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Enso 0.4 ‘Singing Sunflower’ Release

Hey everyone! First of all we'd like to say that we very much hope that all’s well, wherever you are in the world in these crazy times!

We are very exited to announce the next iteration of Enso, this being based the on the latest Ubuntu LTS 20.04 that was released earlier this year, there's a few updates and new applications in this release so lets deleve into what they are

Pinny - note taking app

One of the main new applications to feature in this release of Enso is a note taking application called Pinny, fairly straight forward in terms of it's use, being all that you require for jotting down thoughts and snippets

The main exiting features being that is uses the gtk source view, making jotting down code snippets simple and nicely formatted, it also uses firacode font by default, which supports programming ligatures, again helping with development needs, and looking amazing!

Apphive

Apphive generally features in our releases as being an application manager it's integral to an operating system, helping users to search for / install and remove various applications on the system

This release is not different as Apphive has once again been given a bit of a face lift and some additional features

App stars

The ability to star favourite applications has been around since the last release but has somewhat sat in the background, this has now become more of a drive for the applications listed on the home screen, using their popularity to display the most starred applications to other users while also displaying how many stars each application has received

Performance

Performance was a bit of an issue of the previous release of Apphive, having some latency on initial load of the application and when searching, this has been addressed making the application far more responsive whilst performing these tasks in the background. Most of this work was completed by the elementary team for AppCenter so thanks to them for all their hard work

Dark theme

A personal favourite for the release is the addition of the Enso dark theme, all credits go to paullinuxthemer for creating this wonderful theme for us, based off of the Arc gtk theme

A wonderful visual addition to the OS for easer working in lower light

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

A huge thank you to all our contributors for their help with this release, if you would like to get involved in the next iteration then either pick up some issues on the projects Github page or join the conversation on Gitter

A media collection of images can be found here

[blogenso-os]

Enso 0.3.1 “Dancing Daisy” Release

Summer time upon us once again and the team here at Enso are very happy to announce the next minor iteration 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

Updates

Apphive

The most notable changes for this minor release are within our application malmanagement tool (a fork of the elementary project’s brilliant AppCenter)

The home page has been adapted have a cleaner look with the category selector moving to a list view on the left-hand side, a few colour changes to the view and the addition of the Games category

Starring of your favourite applications is now possible through the application view, this will allow us to determine which applications are deemed most helpful by our users and will in time be the driving factor of which applications are displayed on the home page, so start starring!

Greeter

The greeting application will now auto focus into the password input text box on load, the default avatar has been updated to be more generic and the guest user and additional users’ selection have been disabled by default to make the screen look less busy and the clock will position itself better on smaller screen sizes

Plank

The simple dock application has had some minor alterations and has merged with the main branch to bring over some of the changes that have been applied such as improved performance and HiDPI support

A new dock item for Multitasking View has also been added, to allow users to add this element back in if required

Wallpapers

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

[blogenso-os]

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:

Here's what's new in 0.3

Launchy

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)

Apphive

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

Enso Welcome

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.

Some feature updates:

What's been updated

Greeter

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.

Keyboard settings

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.

Desktop settings

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.

Plank

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

Wallpapers

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

[blogenso-os]

Road to 0.3

Development of the next release of Enso is coming along nicely, so we thought now would be a good time to update everyone on how things are going, what to expect from our next release

With the new release of the *buntu 18.04 series there are many upgrades in various projects within Enso including: Gtk 3.22, some elements of Xfce 4.13 and Mutter 3.28 to mention a few.. Along with these various projects within Enso have some changes:

Updates and Additions

AppHive

(a fork of elementary’s AppCenter) - a new software centre to replace Gnome Software, to make installing Deb and Snap packages simple and a little more lightweight than Gnome Software

Galal

a few additions have been made to our integrated WM the main one being the addition of the latest version of mutter, and updates from the Gala main branch from elementary have been rolled into this application, along with some small changes around the Multitasking View and keyboard shortcuts.

