Achieving nirvana: Enlightenment 0.28 hits the desktop

Very nearly 30something environment gets spruced up… and there's a new Trinity, too

Fresh on the desktop this week is a new version of Enlightenment as well the continuation of noughties hero KDE 3, the Trinity Desktop Environment, for those who prefer things a little old school.

Enlightenment version 0.28 is the latest release of one of the older Linux graphical environments, which first appeared in 1997. Version 0.28 arrives nearly two years after the previous release – we reported on Enlightement 0.27 in January 2025. If you're not familiar with this venerable window manager, often referred to as just E, we refer you back to that article, which also explains Enlightenment's slightly strange version numbering scheme.

Last time around we noted that its single-line release notes really didn't give us much to write about. The development team has made up for it this time, with some 68 lines of changes. It's both the same old E, and simultaneously a modern tool: it is still an X11 window manager, but it can also act as a Wayland compositor if you prefer. It offers conventional stacking resizable windows, but also can act as a tiling window manager if you prefer. On recent distros, it can now talk to the Pipewire audio server, and it can also work with NetworkManager to control network connections. This version delivers preliminary support for NetBSD too.

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This isn't really a tool for newbies or those looking for a simple easy desktop. A sign of its age is that the first-run wizard asks if you want windows to activate as soon as you move the mouse pointer over them. This was traditional 20th century Unix behavior, and in the early days of Linux it was called "focus-follows-mouse," but it's rarely seen today. E isn't a full desktop environment: it only offers a few of its own optional tools, such as the Ecrire text editor, Ephoto picture viewer, Evisum task manager, and Rage video player. Even its taskbar is optional. It is more like a basis for experienced users to customize and build their own environment around.

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Trinity is back

The Trinity Desktop Environment has a rather lower learning curve: TDE is a port of the final version of KDE 3 to modern Linux. Proving old school is still cool, the project – which keeps the look and feel of 2005-era KDE 3.5 alive – has just announced TDE release 14.1.7, with dozens of bug fixes and plenty of new features. Among these is a tweak to the kicker/taskbar: you can now scroll the taskbar using the mouse wheel, flicking through your open applications.This release drops support for Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" but adds support for the latest 26.10 "Stonking Stingray."

Forks of older versions by users disenchanted with new versions are a recurring feature of the FOSS world, but they often tend to peter out after a while. TDE is one of the exceptions: we first reported on a new release in 2021 and again in 2023. ®