This tutorial is supposed to show some features of the Enlightenment window manager as an alternative to the often used Gnome and KDE managers. I will install Enlightenment on a desktop computer with Ubuntu 11.10 installed.

Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a stacking window manager for the X Window System which can be used alone or in conjunction with a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a gOS 1.0.1 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Listen. I get it: Ubuntu is an excellent Linux distribution. The latest version, Ubuntu 10.04, is great, and I certainly see why there are several Linux distributions based on Ubuntu such as Kubuntu. But do we really need two new Ubuntu desktops, Unity and Light? Can Canonical do everything that it's already doing while adding more work to its load?

I played a bit with Kubuntu this morning in preparation for the article "PC-BSD for Ubuntu Users". It made sense to me to compare the two operating systems if they were both running the same window manager (KDE) so I wouldn't be distracted by Gnome v.s. KDE issues. That was my first mistake....

E17 is a lightweight window manager/bundle of libraries for Unix based operating systems. E17 is designed to be both elegant and fast - two goals it succeeds at very well.

Enlightenment 0.17 is the next generation of UNIX graphical environments. It is not just a window manager, but it is also a desktop shell. A desktop shell means, a window manager plus a file manager, plus configuration utilitys all in one. They are not separated as usual. Now, let’s take a closer look at all E17 features.

Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and so on are getting lots of attention but it seems everybody is forgetting about Xubuntu so I decided to make a screenshot tour of Xubuntu. I never used XFCE so my notes are from the point of view of someone used to Gnome (so I'll underline the difference between XFCE and Gnome too - or Ubuntu and Xubuntu if you want).

So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. [...] And I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all works.