I am new here and am both excited to learn more about Elive and also to hopefully keep on using it. I've already installed it and uninstalled it twice since I kept getting a freeze-up whenever I wanted to change my Wallpaper and/or background in general. But here I am giving it another go since I disliked the fact that Bodhi, (the other distro I was testing out) uses systemd? Pretty sure that is not the case for Elive right?
But, to the point, I've been looking on the forums as to why use E16 as opposed to E17, for example? From what I read on Bodhi's website, E17 was better in quality than any releases after that. So I am curious? How/why is E16 "better" than E17?
I'm a fan of just having dark/black themes/backgrounds so I tend to be rather minimalist in that regard. I am rarely staring at a desktop background so fancy images don't mean much to me. Just one of my personal tastes/flaws I suppose.
I'll keep trying to read on the forums looking for an explanation but if someone here to point me to an explanation it would be great!
Welcome to the forum.
First I have to disapoint you, Elive like allmost all current distros uses systemd.
So with that out of the way let's get to the freezes.
That shouldn't be happening, unless you're using enormous images of a few hundred Mb.
Can you be more specific in how you tried to change your background?
The conventional way is to simply copy images to .e16/backgrounds and then they can be chosen through the "enligtenment" menu.
As to the, not altogether uncontroversial choice of E16:
The intention is to have an E22 based desktop in the future but that still is a lot of work, as would be for E17.
Seeing the amount of work E17 for Elive would require and being no more than a transitional desktop anyway, the choice fell on E16 as a stand in.
E16 is rock solid stable, well maintained, extremely light, easily customized and uncluttered. We hope you get to like it as E22 isn't around the corner, at short notice yet.
After trying during years Cinemaon, Gnome, XFCE, KDE, Budgie, I stopped 2 years ago on ELive / Enlightenment.
It's fast, stable, very functional. And as @triantares a group of people are still maintaining / updating it.
I used E17 in the past with ELive 3.0 but I do not miss it, personal taste though....
I installed ELive 3.7.x at least 20 times on 3 differents hardware and didn't experienced your problem (Background/desktop picture freezing the PC)... Curious to have more details.
I did spend some more time reading after posting the original post. So your responses even further surprised me. After doing more reading I came across some posts that referenced creating a "special Elive/E16 flavor/project" which left me thinking "oh, my question earlier was off, they're using E17 by default but considering a 2ndary E16 option".
Now, it looks like I was right all along in my initial asking and thoughts? So Elive, by default does come with E16 but you are thinking of jumping all the way up to defaulting it to E22?
I'll come back and post once I write down exactly how I kept getting Elive to lock up when trying to change the theme/background. I just wanted it to be the default black that I like about Enlightenment. So no I was not trying to upload my images and/or home pictures to use as backgrounds/wallpaper. I even managed to lock up the live/usb version of Elive trying to do the same thing.
I've been wanting to live and use Enlightenment for years now; ever since I saw it on Void linux. Not that I want to use Void though as I'd like something more developer/programmer friendly, hence Debian-based distros. It might be easier for me to slap E16/17 on Devuan instead.
Elive is pretty gorgeous and snappy I must admit. So kudos to you all! I'm sure it's a lot of work. But the systemd thing is a no-go for me. Thank you for the direct response on that.
Yes, simply said : E17 will be outdated once E22 is up and running. That isn't that far away so not really worthwhile to put that much work into it.
As you will have noticed. Elive isn't just Debian with Enlightenment slapped onto it, it's made to fit.
Have a look at the stable 3.0.0 version to see what E17 could be made to be. Just putting E17/E16 on Devuan will probably be a disapointment, after that.
And it suddenly hit me ...... What version are you running? I simply assumed you were running 3.7.8 "Testing" as that provides only the E16 desktop by default.
"Stable" is based on Wheezy (32bit) whereas "Testing" bases on Buster (64bit).
Apparently I am running 3.0.6 stable version. I downloaded a few distros one night so I lost track of what/where I was doing it. I think I donated to this project. I think.
Is this the distro that has a an old music video of "don't leave me this way"? It made me laugh so I donated.
I meant no insult when I said, "slap E17 onto Devuan". And I am sure E16 has been "fit" onto Debian here for Elive. It is very nice! I don't have such skills, nor such time unfortunately.
Where/how does one get their hands on the 3.7.8 version? Thanks again.
Non taken, I was just trying to point out that there's a difference.
It is still in pre-beta testing fase but already very stable. If you want to I can PM you the link but that would sort of create a moral obligation to continue testing, discovering bugs or telling us what you think is missing.
well, elive always used sysvinit until now, the stable version still uses sysvinit, only the alpha versions (in development) is using now systemd at the moment, and is going to use it for now for compatibility, but if is possible (and only if possible) it will include an option to switch to sysvinit from the installer on these in-development versions
Note: Talking about the wallpapers problem I assume that @ob1 is using the stable version which uses E17 and not E16, the development versions are more like... well, nothing too much defined yet
@ob1 E17 has a few bugs, which is probably not going to be fixed (switching to E22 is more wise), I think that the wallpapers feature had one of them... I suggest you to instead, right click in an image in your file-manager (thunar) and click the option to "select for wallpaper", its an integrated elive feature that creates the needed things for use its as wallpaper
yeah, -we- are well used of the alpha versions but for the general public, the stable version is a much better experience, if we ignore the fact that is a bit old... I never install alpha versions in friend's computers, even if is newer, because the usability and beauty and everything is much better in the stable version
The distros out there still running init on Debian
package base - you need 3 fingers to count them.
systemd has grown up nowadays,
so there is no serious reason to avoid it anymore,
it's the other way around meanwhile.
No offense, but may be it would be good,
if you try to understand the ideas behind and get some deeper knowledge about before you just call it a no go.
If you want to use a rolling release running distro on Debian base - read more about systemd and it's features- then you can become happy with the Elive 64bit Release very soon.
Kdrgds
but for the general public, the stable version is a much better experience, if we ignore the fact that is a bit old... I never install alpha versions in friend's computers, even if is newer, because the usability and beauty and everything is much better in the stable version