Also brings improvements to new Gadget infrastructure

Nov 6, 2017 17:00 GMT  ·  By

After more than a year in development, the Enlightenment 0.22.0 desktop environment and window manager is here, and the final release is available to download.

As expected for a new stable series, Enlightenment 0.22 is a major release bringing great improvements, new features, and countless bug fixes. And we'll start with the support for the next-generation Wayland display server, which was greatly improved in this release, adding support for relative pointer motion protocols, pointer constraints, and xdg-shell v6.

"The majority of development for this cycle has gone towards improving Wayland support," said Mike Blumenkrantz in the release notes. "This covers, but is not limited to: adding support for xdg-shell v6, pointer constraints, and relative pointer motion protocols. These additions improve XWayland support and increase stability across all components running under Wayland."

On top of those great Wayland improvements, Enlightenment 0.22.0 further improves the new Gadget infrastructure to be more robust, as well as to provide a more intuitive and simpler EFL-based API for application developers who want to integrate support into their apps. At the moment, all available gadgets and their functionality were ported to the new infrastructure.

Enlightenment now uses the Meson build system

With this release, Enlightenment now uses the Meson build system by default, which the developers confirm to be significantly faster than autotools. Enlightenment 0.22.0 also implements a graphical user interface for the ASKPASS feature for Sudo and SSH (Secure Shell). This will pop up a dialog whenever a password is needed for said services.

Lastly, Enlightenment 0.22.0 improves the tiling window policy by addressing numerous issues and adding some new features, such as a more appealing window dragging user interface, and introduces per-window volume controls for the PulseAudio sound system, which was binded into the graphical user interface (see the screenshot below to see it in action).

Enlightenment 0.22.0 is available for download right now on our website, but it's also coming soon to the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. We recommend updating to this version as soon as possible. The development cycle of the next major Enlightenment release starts now, and the development team promised to further improve the desktop experience.

Per-window PulseAudio volume controls
Per-window PulseAudio volume controls

Enlightenment 0.22.0 (2 Images)

Enlightenment 0.22.0 released
Per-window PulseAudio volume controls
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