Enlightment is a desktop environment that has been around for a very long time, and unlike other light wieght desktops such as Fluxbox, OpenBox and FVWM, Enlightment has mysteriously escaped being available in the official Fedora repos. That may change as of Fedora 20.
News of this development, as reported by Phoronix just hours ago, comes via the Fedora Project Wiki, where the following was mentioned in regard to Enlightment E17:
Enlightenment 0.17 a new stable release has been released after 12 years or so of development. As many desktops are being landed on Fedora, Integrating Enlightenment in Fedora can not only enlarge the number of available desktops in Fedora, but also improve user experiences and give users another choice of Desktop Environment.
Furthermore, the Wiki entry goes on to detail the benefits of having Enlightenment E17 available–officially–in the Fedora repos:
Of course users can benefit from this new DE in Fedora.
In the past Fedora users can only use yum to install GNOME/KDE/LXDE/XFCE, after Fedora 18 released, MATE/Cinnamon are available for yum, too. Although users can compile DE by themselves, it’s really painful and hard to maintain. Think about every time after reinstall the OS :). It would be more convenient to provide RPMs to users, so install/update/uninstall will be very easy.
Moreover, Enlightenment is a famous desktop environment with a long history, thus there must be many fans/users of it. We think bringing it into Fedora can also attract more users.
Michael Larabel of Phoronix goes on to mention his thoughts, offering that “Enlightenment has been around for a long time” and “can run on Wayland“; to which we both agree that it is “surprising that Enlightenment still isn’t packaged and available inside Fedora”.
Enlightment E17 has been in development for some 12 years, and was officially released at the end of last year, despite being used by many, pre-release, for over a decade.