GOs is no more Enlightened

Well, what can we say? The title says it all after all. In short, the Cloudbook release date was postponed to February and we new it, but what made it delay was somehow a mystery. In the GOs’s Website you can still download GOs Rocket Beta, do it while you can because…. from the next release GOs should switch from Enlightenment to Gnome. Yeah, sure, the originality of GOs has just gone away. Now GOs is just a standard Ubuntu desktop, with a different theme and a bunch of launchers for Google applications on the bottom of the screen. Useless to say, I don’t like this choice 🙂

But how did all of it come to light?

Earl Malmrose, the CTO of ZaReason, informed CLICK during the sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 6X) that the gOS version on Everex Cloudbook is going to use GNOME instead of Enlightenment.

Here is what ZaReason has to say about it:

The short and simple explanation is that gOS was using Enlightenment. They worked as hard as they could within that environment, but in the final analysis, they needed more so they switched to GNOME.

What does this mean for you? Your Cloudbook will be more solid than ever, justifying the two phrases: “It’s worth the wait” and “good things come in small packages.”

(this piece of new is taken from Cloudbook.com)

Well, according to ZaReason, the GOs theme decided that they had reached a dead end with Enlightenment’s potentials. They needed more flexibility and therefore switched to Gnome. Well, that smells cheesy to me, sorry. In OpenGEU we use Enlightenment and pieces of Gnome exactly because what we always said is that E17 is perfect for geek users, if it is left alone as it is, while it can become the easiest and friendlier desktop on earth if you mix some little pieces of something else into it.

What I really don’t like is something like what has been said on CLICK, that is: E17 is slower than Gnome. People, Gnome and KDE are the heaviest DEs out there for Linux, they surely are the most complete DEs, for sure, but they are freakin’ slow compared to XCFE or E17; saying that E17 is slower than Gnome is like saying that the sun rotates around the earth! E17 can be customized and configured as much as you wish! For example, the default configuration of OpenGEU features an heavily animated background, an animated theme and it is pretty heavy but yet it is faster than Gnome, of course. You can see it from the LiveCD for example! Please, try to compare the Ubuntu Live CD usability with that of OpenGEU Luna Nuova. The latter is of course MUCH MORE responsive and fast.

Also, for the next release of OpenGEU, Luna Crescente, I’m working on new and faster themes. You can also configure E17 to be even faster of course! You can configure the speed of animations, memory allocated, everything from a guy and let’s not forget that E17 is still in beta stage even if it looks like it is going to be released very soon.

The whole problem, IMHO, is that since GOs is being sold on real hardware from Everex, they are now looking for something more solid than a beta software. Then they shouldn’t have used E17 on first instance if the result was going to be this one. What I’m saying is that every E17 enthusiast (like me) or developer knows of the limits and potentials of Enlightenment, so why using it to drop it in the middle of the work after some time? I don’t get it. They knew from the beginning what thy could have done with E17 and what they couldn’t. They even developed a pair of new Modules! So I was always thinking: wow, they’re doing great with E17, if only I had some Enlightenment developer on my side too… and then they quit like this 🙁
In OpenGEU, for example, we’re now getting crazy to find E17 developers to help us create a better E17 Desktop! Where are they gone? Nice and cool projects like OpenGEU and OzOS are waiting for them. We will always use Enlightenment and we believe in it, we don’t just use it. But E17 can be as fast or as heavy as you wish, whilein this stage it cannot be as much user friendly as you wish. We need people to code new useful tools to have an easier E17 desktop. The problem is that almost every E17 developer out there hates things like a Systray… they think a normal user ca live without ’em.. well, a normal user can’t because a lot of applications use the Systray to work and you won’t change this reality. But that’s another problem… just to tell you that E17 developers are usually used to the usability of Enlightenment at this stage.

We are not going to accept it, we’ll help the E17 and Linux community have a better and easier E7 desktop, for as much as we can, and only if we’ll be able to do it, since we need coders and developers but of one thing you can be sure: we won’t ever drop Enlightenment, and we are sad GOs did it.

Unless they are doing it only for the CloudBook’s version… it could be an option, I don’t know but I don’t believe it. We’ll see, only time will tell 😉

What’s sure is that I have an eeePC and I’m working to port OpenGEU to it, with the next release, Luna Crescente, and another thing I know for sure is that if I had a cloudbook (I can’t have one, I live in Italy) I would surely erase the Gnome GOs desktop in the same moment I’d turn it on, to switch to something else. In the worst case I’d use Ubuntu, always better than a simply modified Green Ubuntu remix… with a different name.