Every workstation in my office runs Elementary. Around half of our employees came to the company with little or no prior technical experience, and it's worked out pretty well.
Yes, because elementary OS is not Ubuntu. In the past, we carried newer versions of GTK or other core libraries, so pretending to be Ubuntu would actually do more harm than good.
However, we have added an `--upstream` or `-u` flag to lsb_release like other Linux-based OSes to point to an upstream release if the downstream release is not supported. I believe this has been adopted for installers of tools like Ruby and Node.
What else do you need for an OS now? As a developer what I need is a browser a terminal and an IDE. Everything else just need to be fast and non-distracting.
Just last week I wrote a blog post about installing eOS on my SO's parents PC. They are not technical at all yet they have had (close to) no problem with switching from Windows to Linux thanks to eOS.
I have the exact opposite experience - the microphone doesn't work, everything is incredibly slow, my SO is buying a Windows 10 licence this christmas. It's a shame, the user was just fine with Cinnamon on Debian 5 years ago, but that machine and software is no longer good enough.
"Linux" and "everything is incredibly slow" should not belong in the same sentence. Did you try installing an up-to-date Debian? Not sure if Debian packages Pantheon desktop already, but there are plenty of workable alternatives.
For the microphone not working, you'd have to check what's going on in Pulseaudio and ALSA - both of these can be problematic at times.
> Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition.
This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.
This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs, so there were no drivers that one could install on a mainline Linux distribution. It's really a shame that all the Android drivers are Android specific. The machine wasn't bought with Linux in mind, so the exotic hardware not working isn't really that big of a surprise. The reason Linux was installed was because the OEM Windows 10 that came with it was designed for a different market and it also eventually borked itself - complained about updates yet wasn't capable of updating itself. I got tired of trying to debug it remotely and installed linux. Hopefully with a retail license of Windows 10, we'll be able to install a pure non-crappified Windows 10 version and let it be. And the retail license will allow us to transfer it to whatever the next hardware will be.
There really is no difference between hardware support on Debian and Fedora given that the kernels remain the same - this isn't the case most of the time of course as Debian maintains stability whilst Fedora is very close to upstream most of the time.
> This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs
IIRC, there was such a chipset with a PowerVR GPU. In that case, you'd pretty much be SOL. You'd have to run Windows 10 and hope that a from-scratch install of W10 can pick up the proper drivers from the "updates" channel - which I wouldn't be sure about. Most other hardware is far better behaved.
I'm new to Linux (switched from macOS) and I ended up on Debian Gnome after testing many including Elementary. I don't know why but somehow the same DE works better on Debian (as long as I select non-free and testing) than on the other distros that I tested. At least in my case.
Just FYI, if you have to buy Windows, you can get a working license key from eBay for <$5 (I've used three different keys from different sellers with no issues).
for a time they gave away windows 10 for free for anyone with 8. all those people who upgraded all have the same serial so there are probably millions of computers with it. this simply associates yer VM/computer with that serial and goes and activates. So its definitely not the most legal thing in the world, but its not like you are going to get caught since you are using the same serial number as millions of other folks.
That sounds like a bummer, everything was working just fine pretty much out-of-the-box, INCLUDING printer, scanner and WIFI, which are/were notoriously frustrating to set up on a Linux machine.
So Elementary OS is essentially what Redhat Linux used to advertise itself as, but never quite was? A comprehensive, integrated desktop OS built on GNU/Linux?
When people ask me for a "user-friendly" or newbie-friendly Linux Desktop experience, I recommend either Elementary OS or Mint Cinnamon Edition, depending if they are coming from macOS or Windows, respectively.
This is true so long as they're not in some need to always be using the latest kernel or packages (e.g. casually curious desktop user, or developers looking to use standard interblag languages/tools). People who are setting up the machine for their parents or aunt or uncle, or who are just wanting to "get into Linux" by using it some of the time.
Both of them focus on an approachable UX, OOTB functionality, and stability. Updates tend to be minor desktop-centric improvements, building on the same kernel and base packages over a year-and-some period, as they are both built on top of Ubuntu LTS. Things change less often, so they break less often.
If they really do desire some newer software version that isn't backed by the Ubuntu LTS, the PPA system is there to fall back on. It's certainly no AUR, but for people who want a very middle-of-the-road experience, where the OS gets out of your way so you can get things done, it's a decent balance.
I have not experienced the version upgrade experience in Elementary for a while, but in Mint I have had better experiences with version upgrades than with any other non-rolling desktop distro. Reliable version upgrades are an under-appreciated aspect by longtime Linux nerds (myself included) who think nothing of a quick backup and re-install because of segmented /home partitions, have self-hosted backup systems, or other such advanced configurations. It is the main reason I don't recommend the non-LTS Ubuntu desktops, because of the number of times I have seen the upgrade go awry for less savvy users, e.g. from 17.04 to 17.10.
