An Enlightened Experience: E17

It's been some time since I've used Enlightenment on a regular basis. I used some months E16 as my main desktop and was very happy with it. For some reason I cannot anymore remember I moved to some other desktop or some window manager in my continuing search for the perfect desktop experience.



For the first time I installed E17 that still is in development. But what an experience it is! It looks nicer than ever, the eye candy is not disturbing but adds value to the user experience. I even like the way Enlightenment is configured when first run. After I learned how to turn off the desktop icons I was extremely happy with Enlightenment.



One of the features I like is the way users can download and install new themes and wallpapers. Even the animated wallpapers don't disturb me, the just look great. At the moment Enlightenment seems to be the prettiest desktop available. Furthermore, it is usable and it's got all the functionality I want my desktop environment to have. And it is lightweight enough for my 1.99 GHz CPU.

If you like KDE4's looks but otherwise it is not up to your standards, you might like this one. It is still prerelease, but it seems to be a lot more stable and usable than KDE4 is at the moment. Of course window managers like Openbox can be tweaked to look great, too, but Enlightenment looks perfect out of the box. You don't need to spend hours looking for pretty themes and installing third party panels and other plugins to make a lightweight window manager as usable as Enlightenment is.

It's good to be back!