Enlightenment 0.28.0 shipped on October 31, 2026, bundled with its sibling EFL 1.29.0 and packing nearly two years of development into a single release. The headline feature is a native NetworkManager module that finally brings integrated Wi-Fi, Ethernet, VPN, and Bluetooth networking to the niche Linux desktop. Alongside networking, the update adds native PipeWire audio mixing, a clipboard-history module, and initial NetBSD support, while much of the remaining changelog focuses on memory-safety and stability work. What's often overlooked is that the underlying EFL libraries powering this release also run inside millions of Samsung smart TVs, watches, and refrigerators.

Enlightenment 0.28.0 ships with NetworkManager support after a near-two-year silence

The niche Linux desktop closes its biggest long-standing gap. The same libraries running in millions of Samsung smart TVs and watches come along for the ride.

Enlightenment just walked out of a long nap. Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler, the project's founder and lead developer, announced 0.28.0 on October 31, and it's the release that matters most in a while. It bundles nearly two years worth of changes into a single tarball, and the headline addition is arguably the one people have waited longest for: a native NetworkManager module handling first-class Wi-Fi, Ethernet, VPN, and Bluetooth networking.

That final piece might sound mundane to read about. It isn't, if you've used any mainstream Linux desktop recently. GNOME and KDE have offered polished on-screen Wi-Fi controls for years now. Enlightenment users always worked around the gap, usually by opening a terminal or bolting on a separate tool. Now it's built in.

The two-year gap is what makes this release notable, though. 0.27 shipped in January 2025, following 0.26 in December 2023. Historically the project ran on a roughly annual cadence, so this version sits nearly a full cycle behind schedule. Its small, volunteer-driven pace explains the slip.

What's actually new

Beyond networking, the additions you'd notice day to day are the interesting ones. There's a native PipeWire audio mixer now, letting you pick outputs and cycle between sinks right inside the desktop, with PulseAudio support kept around for the meantime. A clipboard-history module tracks things you've copied before, complete with themed popups and individually removable entries. It all wraps up with initial NetBSD support, pushing E past Linux and its existing FreeBSD footing into the broader BSD family.

Oh, and the Pants module is back. It's a long-running inside joke within the project, a whimsical module for draping skirts, kilts, and lederhosen across your interface, and it's returned complete with translations. The project clearly still keeps a sense of humor.

Your fridge may already be running this code

Here's the part that usually gets skipped by the announcement. Enlightenment is a niche desktop, a beloved hobbyist's toy by most accounts. Its underlying libraries, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, quietly power a genuinely large slice of the world's consumer electronics. Samsung adopted EFL as the core toolkit for its Tizen platform, and today it runs inside everything from Galaxy Watches and smart TVs to Family Hub refrigerators and set-top boxes.

The reason is simple. EFL was built for tiny footprints, taking as little as 8MB including all widgets, and reportedly running a full session on about 48MB of RAM with no GPU. Back in the day that felt like an expensive gamble. It turned out to be the right bet. So improvements like the new OpenGL vector renderer and AVX2 performance work in the EFL 1.29.0 sibling release don't just help desktop enthusiasts. They flow into the software cooking away in your living room.

EFL 1.29.0 ships alongside

As usual, Enlightenment's release is tightly coupled to its foundation libraries, and EFL 1.29.0 dropped the same day. It's a meaty update, the first main EFL release since 1.28.0, and it carries the modernization work straight into the desktop. Highlights include a new span-based OpenGL vector renderer, AVX2 detection with accelerated blending, a PipeWire audio backend, and real progress on macOS support, including native menus, Dock icons, and Retina backing-scale access. It also gains the initial NetBSD footing seen in 0.28.0 itself.

The codebase is enormous to keep coherent. EFL is a modular set of C libraries, Evas for rendering, Edje for theming, Elementary for widgets, Ecore for threading and events, Eina for data structures, all working across X11, Wayland, DRM, and now macOS. That's not a trivial maintenance burden.

A mature project maintaining over a million lines

A large chunk of the changelog isn't flashy at all. It's memory-safety work: use-after-free and double-free fixes, reference-counting corrections, object-leak patches. The team restored Valgrind startup support, added timestamped logging, and tightened signal diagnostics. That reads like the sound of an adult project maintaining a roughly 1.5-million-line C codebase rather than chasing novelty. There's also meaningful privilege-reduction here, process priority adjustments can now be made without requiring CAP_SYS_NICE on Enlightenment itself.

If you're only now discovering Enlightenment, its reputation is worth knowing up front. It draws consistent praise for extreme customizability and low resource use, and consistent criticism for a steep learning curve driven by unconventional right-click menus. The community's been around since 1997, including the famously slow stretch where E17 took more than a decade to stabilize, finally shipping in December 2012. The project has matured considerably since then.

It's arguably one of the most flexible desktops available on Linux today, though it demands effort to set up. The new features close real gaps, with networking and clipboard history ranking highest, but the learning curve doesn't shrink just because the software improved. If you want a keyboard-driven, deeply tweakable environment and don't mind a bit of configuration, this remains among the best. If you prefer something that just works on day one, you'll likely still drift toward GNOME.

Where to get it

Both releases are live right now. Enlightenment 0.28.0 ships as enlightenment-0.28.0.tar.xz, and it requires EFL v1.29.0 or newer, so grab both. EFL 1.29.0 is available as efl-1.29.0.tar.xz. The desktop continues to support both X11 and Wayland, though the stated long-term goal is to become a standalone Wayland compositor and eventually drop X11 entirely.

Head there if you want to dig into the release announcement.