Most of linux lovers worldwide often debate on which is the best desktop environment with positions being taken in favour of Gnome for its rock- hard stability, KDE for its beauty and cutting-edge technology and XFCE for its being lightweight and fast.

But…few people know there is actually one more DE that has all of the above characteristics, which is lightweight, fast, beautiful and rock-solid : it’s name is enlightenment, also called e17. This DE, despite a very little request of disk space for installation has a very user friendly interface, actually really pleasant to see, and was definitely the first desktop environment to include graphical plugins and effects such as real trasparency.

Switching themes and icons is as easy as in any other linux DE, therefore it doesen’t compromise customization from the user.

A lot of nice add-ons and plugins are available, and the integration with the rest of the desktop is almost perfect.

The docking bas has a nice effect which makes it look a little similar to mac os (icons increase their size when the mouse passes over them).

installing e17 in ubuntu (the distribution I am using most of the time now) is relatively easy: firstly you need to add the repository in the sources list (can be done easily both by interface or by console

deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu jaunty main extras

(the command to add the key from console is:)

sh -c 'echo "## Enlightenment e17

deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/ubuntu jaunty main extras” >> /etc/apt/sources.list’

then we can download the repository key and activate it with

wget -q http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key

sudo apt-key add repo.key

then we can finish by updating the sources and installing enlightenment

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install e17

remember that once you finished installing you can look for the additional plugins and themes by checking all the packages mentioning enlightenment

sudo apt-cache search enlightenment

in order to be more complete as possible I want to inform that another good repository for Englihtenment is the following one the procedure naturally is the same mentioned above:

deb http://opengeu.linuxfreedom.com/ubuntu jaunty main extras opengeu