Enlightenment is classed as a "desktop shell" as it provides everything you need to operate your desktop or laptop, but it is not a full application suite. This covers functionality including launching applications, managing their windows and performing system tasks like suspending, rebooting, managing files and so on.

The Enlightenment Project is moving towards using Wayland as the base display system, while Enlightenment itself is to become a full Wayland compositor in its own right. This takes time, and there have been some bumps along the road, but the goal is that support for X11 will be eventually be discontinued.

Enlightenment is built on top of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), using the libraries written for the user interface as well as those for the Compositor itself. This means that any improvements made to EFL are included in the Enlightenment Compositor.

Enlightenment also serves the Window Manager and Compositor for Tizen, due in no small part to its efficiency and breadth of features.

See About Enlightenment for more details.