Welcome screen

a new Welcome screen will make its first appearance in Enso 0.3, giving new users a select few options to help them get going with the system

Launchy

a revamp of Panther Launcher that sits in Plank instead of having the applications menu in the top panel, with integration with Ecosia providing a ‘search the web’ option with each search.

Improved Gtk theme

Minor changes to the colours of the window control buttons, with a changed default position that is more Mac OS like

Global app menu

Global menus are available as default, integrating the xfce4-appmenu plugin into panel to display a global menu for active applications

Still in development

Galal shortcuts

adding show desktop shortcut and removing default shortcuts that don’t work in Galal

Keyboard config issue on install

an issue that on install where the keyboard shortcuts aren’t always copied across, numerous people have raised this as an issue, the config is being written to xfce4 instead of Gala so this setting is needing to be read

Keep up-to-date

Enso 0.3 is definitely getting there but there are a few more bits required before the next beta version of our system is released, you can keep up with developments via our Github page below or get involved with ideas / suggestions / development via our Gitter Lobby

Project Roadmap

Gitter Lobby

[blogenso-os]

Panther Launcher Revamp - Say Hello to Launchy...

Panther Launcher is a great tool - a fork of elementary’s application menu, we took this simple, functional menu and integrated it into Xfce panel. 

But we thought it was about time for a little change…

Say hello to Launchy, still the same application underneath as both of its predecessors, but just visually a little different and with more minimal features to make it orientated around running low on resources and keeping to the simple task of searching for and launching applications

Views

An element we decided to remove from our fork was the different views within the applications menu, we felt that having a single view that would allow you to easily find the application you were looking for was the best way forward, so we took the category view, as this is the simplest way to filter through the many applications installed on a system and added in two categories to make things easier, the ‘All’ category to see all installed apps and 'Saved’, an area for you to add your most liked applications.

In Launchy we thought we’d go back to different views, as people like different things.. so Launchy has 3 separate views, the stared grid view that displays all applications, category view to enable filtering apps via categories (pretty self explanatory) but good if you aren't entirely sure of the applications name (I know this helped me when getting started with Linux) and finally stared items are now stored in their very own view.

Panel

One main area that Launchy will be different is in it’s size and location, we have decided to move the applications menu to the bottom left of the screen, launched from Plank rather than keep it in the top left, integrated into the panel, this move was made to free up some real estate for a global app menu i.e. file, edit, tools and all that jazz.. so stay tuned for news on that!

Release

Launchy is in it’s infancy, and not yet ready for release, it is does however have it’s very own repository on Github so head over to it’s repo is you’d like to have an early peek, develop further and send us a pull request!

[blogenso-os]

Enso 0.2.1 "Peach Blossoms" Release

Here's what's included:

Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Linux Kernel 4.4.0-112

Enso Greeter 1.0.13

Panther Launcher 1.0.26

Galal 1.0.34

Built on the latest Ubuntu LTS this will include various security updates that will have been applied to the LTS release of Ubuntu over the last number of months and using Kernel version 4.4.0-112

In terms of Enso development a number of the in house applications have been further developed to fix certain issues, such as Panther launcher resizing itself on change of the screen resolution, Enso greeter now applies a nice blur effect onto the set background which was kindly taken from the Deepin project and we must say it looks awesome!

Finally Galal now includes a new windows switcher that lists the active windows in a much more easy to read manner that is more familiar to users than was previously implemented

Download

You can download the latest release of Enso from the link below

We hope you enjoy our new release and do let us know of any issues either by our 'Contact Us' form at the bottom of the Info page or via our Github page

[blogenso-os]

Merry Christmas from Enso

We'd like to wish you all very Merry Christmas from everyone here at Enso, to help you enjoy this holiday season we're rolling out a few minor bug fixes to various parts of the system. 

