Vlogcanic

Enlightenment is free and Open Source window manager for X Window systems that can also be deployed as a full desktop environment (such as KDE or GNOME). It’s built upon the Enlightement Foundation Libraries or EFL.

It’s the brain child of Rasterman (real name, Carsen Haitzler) who remains as the lead developer ever since Enlightnetment’s first release in 1996.

Enlightenment is noted for many unique features and for graphical beauty coupled with very high efficiency so while its full of nice 2D effects all over the desktop it doesn’t need that many resources to keep working swiftly and responsively.

In the eleven years that span the project’s history there’s been no final official release (every Enlightement you can find in any distro is considered to be a betta version). The latest one is 0.16.8.12, released on Feb. 16 2008. Currently, version 0.17 or E17 is under development.

Because Enlightenment has had a jumpy history and has been something of a one man’s project, it’s not been as popular as GNOME or KDE for use as the default desktop environment in most distros. There are, however, a few to choose from:

• Elive an installable Debian LiveCD with E16 and E17.
• gOS a distro based in Ubuntu, also available as an installable LiveCD, built to work in low end computers, heavy on Google applications and with a Mac OS X visual twist.
• OpenGeu formerly known as Geubuntu, is basically Ubuntu with E17 and a lot of work to make GNOME and XFCE fill in the gaps in Enlightenment.