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 modest uplift to Enlightenment 0.25, which was released in December 2021.
For those unfamiliar with it, Enlightenment (sometimes referred to as just ‘E’) is a deft, 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, modularity, and unique look and feel, though the latter isn’t to everyone’s tastes. The Moksha desktop used by Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux is based on Enlightenment, so if you’ve tried Moksha you’ll be halfway familiar with E.
What’s New in Enlightenment 0.26?
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
See the official release post for more details on this release.
You can download the source code for E26 from the link above, but do note that the latest release does depend on EFL v1.27.0 or later, so you’ll need that to build it successfully.
Don’t fancy the hassle?
You can install Enlightenment on Ubuntu, albeit not the latest release.
Ubuntu 23.10 has Enlightenment 0.25.x in the Universe repository, so a sudo apt install enlightenment will install it. Then, log out, hit the session switcher, select the Enlightenment session, and log in.
