Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

by diggernet • 8 years ago

561 421 8 years ago

sanimal• 8 years ago

I don't like the "Pay What You Want" system they have to download the OS. It feels misleading that you have to click on custom then enter 0 to download for free.

I totally understand how important donations are to keep a project going but this one rubs me off the wrong way. I hope I'm not the only one.

parf02• 8 years ago

I think it's totally fair they do this to be very honest.

xupybd• 8 years ago

I don’t mind it. It’s a reminder that you’re getting something for free and that you could donate.

You have to enter 0 as oppposed to by default paying nothing.

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

This is a relatively recent change. I remember that they used to be much clearer about this back in Loki.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

They've had this since at least 2015, so not really all that recent.

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

You're definitely not the only one. They have been called out before for this exact stunt:

https://liliputing.com/2015/02/elementary-os-devs-say-youre-...

Along with the "you're cheating if you don't give us money" (paraphrasing) quip. There are better distros out there.

treeform• 8 years ago

That is like the first thing I saw too. I was not fooled. But maybe this system works better then a free + donate button. Only data can tell... Maybe people are donating more with this system?

all2• 8 years ago

I didn't see anything remotely like A/B/C testing. They might benefit from something like that.

ademup• 8 years ago

I love it. I feel that having the downloader physically typing the number zero ensures that the downloader understands that there is 'A' number that belongs there. It respects the downloader (no ads or pushy verbiage) while sending this message of 'yeah, it is free to use, and it costs money/time/resources to create, so your financial contribution would be appreciated.

dymk3• 8 years ago

It’s just forcing you to confront the fact that you’re using software that others put a lot of effort into, for free. A simple fix to quell the bad feelings would be donate a few bucks. Win/win.

rijoja2• 8 years ago

Nah .. everybody thinks that they will give contributions and are really charitable in their heads. When it comes down to reality however you never really donate. When it's pushed into your face like this there's an actual call to action to do it. If you want it for free you still get it.

Remember this is for consumer oriented projects, they can't expect to get B2B support deals for keeping vital servers up and running. So why not. Maybe a slider would've done it better, because then the 0 value is made available in a different way. Like the humble bundle used to. But that's just nitpicking. And sliders with different platforms and whatever might get messy.

dlivingston• 8 years ago

This is a pretty common practice in the arts - Louis CK and Radiohead both used this to great effect.

Indeed, my recollection is that Radiohead made more money on their album In Rainbows doing 'pay as much as you want' than their label paid them on previous records.

y4mi• 8 years ago

I'll be honest.. I tried elementary os when they first released it but never got it's charm.

It always felt like an inferior version of macOS... Which I don't like.

I personally prefer to develop on a Linux install... But elementary OS is not what I'd use if Linux is an option

benologist• 8 years ago

It does feel like an inferior macOS, but macOS and increasingly proprietary hardware feel like an inferior alternative to open source and open computing too.

wlesieutre• 8 years ago

Inferior macOS is how most of my experiences with Linux distros have felt. Maybe the desktop environments just aren’t my thing, the inconsistent UIs feel sloppy, and I always ending up needing to drop down to a command line to fix something or other is was annoying.

Elementary doesn’t fix needing to drop to a command line, and the UIs are only unusually consistent and well thought when you stick with the built in software. But the overall experience of it feels like someone actually thought about it more than the alternatives I’ve tried.

automathematics• 8 years ago

Check out Solus OS

type02• 8 years ago

MacOS is an inferior version of BSD!

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Jokes aside, I've always wondered why people don't try to get more user adoption for BSD.

timbit422• 8 years ago

elementary OS is Linux.

chaostheory2• 8 years ago

imo It's a Chrome OS alternative meant to be used by people who aren't technical.

BonesJustice5• 8 years ago

I was looking at screenshots of the first couple releases yesterday. I’m not surprised if you were unimpressed. I would have been too.

The latest release looks worlds better. If it’s been a couple years since you checked it out, try taking the Juno live ISO for a spin.

matchbok• 8 years ago

70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot.

grawprog• 8 years ago

Seems like people agree with you. From what I can tell, the 117 apps on their 'store' seem to all be made by them or contributors to the project.

I may be wrong about this, but at a quick glance it looked like stuff that would be mostly included in other desktop environments.

This is just my impression from skimming through it.

nkkollaw3• 8 years ago

70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot. reply

I wouldn't compare elementary OS's fee to that of Apple and Google.

Apple and Google take that 30% and keep it as profit, while elementary put it back (some percentage of it, I assume) into the project in the form of bounties a BountySource to fix bugs and improve the project. The more the project improves, the more users it will have, the more your app will sell, etc. etc.

Also, your bitter downplaying of the project by calling it an "experiment" vs. Apple and Google and the whole negative tone of your comment is pretty annoying. You're the one comparing the project to the biggest tech companies in the world, not them. Weird.

monochromatic• 8 years ago

Oh come on. Google and Apple also reinvest money into improving their offerings.

willio58• 8 years ago

I have no problem with an operating system that is trying to get adoption attempting to monetize. I say go for it. We’ve seen the adoption rates in the public for operating systems that take the completely free route.. near zero.

Alterlife• 8 years ago

This comment troubled me so I did some reading.

1. You can run Linux applications on elementary. There's nothing forcing anyone to use the store.

2. The split is actually higher than you said for cheaper app apps because the minimum cut for elementary is $0.50.

3. There is a review process which I assume involves human effort.

4. Significantly, there is no enrolment fee and no subscription cost. So you could consider this a referral / hosting fee for elementary.

This seems reasonable actually. Projects need money to run.

LeoPanthera2• 8 years ago

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own.

The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system.

Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far the best "out of the box" experience of any Linux distro I've seen.

jniedrauer2• 8 years ago

Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge.

Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. Additionally, Fedora tends to adopt new technology very early. Gnome has defaulted to Wayland for over a year, and the experience was badly broken at first. These types of things require experience to work through.

I don't personally use gnome, so none of this bothers me. But the defaults aren't what I would call "sane" for a new user.

LeoPanthera2• 8 years ago

Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS.

I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.

kitsunesoba3• 8 years ago

In the past I’ve had serious issues with drivers in Fedora — once in the past on a cheap laptop where getting sound working 100% was near impossible and I accidentally bricked the system installing RPMs in the process.

More recently I had a Fedora update eat my Broadcom wifi drivers which isn’t fun to fix when you don’t have an easy way to hardwire a connection and your cell connection is too weak to tether reliably.

ryanmarsh2• 8 years ago

Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).

tapoxi2• 8 years ago

I absolutely love Fedora, and I think they've even managed to make great progress on sane SELinux defaults (I haven't seen an audit2allow prompt in Fedora 29!) but I think "Workstation" is a great term. It's a wonderful experience for developers and I think it can eventually supplant the Mac as the ideal dev workstation.

But for friends/family I'll always recommend ChromeOS. A little less so these days because of the weird Android integration, but the laptops are incredibly cheap and the system is almost impossible to break. I don't need to spend Thanksgiving fixing my Mom's Chromebook, I know its already patched.

Investogician2• 8 years ago

For the "I'm scared of computers" crowd, isn't it still a bit hands-on to get proprietary codecs so you won't run into to problems watching things like YouTube?

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 8 years ago

For that crowd one wonders why anyone is recommending any Linux distro instead of a tablet or a Chromebox or something.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

Does not happen anymore if you go for a distro like Mint.

coned885• 8 years ago

Ubuntu even has an option to install these at install time

bubblethink5• 8 years ago

youtube specifically, no, because youtube will do vp9 fine. Other sites though, which use h264 will be a bit problematic. Still, you can install chrome for that crowd, and they'll be fine too. Alternatively, you can enable rpmfusion or other third party repos, which has become a bit easier (almost too easy unfortunately) in recent fedora releases. I'm personally not a big fan of this direction though because it blurs the lines between official good quality software, semi-official software that is mostly fine except for patent trolls, proprietary drivers, and random proprietary software delivered through flatpak/snap etc. Currently, all of these are almost enabled by default, or are just one click away.

floatboth5• 8 years ago

YouTube is mostly VP9 (and now slowly getting into AV1). Firefox actually automatically downloads OpenH264 for all the other online video.

MP3 patents have expired, so distros are shipping MP3 codecs out of the box now.

baybal2• 8 years ago

In our company in China, we had few admin staff who first touched a desktop PC on their workplace. Ubuntu Mate worked flawlessly for them.

