Enlightenment
Version: 0.20 Web: www.enlightenment.org
The grace of the Unix way is in the freedom it gives you to choose which applications you wish to use and organise your desktop any way that suits you. You can see the different camps every day in online Linux communities: KDE lovers, Unity/ Cinnamon/Gnome users, geeks with their minimalistic tile window managers and perhaps command line warriors. But wait. Even this list doesn’t cover everything. There is another desktop environment that is not targeted at any particular audience but instead is a pure art: Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is a shell originally spawned from the custom window manager for X11 and offers a variety of tools to manage your desktop, all built around the core EFL library, which handles almost everything, from UI widgets and thumbnails to desktoplevel encryption and access to devices. The default Enlightenment desktop has a dock-like bar at the bottom and virtual desktops, and it enables you to access the application menu by clicking on the desktop. The desktop ships with Enlightenment-specific accessories, like the Terminology console, Enjoy player, EPhoto viewer and many more. Most of the standard apps are minimalist, but they all feature very appealing graphics and lots of cool extras, such as image previews in the terminal.
It might take some time to get used to Enlightenment, but the desktop is very stylish and remarkably fast, providing good eye-candy and effects even on ageing hardware. The latest 0.20 release finally brings stable Wayland support (if you have EFL built with certain parameters – see http:// bit.ly/1PXQx86), a new geolocation module, reworked audio mixer and many refined widgets.
While Enlightenment is available for almost any popular Linux distro, the latest release can be a little tricky to obtain. You may want to try a Debianbased Elive, or install the Enlightenment pattern in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or use Arch… The Enlightenment project doesn’t provide any demo live images, so it’s best to try the desktop within some distro.
“Standard apps feature very appealing graphics and lots of cool extras.”