This is what always comes to my mind when someone mentions Enlightenment: https://web.archive.org/web/20230424121033/https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened. Might provide some answers too.

I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.

Enlightenment has been around for decades, and it was quite a bit more popular in its early days because things like KDE/Gnome/etc weren’t the de facto DEs pretty much everyone used like they are now. I used it back when I had a linux box like 25 years ago and it was great, it was very slick and pretty, but now so much is written for KDE/Gnome that it feels like using anything else is just asking for trouble.

Others have pointed to the very slow development pace. I’ll point out something else. When I was first starting out with desktop, Linux enlightenment 16 was one of the desktop options but apart from looking very ‘different’ to KDE or Gnome, it was damn difficult to get it to look anything other than default. Other desktop managers came on in leaps and bounds but enlightenment just stayed where it was and from what I can tell still is where it was. Meantime, kde and gnome have had multiple major versions and forks. These days I use either xfce or cinnamon, depending on whether hardware acceleration is available. Fundamentally I want my desktop environment to be a launcher for my applications and a way to manage my peripherals and UI preferences. I don’t want to be looking at it or dealing with it or spending time thinking about it. I suspect that enough other people feel the same way

My bet is that this happened because they do develop both the Enlightenment desktop and the E libraries, which is a tremendous amount of work. Add to that that if they are a small team, they’re not going to go relatively fast (afaik E17 took years…). Maybe it was the reason GNOME/GTK(+) and KDE (which began with an already developed GUI library) caught up.

But as I always say in this kind of posts, both Enlightenment and E are amazing and I so wish they were more rich featured and popular and, if I were the XFCE mouse and got fed up with the bullshit of the GNOME-ization/libadwaita-zion of GTK, I’d consider porting all my shit to E - it would be awesome if those two merged into one. GTK and E are both written in C, XFCE has a robust set of apps and a seemingly bigger team behind it…

Enlightenment has been around for 28 years. This means there is enough adoption for it to keep going on.

I used it when I used arch linux on a PC with 4GB RAM and an HDD. Enlightenment loaded up in no time compared to even sway, looked pretty and had quite a few features like not terminating session if there are open apps and wallpapers per workspace! Its native apps like file manager and terminology were also extremely snappy. Using E apps felt like I had an NVME instead of HDD and I felt like I had a full desktop instead of a minimalistic WM without sacrificing speed. Switched away when I got a PC with good specs overall & a real NVME and iirc the desktop was crashing every now and then on the new PC. The default UI is very weird, you need to place most of the app icons by yourself and I think pressing Meta doesn’t invoke the app launcher? Also I cannot start E with wayland currently, I could on v0.21.

When it was first developed it was too heavyweight and too customisable. The effort needed to theme it was huge and a lot of the popular themes were poor from a UX point of view.

Still E16 was usable, and then the development of E17 started about 24 years ago. People are still on E16 you say?

I was using E16 years ago and liked it but eventually switched to Gnome (2, I think), after waiting for E17 for too long.

What made me quit was the wait. All the other DEs at the time were releasing new versions frequently but Enlightenment took forever.

Enlightenment is SO configurable that it almost doesn’t have a look, and therefore doesn’t really have "brand’ per se. Take a look at galleries and collections of enlightenment setups: they’re all massively different in look and behaviour.

I remember in my early days of Linux (late 90s) it was too much for me.

Based on what I’ve seen, for a DE to gain much traction, you need at least one well-known medium-large distro putting it as a default on some of their install media—MATE is well-represented these days because Mint backed it at a crucial stage in its development. I don’t think Enlightenment ever had that.

I suspect it just isn’t well known. I used it for a while in my early days in Linux, which was back in the late 1990’s, and i honestly haven’t heard much abiut it over the years.

I do remember being impressed at the time. I think most people stick with the defaults for whatever distro they first choose. Since i was using Slackware back then, there was not a default choice, so i searched and experimented.

it was pretty popular back then. some people still use it, tho i use fvwm

It serves a very specific purpose for very particular people. It’s meant to be as minimal as possible, and highly configurable, which means less rich interaction pieces and opinionated design decisions. Lots of developers still use it though.