Enso 0.3 “Rabling Rose” Release
Summer time is now officially upon us and the team hear at Enso are very happy to announce the next formal beta release of our operating system, here’s all you need to know...
Built on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, version 18.04 Enso includes all the latest security and system packages from the main Ubuntu dev branch and these packages will be supported by Ubuntu for the next 3 years
New applications released:
A new improved version of panther launcher - Launchy is an application menu that can be launched from Plank (Enso's default dock). Launchy allows you to search and launch applications with ease, search for applications directly, via the list of installed applications or by category and even save your most used applications to the starred view for simple selection in the future A feature worth noting is the ability to search the internet for the search term via Ecosia (the search engine helping to re-plant trees), saving time having to load a browser (more search engines will be added in the future)
An application centre that supports both deb and snap apps, we're very happy to announce the addition of this application in this release of Enso
A fork of elementary's brilliant AppCenter, this is a feature rich software centre that allows for ease of install, updating or removing applications. Where Gnome Software was previously used was a little clunky and slow at performing certain tasks, we felt a different centre would benefit our OS and AppCenter is a great, fairly lightweight application centre that allows you to browse and install applications with ease. The main downside being that Snap packages were not supported, and although we're not the biggest advocates of Snap packages giving our users choice and the ability of doing what they want is always our priority, so support of Snap packages is included in AppHive
Nearly every distro out there includes a welcome application these days, to varying degrees of functionality, some of them are filled with useful information, tools and guides to help users starting out with the distro. So, at Enso we felt like including one would help the user when starting out with our OS for the very first time and are unsure where to begin.
Our welcome screen is fairly simple compared to more developed dirsto's and this is something we are looking to improve in future releases of the OS but for now it's a simple guide to some useful applications and areas of the OS just to help users get started.
Datetime Applet & Global Menu
Some small but noticeable changes to the panel will be the new date time applet and global menu's, with a more detailed date and time window, which offers little functionality in its current state but we are hoping to add extr functionality to this applet in the future such as visibility of events.
The global menu is a feature that we like very much on different environments such as Mac OS and Unity (before it was cancelled) and is something we feel has always been a good feature for providing ease of use, so thanks to the good work of the developers of Vala Panel for their work on this plugin for Xfce Panel that we have included into our OS as default.
A few minor changes to our beautiful lightdm greeter, most noteworthy is the clock will be displayed at a smaller screen resolution. Where before the lowest it would appear at was a large 1600px has now been reduced down to 1000px in width. Other changes include the user avatars are a little larger and have changed position to be a little more centred vertically.
A lot of work has gone into keyboard settings for this release, we wanted to bring it into line with Xfconf as this is where most of the keyboard settings are loaded from, as Enso uses Xfce session instead of Gnome or Pantheon it made sense to bring this in line.
We had a few bugs, the main one being the default keyboard settings after installation weren't being picked up and were always set to 'GB, US' keyboard layouts after install, a majority of the shortcuts didn't work and this of course was causing a few upsets, getting the Xfconf library implemented into this application has been a fairly straight forward task and one that has improved functionality in this area and will be a great library to use in Enso going forwards as getting Gala and Xfce to communicate better with each other is a major point of this project.
A few additions to the desktop settings, one being the ability to configure Launchy, such as icon size, start on category view and display at top (useful if people want to use is as a panel plugin).
Plank configuration has also had a few features added, like being able to change the theme and add docklet items to the dock.
The Plank project has now been forked into our own version of this great and simple application, we had some ideas on how we'd like Plank to work differently from what the standard application does, for instance added menu items of applications to launch new windows and minimize all visible windows, we also felt that the selection through multiple windows of a single application was a bit off, so active windows will now cycle through on click of the application icon, rather than the former minimise / maximise all function. If the windows are minimised when an icon is clicked then the last active window will be displayed and the cycled will go through from last used.
A separator docklet has also been added to Plank's docklet library, unfortunately only one item can currently be added to the dock at a time but we are looking at improving this in the future
Our default wallpapers have been updated with some great additions, we would like to thank all the photographers for their amazing work and for releasing the images under Creative Commons Licences, you guys rock!
A list of the wallpapers and their creators can be found on our Github page
Download & Getting Involved
You can download the latest release of Enso from the link below
Want help getting started? Head over to our Docs page or join the conversation on Gitter
