For the youngsters out there: Enlightenment was released at a time when Unix desktop environments were mired with twm and Motif, or OpenLook if you were adventurous. These were very sparse (twm), or trying to ape the Windows 3 look and feel (in the case of Motif). This was a time where many display drivers only supported 256 colors, and your entire X desktop would shift colors when hovering over windows that had different palettes.
Enlightenment was one of the first window managers that used bitmapped assets for window decorations. IMO, it was one of the first UI things that distinguished Linux and its community from that of the older corporate UNIXes.
It also made less sense on those corporate OSes because they usually used X terminals over the network where sending all those bitmaps would slow things down.
I always preferred HP VUE. It looked great for its day. It was later boringified by Sun and IBM to make it more corporate and released under the name CDE. Because of course IBM wouldn't stand for nice colours.
> I always preferred HP VUE. It looked great for its day. It was later boringified by Sun and IBM to make it more corporate and released under the name CDE.
TIL - I have used CDE in the past but didn't know that it's origin was HP VUE.
> Because of course IBM wouldn't stand for nice colours.
I remember starting with DOS and then SunOS. The setup we used had both basically in terminal mode all the time (don't know if SunOS had its own DE). Then came Windows for Workgroups and for some reason, even after coming from an all-TUI setup, I wasn't blown away with the UI.
However, later we ordered a beefy Solaris machine (it came with its own tray that had wheels) - thats when I saw CDE for the first time. Don't know what it says about my aesthetic sense, but I thought it was the most beautiful DE I had seen; I loved exploring it. Also, the DE colors were in alignment with the color palette used for casing/monitor/mouse - a cohesive package. Also remember the positively giant 17" CRT with Sun mouse which felt much more precise compared to the cheap desktop mice we had. I was very impressed - maybe that was the start of my bias towards *nix.
Also, HP used mostly sans-serif font and CDE the (in my view) more boring serif ones. It was really like the IBM business suits had screwed it all up. Unfortunately HP refused to support VUE any longer. I still have it here though on a HP-UX 10.20 machine.
Sun was good at design of their machines (much better than HP) but not the UI in my opinion, their java desktop was also super ugly.
Of course tastes differ :) So your mileage may vary.
If memory serves well (I only have 3583 bytes free ;) Enlightenment was one of a generation of X window managers that implemented bitmapped theming, for example fvwm, fvwm95, aftertep, windowmaker, icewm... it's just that Rasterman took the bitmapping to the next level.
Enlightenment was one of the first window managers that used bitmapped assets for window decorations. IMO, it was one of the first UI things that distinguished Linux and its community from that of the older corporate UNIXes.