With E17 Out, Enlightenment E18 Is In Development

The first point release of the Enlightenment E17 desktop was released today. In addition, an early development snapshot of E18 was released too.

E17 was finally released last month on 21 December after more than one decade in development for the interesting yet lightweight window manager. E17.1 was released to end out January by providing some bug-fixes atop the open-source window manager. There was also an EDBUSv2 snapshot released as well.

Perhaps more interesting than the first E17 point release with bug-fixes is an "E18" snapshot, tagged at revision 83478.

It's still likely several years out before seeing an Enlightenment E18 release and I haven't seen too much information publicly revealed yet about E18 plans. A few months ago I even wrote, "The first version of Enlightenment was released by Carsten Haitzler in 1997 while this 'E17' release has been in development since 2000, yes, 12 years ago. It will be interesting to see how many years it takes to reach E18, or rather if X12 will come about prior to an Enlightenment E18 release."

One of the few E18 references on the Enlightenment web-site at this point is on their composite manager Wiki where they note, "For E18, the plan is to move to full composited system and maybe even drop the non-composited support. The core will be changed to make better use of this feature."

More information on today's Enlightenment releases can be found at Enlightenment.org.