Few others in marketing and business development who were protesting the lack of usual Windows, got along well after being pressured to actually try it before complaining

We have nearly windows free work environment. Ironically, the only workers who have to use Windows are engineers. There is simply no alternative for Solidworks, Vivado, Cadence, FEM/physics modelling and gazillion of Windows only SDKs for microcontrollers

michaelmrose9• 8 years ago

This is quite frankly a sub optimal recommendation. Fedora adopts crap that quite frankly doesn't work at time of adoption and only offers support for 6 months.

It also used to be true that updates between version x and x+1 were a crap shoot. Regular users don't want to reinstall twice a year even if its easy to do so. They also want to use stuff after others have found the showstopper bugs not help find them.

I used fedora from version 1 -> 14. Its great that stuff like fedorasolved.org exist but they needed to because it was always freaking broken for the first month of its sixth month cycle.

BenjiWiebe5• 8 years ago

I started in the low teens of Fedora. It was a lot worse then. The issues you mention are almost non-existent now.

kitsunesoba3• 8 years ago

The project is interesting and I have to give it props for being one of the few Linux distros that’s put the necessary level of thought into UI/UX and made consistency a priority.

That said, I question some of their technical choices, most namely the choice of Vala as the project’s official language. Not that Vala is bad, but it’s incredibly niche at best and I think it severely limits contributions. Not many are going to want to learn a new language that’s scarcely used elsewhere in order to be able to work on any kind of project.

coleifer2• 8 years ago

Its not too different from c#, and it's very popular for writing gtk applications.

kitsunesoba3• 8 years ago

Even so, it’s going to scare off a lot of potential contributors long before they investigate the language deeply simply by having a name they don’t recognize. It effectively limits the contributor pool to those who’ve previously written GTK apps, which is relatively tiny compared to the number of devs coming from more mainstream backgrounds.

weberc24• 8 years ago

I briefly flirted with contributing to the project, but the code was a horrendous mess and the build system was worse (CMake mess; most of the dependencies were implicit; etc). Vala aims to be intuitive for C# developers, which is a nice goal but everything is built on the trashfire that is GObject and the Vala abstraction leaks like a seive. Hopefully much of that was fixed with time, but I doubt GObject is any better these days.

ryanmarsh2• 8 years ago

Thanks I was staring at the code examples trying to figure out which language it was. Some of the examples looked like C# but then some I could have swore were C++. Took me a minute.

Teknoman1172• 8 years ago

What exactly do you mean by implicit dependencies with CMake? Do you mean that they just linking libraries without searching for them via find_package or find_library?

hawski• 8 years ago

Learning Vala is still far better than GObject-C. Rust GTK bindings are probably not yet there. So what's left? Python and JavaScript. If you care about native performance the way I believe they are these will also not cut it.

Vala seems then a logical choice, especially at the time they were deciding. The question I have is: will Vala be supported further by Gnome in foreseeable future? I heard some time ago that it's not so sure. I would be pleased to hear otherwise.

rijoja2• 8 years ago

Sure got that one right. GObject-C is an impressively good implementation put next to WinAPI but way behind to anything vaguely modern.

computerex• 8 years ago

Vala is more or less dead.

scythe2• 8 years ago

https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/02/19/on-problems-wi...

There are currently 179 unreviewed patches in Vala’s request queue. The oldest patch there is 2,556 days old, so we know that it’s been seven years since anyone has cared for the outstanding patches. Any of those discouraged contributors might have eventually turned into Vala maintainers if only their patches were reviewed. Of course, most would not have, but if only one or two of the people who submitted patches was an active Vala maintainer today, the project would be in a significantly better state.

floatboth5• 8 years ago

Rust GTK bindings are probably not yet there

They're good enough for https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Fractal :)

what's left? Python and JavaScript

And D, and C++. gtkmm (C++) is really underrated imo

will also not cut it

SpiderMonkey (gjs) is a fast JIT. Of course you'll have more RAM usage than with a compiled language, but performance should be good.

(And don't forget that many GUI applications spend way more time in the GUI library's code than in the application code.)

syn0byte• 8 years ago

I think its part of that UX consistency you were praising. Vala's got 'nice' coupling with Gnome in the same way C# has 'nice' coupling with the Windows UI.

valac also compiles to C so no weird ABI stuff. No external runtimes or VMs required. I hate to say it but Gnome did something pretty neat with Vala.

mepian• 8 years ago

This kind of attitude towards less popular programming languages is very damaging to the field of software engineering. Domain-specific languages are our best tool to combat the excessive complexity of software. The difficulty of learning a new programming language is overblown.

ionforce• 8 years ago

The difficulty of learning a new programming language is overblown.

This is a value judgement, ripe for disagreement.

Why do you think learning a new programming language is not difficult, as others perceive?

ryandrake• 8 years ago

OP argued that the choice to go with a niche language limits contributions, which is almost certainly true, even if it does combat complexity. You can both be right.

zapzupnz4• 8 years ago

When people say they resent having to learn another language, I wonder if it's really the language they don't want to learn or another set of libraries and frameworks. I mean, that's fair enough, the wheel only wants reinventing so many times.

Windows has Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP; macOS has Cocoa; and Linux has … well, a lot of things, each with their own quirks, and not all of them with bindings into every language a developer might want to use.

vortico• 8 years ago

The difficulty of learning a new programming language is overblown.

I'm not sure that's the primary reason for people to disagree. A larger reason is that a smaller language has a smaller ecosystem, and solutions in a common language need to be completely rewritten to the new language.

ken• 8 years ago

I have no problem with the technical underpinnings. Or rather, I think (almost) every programming language today is kind of lousy, and the choice of Vala doesn't scare me off any more than anything else would have. No platform in the history of computing has made a great choice for its primary language, so I can't hold that against them.

When a platform gets the user experience right, developers will figure it out. Developers complain endlessly about JavaScript, but they want to target the web, so they made it work. Or Objective-C, and the Mac. Or C++, and Windows. We like complaining, but a non-ideal programming language really isn't a blocker.

The issue I have is that I don't see a great user experience here. This new brand of "consistency" just looks confusing to me. Every possible UI control -- from window title bars to tabs to buttons to lists to labels to text fields -- is a plain gray rectangle, with the same color and border. Am I supposed to figure out everything from context? I don't have much confidence that I'll be able to learn a new app, much less write one that other people will be able to figure out.

The metaphors, where I can find them, make little sense. I don't know why I'd want to "flick through" a grid, to select from a list. How is this better than scrolling through a list? They seem to be blindly copying parts of Apple's systems, without understanding why or when Apple made those design decisions. There's so many obvious rip-offs of macOS here, it's sometimes hard to tell if it's meant to be a parody.

And for some crazy reason I just can't get over the lone word "Applications" sitting in the corner of the screen -- the only word anywhere. It looks like a mistake. At best, it's clumsy. My steering wheel doesn't need "Steering" printed on it.

SyneRyder2• 8 years ago

Not many are going to want to learn a new language that’s scarcely used elsewhere in order to be able to work on any kind of project.

As someone trying to make some (proprietary) software compatible with elementaryOS, Vala looks really fun to work with... but the cross-platform story for Vala isn't clear. 98% of any sales are going to come from the Windows & Mac versions, so I have to prioritize what will work best on those platforms.

If I could make significant sales just from an elementaryOS version on its own, that'd be a different story. But elementaryOS already discourages sales by making their App Store "pay what you want" & excluding proprietary software. That's fine, and I understand their reasons! But as an elementaryOS user, it'd be nice to be able to install Sublime Text directly from the elementaryOS App Store, even though it's proprietary software, just like I can from Snapcraft.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

I don't get the issue. They managed to make something good out of it, it felt like a great tool rather than a niche thing.

SonnyWortzik• 8 years ago

I used El.OS for 3 straight years and had to drop it for business reasons. The OS is excellent. Highly recommend it if you are not bound by your business needs.

tapoxi2• 8 years ago

What advantages does Elementary have over (its upstream) Ubuntu? It just looks like a different GTK/GNOME Shell theme to me.

a9entroy• 8 years ago

Advantages: * It looks very pretty (arguably). The window theme is aesthetically very good looking. Some might prefer Gnome's look. * It is "fast". I found it to be faster than Ubuntu in terms of normal actions like opening apps, power off, power on etc. * Hassle free for the most part. If you don't do anything crazy, it works smoothly and is very low maintenance.

