Enlightenment 0.28.0 Adds NetworkManager and PipeWire Support 658 Days After 0.27
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Enlightenment 0.28.0 Adds NetworkManager and PipeWire Support 658 Days After 0.27
The window manager's first release since January 2025 needs EFL 1.29.0 and adds NetBSD support, a clipboard history and battery charge limits.
Carsten Haitzler released Enlightenment 0.28.0 on Oct. 31, 2026, adding a NetworkManager module, native PipeWire mixer support and a clipboard history. The previous release, 0.27.0, was announced on Jan. 11, 2025, 658 days earlier.
The release notes list about 68 changes. Enlightenment 0.28.0 requires EFL 1.29.0 or newer, the project's own toolkit libraries.
The table below sorts the headline entries by area. The tarball is enlightenment-0.28.0.tar.xz, and the notes name EFL 1.29.0 as the minimum toolkit version for building it. Haitzler's name appears on the release; the page does not say how many contributors worked on the 0.28 cycle.
What changed in 0.28.0
| Area | Change |
|---|---|
| Networking | New NetworkManager module for Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth and VPNs; NetworkManager and ConnMan auto-detected |
| Audio | Native PipeWire mixer support alongside PulseAudio |
| Clipboard | Integrated history module with optional persistence |
| Power | Battery charge limits; ACPI CPU power profiles; AMD GPU power settings tied to CPU levels |
| Platform | Initial NetBSD support |
Battery and AC polling moved to a worker thread. Windows gained a "Roll Up" shading transition and always-on-top and always-below actions. The Pants module was restored, and X11 keyboard repeat rate and delay became configurable.
Per-desktop and per-screen profiles were removed. The notes do not say why, which matters to anyone who keeps a different configuration on each monitor.
Building it
Build requirements are EFL, libexif and libpam, with libpam needed on Linux only. The notes recommend connman, NetworkManager, bluez5, bc, PulseAudio, PipeWire, PackageKit, udisks2, ddcutil and gdb.
The Register reported in January 2025 that 0.27 arrived with EFL 1.28. Distributions packaging 0.28.0 therefore have to move to a newer EFL as well.
Smaller items and packaging
The notes also list fixes across gadgets, the taskbar, IBar and the window switcher, timestamps in logging, and updated French, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese translations. The ddcutil recommendation covers libddcutil.so.2 through .5, so packagers have four library versions to match.
The NetworkManager module can manage saved connections, shows traffic indicators and has configurable polling. ConnMan remains supported, and the module picks between the two on its own.
The Register's 2025 piece quoted Bodhi Linux maintainer Robert "ylee" Wiley on why Bodhi forked Enlightenment DR17, a reminder that some distributions ship their own variant of the desktop.
What the notes say about Wayland
The release page gives no Wayland status. Two Wayland items appear: guarded Wayland canvas updates during startup and fixes for shutting down a nested Wayland compositor. Everything else in the networking, audio and clipboard modules is described without reference to a display server.
The Register put the project's first release in 1997, which made it about 28 years old at the time of its piece. Of 0.27's notes it said they were brief: "This has a lot of fixes, mostly with some new features."
Linux readers tracking patch levels have a different story to watch this week, and old code coming back to life is the subject of the kbemacs revival.
The download is enlightenment-0.28.0.tar.xz. The link label on the page still reads 0.27.0, though the URL points at 0.28.0.
Sources
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