After more than a year in making after its previous 0.26 release, the lightweight modular desktop environment and compositing window manager Enlightenment has just rolled out its latest version, 0.27.
Debuting an impressive 28 years ago—yes, that’s right, when GNOME or KDE didn’t exist yet—this project is one of the oldest open-source, desktop-focused endeavors. Remarkably, it continues to be actively maintained, largely thanks to its original creator, Carsten Haitzler.
It is designed to be resource-efficient, making it an excellent choice for older or less powerful hardware. Despite its lightweight nature, Enlightenment supports advanced visual effects and animations, making it visually appealing without being resource-intensive.
Regarding the new features in Enlightenment 0.27, there’s an interesting precedent. The entire announcement boils down to these two short sentences from Haitzler:
This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes mostly with some new features.
What can I say? It’s a little strange—and honestly, a bit frustrating—to pour a year’s worth of effort into improving a product, only to wrap it up with a description like, “a lot of fixes mostly with some new features.” Anyway.
If you take a closer look at the 0.27 GitLab branch of Enlightenment and review the closed PRs, you’ll find the following changes.
Notable improvements include updated Japanese, Polish, Georgian, and Portuguese translations. Additionally, the credits for Japanese translators have been corrected, and a Wayland session desktop file has been renamed for better clarity.
On the technical front, the update includes fixes such as handling errors in the ALSA mixer, improving support for flat mouse acceleration and high-resolution scrolling, and resolving issues with the hibernate command on OpenBSD.
Moreover, a new “convertible” module has been introduced, alongside updates to handle edge settings and input configurations more effectively.
If you’re using this desktop environment, the new Enlightenment 0.27 is already available in the official repositories of some rolling-release distributions, like Arch. If you’re using a different distro, you’ll need to wait until its next point release to get your hands on it. The source tarballs are available for download here.