Disadvantages: * Tons of bugs. A lot of bugs have not been fixed since a long time. So, if you find a bug, be prepared to fix it yourself. * eOS devs also make their own Code editor, Mail app, music app, videos app, photos app, calendar app. Some might say that this is a waste of time. * No minimize button. And this is a little frustrating. The devs want you to use the workflow they recommend to the point that they went through the effort to hide the key and make it so that you can't enable it.

veddox• 8 years ago

Well, for some people that is a pretty big advantage. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 now, running Unity. Despite all its bad press I love Unity - it perfectly fits my workflow and just gets out of your way. (Not like Gnome Shell, where a third of your screen real estate is gone just with various menubars, each of which you could park a truck on.)

Gnome Shell on 18.04 pretty much killed Ubuntu for me. Next time I set up my computer, I'm going back to Elementary. (I used it some years ago, but it was still very buggy. I'm hoping they've fixed some of those since.)

smhg• 8 years ago

Unity still works perfectly fine on 18.04 for me. There is still some maintenance going on, so it can be an ok choice for the near future.

saganus2• 8 years ago

What kind of apps does Elementary OS support?

Can I install .deb packages or other Linux-compatible ones?

Otherwise it's going to be hard to adopt an OS if there are not enough of the apps I use, no?

kevingrahl3• 8 years ago

I’ve been using elementary OS for the past two years or so; you can use everything that runs on Ubuntu which of course includes .deb packages.

jammygit5• 8 years ago

Does it support snaps as easily as Ubuntu does?

saganus2• 8 years ago

That's great!

For some reason I thought it was an incompatible new platform.

nkkollaw3• 8 years ago

elementary is not for me because it limits configuration a little bit too much to my taste, but it's a wonderful project.

One of the cons of Linux--which is the OS I use exclusively--is that most apps are made by programmers, and programmers often don't care and don't have design skills. elementary OS looks absolutely stunning, and it's perfect if you stick to curated apps and you just want something that works.

Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps. On this aspect, I really don't understand the critics: people need money in life. If a project brings a little bit of money, you can keep working on it. End-users win because there are updates, less bugs, and new versions instead of abandoned projects.

In addition, as for their 70/30 fee they redistribute the money (I don't know in what percentage) on BountySource, so that the project gets developed further.

Honestly, other distros have a lot to learn from elementary.

jammygit5• 8 years ago

"Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps."

This is the most exciting part of elementary IMO: it is a model for free software to bring in some cash and fund full time development.

nkkollaw3• 8 years ago

Definitely. They were the first to do that, so it wasn't easy.

llIIllIIllIIl2• 8 years ago

I tried to use the OS multiple times through the recent years, but every time there's a missing feature that breaks all bi+lingual user experience: You cannot switch the keyboard layout for each window separately. Seems like they do not care about anyone except exclusively English speaking audience.

andrewflnr2• 8 years ago

That's unfair. If you're not bilingual yourself, wanting to switch keyboard layout per window is extremely non-obvious. It would never have occurred to me.

llIIllIIllIIl2• 8 years ago

That's why almost all OS have this as an option. You either change the layout globally or per window (or application, doesn't make that much difference).

amaccuish• 8 years ago

It's also excruciatingly slow to switch keyboard layouts (for me between latin and russian). I moved back to macOS over this since I do it so frequently.

solarmist3• 8 years ago

This.

There are 1,000 of these little things that just aren't right with linux as a desktop that make me drop it in less than a week every time I try it out.

* How to I switch keyboards from English to Japanese easily?

* How do I run excel or Lightroom or blah software that I'm already familiar with?

* How do I upgrade my OS if I don't know the difference between Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 and Linux 3.16.0-4-generic or some such? Or even the difference between Intel and AMD? Why am I picking "amd64"? I have an intel processor! (That was hypothetical don't answer that)

* How do I buy a new laptop that all of the hardware just works like it's supposed to?

* How can I upgrade a piece of hardware and be sure it'll work?

Only macOS and Windows answer all of those questions.

icebraining• 8 years ago

How do I upgrade my OS if I don't know the difference between Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 and Linux 3.16.0-4-generic or some such? Or even the difference between Intel and AMD? Why am I picking "amd64"? I have an intel processor! (That was hypothetical don't answer that)

Are you using some arcane distro? In most you just tell it to upgrade, you never need to know specific package names or version.

How do I buy a new laptop that all of the hardware just works like it's supposed to?

Buy one that says so?

How can I upgrade a piece of hardware and be sure it'll work?

Buy one that supports Linux?

Only macOS and Windows answer all of those questions.

People with Macs who can't run some Windows-specific app, or don't have drivers for some specific hardware, is a common occurrence in my workplace. Also Windows devs who can't test stuff in Safari.

NuSkooler• 8 years ago

I've been using Elementary OS for a few major versions now. It's become my main desktop OS.

I'm a bit worried about putting too much into the "store" and their own browser, but so far it hasn't impacted me any. Anything that applies to Ubuntu proper applies in eOS for the most part, but the UX is just much more polished.

When I first saw it I was worried of too much "MacOS" like (which I'm not a fan of), but that has't been the case for me at all.

cassidyjames2• 8 years ago

For what it's worth, elementary does not create Epiphany; that's the GNOME browser and is largely a GUI wrapper around WebKit, the exact same engine as in Safari.

AppCenter is a way to serve the app developers who were already attempting to target the OS while also enabling both them and elementary to cover (some) costs.

xaduha3• 8 years ago

I'd recommend https://getsol.us if you asked me what Desktop Linux distro to get.

rudedogg• 8 years ago

I really like Solus, but I've had issues updating it.

I installed it on an old laptop for a friend, which they have occasionally used for a year or two. Recently, they wanted help setting up a USB device, so I started by trying to update. The GUI showed a progress bar like it was working on it, but it wouldn't proceed.

To debug, I ran the update utility from the command line. It spit out an error that the update server JSON wouldn't load. I copied the URL and paste it into a browser - it was some sort of cache miss. It made it so I couldn't update or install anything, forcing me to reinstall the OS. This was a couple weeks ago.

I also vaguely remember something similar happening when I used it for a year or so; where I couldn't get updates to work and had to reinstall.

xaduha3• 8 years ago

Well they changed stuff recently, new domain, new ISO. I hope that means they got their act together, it's a great project overall.

ledgerdev3• 8 years ago

I too love solus, but I'm a bit concerned with the ongoing project stability with it's creator and technical leader(ikey) leaving the project. It's been such an amazing project.

What do other think, can it continue to be relatively stable and not break things too much going forward?

xaduha3• 8 years ago

Have you read/listened to this? https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail

I'm hopeful, it's great to have BDFL at the start, but community takeover should and does happen at some point. Maybe this is it.

cnasc2• 8 years ago

My impression is that Ikey has been more or less gone for a while, and the recent news was just confirmation that he didn't plan on coming back. I use Solus on my Thinkpad and it's been great for me (I package SBCL and Kakoune for Solus)

cordite2• 8 years ago

I am currently on this os, it’s pleasant most of the time, but it crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen. It also starts having windows flicker for a few seconds at random after a few days of uptime. I use Nvidia GTX 1080, it seems to work well otherwise.

thrownaway954• 8 years ago

How can something that "crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen" be "pleasant most of the time" to use??? If Windows, OSX or Linux did that, would we even use them? Look I like to support open source projects, but junk is junk and if this thing crashes like you say so... it's junk.

cordite2• 8 years ago

My solution was to disable the lock screen at home. But I still can’t disable accidentally pressing the lock key combination. It doesn’t seem to be configurable in the keyboard settings.

kevingrahl3• 8 years ago

I’ve been using elementary OS since a few years on my main machine and really like it but there are a few quirks that bother me.

For example I can’t use the WiFi drop down to change networks but instead have to open the network manager to scan for new networks. Also when right clicking on external disks in the file manager to mount disks the dialogue appears not where I’ve clicked but a few centimeters above. Stuff like that. I’ve come to live with all those flaws and very rarely have to boot up Windows to use software like Photoshop/Illustrator.

Overall I can recommend elementary OS and have convinced some friends and family to switch from Windows to it.

type02• 8 years ago

Elementary is a fine distro, but short off being pretty and not afraid to ask for money what does it i really achieve that I can't get on other bigger distros?

BonesJustice5• 8 years ago

At the moment, not a whole lot, but if you’re in the group of older MacBook [Pro] users who are looking to upgrade, don’t like the options from Apple, but love macOS, then it makes the transition less painful.

My hope is that it will further distinguish itself with time.

