Enlightenment reaches 0.27, continuing its quiet but persistent journey

An elder returns, for those still seeking it

Enlightenment is one of the granddaddies of Linux desktops, and after a couple of years, the project has a shiny new release.

Version 0.27.0 was released earlier this month, with possibly the shortest description in its release notes that we've seen in any FOSS project:

This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes, mostly with some new features.

And that's all, folks. Enlightenment 0.27 does not stand alone, though: its graphics programming libraries have long been separated out as the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, or EFL for short, and along with Enlightenment 0.27 came EFL 1.28. This has a substantial Git commit list with many thousands of changes across 151 files.

Enlightenment's default terminal and file manager. Remarkably, that's most of the bundled tools - click to enlarge

Enlightenment has a long and at times complex history, which is partly reflected in a non-obvious version numbering system. (It has a place on the ZeroVer list.) The first release was way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest graphical environments for Linux that's still in active development. Development Release 16 appeared in 1999, followed by a 13-year hiatus. That version, known as 0.16 or DR16, is still maintained today: it's now called E16, and version 1.0.30 was released on August 10, 2024.

With the release of Enlightenment DR17 in December 2012, EFL, developed alongside earlier versions starting in 2000, became more formally recognized as a standalone toolkit. That version is also still maintained today, in the form of a fork called Moksha. The lightweight Ubuntu remix Bodhi Linux is based on the Moksha desktop, and we looked at Bodhi version 7 in August 2023. Bodhi maintainer Robert "ylee" Wiley told us why the project forked that version:

Bodhi supports a lot of old machines. […] E17 had an option to turn compositing off. E18 and all releases after [having] no ability to truly disable compositing. These releases simply will not work right on … older video cards.

Since Enlightenment D17, updates have been much more frequent: the project released ten more versions in the next 13 years. Reportedly, after a somewhat rocky patch early on, the last few versions have been cosiderably more stable. This long gap, followed by a more regular release schedule reminds us of the pattern followed by the WINE project.

Enlightenment is unhappy with an emulated video card. It wants a real GPU, and all to itself..

Although few put it front and center, most big-name Linux distros include Enlightenment. For example, openSUSE includes it as one of the options when selecting a desktop during installation. Back in 2018, The Register looked at Elive, which is one of the few that does. It's still alive and a new version was released in December. We suspect that a version with E27 will follow before too long. The Tizen project is used in many smart TVs; Version 9.0 M2 came out in October, and it uses Enlightenment and EFL.

We tried out the new release on Arch Linux. It works very smoothly, and while it's still lightweight, true to its 1990s roots, it retains more animations and visual effects than we're used to seeing in 21st century desktops. In a VirtualBox VM, Enlightenment complained about missing OpenGL support if hardware acceleration wasn't enabled, and with or without it was very unstable, but we think that's because it's unhappy with the emulated hardware.

Enlightenment isn't for everyone, but it's good to see such a venerable project updated. In an increasingly bland landscape of corporate Linux, it's a fun alternative. ®