LET THERE BE LIGHT

Enlightenment started life in the year 1997 as a Fvwm window manager hack. The Enlightenment developers are still working on version 0.17, which will provide a feature-rich desktop environment that is aesthetically pleasing and gives users as much freedom as possible. Although the previous version, Enlightenment 16, is several years old now and has a large community of fans, the history of the current developer version, Enlightenment DR17 (Development Release 17, also known as E17) has been anything but smooth. The developers have had to rewrite numerous tools and libraries, and they have completely ditched much of the code in the process. The fact that many of the Enlightenment developers are also responsible for other important libraries – such as the Imlib2 graphics library, which is used in Gnome – has also had an effect on the progress.