They’ve got the basics in place, which is no small task given they’ve essentially created their own desktop environment. They have a long road ahead of them before they catch up to distros like Mint in terms of features, but with more of the underpinnings in place (like their new cloud providers API), I’m hoping it starts to feel more complete during the next couple releases.

sneak2• 8 years ago

To be a macOS replacement, an OS needs to work well on Apple hardware. Does Elementary OS now work well on Apple hardware? The last time I tried it, it did not.

timbit422• 8 years ago

With the T2 chip only macOS can run on Apple hardware now.

radicaldreamer• 8 years ago

That's not true at all: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330

sneak2• 8 years ago

Not true; I just booted the Elementary installer off of USB on a T2-equipped Mac. Even if that didn’t work, though, T2 Macs are a tiny minority; my question still stands for the millions of other Macs.

scandox2• 8 years ago

Whenever I see a skeuomorphic desktop it reminds me to make a donation to Arch.

qazwse_• 8 years ago

Can you explain what you mean? From what I'm seeing there isn't any skeuomorphism in Elementary.

cnasc2• 8 years ago

In this case I think they meant "dimensional" rather than skeuomorphic. Elementary isn't flat, but that's a selling point in my opinion.

scandox2• 8 years ago

"A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that are inherent to the original."

To my mind any icon based interface qualifies. Ready to be wrong.

zwaps• 8 years ago

Some of the comments here feel weird.

Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine.

Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences with numerous typography mistakes, icons of different sizes and grid alignment imbalances everywhere.

Like check out this Mint (grey theme) screenshot: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Li... and compare it with elementary OS here https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/elementary-os-0-...

Mint is great, but seriously. Look at that logo render. Even worse, look at the start bar. Every single text and logo has a different height. I mean how do you even do something like that unintentionally?

I am using XFCE right now, and it's great because its much faster than KDE or Gnome on this old laptop. But it sure isn't a pretty UI. I know a MSc. designer and she claims using my laptop makes her physically sick and dizzy. I don't care as much, but I can see the point. Everything is misaligned, in the start menu, the task bar, the apps. In the window bar the buttons and the minimize arrow aren't the same size. I mean seriously, whoever did this just did not care about Ui.

I don't think ElementaryOS is for everyone. If you have any interest in non-standard repos, recent kernels or doing stuff in commandline, you are just better off elsewhere. I understand their choices, but I don't use it because of how they do the app store, among other things.

But if you just want a computer that runs, looks good and doesn't break if you do X, then I think ElementaryOS is the #1 choice in the Linux world, and we should be thankful that it exists.

omnimus• 8 years ago

xfce is quite beautiful the default theme is just dated. you pick something else and its fine

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

Desktop Linux isn't really that difficult. It could be easier. The thing is that the people who want "really easy" probably aren't going to bother installing any new OS. Microsoft and Apple work hard, not just to make their OS easy but update their OS to whatever random hardware or software thing has come out (games and printers, say). Not being able to do "this one thing" is the main complaint I hear from friends who randomly wind-up with desktop Linux from computer recyclers mostly (it's my complaint too at times).

Also, elementary OS looks a lot like the "gnome shell" and latest Ubuntu thing. Mint/Mate has become the main Linux shell by staying with Window 7-like-shell. The newer shells are easier but less powerful. So it would win for those who want easy. Except those who want easy will do nothing and stay with MS/Apple. After they are "free" too or seem like that to the average person.

watermans• 8 years ago

In what way has Mate become the main Linux shell? It’s not the DE of choice for the most popular distributions so it likely doesn’t have a lot of exposure among Linux environments.

finchisko5• 8 years ago

It's not, it just can be ugly as some distros are showing us.

DCKing3• 8 years ago

I agree. I would be using Linux full time if the experience was not so jarring all the time. Fonts and themes are off, stuff gets jumbled around, things are wildly inconsistent. You end up spending lots of time doing weird hacks to make everything look alright. Even Elementary will break if you move outside the core applications - it cannot be helped in this ecosystem.

When Linux works for you it's so damn great but I cannot fully enjoy a UI that is so inconsistent and ugly so often.

osrec• 8 years ago

If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. Of all the Linux distros I've used in my company, it's given us almost no headaches. The fonts are crisp, and icons look fine too. Adding monitors has also been painless. And even my least technical users are able to use it (but might need a bit of help now and again). For us, it has actually been a pleasure to use because of its speed.

If you're prepared to give up whizzy animations etc, do try it when you have a bit of spare time.

coned885• 8 years ago

Been using linux for decades and have never had to do any of this. Even 15 years ago I didn't need to.

Canadauni• 8 years ago

I had a similar perspective as you. I couldn't get past a lot of default design decisions made in many distributions and I didn't want to spend the time tweaking my machine. I installed Pop_OS after seeing the Theano release a couple of weeks ago and basically haven't booted into windows since. As a casual user I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a similar linux experience as I was.

dingdingdang• 8 years ago

Minorly unfair on Mint since it is a 2 versions old screenshot being compared to present day version of Elementary.

Personally by far prefer the Mint paradigm: it is clear what is running and what is a launch icon without studying icon shading/overlays/dots..etc.

PakG1• 8 years ago

Could you share a screenshot for Mint today then and describe how it's improved?

AndrewDavis2• 8 years ago

I hear these every so often.

Just curious if noticing or more so, even being bothered by them is the norm?

Example Mint, the font heights I wouldn't have noticed and definitely something I would not be consciously aware of if I used it. And I still don't know what's wrong with the render beyond it looking at bit outdated.

Am I the odd person here or is it a vocal minority that have issues with it?

DanBC• 8 years ago

I dislike the Linux Mint desktop image, but that's trivially easy to swap out.

I genuinely can't see the other problems with the image, and I feel that it's not a good example to illustrate the point.

But I'm sure parent poster is right, and that linux desktop environments use a wierd mish-mash of icons and fonts with weird sizing and line heights.

lazzlazzlazz• 8 years ago

You are part of the vocal, online minority that doesn't look at Mint and cringe because it looks so amateur and dated.

Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly without necessarily being able to articulate that the "font heights", etc. are the problem.

By a common user's standards, Mint looks amateur and janky compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS.

HumanHater2• 8 years ago

As a person who chooses Mint MATE everywhere I have that option: no, I don't have this bullshit complaints. The whole point of OS is to let user start his favorite programs and get out of the way. That is what MATE get right and most other systems get wrong.

I also don't see any real problems with icons or fonts or anything but maybe it's just because I adapted to them. Without hardware problems overall experience with MATE is far superior than with Windows or Mac OS.

coned885• 8 years ago

Weird argument. Because I have given Linux systems to the elderly before. People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine.

My mother was a long time windows user. Kept getting viruses. She was converted to Ubuntu and has used it for over a decade now without issue.

Linux is far easier for people than you think. My mother is a senior citizen now and this is her second computer.

The UI concerns you bring up are just silly, They are about the same as you buying a new hammer and it having an inconsistent wood grain or a metal burr.

tathougies3• 8 years ago

Yeah same experience here. Installed gentoo on our home computer for my mom and dad and once i showed them how to open Firefox, they were happy as clams. The only issue was when my dad wanted to install tax software

amenghra• 8 years ago

Give them iPads (or Android tablets) + a wireless keyboard.

NeedMoreTea• 8 years ago

What you call silly others might call "fit and finish". Or simply "doing an adequate job".

With a kitchen if there were a few mm difference in height between wall unit cupboards, or wall sockets, it would not affect your use of the kitchen one iota. Yet everyone would likely notice such an amateur and slapdash job and employ a different contractor for their own home. Same with the difference between a table made by assembling a flat pack and something craftsman made.

There's a reason Apple put so much score into the user interface guides and specifications for icons, interface and such.

rqs• 8 years ago

People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine.

I think the original comment was talking about ugly UI rather than "Linux works just fine".

The key point I believe was, if Linux came with better UX design like what Elementary OS did, then it will be "Good" instead of "Just fine".

It's about an upgrade, bring Linux to a better level, not "Linux UI looks ugly, it's bad and unusable".

mrhappyunhappy4• 8 years ago

Oh, so the same reason people are paying for iPhones, BMWs and haircuts? Look, you wanted less hair, you got it! Ppppppplease... people pay for details and the products and brands that deliver them are obviously doing something right.

ornel• 8 years ago

We just finished a project in rural communities in Panama and gave laptops (ThinkPad 13) with Mint 19 Cinnamon to people with very little experience with computers. However, we kept Windows 10 in one of the computers and guess what, that's the only one that gave us trouble, when the user got all scared and confused with the Office trial version telling them they needed to pay. All the other users had no major problems at all with the user experience.

marktangotango• 8 years ago

Curious how you’re using xfce, xubuntu ui is very consistent, none of the issues you noted. I have used xfce as an apt-get install (chromebook with crouton) and that was very very bad.