Panther Launcher

Our easy-to-use application launcher has received some minor changes around sizing of the window, it was a little all over the place with it's resizing when the screen size was changed (which happens a fair amount when using a virtual machine), so now it should load in a more horizontal rather than vertical manner and generally sticking to a 4x3 columns and rows setting.

Greeter

The login screen (or Greeter) has also had a bit of work done, again just minor fixes, the position of the clock and size of the avatar images have been changed to be better placed on the screen, the clock is now stuck to the bottom right rather than being in a more floating position somewhere on the right, which at times overlapped the login box, and it will also hide itself on a smaller screen now. There is a more exciting change to this as well, if you locate the greeter config file which lives in /etc/lightdm/ you will notice a 'blur' setting, if you change this setting to be 'true' then a blur affect will be applied to the background image when loaded (a word of warning for all HiDPI users, it didn't work on our test laptop...), amending the 'brightness' setting between 1 & 10 will set the blur density, so go off and enjoy some bluryness  ...

Gala - Window Switcher (work in progress)

Something to look forward to in the new year... We love Gala - the WM developed by the elementary team, but the only niggle that we didn't like all that much was the window switcher, which being something you use fairly often becomes a fairly bigger niggle... so we thought we'd look at developing a different way of flipping between windows Luckily for us such a development has already happened and details can be found here regarding a plugin that was developed to such an effect (that looks like the below). We are looking at integrating this into our WM instead of having it as a separate plugin, this change is currently still undergoing testing it ensure that all works and we are also looking at making the display a little nicer, will provide more details as we look to roll this out in the new year

[blogenso-os]

Enso 0.2 "Blossom" Release

It brings us great pleasure to announce the latest release of Enso, 0.2. While only including a few functional and cosmetic changes we felt that overall we had reached a point where the OS was more complete and a better experience than our initial release and it was about time we got on and released it. The main goals of this release was to get the different elements working in harmony with each other, Xfce and Gala are the two main components of our system and both aren't designed to work all that well together, Gala WM being more GNOME 3 based and Xfce being a little more dated in it's technologies (which makes us love it so).. So here's what's changed...   

New login - Greeter

The first thing you may notice (after installation) is that the login screen is now a little different from what it was, it is entirely different from the screen that was used before and is in fact a fork of elementary's Pantheon greeter amended to work in a more central and horizontal manner than their's currently does.   Our aim was to get something that was more pleasing on the eye than the previous login screen, we had already done some cosmetic changes to the desktop environment and each time we booted up we couldn't help feeling a little let down by the initial screen.

Cleaner desktop

Now this next one may involve a little controversy, but we hope that most people are happy with the choice. We have cleaned up the desktop so by default no icons or shortcuts can be displayed on the desktop. This is something which generally annoys a few people, but we don't feel like it's something that is needed in our environment, there is enough places that you can save you favourite items too (such as Plank or Panther) that it really isn't necessary (in our minds). Our main reason for removing this is that Gala isn't the lightest on resources and runs a background as standard and xfdesktop also consumes a fair amount of memory when running, so we felt that one had to go and we weren't all that fussed on desktop icons anyway.   However.. If this is something that you simply cannot live without then you're in luck, as we haven't entirely removed this function, we will put a more detailed explanation in our docs sometime in the near future but it basically consists of going to Session and Startup  => Application Autostart => and un-ticking the 'xfdesktop quit' item, reboot and hey presto :)

Panther - Saved Applications

A query we got a number of times after our initial release was having saved items in the Panther Launcher, this is something all longterm Xfce users are accustom to from using Whisker menu. Being longterm Xfce users ourselves it is of course something that we are also accustom to, and felt that Panther would only benefit from this additional feature. ​

So launching Panther for the first time you will see the 'Saved' menu item, which we have pre-populated for you guys with what we deem to be useful applications, you can easily add more in or remove what is currently included by right clicking on any item in the launcher. There are a few features that we'd like to improve on in the future, such as being able to right click and save when searching for an application. And if already included in the Saved list a little star icon is shown next to the application icon, and that when right clicked the menu will display 'remove from saved' instead of displaying 'add to saved' once more (although clicking this won't re-add the application).    