As a final note, the only reason I don't recommend Pop! or Ubuntu itself, is how unfamiliar the GNOME interface metaphors tend to feel to newbies. I realize other people completely disagree with this approach when recommending Linux distros.
pop! shares dna with elementary (same people worked on both) and probably is closer to that definition. E.g. backed by a company with actual customer support. Different aesthetics though.
It’s worth developing: Pop! is the fork of Elementary by System76, which is known for high-quality open-source laptops/desktops. I have never tried either so I can’t assess the quality. From the screenshots I have seen, it remains Linux, so not as smooth as macOS.
yeah pop is just using the gnome desktop (with custom theming, a few extensions, and an improved set of default keyboard shortcuts.
They have collaborated with elementary in a few areas though. Instead of gnome software, they have Pop Shop, which I believe is a fork of the elementary app center.
They also use their own installer, which I believe was a collaboration with elementary os.
While I have sympathies for System76 and Debian, there is no way I am going to install an OS with this name.
- How am I supposed to pronounce this? pop? popos? pop-OS? What should I do with the special characters?
- What happens if I accidentally paste this into the shell?
- What associations should the name "Pop!_OS" have? Appart from the english "pop open" something, in German there is: "Popo" -> Childs word for "bum", "poppen" -> "to hump". Both not exactly favorable.
Also, who comes up with names like this?
Have you talked to any marketing person to this before deciding on a name.
If you want professionals to put this on their machines, better make sure it sounds vaguely like something you might be able to put trust into.
For as long as it existed, Red Hat Linux was the closest thing to a "standard" choice for Linux desktop users. Comparable perhaps to the role of Debian GNU/Linux today, except that Debian used to be very hard to even install prior to 2005 or so. "A comprehensive, integrated desktop" is a subjective matter though. Plenty of people would say that most Linux distros have been providing that for a long time.
I love the idea of having a Linux distro that emulates macOS, but I see no point in copying only the vague look, when it still differs in basic functionality, like using different keyboard shortcuts.
I don’t understand why (based on semi-thorough googling in the past) it is not possible to change all shortcuts to be like macOS (cmd-c instead of ctrl-c etc.)
One of the best things about macOS is the special character inputs, which is one place I think Apple has outshone their competitors for a while. Even if Elementary doesn’t introduce the same keybindings it would be nice to have some set up automatically without having to fiddle with the compose key settings. It’s a very common UX issue imho and also an area where you can easily “beat Windows”
I don't know if it's what the OP meant, but on macOS you can hold a letter key, and it will pop up a little dialog with a bunch of similar characters (hold 'n' and chose from 'n' with various diacritical marks), and you can just press the corresponding number key to choose it. I'ts not as fast as a dedicated key shortcut if you're constantly using the same character, but it's far easier if you're only occasionally using various characters and don't want to remember different shortcuts.
Just tested this - it seems like a handy feature but apparently also dependent on the application using a specific textbox from the macOS UI toolkit. So it doesn't work in iTerm, and probably not in Firefox either? So not an "OS" feature exactly, and probably something the GTK folks could provide an equivalent for if they don't already.
On macOS you can also type things like Opt-U to get an umlaut, followed by typing the letter you want underneath it (eg for ü, ë, ä, ö). ß is Opt-S, I think é is Opt-E E, etc. I prefer that to the AltGr+key shortcuts, which I find harder to remember. I don't use the Mac as my primary OS anymore, but that's one of the things I miss the most.
I'm not sure what GP means by special characters, but I use fedora workstation 30 for my day to day life and I can attest that Arabic and Chinese input are absolute garbage compared to OS X.
Arabic key layout is different (which fine, OS X uses something non-standard anyways), but makes it absolutely impossible to customize it. Text boxes frequently jumble themselves up with left/right mixed input, while OS X handles this as expected.
Chinese input is slightly better, as you don't have to deal with order wonkiness. But pinyin input is halfhearted at best, and requires a bunch of qol changes.
Mostly the Latin-1 subset (plus East Asian overlines and the Chinese ‘v’ tone mark) and other characters that appear in names, but also “”‘’–•—¿¡§ are all rather useful if you can get to them. The math symbols for partial, adjoint, sqrt, almost equal, not equal, equivalent, isomorphic, geq and leq are also nice; others like sum and integral are pretty but require too many decorations to be useful anyway. On OS X last time I used it if you press eg Option-u you get a hanging diaeresis and the next character you type will be umlautted if possible. You can enable this on X with [Compose]+:, but you usually have to fiddle with settings to enable it, and that’s not the Elementary philosophy.
