Enlightenment is a window manager, compositor and minimal desktop for Linux

If you have a car made in the last few years, the ui on the display of the computer in the dash is most likely powered by Enlightenment Foundation Libraries aka EFL. If there is any lag or the touchscreen is not "pixel perfect", that's not Enlightenment's fault, in fact the Enlightenment project has gone way out of its way to make it very easy to not screw up graphics performance.

Personally I liked Enlightenment DR17 in the late 2000s. Nowadays I'm using i3 or Sway.

Related:

Enlightenment 0.26 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38753048 - Dec 2023 (50 comments)

Enlightenment Desktop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761648 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)

Enlightenment 0.25.0 Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29710006 - Dec 2021 (2 comments)

Enlightenment – The Underrated Window Manager - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998041 - March 2017 (1 comment)

Enlightenment DR 0.18.0 Release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6951873 - Dec 2013 (34 comments)

E17 is out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4955861 - Dec 2012 (68 comments)

E17 (Enlightenment) enters alpha after 12 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4756898 - Nov 2012 (75 comments)

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries release version 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156191 - Jan 2011 (5 comments)

Linux desktop with Enlightenment (e17) by top-tier electronics maker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947656 - Nov 2009 (15 comments)

Used Enlightenment as daily driver for about 3 years. Overall it was nice, but I eventually gave up on it after trying to configure things outside the typical GUI-based options. The config documentation [0] takes too much time to understand. Eventually moved to AwesomeWM on X11, then to KDE, then to Gnome / Wayland.

[0] http://www.enlightenment.org/docs/start

There's a certain nostalgia I feel looking at the current state of the website. I first got interested in Enlightenment about 20 years ago, and remember tinkering for endless hours to get things up and running.

It felt so modern and futuristic at the time, and always seemed just on the edge of breaking out into a major player in the Linux desktop space. Always in a state of "lots more coming!". Today, it feels a bit frozen in time, but maybe that's a good thing.

For some reason I keep coming back to Xfce, which also seems like it hasn't changed all that much, but has enough usage that it's easier to troubleshoot and find solutions to problems.

Might have to spin up Enlightenment for old time's sake and to see how things are looking these days.

Enlightenment was my JAM on Slackware 7.1 way back when. Relatively Smooth even on a K6-233