In a recent development, the user environment Enlightenment 0.26 has been released after a year and a half of development. The environment is built upon the EFL libraries (Enlight Foundation Library) and Elementary widgets. The source code of the release can be found at this link, however distribution packages are not yet available for download at this time.
The Enlightenment desktop consists of various components such as a file manager, a set of widgets, an application launch panel, and graphic configurators. One of the key features of Enlightenment is its flexibility in customization. The graphic configurators allow users to configure all aspects of their work environment, from changing the design to setting up virtual workers and controlling fonts, screen resolution, keyboard layout, and localization. It also provides low-level tuning options, including caching parameters, graphic acceleration, energy consumption, and window manager logic.
To enhance functionality, Enlightenment offers modules or gadgets that can be added to the desktop. These modules include a calendar-planner, weather forecast display, monitoring tools, volume control, battery charge display, and more. Additionally, the components of Enlightenment can be used independently in other projects or to create specialized environments such as mobile device interfaces.
The mandatory dependencies for Enlightenment include EFL, LibEXIF, and LIBPAM (Linux only). To ensure full functionality, the recommended dependencies include Connman for network configuration, Bluez5 for Bluetooth support, BC for a built-in calculator, Pulseaudio for sound device control, acpid for hardware event handling, Packagekit for system update tracking, udisks2 for external disk mounting, DDCUTIL for screen backlight control, and GDB for emergency completion tracing.
Some of the notable innovations in Enlightenment 0.26 include:
- Added settings for using the ddc protocol (Display Data Channel) to control the screen backlight.
- Increased the size of window previews in sketches.