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?
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 wasn’t hunting for bugs. She was doing something mundane; preparing lecture slides for a course she teaches as a graduate student. She had a couple of PDFs typeset in LaTeX, opened one of them in Atril, a document viewer, and her entire desktop froze.
It wasn’t a one-off glitch. The freeze was reproducible, which is both frustrating and, for a developer, oddly exciting. A reproducible bug is a bug you can actually chase down. So she did.
After digging through the codebase, Kamila traced the freeze back to the way E16 handled overly long file names.
When a window title was too long and needed to be truncated, the algorithm responsible for doing so had no iteration limit. So it would spin indefinitely, locking up the desktop entirely. The bug had been sitting there, dormant, since 2006, waiting probably for exactly the right set of circumstances to surface.
She patched it and the fix is available on her blog. I hope she made a pull request to the original codebase as well.
Why this story matters
On the surface, this is a niche story about an obscure window manager that most Linux users have never touched. But look a little closer and it is something more than that.
Kamila was born in 2004. The bug she fixed was already two years old by then. She grew up, went to university, became a graduate student and a teacher and the bug just sat there, in a codebase maintained by a handful of enthusiasts, waiting. It took someone who actually uses E16 as a daily driver to finally stumble onto it and care enough to fix it.
That is the true open source spirit. Not a big company, not a bounty program, not a CVE filing. Just a person, their computer, a frozen desktop, and the curiosity to figure out why.
There are people who have been maintaining this codebase for decades. There are people who still use it. And every now and then, one of those users catches something no one else did and quietly makes the software a little better before moving on with their day.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole point.
Source: The Register
