Mageia forum

Hello.
Moksha is a fork of Enlightenment Desktop Shell by Bodhi Linux team. Many enlightenment users (include me) note that E18 & E19 is a regression. E17 was much better and more stable. Enlightenment developers quickly deploys new features and don't fix exists old issues. That was a reason for a fork.
Moksha based on E17 and includes features & security backports from E19. Current Moksha stable version: 0.1.0 (that's first stable moksha release used as default desktop shell in bodhi linux).
https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha

I know that proposals need to be placed in wiki. But first of all, how much Mageia users like Enlightement (and what you think about Moksha)?

Before getting too enthusiastic about Moksha, I would read this: http://simotek.net/tech/projects/opensuse-e/enlightenment-e19-vs-e17-in-opensuse/. While this was written before the release of Moksha, I think the reasoning is sound.

I finally started working with E in E18, so have no nostalgia for E17. E18 offered us annoying rendering problems and reduced responsiveness that we had to grin and bear. However the discomfort was worth it as those developers who Jeff complains about not devoting sufficient time to fixing bugs plowed ahead and released E19 rather quickly -- offering us great improvements. Despite what one might infer from Jeff's comments, work continues on E19 (now E19.11) at the same time developers are pushing ahead with E20 and work to get stable Wayland support enabled.

Those of us who use E are committed to it, despite some admitted imperfections. It is light, fast, highly configurable and, having just worked to update some themes for another distro, complex as the devil underneath. Jeff Hoogland's work with Bodhi and his writing or utilities (e.g., ePad) are worthy of the highest respect. However, forking E is simply a bad idea as our community is too small to be split by a bit of impatience with developers. (What would Jeff have done had he lived through the birthing pains of KDE 4?)

Moksha is even worse for Mageia as there is little enough support for E at present. As I recall, Mageia 4 missed updating a couple of files for E offering only workarounds. Mageia 5 slipped out the door with the very problematic version of E18 in the stable repositories that I suffered with over a year ago -- and when E19 had already had its 4th or 5th update. I understand that Mageia cannot afford to support all DEs equally -- which makes it all the more important not to detract from the support there is with yet another fork. That clearly threatens more harm than good. Let's boost support for Enlightenment itself -- which will also give us the time to see if Moksha offers much more than distraction.

EDIT - 05/10/2015: Not to belabour the point, but alphas for EFL 1.16 and "friends", including Elementary and Evas generic loaders, have been released today with not just new features but a long list of fixes. I think this is at odds with the criticisms Jeff levelled at the developers and raises the question: will he and Moksha be able to keep up with the evolution of Enlightenment?

True enough, the rewrite of WM E16 to create DE E17 seemed to take forever. However, that did not stop folks from using the "development" versions. In fact, there were more E-centric distros before the "final" release. Post E17 we are talking some rewrites, but as a DE. I think the switch to "major" release numbering has, perhaps, been more cosmetic than anything, a bit like Firefox going to a "rapid release" cycle with "major" releases every 6 weeks, many of which see only minor tweaking. For FF it made the development work appear more rapid (to compete with Chrome), while Jeff (and others?) see the change in release numbering in E as major changes.

From what I have seen, E18 was the opening shot in moving E forward, and it was very rough around the edges, a bit like the early releases of KDE4. E19 got most of the bugs out, started to add some features back (perhaps comparable to the way Gnome Shell developed), and started development for Wayland. Bug swatting continues on E19 while E20 is now out in alpha, and we can look forward to a stable release in a few months. The developers are currently soliciting input for the next major cycle, asking if E21 work should focus on cleaning up and rationalizing the settings OR focusing on the API for gadgets to improve the gadgets and ease their development. The losing proposition will become the priority for E22.

E users can vote for their choice (settings or gadgets) here: https://phab.enlightenment.org/V14

PS Some distros still do have E17 in their repositories for those who prefer it or because they are simply not up to date. Mageia's release cycle did not fit well with E as it froze things with E18 even though the delays in releasing Mageia 5 might have allowed the inclusion of E19. In retrospect it is too bad that we didn't just retain E17 and catch up on a later dev cycle.