For chromebooks galliumos is very nice as well.

moron4hire• 8 years ago

Is that Mint screenshot the Mate or Cinnamon DE? Last time I used Mint was about 3 years ago and it looked nice than that. I'm not an expert on Linux DEs, but that looks like what I remember of Gnome.

But anyway, agree with your points in general. I'll probably end up installing ElementaryOS in a VM. I do VR development full-time so I will need Windows as my main computer, but I definitely like having a Linux system around for everything else I do.

tEMporality7• 8 years ago

Compare the latest Mint with Elementary. It's much cleaner.

Ar-Curunir• 8 years ago

I've gotten around this by minimizing my usage of graphical applications; I use Firefox, a PDF reader, (recently) Zotero to manage papers, and finally a tiling window manager to reduce graphical elements. Everything else happens in the terminal. Linux just isn't ready for GUI apps :(

wingworks2• 8 years ago

I try every year I try a few different Linux distros and each time I notice a tonne of UI and UX issues, and leave again (I mean, even the basic things like being able to resize windows is 95% of the time a pain on most distros I try. I'm sure there is a fix for it, but the point is, you shouldn't need to fix it, it should "just work"). In my mind Ubuntu is the closest, but still far far away.

I love Linux, and I use it almost every day (Debian), but only ever as GUIless servers, which it's amazing at. Just hope one day a team with design and ease of use will make a distro that "normal" people can enjoy to use. (but you would need other apps that look and work great in it too, which I fear will be the harder issue to tackle)

quantummkv• 8 years ago

I've been using the Kde desktop (Kubuntu) for about 6 months now after switching from Windows 10 for Ruby development.

The UI is damn good. Way more polished and consistent than what passes for the three way mess that the Windows 10 UI is these days. Straight out of the box you get a polished, Windows 7 type layout, complete with a start menu better than Windows, consistent fonts and smooth animations. And unlike every other desktop, the dark theme actually works as advertised.

The only time I go back to windows is when is need Corel Draw for my graphics design work. And I immediately feel the difference in polish and consistency. If I could get without Corel Draw, I would definitely banish Windows from my laptop.

That being said, GNOME is a clusterfk. It's what we all accused Windows 8 of beign. A wannabe tablet desktop in a world without any actual tablets. What is possessing them to remove functionality available in ALL other desktops? When this is pointed out they point to extensions written in a leaky javascript implementation, which can be broken the next gnome update because why not?

If you want a modern desktop on Linux, Kde is what you want these days.

jammygit5• 8 years ago

Imho, gnome is quite nice. I think I'm in the minority maybe but I would be pretty sad if gnome went away one day (or had another memory leak/slowdown issue)

andrepd2• 8 years ago

Why are you comparing Elementary OS with a version of Linux Mint that's at least 5 years old? Especially when they had such a big design shift in the last year or two.

Up-to-date screenshot (still with the "old" theme Mint-X, but actually Mint-Y (based on arc) is the default as of the latest version): https://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/serena/gallery/5....

The choice isn't between ugly and Elementary. It's a false dillema. E.g. Cinnamon, which is pretty and functional.

virtualritz• 8 years ago

It's almost as bad 5 years later then.

- icons on task bar too low

- icons on task bar vertically not aligned

- task icons different size than pinned icons on task bar

- task text vertically aligned too high

- icons stylistically not matched

- system icons unreadable (badly designed, all look the same, don't convey purpose adequately)

- task bar icons on right are vertically all over the place

- task bar mini icons sizing on right is not consistent

- file manager icon sizes all over the place

- file manager bottom bar icons are too low and lack 'breathing room' at bottom compared to top bar with buttons

- file manager top/bottom bar size is mismatched

- horizontal alignment/margin of icons on file manager's top and bottom bars is inconsistent

I could go on and on. People who don't care about these things don't see them. Their vision is not trained for it. But for a polished experience, even to UI laypersons, they make all the difference.

adar• 8 years ago

With all due respect, that screenshot you linked looks straight out of 2008.

nobody2719• 8 years ago

I don't think Linux will e... okay, probably ever, be a replacement for Windows or MacOS. Linux is Linux no matter how you dress it up. The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done. Forget about the fact that they'll be running down dependencies and the programs themselves don't usually work as good. What is the benefit they get for all that time and frustration? Then one day their keyboard will randomly stop working or they wont be able to get connected to the internet because of an update.

Smart people do dumb things sometimes. Trying to get the general public to use Linux is a perfect example. It's not even Linux under the hood. It is Linux.

lewiscollard• 8 years ago

The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done.

Can we put this myth to bed yet? I use Linux full-time at home and on my laptop and I can't remember the last time I had to do this. Hey, I only see a command line because I can do stuff much faster there, not because I need to (I live in a command line on my Mac at work, too).

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

Linux in the form of Chrome OS seems to be capturing a lot of market share lately. Likewise Linux is also by no small margin what runs of most people's mobile phones or tablets. And the remaining ones run a fruity flavor of BSD. So most of what users is using is already unix and most of that is in fact Linux. MS is of course still pushing their own kernel but they seem to be insisting on that less when it comes to servers and all but gave up on mobile.

The problem with 'traditional' linux distributions is not Linux the kernel but the notion of window managers and other stuff that just isn't very good or user friendly. With Chrome OS, basically Google decided to cherry pick Linux for stuff that they could use/savage and scrap/replace the rest. Given how successful they are with that approach, I'm very confident in predicting that KDE vs. Gnome is never going to end in a victory for either. At least not in the form of world dominance. If anything, I see a lot of techies using alternative, lighter weight window managers. Even the target audience is opting out of using either.

Elementary OS looks like straightforward rip off of OS/X before they dropped the whole aqua look. That is to say a bit dated, not very original, and not that impressive or tempting to me.

chris_wot5• 8 years ago

When was the last time you used a Linux distro? I haven't unzipped and tarred a file to compile a program in a long time. Everything you need to get on something like Ubuntu you can get from a GUI.

I honestly see very little about your argument that is constructive, and in fact "It's not even Linux under the hood. It is Linux." makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

gnulinux• 8 years ago

I'm starting to think the whole is plotting this weird conspiracy against me... I think linux is very comfortable, I think it looks pretty, it gives me power to make it prettier. Windows comes with fucking ads in the UI how is that any prettier? OSX is supposed to be polished, but I constantly experience problems like my screen randomly flickers, it forces me to login twice every time, sometimes all windows suddenly lose focus and the only way to come to a good state is to go to a non full screen window... I don't know man, having used all three I'll take linux any day and it's because it's prettier, UI is more functional, and the system actually doesn't have handcuffs.

MattRix• 8 years ago

If you think Linux is prettier you need your eyes checked. You're confusing functionality and reliability with prettyness.

xur17• 8 years ago

I'm in the same boat - I used a Mac at my last job for ~4 years, and if given the choice I'll choose linux hands down. I find it more comfortable, but maybe that's just because I'm used to it?

alpaca128• 8 years ago

As someone who has actually used elementaryOS for some time(both previous versions about 6 months each) I have to disagree with your "doesn't break if you do X" claim.

You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again - say hi to at least 2 different kinds of graphics glitches and possibly a randomly appearing bug in the file manager. And I'm not sure if it was a bug or a feature, but last time I used eOS I didn't enjoy the default video player's "fullscreen mode" in which it still didn't overlap the lower part of the desktop with the dock.

But keep in mind I haven't tried the most recent version which came out not long ago, I'd be surprised if some of the problems weren't fixed yet.

I think elementaryOS is on the right track, but it's definitely not more stable than the average distro, including the ones with rolling-release update models.

SyneRyder2• 8 years ago

You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again...

Definitely this, unfortunately. elementaryOS 0.4.1 Loki was fairly stable for me, but then I installed 5 / Juno, and now the machine often locks up with a completely black screen, except for a handful of items visible where the top menu bar usually is. It seems to occur when it wakes from a sleep mode (though this is on a Parallels virtual machine). The only solution is to reboot and lose whatever you were working on.

elementaryOS is great and the first Linux I've really enjoyed using (I'm normally a Mac user, the kind who uses software by Panic). But it still has so far to go. It's also worrying that you can't upgrade from 0.4.1 to 5. Even with all of Microsoft's disasters with updates, they've still managed to let you upgrade from one version of Windows to the next one.

graposaymaname• 8 years ago

Used Loki for 6+ months here, In my case the main problem was that it took too much time to shutdown the system. I don't know if that's an elementary specific issue, but I've noticed it on multiple systems with the OS. Again, I've seen hardisk issues propping up while using elementary. It was really easy to use but then it had issues.

