Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.

Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.

▲ pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I got introduced to it via some friends that were former Amiga users.

▲ vidarh 2 days ago | parent [-]

In '99 or so, I ran Enlightenment with Amiga-style draggable virtual desktops. As a former Amiga user, it made me very happy.

▲ antisol 2 days ago | parent [-]

May I present: amiwm

https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiwm

▲ vidarh 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I saw that back in the day, and it's great, but that was too faithful. I liked the eye candy of Enlightenment, but with a nod to the nostalgia...

There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.

▲ antisol 2 days ago | parent [-]

I feel you. Same reason I don't use amiwm.

  > There is still a lot of things I miss from the Amiga, but I'm acutely aware that a lot of what I wish for are based on rather rose-tinted memories.

Yes! I have often wondered what it would be like trying to daily drive an OS4 amiga for modern stuff. I suspect it probably wouldn't be super awesome, mainly due to lack of software for modern things. But I'd really like to try it - if only I could run OS4 on an x86 PC*. I would definitely try it out.

(* yes, I know I can run it in an emulator, but that's not the same)

One thing I'd particularly love to see is something like ARexx adopted in modern OS's and software. It would be super-useful to have most applications expose something like an arexx port, would make a lot of cool things very easy to do.

▲ vidarh 2 days ago | parent [-]

The odd thing is that a lot of Linux software does have Dbus support, but it somehow feels like the barrier is a lot higher and buy-in a lot worse. Just throwing together ad-hoc scripts w/dbus feels like it has a higher barrier.

Datatypes is another obvious one - present-day Amiga's can support modern image formats in apps that haven't seen updates for 25+ years...

I recently added hacky assigns to my (very hacky) little shell, as an experiment, as it's one of those features that feels like it's "just" link symlinks setting an environment variable to a path, but as it turns out it really is a lot more ergonomic (to me at least).

I've settled on a tiling wm w/one floating desktop to sort-of emulate how I typically used my Amiga screens, and that I like.

> if only I could run OS4 on an x86 PC*. I would definitely try it out.

AROS would be the closest thing. E.g. AROS One (a distribution)

https://sites.google.com/view/arosone

It's been many years since I spent any time on AROS, so I don't know what it's like at the moment. Back then I could boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS with a startup-sequence that booted straight into FrexxEd (editor w/extensive AREXX support co-written by the author of Curl) faster than a default install of Emacs would start on the same machine.

	▲	antisol 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You make a good point about dbus. It is sooooort of similar if you squint. But I think both your points are correct. I feel like the buy-in factor is probably the big one - I think if there was lots of buy in the tooling would probably get easier. How did I not think of datatypes? Yeah, omg they were do great. I'll never forget my amazement when I installed one (I think for jpeg) and now just everything supported jpeg. I think IIRC beos did something similar to that. Oh yeah I've seen AROS, but like you I haven't actually fired it up in a long time. The last time I did it was "Amiga Research Operating System". I just noticed on their wikipedia: `there is also an ARM port for the Raspberry Pi series` That sounds like a good excuse to break out one of these pis I have sitting around!