Enlightenment (software)

Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a compositing window manager for the X Window System. Since version 20, Enlightenment also supports Wayland, and is shipped with some linux distributions such as Bodhi Linux and Pentoo.

Enlightenment includes functions to provide a graphical shell and can be used in conjunction with programs written for GNOME or KDE. When used together with the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), Enlightenment can refer to an entire desktop environment.

History
The first version of Enlightenment was released by Carsten Haitzler in 1997. Originally, it was just a window manager before the addition of the EFL.

Bodhi Linux was built around the Enlightenment 17 desktop, but forked it to create the Moksha desktop.

Elive Linux also used a fork of E17 as its main desktop environment until 2019, when the 3.7 series was released. It also features E16 and has future plans to integrate the new E26 version.

The current version as of August 2023 is E25.

E16
The release of E17 meant a fundamental redesign of the enlightenment manager. As a result smaller part of the community decided to stay with the E16 codebase and continue independent development of this version, simply naming the manager "e16" while releasing under independent version scheme. It reached the 1.0 milestone in 2009 and is still actively developed (1.0.29 as of 2023).

Reception
A 2011 review of E16 found it was highly customisable, featuring per-window configurability, support for virtual desktops with much larger screenspace than monitor size, and that "nearly everything can be done with the keyboard." While the appearance was praised, the desktop environment was criticised as being somewhat unstable due to bugs at the time. While E16 could be used as a window manager for GNOME or KDE, the review found they had poor compatibility.

A 2014 review of E17 found the design to be fast, touchscreen friendly and have a nice appearance, but was annoyed by the small selection area to resize windows. The appearance of the default terminal with the desktop environment, called Terminology, was also praised and the author personally liked the desktop left and right click menus.

A 2017 review found E18 to have lightweight performance, remarking a similar appearance to Mac OS, but also mentioning a steep learning curve due to the desktop left and right click menus.

A 2020 review praised Enlightenment for its high number of keyboard shortcuts, and that it was lightweight enough to run well on older hardware, with low idle CPU and RAM usage. However, it criticised the desktop left and right click menus for having too much complexity.