(Did anyone else have these issues?)

michaelmrose9• 8 years ago

If you haven't noticed 90% of people are running windows which is quite frankly ugly by default. Further it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp. It's probably accurate to say that most people aren't terribly concerned with aesthetics as much as functionality.

That said steps to achieve a relatively consistent look.

Open your configuration app and configure your gtk theme to something that looks nice. If you don't have one you can install lxappearance which is from lxde and has minimal deps so you can easily install it in a minimal environment.

Install qt4-config if you have any old qt4 apps. Set it to use gtk+ style for qt4 aps.

If you use newer qt apps install qt5ct and select gtk style.

In 5 minutes you will have a relatively consistent look.

A few notes.

- Its increasingly likely you have zero qt4 apps and could probably skip that part and not care

- qt5ct actually lets you set a custom stylesheet and or colors if you want more manual control but this is hardly required.

- firefox is really stupid about drawing website elements with dark text on a dark background when run with a dark theme. You can run individual gtk apps with a different theme like so

env GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light firefox

you can copy your firefox desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the command to ensure that this works properly automatically.

Chrome somehow figures out that a dark theme doesn't mean you want to draw webpages differently so I consider this a firefox bug that mozilla wontfix.

In a perfect world someone would create a single useful gui to configure qt4 plasma gtk2 gtk3 apps which only had settings that would effect all of the above consistently and required no tweaking.

In reality land most people don't care including those shipping distros can probably ship with or arrange a reasonable look with minimal fuss.

ivm2• 8 years ago

it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp

It was a decade ago. The world has moved on since then and the expectations are much higher nowadays. For example, see software landing pages today vs. 2008. Even modern Instagram photos look like they were professionally edited for a magazine.

JetSetWilly• 8 years ago

On the other hand the elementary OS screenshot has the designer’s disease of using poor contrast text - grey on white? Yuk.

dmix• 8 years ago

linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences

I disagree, recent Gnome versions from the last few years have been amazing. Nearly on par with Elementary.

z3t4• 8 years ago

It seems your designer friend has occupational injury, eg she is trained to spot those issues, but it can give problems in real life, where not everything is perfectly aligned.

iforgotpassword2• 8 years ago

Agree, and this is why I don't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't a techie. It's just plain ugly and that's the first thing people notice. There have been improvements and exceptions here and there, but the UI sector seems so volatile that just because current GNOME or KDE look consistent and usable, I can't expect the next iteration to be good as well.

Since starting to primarily use Linux in 2008, I've consecutively moved to simpler and simpler DEs, to the point where I'm currently running i3 everywhere for about 4 years. Less ui = fewer things to fuck up.

Folcon3• 8 years ago

So one thing I don't understand is why window managers in linux never seem to have ways to let the user tweak the UI? I mean it's something to add, but I find it odd that no one has thought to add it?

Or is it just a feature hidden somewhere?

I've thought on several occasions that I'd be pretty happy if I could just hijack how the UI layer was rendering some program, tweak text sizes, adjust colours and make that a user specific choice that can be done at the OS level. It would make linux far more accessible in my opinion and give the average user a way to fix issues that as you say may make some feel physically sick and dizzy.

Users could then start sharing fixes and tweaks and devs who are interested could pull in these settings into the main program, the work could be shared and these OS's could get better! =)...

It just seems such a prefect example of give power to your user and everything is editable, many people don't have time to dig into the internals of everything, but they'd be happy using a relatively straightforward tool (or at least one with tons of tutorials) to adjust the programs they use to their liking, and I'd wager they'd be pretty happy sharing the tweaks they made too.

Maybe this already exists? If it does please tell me! It's the one major thing that keeps me coming back to macs/windows machines. I find it pretty funny, most of my linux time is lived in servers and when I was a teen I ran ubuntu desktop for some time, but I just couldn't deal with it after a while. Which is a shame in my book, and I could certainly see something like this being in the community spirit of linux.

PS: If anyone is thinking of doing this and want's to talk to me for some reason, I'll be happy to discuss this further =)...

secure• 8 years ago

The look & feel of applications can be changed by using GTK or Qt themes and there’s entire websites dedicated to sharing these.

Isn’t this what you describe?

Side note: Window managers are only responsible for the window decoration, i.e. the frame around the contents and the title bar. Not a lot to tweak there, but most window managers do actually allow changing pretty much every aspect of it. GTK/Qt are toolkits, not window managers.

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

When I used it 2-3 years ago the UI was slick, lean, responsive .. above ubuntu in terms of average user appeal.

mcjiggerlog• 8 years ago

I recently installed kubuntu with the latest version of KDE Plasma and was blown away. This is by far the most polished linux experience I've ever had. My girlfriend who is definitely not a linux user forced me to install it on her laptop too after seeing it.

Everything "just works", even more than macOS IMO, and you can configure everything to your hearts content. Animations are smooth, UI is very polished and consistent. Definitely recommend checking it out.

BenjiWiebe5• 8 years ago

I've had the same experience installing the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, minus the girlfriend.

finchisko5• 8 years ago

I totally agree. Linux pro users seems not care much about the detail. I'm the exception. Can live with Ubuntu, but most distros have terrible ui (you can see the misaligned items from miles away).

finchisko5• 8 years ago

I'm terrible person, but I couldn't resist to get example of very ugly and visually inconsistent linux distro. And that guy reviewing it, is saying the dream distro in video title. What?

Just watch the video and wait for settings app to get what I'm talking about. If it miss-aligned items don't bothers you, then you're weird (or maybe I'am) :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCsRMLhVL8Y&t=418s

dsego3• 8 years ago

I mean, even now in ubuntu gnome, a right-click menu has a gap (gutter?) on the left side, probably left for icons which aren't enabled by default. This is just lazy coding in my opinion.

raylangivens• 8 years ago

There is a plethora of Linux based distros out there. I recently bought a Lenovo L480 with DOS. I ended up trying out Elementary since I liked the UX. A day or two after using it, it already started hanging on me and wouldn't boot. There was this super weird bug as well because of which the first time I opened Google Chrome, the close button on top right would freeze and I'd have to close that and reopen Chrome. I hated being part of these "edge cases".

I then ended up using Ubuntu and that has been stable as rock. No surprises, rock solid. I used it back in college. There are very few Linux based distros that are battle tested, Ubuntu is certainly one of them, on account of being backed by Canonical, which actually gets paid to develop the OS unlike most other linux based distros that have to work on "donations" or "foundation money".

Anyway, I'm happy with Ubuntu for my needs, I don't have super fancy needs and I don't want Arch level of customization. All I want something that works out of box and has a UNIX like CLI (I'm a programmer).

Another thing that sucks about Linux based OS's is that the power management is just repugnant. There are so many OS's out there and so many laptop models that I understand it is a herculean task to get maximum performance on every possible laptop.

Which is why, I decided that my next laptop is going to be an MBP, the Retina display is mind blowing, has a UNIX like interface, great battery life, a bit pricey but when it comes to being more productive as a programmer, I'm willing to pay more.

saint-loup• 8 years ago

As as person of average linux savviness, I applaude Elementary OS ambition and really wanted to like it, but the UX is really weird to me. It's really not file-centered (no file on the desktop IIRC, weird file selection in the explorer...) and there are oddities like maximise and close buttons being at opposite sides in a windows.

Disclaimer: I only used it for a few hours.

Teknoman1172• 8 years ago

I've been using Linux for 15 years, and I definitely agree with these points. I'm not particularly sensitive to the UI clunkiness, but I do try and use applications that use the same GUI toolkit to have some basic consistency. It definitely shows when you compare it to even mediocre macOS apps.

At this point though, most of my professional life is spent in a terminal emulator (alacritty), Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, qpdfview, and pcmanfm-qt. I also switched to a tiling wm (i3) with window decorations shut off, so basically my consistency comes from being super simplistic (graphically atleast).

