21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug!
21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug!
https://itsfoss.com/news/kamila-enlightenment-e16-bug/
Publish Date: 2026-04-20 05:25:00
Source Domain: itsfoss.com
Okay, not a Linux bug in the kernel, but one that has existed in the Enlightenment window manager E16 since 2006, when Kamila Szewczyk was barely a year old.
Kamila, now a 21-year-old graduate student at Saarland University in Germany, daily drives a window manager that predates most of her classmates. That alone is a fun fact.
But what makes it remarkable is that she didn’t just use it, she dug into its decades-old codebase, found a bug that had been hiding there since 2006, and fixed it.
What is Enlightenment E16, again?
Kamila’s Enlightenment E16 desktop
For the uninitiated, Enlightenment is a window manager for Linux, the software responsible for drawing and managing the windows on your screen. It first appeared in 1997, making it older than a significant portion of today’s Linux user base. E16, the version Kamila uses, arrived in 1999 and quickly gained a reputation for being highly customizable and visually impressive, at a time when most Linux desktops were far more utilitarian.
Enlightenment is not as well known as KDE or GNOME, and even LXDE has broader name recognition today. But it has a small, dedicated following and can be found in niche distributions like Pentoo or Bodhi Linux. Bodhi actually uses Moksha, a fork of Enlightenment, as its default desktop.
Over time, the Enlightenment team began a complete rewrite of the project using a new modular framework called EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries). That rewrite took over a decade and eventually became E17, released in December 2012. E17 evolved from a simple window manager into a full desktop shell with modern compositing and improved hardware support.
But not everyone followed. A portion of the community stuck with E16, continuing to maintain and develop it independently. It reached the 1.0 milestone and, as of 2024, the latest release is version 1.0.30. It is very much alive, just quietly so.
Kamila is part of that quiet community.
The accidental bug discovery
She…
