alt Hacker NewsOh, people are still using Enlightenment.
My last time I used it was still in the 1990's, before I settled into Afterstep and soon afterwards Windowmaker.
In what concerns my use of GNU/Linux, it was CDE on others.
Apparently nothing big came out of Enlightenment and Tizen.
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I still install it and play with it for a bit every other year. I really appreciate that it's held true to its own core. Yes it works with Wayland now, but it's still using its e-foundation libraries. I still wish I had screenshots of my desktop from 1998/1999. Downloading cool software from Freshmeat, hitting up Slashdot (news for nerds... stuff that matters) to see what was going on. Kinda wish I was into IRC back then but I was more of an ICQ->AIM chatter. It's an era I wish we could have back.
Enlightenment always had a pretty weird value proposition. In the very beginning, there was "fvwm-xpm" and early "E" prototypes. They were graphically crazy with a heavy focus on shaped Windows. There's still nothing quite like that weird steampunk/Brazil-ish theme they had. Probably for a reason.
Then they went both visually rather tame and scope-creepy (own graphical libraries etc.). At the beginning I was hoping that we'd get some kind of Amiga-influenced design sensibilities on X (basically a more "artsy" MUI), but that never manifested.
I was also a huge fan of WindowMaker. Simple, effective, stylish without getting in the way. Also allowed me to have a vertical taskbar, which I stuck with even on Windows until Win11 has taken that from me - because Mac is the arbiter of taste and everyone must copy it.
Moksha (a fork of e17) is the main desktop for Bodhi Linux, an unofficial Ubuntu-based distro:
Funny, I was also one of those people who switched from E to WindowMaker. At the time I had no idea it resembled NeXTStep, but it was great.
After that I changed to KDE 3 which was a major milestone at the time. I think GNOME at the time was technically superior though.
Then shortly after I realized that desktop on Linux wasn't really going anywhere, so I switched to macOS (OS X at the time).
AV Linux uses Enlightenment 0.27.1. The creator of that distribution also offers a version based on Moksha 0.4.2, the E17 fork mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
https://www.bandshed.net/
Latest Version Release Announcement:
https://www.bandshed.net/2026/03/01/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...
A few more details from and older release announcement:
"Both ISO’s are built on an MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base with Liquorix kernels."
https://www.bandshed.net/2025/11/27/av-linux-and-mx-moksha-2...