Enlightenment 0.27.0 has been released, and we’ve got some highly informative release notes.
This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes mostly with some new features.
↫ Carsten Haitzler
That’s it. That’s the release notes. Digging into the commit history between 0.26.0 and 0.27.0 gives some more information, and here we can see that a lot of work has been done on the CPU frequency applet (including hopefully making it work properly on FreeBSD), a lot of updated translations, some RandR work, and a ton of other small changes.
Does any one of us use Enlightenment on a daily basis? I’m actually intrigued by this release, as it’s the first one in two years, and aside from historical usage decades ago – like many of us, I assume – I haven’t really spent any time with the current incarnation.
I’ve tried enlightenment periodically every couple of years looking for that game-changing elegance and beauty that seems to be the promise … and I’ve never seen it. For my use habits (pretty vanilla) I find it awkward, blocky and unsophisticated.
Time for another try?
No. No time for another try, Enlightenment got stuck in the nineties, it will never serve an average power user as it is today, and there are no signs it will ever change in the future. EFL look great honestly, something like GTK+ used to be, but the DE I think its a lost cause in its current state.
Enlightenment was a favorite for a long time. I still like the look (reminds me of the old days with Unix desktops), but it’s no longer an option. I have different requirements for my daily driver now, and KDE Plasma delivers.
S0me might use it daily without knowing:
If you own a Samsung device like a TV or a smartwatch the UI is using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries*:
https://docs.tizen.org/application/native/tutorials/ui-builder/ui-builder-overview/
*(ok, technically not the Window Manager, but the things it is based on and that makes it different …)