Additional Updates

As well as the main changes above there are a number of smaller additions to Enso. There are now different settings applications for Desktop and Keyboard settings, they are taken straight from elementary's system and converted into stand-alone applications as they both have already been well developed and will help with changes such as keyboard layout and shortcuts. The Xfce desktop having been replaced with the built in Gala one means that changing the background and dock settings are now done in a different location as well.. Both can be located in Panther under  'Other' and are simply named 'Keyboard' and 'Desktop'.

A new right click menu on the desktop has also been added to bring a more minimal feel to the pretty bloated one that Xfce desktop had, this only includes 4 menu items allowing minimizing of all applications currently clogging up your view, display the multitasking view, opening Xfce settings and opening Desktop settings for an easy background change.  

[blogenso-os]

3k downloads of Enso

We now have over 3,000 downloads of Enso OS, which is far better than we ever thought we'd get so thanks to you guys for downloading an supporting our small project.  

Here’s what’s in the pipeline for the future...  

Enso 0.2

The next release of Enso is now in the pipeline, 0.2. Which will include fixes for a few issues that were found in our first release, we also hope to bring in some design changes to make Enso look cleaner and easier to use (nothing too drastic though).. On top of these small changes we hope to bring in some additional features.. Such as including a 'Saved' or favorite menu to Panther, so users will be able to right click on an application icon and save it to their 'Saved' applications. Within the right click menu another option will allow you to add or remove (if already pinned) the application to the Plank menu. There is already support on some applications to perform selected tasks (such as opening a new tab in Firefox), but we only recently found out about this feature so thank you Panther team! We are also looking into other possible changes such as a keyboard shortcut editor and some more information on what shortcuts there are currently, as well as trying to make Gala WM run a little lighter and not consume as much memory as it currently is.

Ecosia

In addition to these changes we are also going to include a great project which we recently stumbled across, it is called Ecosia, which is a search engine that donates 80% on it's profits to different conservation projects around the world, helping to plant trees as you search the web. Now of course we're not going to force you to use this search engine, just include it as either the initial homepage of Firefox or some information about the project in the next release We're not quite sure yet but we exited by this project and hope to help out in anyway we can.  ​

Get involved  

If you have an thought on this or ideas of what could improve Enso then we'd love to hear it, let us know either through our contact us section at the bottom of the Info page or raise a ticket through our Github project page ​

[blogenso-os]

Enso 0.1 "Seedling" Release

The Enso team is very happy to announce the first beta release of Enso OS, version 0.1 Seedling! Enso aims to be a clean and simple OS that is easy to use and incorporates some of our favourite projects from around the Linux world. Built on top of Xubuntu for a solid and reliable base, we have re-themed XFCE to our own liking, added some nice features to the environment and ship it with some extra application in which we hope you'll enjoy...

Environment Xubuntu is just great, we chose this as a base because in our opinion it is one of the most reliable and sold systems out there, we have been using it for a number of years and have encountered very few issues. We took all of the best features from the existing system and molded it to work with what we required. Gala (window manager) by the elementary team has been incorporated into the shell of XFCE to provide some nice additional features to our environment. Such as animations on various tasks like launching, minimizing and closing application, application selection and repositioning of application (right, left, maximized or normal), workspace selection and multitasking view. Panther Launcher is also included in our environment, to help with it's ease of searching for and launching of applications. Plank is the simplest and nicest looking application dock there is (in our opinion) it does what it needs too and does it without issue. Download To download Enso and give it all a try head over to our documentation page to find out where you can download it from. From there you can also get more information and tutorials on Enso, to help you get going with installing and first use of our system. Thank you & Enjoy Thank you for choosing Enso, we do hope you enjoy our OS and let us know of any little teething problems you encounter on our Github page.