo that SGI included with IRIX called "fsn". Ironically, at the time, many people criticised it for being unrealistic. There is an open source clone called "fsv".