An early Christmas treat has arrived for those seeking Enlightenment — no, not spiritual concept, but the EFL-based desktop shell for Linux and BSD systems.
Enlightenment 0.26.0 is a modest improvement to Enlightenment 0.25, which was released in December 2021.
For those unfamiliar with it, Enlightenment (sometimes referred to as just ‘E’) is a clever, lightweight window manager, compositor, and desktop shell built around the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). It’s designed for X11 but an experimental Wayland mode is available.
Enlightenment is famed for its low-resource usage, modular design, and unique aesthetics, although the latter element may not appeal to all. The Moksha desktop utilised by Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux is based on Enlightenment, so if you’ve had an experience with Moksha, you’d be somewhat familiar with E.
What’s New in Enlightenment 0.26?
Here’s a representation of Enlightenment
Bug-fixes feature heavily in Enlightenment 0.26 (referred to as E26), but a small selection of new features and core enhancements round things out, including:
- DDC option added to backlight settings
- Larger task previews
- Watermark added to wl mode
- Support action desktop files in EFM to add file actions
- org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver inhibit support
- Support for logind’s lock/unlock Dbus APIs
- API to play sound samples for notifications
- Option to use xrandr cmdline not direct API in Randr X11
- New params added to mixer actions
- Flat accel + hires scrolling options added to input settings
- Option to set hidden state in netwm
Check out the official release post for more insights about this release.
For access to the E26 source code, utilize the link above. However, remember that the most recent release requires EFL v1.27.0 or later for successful building.
Not interested in complications?
Enlightenment can be installed on Ubuntu, even though it might not be the newest version.
Ubuntu 23.10 includes Enlightenment 0.25.x in the Universe repository. You can simply install it by entering sudo apt install enlightenment. To use it, log out, access the session switcher, select the Enlightenment session, and then log back in.