Never saw this one coming: Enlightenment has been forked. The new product is called Moksha (Sanscrit: "emancipation, freedom") and is based not on the newest version of Enlightenment, E19, but rather an older version, E17.
Behind Moksha is Jeff Hoogland and the folks at Bodhi Linux, who got frustrated with the turn that Enlightenment development has taken, and believe Moksha will be the path that takes the useful, stable release of E17 and makes it into something better. From Hoogland's blog:
Bodhi has always been a project based around the Enlightenment desktop.
The Enlightenment desktop however has changed a lot over the last few years. It went from being the "Duke Nukem Forever" of open source software without an official release in over a decade to having three new "major" versions released in the course of the last three years.
The problem with these major releases is that instead of continuing to perfect the end user facing components E17 started over the course of a decade, they were essentially internal tear downs. While optimizations are a good thing to be had, optimizations that break existing features users enjoy and use are bad. These tear downs were rushed to meet release deadlines and did not have the same quality and stability the E17 desktop had come to know.
The E18 desktop was so bad Bodhi skipped it entirely (although you can still find old packages in the 2.4.0 testing branch). When E19 released in the fall of 2014 it did make things better, but that was not difficult considering the mess E18 was.
E19 was usable enough that I gave it an honest try. I spent hours working with the upstream developers and filing bug reports. The biggest issue was that none of the Enlightenment developers were using E19 as their daily desktop. As soon as it was released they jumped on to their next rewrite - E20.
After my umpteeth bug report was met with "Works with E from Git" I was ready to call it quits. In fact for several months I did essentially quit. I was so frustrated I stepped away from the project I had devoted countless hours to over four years.
Submitter note: As an Enlightenment fan, this is interesting, but worrying. Enlightenment is a big code base, and a lot of work to take on. Hope they can make it work - E17 is a fantastic desktop!
Bodhi was a nice distro last time I tried it, but hopefully Moksha will be separate enough that others will package it up like the nice SlackE17 I currently use.