So, it was brought up in another thread that maybe I could make a post about Enlightenment (a.k.a. E) and start a conversation about it in general, and also the possibility of adding E to the installer for EndeavourOS.
As Endeavour values the community, I believe what better way to grow the wonderful community than to possibly offer another option for using Endeavour.
The main distros that I’m aware of that offer Enlightenment as an ISO are Void and Bodhi (Bodhi actually uses a fork of E knowns as Moksha). I believe you can also select Enlightenment on
OpenSUSE or Manjaro if doing a network or customized install.
Why would you want to use E?
- lightweight in RAM and power consumption
- possibly more customizable than Plasma
- just a crazy amount of features with many unique to E
- very stable
- offers Wayland
- fun to experiment with
Introduction and Background:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enlightenment
If installing from the repos:
Install: efl, enlightenment, terminology (optional), connman (optional but probably needed)
efl dependencies (copied from “pacman -Qi” on my system):
Depends On : avahi bullet curl fontconfig fribidi
gst-plugins-base-libs luajit libexif libgl libinput
libpulse libspectre libraw librsvg libwebp libxcomposite
libxcursor libxinerama libxkbcommon libxp libxrandr
libxss libunwind mesa openjpeg2 poppler shared-mime-info
mailcap ttf-font scim libibus glib2 wayland
wayland-protocols libxkbcommon-x11 pulseaudio
Optional Deps : geoclue: For elocation
gst-plugins-base: Video and thumbnail codecs
gst-plugins-good: Video and thumbnail codecs [installed]
gst-plugins-bad: Video and thumbnail codecs [installed]
gst-plugins-ugly: Video and thumbnail codecs [installed]
gst-libav: Video and thumbnails with ffmpeg/libav [installed]
libreoffice: Office document thumbnails
python2: Compare Eina benchmarks
enlightenment dependencies (copied from "pacman -Qi on my system):
Depends On : efl xcb-util-keysyms hicolor-icon-theme pixman mesa
desktop-file-utils udisks2 ttf-font bluez-libs pam
Optional Deps : connman: network module [installed]
acpid: power events on laptop lid close [installed]
geoip-database: geolocation module [installed]
xorg-server-xwayland: xwayland support [installed]
packagekit: needed for packagekit module [installed]
This will give you a good base system to use as a DE.
Notes:
- Terminology is the terminal based on efl
- connman is the replacement for the more common NetworkManager
- enlightenment package has its own file manager “enlightenment_filemanager” built in
- Enlightenment will run a setup that upon first launch that will allow you to set scaling, window focus, and many other features.
Connman setup:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ConnMan
Notes:
- systemctl enable connman.service, disable NetworkManager.service if you want to only use connman
- to show a wifi indicator in the shelf (i.e. dock): left click with mouse on desktop then click settings>modules then click at the top where it says “System” click on “Connection Manager” and select “load.” If it doesn’t show, right click on the shelf then select shelf>contents and make sure “Connection Manager” is added.
Touchpad setup
I use libinput: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/libinput
There isn’t a built in way to configure your touchpad, so use libinput (my preferred) or synaptics. For example, I put the following file titled 90.touchpad.conf in my
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d folder to configure libinput:
# For xorg-x11-drv-libinput
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "tap-by-default"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchDriver "libinput"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
Option "AccelSpeed" "0.3"
EndSection
I hope someone might find some of this helpful. Of course you can glean most of this from the Arch wiki, but I’m hoping this helps anyone interested in trying E right away. I will come back to this post to add a few things and format as needed.
