Bodhi to Fork Enlightenment to Produce "Moksha"

by Ostatic Staff - Apr. 28, 2015

Bodhi founder and lead developer Jeff Hoogland today blogged that Enlightenment just isn't what it was back in the E17 days. So much so that Hoogland almost quit the distro business altogether. However, after his return, Hoogland decided the best way to handle Enlightenment was to fork it.

Jeff Hoogland today said that the Enlightenment desktop has changed a lot over the years. Its last couple of releases seemed to break things that users liked and introduced other bugs. He tried to work with the upstream project, but most of the developers had already moved to E20 and didn't worry too much about fixing bugs in E19, according to Hoogland. In discussions with the community, Hoogland found he wasn't the only one who felt E19 brought many regressions. He wondered what to do.

Then it hit him, "fork it."

Hoogland today said that his new desktop would be forked from Enlightenment 17 and called Moksha (pronounced "mohk-shuh"). He said:

We will start by integrating all of the Bodhi changes we have simply been patching into the source code over the years and fixing the few issues the desktop has. Once this is done we will begin back porting a few of the more useful features E18 and E19 introduced to the Enlightenment desktop and finally, we will introduce a few new things we think will improve the end user experience.

Since version 3, announced in February, uses E19 the Bodhi team hopes to release 3.1.0 in August which will use the new E17 Moksha fork. Users who wish to use E19 will still be able to install it from Bodhi repositories. So for now, Hoogland is again putting out the call for developers who would like to help fork E17.