I love the look of Elive (plus the fact that 'almost' everything worked out of the box for me). That said, it seems like I have far less control over the look and feel of my system compared to other e17-based distros (such as Open-Geu).
1) I guess Elive doesn't have shelves? That's too bad...I actually liked having that feature, and being able to separate things out around the edge of the screen more easily.
2) Gadgets are placed where the developers want them, not where 'I' want them. For instance, if I want to have the pager and windows list be part of the same container (not sure what the actual term is, since I'm new to e17). Plus, I feel like I have no control whatsoever about what icons are available to me (Entangle or something is supposed to give me control over that I guess, but I cannot get it to do anything for the life of me...)
3) Lack of interesting gadgets. Really, I'm not concerned about my cpu usage or the temperature inside of my computer on a daily basis...but I would like a sound mixer, a weather gadget, and a way of managing my wireless all right there on the desktop. These are pretty much standard components, and there really isn't a good reason not to have them. I can understand the wireless problem, since e17 doesn't have a tasktray and can't use network-manager, but it shouldn't be overly difficult to write up a more concise front end to something like wicd and have a gadget for it. On a related note, wicd (or something similar) should be available by default. When you first install the OS, you cannot connect to WPA/WPA2 access points.
4) Sound is something that enlightenment, in general it seems, just plain sucks at. The first time I tried geubuntu, trying to change the sound level crashed enlightenment...with OZos, the mixer was upside down (moving the mixer bar down turned the sound up, and vice versa)...open-geu gave me no control whatsoever over sound (mixer/buttons, even when "properly configured" did not turn the sound down). Now, with Elive, my increase and decrease sound buttons work just fine, but my mute doesn't work at all. I looked through the key bindings, and found there was no mute in there by default at all...I'm going to look around to find the correct command to mute/unmute using the hotkey on my laptop, but still...very annoying. At the very least, a mixer should be available by default so I have at least some way of controlling it.
5) I may be old-school, but I really would rather have my left-click button on the desktop allow me to highlight items on the desktop. If I can't have that, I would at least like the ability to disable that really annoying menu. Yes, it gives me access to important functions, but I'd rather have a button on the ibar that gave me access to them. The right click access to favorites is nice, but the left click is just annoying. On a related note, I added the "start" gadget (I "enabled" it, but I guess it can only be loaded? For some reason, when I go back to the modules menu, it always just shows it as loaded, not enabled).
6) The terminal used by default is kinda annoying...I honestly have no clue how to configure it (I personally like a darker color for the transparency, and a scrollbar on the side for seeing old output). It is very difficult to use effectively if you do a lot of work at the command line (like me, since I write CLI programs for class).
All that said, this is a beautiful OS, and I do plan to continue using it. I just wanted to point out some things that I personally consider pretty obvious components to a user-friendly OS. In a nutshell, the following should be done in a future release (IMHO):
1)Make it extremely intuitive to modify the ibar. I shouldn't need to navigate menu after menu to find a way (which I still haven't) in order to add/remove programs from it. Right click-add/delete. Very simple, no fudging around with menus.
2) Basic user functionality (wireless manager, mixer, etc) should be available on the desktop by default (and at the very least AVAILABLE on the OS by default...I don't know about you guys, but I am not a fan of configuring WPA via command line).
3) Make the overall system more configurable. This ties back to my first point...make it easier to change the look and feel of the system...make it easier to create a personalized desktop to the way the USER wants it, not to the way the developers thing a desktop should look.
4) Get rid of some of the text-based menus. You have a beautiful Elpanel, and then you drill down to a configuration, and are presented with a list view of options...kinda ugly.