Enlightenment, one of the pioneers of visually captivating desktop environments, has just unveiled its latest releases: Enlightenment 0.26 User Environment and EFL 1.27 Libraries. After a year and a half of meticulous development, these updates bring a slew of features, optimizations, and enhancements to the user interface and core libraries.
Let’s have a quick walkthrough of this release.
Table of Contents
About Enlightenment
Enlightenment, boasting a decade-long legacy as a window manager and X11 compositor for Linux, has continuously evolved to cater to various platforms, including mobiles, wearables, TV UI, and traditional desktop environments. The heart of Enlightenment lies in its core libraries – the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), providing essential features such as widgets, networking, and graphics.
Enlightenment 0.26: What’s New
One of the key features of this release is the experimental Wayland support, which is now available. Although it might have some bugs or issues, you can give it a try. If you have installed it separately, you can get the option to login to the Wayland session from the login screen.
Enlightenment 0.26 also introduces DDC protocol to control screen backlight, a larger preview of window thumbnails and on-disk sync API for configuration changes.
The EFM file manager can now add actions with files via desktop files. For those who still favour screensavers would be glad to know that this release brings a screen saver to disable feature via org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver API.
Here’s a quick rundown of the features in addition to the above:
- Setting for DDC protocol to control screen backlight
- Increased size of preview window thumbnails
- Fixes to implement support for the Wayland protocol
- New on-disk sync API for configuration changes
- EFM file manager can now add actions with files via desktop files
- Support for disabling screen saver activation via org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver API
- Support for DBus API provided by logind systemd service for session locking/unlocking
- Watchdog process added to detect hangs in the main event loop
- Notification system API for playing audio samples
- Option to use Randr X11 extension via xrandr utility
- Additional audio mixing options
- Option for scrolling with acceleration
- Option to control window’s hidden state via NetWM API
Now, let’s quickly wrap up the EFL library update which powers this desktop under the hood.
EFL 1.27 Library update
Simultaneously, the Enlightenment project introduces EFL 1.27 Libraries, a fundamental building block for creating visually appealing, resource-efficient graphical interfaces. Originally designed for Enlightenment, EFL components have found applications in consumer electronics and mobile devices, including the Tizen mobile platform and products from Samsung and Electrolux.
The EFL 1.27 update brings several improvements, such as enhanced APIs in the Eina library, added functionality in Ecore for Windows, and expanded support in elm_cnp for URL lists. The Evas library, responsible for rendering text and images on the screen, now supports JXL and QOI image formats, offering a broader range of options for developers.
Here’s a quick summary of the EFL 1.27 updates.
- APIs for working with relative paths and sha1 hashes in Eina library
- Ecore now supports executing exe files with parent processes on Windows
- elm_cnp adds support for URL lists
- Evas library supports JXL and QOI image formats
- Call to Eet library for syncing changes to disk
- Support for LibreSSL 3.5.x and removal of GnuTLS support
- Elementary widgets now require standard icons from the theme
- Widgets allow pasting from the clipboard into password fields
So, that’s about it. Want to give it a try?
Download and install
The Enlightenment desktop and its components will soon be arriving in the official repository of various Linux distributions.
While writing this, the Ubuntu repository still has the earlier 0.25 version. So wait until it arrives in the Ubuntu repo. You can check here whether the latest 0.26 landed or not using the below link.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=enlightenment&searchon=names
However, a clean script is available on the GitHub page to install it in Ubuntu systems. Detailed instructions are also present in the below link.
https://github.com/batden/esteem
As of writing this, it’s already landed in the Arch repository, which you can easily install if you have an Arch setup by following the below commands. If you need more details, you can read our guide on how to install Enlightenment desktop in Arch Linux.
sudo pacman -S efl
sudo pacman -S enlightenment
sudo pacman -S --needed terminology
Closing Notes
As a fan of the Enlightenment desktop, this environment’s uniqueness, intuitiveness, and refreshing approach truly stand out. Enlightenment’s distinctive widgets and interactions offer fresh air in a landscape dominated by GNOME and KDE Plasma. Here’s hoping that more users explore this desktop, attracting a growing community of developers and testers to further enrich its ecosystem.
Via release notes.