Been toying with the idea of picking up a few design books and taking a hack at writing a GUI toolkit using Rust with something like the react/redux ideology of GUI app development and seeing where that goes (would be for Wayland). Would try the flux model because unidirectional data flow maps very nicely to Rust as I don't want to deal with any refcell shenanigans.

steveklabnik• 8 years ago

That’d be very cool! There’s a psuedo-stealth project to build a GUI toolkit using vaguely ECS principles in Rust for similar reasons. I’d love to see how a flux approach works too!

chaostheory2• 8 years ago

Elementary is a good Chrome OS alternative. I just wish Chrome OS was officially available for PCs.

ohiovr• 8 years ago

It’s just a window manager and not even a very good one.

lupinglade2• 8 years ago

So it’s a replacement for macOS that looks just like macOS? Hmm...

yjftsjthsd-h• 8 years ago

I mean, that does make sense. Also lowers the learning curve if it's more than superficial.

TheRealPomax3• 8 years ago

Only if you squint and ignore the rest of the sentence? It's an alternative to both macos and windows for people who not just not care about what their OS is, but have better things to do with their life than even bother to know what OS they run. As long as it's a pleasant, stable, consistent UI, and lets them do "the things they want to do" rather than "install the apps they need to do the things they want to do".

And yeah, that means if at any point you might go "but it doesn't have X and that's okay, you can download the source and run make" then you're already way beyond who this OS is for. It's supposed to be "as dumb" as MacOS with the app store, or Windows with the windows store.

lupinglade2• 8 years ago

But macOS is exactly that already?

gurtgurt• 8 years ago

Seems pretty interesting, I might try it out later. Does anybody have experience using this to revive an old computer (ie make it faster and more useable)?

seltzered_2• 8 years ago

Question: This may pertain more to GTK, but does gtk/elementary os have an equivalent to macOS's core animation libraries? Particularly to support interactive / fluid interfaces (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/ )? I did a cursory look and couldn't find much.

I've been fairly familiar with macOS development particularly for trying to do more experimental UI (fluid animation) the past few years, but have been staring at linux/elementaryOS more.

floatboth5• 8 years ago

libdazzle (developed for GNOME Builder) has some fancy animated widgets and whatnot

https://valadoc.org/libdazzle-1.0/index.htm

seltzered_2• 8 years ago

interesting. I think the better path (for myself at least) may be to see where people have extended libcairo for uses of interactive animation, and see how cleanly Pantheon approached problems like switching desktops (not even macOS has always gotten it right - mission control's top desktop bar was sluggish in either Yosemite or El Capitan then they decided to hide it upon initial gesture later on).

EastSmith• 8 years ago

Someone knows if this is a good fit for a dev machine: Rails, React, PostgreSQL & Elastisearch? VS Code?

tobyhinloopen• 8 years ago

Get a macbook

ganlub• 8 years ago

Why not? This isn't anything out of the ordinary. Just some Docker containers and VSC. You can even find the Open Source version of VSC in some repositories.

manch23• 8 years ago

Its based on Ubuntu, so whatever you can install on Ubuntu should work on Elementary. Only issue I've run into is while adding an apt repo(for docker I think) I needed to point it to bionic instead of juno.

rehemiau• 8 years ago

That's a common problem I had too, I often have to modify install scripts because of it

car1112• 8 years ago

I think there are 2 fundamental problems with Desktop Linux:

1. Linux doesn't even have a rock-solid gui toolkit on which different environments can be based:

    a. The one which runs on Ubuntu by default and which is probably used on 90%+ installations of desktop Linux is GTK which is utterly a major nightmare to develop GUIs with.

    b. The Qt library which powers KDE is simply not used all that widely. The flagship desktop environment using Qt is KDE which is downright ugly in its default installation.

2. Once problem 1 is solved, people should realize that a usable desktop is not just the Window manager and 3 apps which are blessed by the desktop environment team. It is 100s of thousands of hours of using by many users. It needs stability for other apps to develop around this ecosystem, both Mac and Windows have had a rocksolid GUI library powering their ecosystems for decade+ period and apps develop around them. Without stability and a new shitty GUI library every 2 years, Elementary OS or not, the desktop environment situation on Linux will continue to be shit.

dharma1• 8 years ago

Qt was used on unity8. But it didn't (at that time, and probably not now either) have a comparable UI component library to MacOS (or iOS). I know, because we made one from scratch - which wasn't a great idea either.

Flutter would look interesting if it picks up steam for desktop apps.

car1112• 8 years ago

It's very disappointing to learn that after more than 25 years of Linux being launched, there is not a single decent GUI SDK available.

Much more damning is that RedHat whose entire business model was around making an enterprise ready Linux (server and Desktop) could not build a decent GUI toolkit.

sterlind• 8 years ago

I'd love to have a Linux distro with the frontend of Elementary OS and the backend of Nixos. And I say that as a Microsoft employee. Are there efforts to make Nixos grandma-worthy? Or are the only pretty distros all reskins of Ubuntu?

colemickens2• 8 years ago

You might be interested in this PR: "[nixpkgs] elementary: init a 5.0 Juno" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637

I'm actively trying to build some cool things with Nix/NixOS and then write up a series of blog posts. Several recent discussions on the Discourse and at NixCon have been focused around Nix/NixOS user experience, at least.

I've recently been building a package set of tip builds of Wayland stuff (sway, screenshot/screenrecord/notification utilities), including instructions for using them on Ubuntu via Nix. I'm also building out a set of packages and modules for Kube/Containerd/Kata-Containers for perfectly repeatable offline-first clusters. I think these two projects can be leveraged to evangelize Nix and NixOS nicely, and dovetails into UX efforts as I build my list of rough spots and fix a number of issues in nixpkgs and random OSS projects along the way.

Also, Gnome-Shell and KDE work perfectly in NixOS anyway, and can be easily made to look just like they do on any other distro... I just recently switched to Sway, coming from KDE (~1.5 years) after GNOME (6+ years?). Not any significant visual differences than when I was using Arch Linux.

nh2• 8 years ago

Awesome work!

Having the ability to configure a beautiful-by-default GUI for NixOS makes it much more likely that I can maintain machines for my family with low time effort, remotely.

spindle• 8 years ago

Great work! Thank you!

At the moment it seems that a lot of NixOS users (including me) prefer a keyboard-centric window manager to a full desktop environment, but obviously (well I think it's obvious, anyway) there's a place for Pantheon on NixOS too. A big place, I should think.

colemickens2• 8 years ago

(I wish I could edit; I feel I should to clarify, I didn't do any of the Pantheon work, I just noticed the PR a while back and thought of it. I'm not sure I have the skills for that sort of thing yet.)

moondev• 8 years ago

Not too familiar with Nix, but can't you run different window managers? I know you can install and use Pantheon (Elementary's WM) on Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pantheon

androidgirl• 8 years ago

Huh, had no idea this was a package. I'll have to try it out soon when I reinstall arch for the gazillionth time.

mattycakes01• 8 years ago

It's basically just Pantheon with a custom skin. You can get similarly good results using the "arc" theme and any decent ubuntu-based distro.

muthdra• 8 years ago

`It's basically just ${desktopEnvironment} with a custom skin` can be humorously used for 90% of popular Linux distros but it's not really fair for any of them.

cassidyjames2• 8 years ago

You realize elementary has created the entire Pantheon desktop environment, right? So, "It's just their desktop environment with their stylesheet, their apps, and the AppCenter ecosystem," is basically what you are saying. In which case, yeah, that's exactly what elementary OS is.

debt• 8 years ago

All I want is an OS with a lightning fast UI and ‘08 thumb drive sized footprint, idc about privacy. Gimme ultra lightning fast Casino-electronic-craps-game-level fast UI and shouldn’t weigh too much like I said

Who cares about privacy? If they’re based in the US/EMEIA you can sue the pants off anyone that disrespects your privacy and win in court

lytedev2• 8 years ago

Build your own! Arch Linux is a great base to start with. Check out /r/unixporn for examples!

ChefboyOG• 8 years ago

I ran various distros as a kid growing up, then went years as a professional running Mac. Elementary is the only distro I've not felt stupid friction running on my Chromebook. I know there are other considerations, but as a daily driver, this is easily one of the best distros I've seen

JoshuaAshton• 8 years ago

Shame their app store is a great meme.

bprasanna• 8 years ago

Looks promising. It would be great if they can offer a scaled down version (something like Lubuntu) which we can install in single board computers (like RaspberryPi).

rcarmo2• 8 years ago

The Raspbian distribution has recently been improved to the point where it has a decent (if less polished) experience. I have a Pi desktop for developing in Arduino, and it’s great with the newest 3B+.

truth_seeker• 8 years ago

I find Ubuntu 18 LTS version quite promising both as a developer and normal non-dev user of desktop.

