An all-new version of the Enlightenment ‘desktop’ for Linux and BSD has been released.
Arriving over the Christmas period, Enlightenment 0.25.x (E25) is a sizeable update to the innovative window manager n’ shell combo, and includes new versions of many of E’s core modules, gadgets, and apps.
Now, Enlightenment is not strictly a ‘desktop environment’ per se, more a collection of modular technologies designed to work together. Still, the end result feels a lot like a desktop environment so, in much the same way people refer to KDE Neon as a Linux distro (despite it saying it’s not), many people find it easier to refer to Enlightenment a desktop environment — it’s shorthand, essentially.
There are some really great visual additions shipping in E25, including a new ‘flat’ look and theme, higher-quality wallpapers, and window previews when hovering over Tasks.
Additionally, devs say they’ve refactored code for screen dimming/blanking/timeout, added gesture recognition for touchpads via elput, improved monitoring of hardware temperatures via hwmon, and made it easy to see Bluetooth battery levels from within the Enlightenment desktop.
And a fairly big one: fingerprint unlock support in the lock screen using libFprint plus a new tool for fingerprint settings.
Other changes include:
- Screen setup menu entry
- On loss or re-plug in of screen now restore windows sensibly
- Additional data shown in FPS debugger
- Option to copy screenshot to clipboard
alt+tabhas a large mode with window previews- Scale settings will now modify xsettings DPI to make non-efl apps scale
- Plug/unplug now emit signals which theme can make sounds for
- Reduced power usage when screen is blanked
- Added a palette editor and selector tool to set up custom colours
- Recent files menu in the file manager
- Added settings to speed up/down transitions
- No more edge bindings by default
See the official release post for more details.
Downloads for Enlightenment 0.25 are available from the project homepage.
You can install the Enlightenment desktop on Ubuntu, albeit not the very latest release. Ubuntu 21.10 offers Enlightenment 0.24 from the Universe repository, which can be installed with a sudo apt install enlightenment, while Ubuntu 20.04 LTS offers Enlightenment 0.23.