After almost two years of development, the release of the new version of the Enlightenment 0.23 user environment was announced, which is based on the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) and Elementary widgets.
For those unaware of Enlightenment you should know that it is also known simply as E, is a lightweight window manager for X11 and Wayland. One of its goals is to become a complete desktop environment. It is very configurable and visually appealing, as Enlightenment It includes functions to provide a graphical shell and can be used in conjunction with programs written for Gnome or KDE.
The desktop is made up of components such as a file manager, a set of widgets, an application launcher, and a set of graphical configurators.
Enlightenment is very flexible in processing to your liking: graphical configurators do not restrict the user in the configuration and allow him to configure all aspects of the work, providing high-level tools (design change, virtual desktop configuration, font management, screen resolution, keyboard layout, localization, etc.), as well as opportunities for low-level tuning (eg you can configure caching, graphical acceleration, power consumption, window manager logic).
To extend the functionality, it is proposed to use modules (gadgets) and to process the appearance - themes.
In particular, the modules are available to display on the desktop a calendar-scheduler, weather forecast, monitoring, volume control, battery estimation, etc. Enlightenment components are not rigidly attached to each other and can be used in other projects or to create specialized environments, such as covers for mobile devices.
Enlightenment has evolved to meet the requirements of the mobile user interface as well., laptop and TV for projects like Tizen, as well as the traditional 'desktop' user interface.
The project is currently in transition from X11 to Wayland.
Main new features of Enlightenment 0.23
In this new version Enlightenment 0.23 highlights the significantly improved support for work on the Wayland graphical server, as well as support for the MPRIS protocol for remote control of multimedia players has been added to the music playback control module.
Another outstanding novelty in this release is the transition to the Meson build system which has been completed in this new version.
In addition, a new Bluetooth module based on Bluez5 and added option to create screenshots.
We can also find the ability to move windows during the change process has been added to the interface to switch between windows in the Alt tab and an option added to turn the screen on and off using DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling).
Finally, regarding the availability of this new version, the packages for the different Linux distributions have not yet been formed, but you can choose to download the source code and then compile it on your system.
How to install Enlightenment 0.23 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
As we mentioned, in order to have this new Enlightenment 0.23 version on your distro, dThey will need to download the source code and compile.
For this we have to open a terminal in the system, this is can be done with the shortcut keys "Ctrl + Alt + T" or "Ctrl + T" and in it we are going to type the following:
wget http://download.enlightenment.org/rel/apps/enlightenment/enlightenment-0.23.0.tar.xz
After that we are going to type:
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:"$PATH" export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:"$PKG_CONFIG_PATH" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:"$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
Now let's move on to compilation:
./autogen.sh make sudo make install sudo ldconfig meson build cd build ninja sudo ninja install sudo ldconfig
At the end of the compilation, we will have to close the user session in order to start with this new version of Enlightenment 0.23.
On the other hand, we can wait a few days for third-party repositories to start uploading your own builds.
Those who are interested in this, can use the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:torkvemada/e22 -y
And you just have to wait for the notification of the new version.