Endy3• 8 years ago

Is it binary-compatible with Windows & Mac OS? If it's not, then it's not a replacement and the title should be changed to reflect that. I respect the idea of speed and privacy (though I'm still a minimalist - I believe in using 16/32-bit and less than 1GB RAM). But before I can "replace" Windows, I need an OS that actually works like Windows.

throwawaywhynot3• 8 years ago

wtf

deadlocked• 8 years ago

It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day?

If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS.

I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in various ways that make them less useful, to me, than the apps I named above.

(I've been using Linux as a daily driver for two years now, have been administrating Linux servers for nearly two decades - I know Linux).

avodonosov• 8 years ago

But not for Linux?

gigatexal2• 8 years ago

If it didn’t use gnome and somehow skinned KDE to be that pretty I’d be all about it.

TheRealPomax3• 8 years ago

What a weird thing to say when the whole point of this OS is a focus on consistent user experience, with a negative focus on "does it tickle a power user's tech stack fancy".

gigatexal2• 8 years ago

There’s something inherently gross about running my desktop in some sort of Frankenstein-javascript-single-threaded-modify-with-css mess that I’d rather avoid. And KDE has been faster for me. KWin is amazingly quick. What KDE lacks is the polish that the Gnome based desktops enjoy — if it has that I’d doubt a reason for Gnome to exist.

rustcharm• 8 years ago

It looks nice, and it may be a replacement for ChromeOS or some other limited system, but it's not a replacement for Windows and MacOS.

rubenhak• 8 years ago

Wow, looks cool. The background makes it feel like Mac OS X...

vermaden• 8 years ago

I wonder when they will introduce icons in the desktop :)

randomsearch• 8 years ago

I used Elementary OS for a few months this year.

It’s quite nicely designed in places, but is based on Gnome 3 - which doesn’t make sense for an OS that is all about UX, because Gnome 3 makes plenty of bad decisions and Elementary inherits them. Still, they have done their best to contain them and I think it’s better designed than any other modern Linux desktop.

Couple of failure points:

- the mail client is buggy to the point of being unusable. You could say that about any Linux GUI mail client, but this one is particularly bad.

- Alt-Tab behaviour is strange and awful.

If you want OS X but can’t afford it, this is as close as you’ll get, but it’s a long way off.

throwawaywhynot3• 8 years ago

the linux desktop landscape has really changed. Ubuntu is no longer the cool os for the newbies with the rise of manjaro,mint,solus,elementary

marcus_holmes3• 8 years ago

Anyone tried installing this on a MacBook? I've got an older Pro that keeps running Kernel at 60%+ of CPU - apparently just one of those bugs that MacOS has that "just work" like that.

I really want to install another OS, but both Ubuntu and Fedora can't see the available partition space, and can't find a wireless driver.

Given that Elementary OS is advertising itself as a replacement for MacOS, has anyone tried it and got anywhere with it?

ibnishak• 8 years ago

Isn't elementary OS basically based on Ubuntu with a few ui tweaks?

marcus_holmes3• 8 years ago

I thought it was a different distro?

metasyn• 8 years ago

I installed it a year or so ago on an old 2014 MBP. It's battery was bulging and bending the casing so I knew it was on its way out... I used elementary os for a few months, mostly just using it for spotify, occasional programing, surfing the web.

Worked fine, and in this case, added some life to some older hardware.

marcus_holmes3• 8 years ago

cool, thanks for the info. I'll give it a try... :)

rcarmo2• 8 years ago

I don’t get the hate, really. It’s the only distro I’ve used in the past few years with a “nice enough” desktop where my Mac instincts translate across and where I can use anything packaged for Ubuntu with zero hassles.

I’ve been running it on a low-end Chromebook for a long while now, and upgraded from 0.4.1 to 5.0 via the CLI (not recommended, but feasible if you know what you’re doing), and other than the ultra-niche app ecosystem (which I don’t need, since I mostly run Firefox, Docker and VS Code on it, besides dev packages) it has zero weirdness.

Well, except for the mail client. It has improved, but every single time I try to use it to send out some notes while away from my regular machines it breaks somehow, and there is zero addressbook/calendar integration (I have Thunderbird installed, but keep trying the built-in mail client after each update because I like the UI).

thawkins• 8 years ago

mail on 5.0 is just plain broken when used with gmail. refuses to log in.

9712263• 8 years ago

Just setup a google app password.

rushabh• 8 years ago

Reading the comments here, it seems we don’t realise that ElementaryOS is run by a small team of mostly volunteers, who are doing this as a “free” service to the rest of us.

Lets take a moment to appreciate the immense perseverance, sacrifice, hard work put in by the team behind the project. The work done is pretty slick and complete. I hope there is a philanthropic minded HN member here who can help them with a generous funding, so they can keep building this awesome tool.

ianwalter2• 8 years ago

I’ve been using Elementary for 2-3 weeks and it’s really good. Still far behind MacOS, but it’s the best I’ve felt about a linux distro becoming a mainstream alternative. I’ve used Pop_OS! as well and while it’s good, I wish System76 would have just backed Elementary OS. Elementary is a good base but needs a larger community and more resources to become legit.

msiyer• 8 years ago

Linux is not ready for mass market. I think, proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs.

I my opinion, OS itself has very little value to the end user. The end user needs a fertile userland. The end user should be free to trivially switch platforms without disrupting the userland one bit. This is not some pipe dream. It is very much possible.

Open standards and strict adherence to them need to be enforced. Data formats need to be portable not just across platforms, but across competing software. This is our right. No one should deny this no matter how powerful.

sjellis2• 8 years ago

proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs.

That certainly used to be true, but I think most of those issues have fallen away, and it's mostly just about applications and unpredictable hardware support. Despite the efforts of proprietary OS vendors to invent new whiz-bang features, most people use the OS as a launcher for their Web browser and the collection of applications that they actually care about (office suite, games, professional tools like Photoshop). Proton is a really big deal because it unblocks migration for the people whose key applications are games from Steam.

lamb_duh• 8 years ago

Digital products illicit emotional responses just like physical ones. Aesthetic clouds our judgement when it comes to usability—it's a well documented universal design principle and affects people's sense of usability regardless of culture, location, or education.

There's a relevant XKCD for this discussion: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png

Some folks value privacy and control over appearance. Their sense of value from both outweigh any cons of a bad UI. Others can't move past how a UI feels. Both positions are completely valid.

OSS needs more UI design talent—if you've lodged complaints here, pick a project/distro, dig through the contribution guidelines, and improve the UI.

exabrial• 8 years ago

All I can say is wow, this has been missing for a long time! If there was ever a time for an Acer, Asus, Dell, etc to sponsor a new product and pitch to corp/gov, this would be it.

zzo38computer• 8 years ago

I use Linux without a desktop environment. Works excellent; much better than Windows.

testware• 8 years ago

All comments here are either: A. "I'm so glad I'm on Linux distro A and not Windows but the UX and UI is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro B, it solves the problems of A" B. "I'm on distro B and not Windows, but package management, upgrade and/or compatibility is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro C, it solves the problems of B" C. "I'm on distro C and not Windows, but it doesn't support my audio or video equipment and I need to install and/or spend a few hours searching and compiling various solutions online until my machine is a Frankensteinian monster and while it works for me, it's not for everyone" followed by "have you tried distro A, it solves problems of C" I love the flexibility of Linux in some respects, but I've had stability issues on Ubuntu and Mint, UX issues on some Fedora based ones, and Puppy Linux, compatibility issues in Elementary (and fixes that were available in Ubuntu never made it to Elementary and I got tired of waiting). I've gone through way too many distros finding the one that works for me and none have been really as pleasant as described by people. For work I have to use a Mac, and the inconsistencies in keyboard shortcuts annoys me each and every day. Not to mention non - standard UI components stand out like a sore thumb - especially window maximizing, rescaling, browser and IDE shortcuts, etc. I wouldn't be using it if I didn't have to. Honestly, the OS that I have had the least trouble with and the most enjoyment was Windows XP, closely followed by 7. 8 was a mess of UI and UX oddities, and 10 is only marginally better. If there was a version of windows that was as streamlined as XP for the modern world, I'd fork out $50-100 for it considering the time it would save me and my time being worth more than the hassle, and that my contribution might help subsidize the cheaper community or pirated editions of the OS.

JetSpiegel• 8 years ago

Moving my parents' PC to Elementary cut down the support time to single-digit hours per annum.

That and making sure Firefox has uBlock Origin configured.

Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

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