Too often I want to use the proper spelling of someone’s name and I run off to Google to get the symbol.
The specific bindings vary by person and hardly matters, but having an extra modifier in the Command key is invaluable. It lets you properly "namespace" key binds (ctrl and meta for emacs commands, CMD for global) and prevents hacks like copying text in terminal being different from copying text anywhere else (ctrl-c vs ctrl-shift-c in windows and linux, always CMD-c in macos).
The CMD key is much better utilized by MacOS than the windows/super key is by windows/linux. Most OS-level things are under command, and I'm free to use readline/emacs bindings in any text inputs across the whole OS and never have them conflict with global bindings.
Windows/linux still defaults to many OS commands being in the ctrl space (like ctrl-c for copy, not windows-c) which causes clobbering in the terminal, forcing people to use ctrl-shift-c, for instance.
tbf, windows key shortcuts are actually OS specific. Clipboarding/etc must be implemented by the app in question.
i think a better example would be alt-keys (alt-tab/etc)
I've been using Elementary as my main OS for ~4 years now. No complaints. Everything runs smooth and nice.
However, since they build on the latest Ubuntu LTS release the Kernel is slighlty outdated and may not support the latest hardware. This can be fixed easily using a little tool called "ukuu" that will install a newer kernel for you https://github.com/teejee2008/ukuu
What a spectacular hack! Instead of going around your package manager in such a spectacular fashion, why not just switch to a distro which provides an up-to-date kernel along with associated packages. For example, how does this program handle proprietary Nvidia drivers?
Elementary OS can be installed on top of Fedora. This way you can try it out and go back to vanilla Gnome if you so prefer. While still leveraging the Fedora ecosystem.
Thank you so much for this! I really like the look and feel of Elementary from trying it a couple of years ago, but wouldn't want to leave Fedora now to go back to it just for the feel.
How does eOS cope with multiple displays? This is something both Gnome/Unity and KDE suck at.
KDE just gets total confused when I connect or disconnect a new display, windows jump all over the place, sometimes they move out of the visible screen area if I switch between hiDPI and non-hiDPI displays, or even just disconnect and then reconnect a UHD monitor. I've seen some reports pointing fingers at Qt as the main culprit, tbh I don't care, it doesn't work for the end user.
The latest Ubuntu on Gnome at least doesn't get confused, but it does not recognize my monitor sometimes (I have to turn it off then on again, for example when waking up from suspend), and switching between displays takes about 20-30 seconds (I have my laptop screen disabled if a monitor is connected). But it doesn't remember my open windows, nor the past position of my terminal, which is set to auto-exec on login. This is something that works much better in KDE.
Wait a minute! I use KDE Plasma for at least 2 years constantly and it knows my monitors. I use one at work and one at home and when I plug them it automatically changes resolution and keeps the wallpaper I set for each. Also, got a lot of colleagues switch to Plasma from Gnome for exactly this reason!
Does it keep your windows in place? Resize/move them properly when you switch to a smaller resolution screen then resize/move them back again when you go back to UHD?
I found the situation is worse if I extend my monitor's screen onto the laptop, because when I unplug the monitor and plug it back again, all hell breaks loose.
Mostly the same as Gnome, since eOS is Gnome based. If you're interested Egee on YouTube does a test called "Distro Delves" on many distros, Elementry included, and one of his tests he does on all of them is multi-monitor support.
Strange, because I use plasma (and XFCE before that) and apart some minor issue with scaling it works without problems on a 4k laptop monitor plus 2 external HiDpi monitors
I installed this on my XPS 13 this morning, and it's really nice. It has a lot of overall polish that most DE's are missing, it looks and feels cohesive. It installed without any issues, and I had no problem with my Ubuntu-leaning dotfiles. I will probably keep this for the near future, it's very pleasant.
I find "very pleasant" to be the best description of Elementary I can think. Every other distro I've used have these little annoyances which put I up with, but the folks at Elementary seem to iron them out. For example, weird font and menu issues in KDE, space hogging title bars and weird workflow in Pop, occasional screen flickering in Mint.
Is global menu possible on Elementary yet? Searches only turn up old links for the now-dead unity style, but nothing based on libdbusmenu.
Still seems to me that Plasma with libdbusmenu-qt5 is the closest interface paradigm to MacOS for people trying to swap (not that there aren’t other problems), but glib and gtk versions exist so someone out there must be working on it?
This is proving exceptionally hard to search the web for, so apologies if this is out of date, but it seems the answer was “no, and it never will be, so stop asking” as of 2018: https://twitter.com/danielfore/status/991836014070022144
Was this from before Elementary was positioning as the MacOS replacement? I can’t be the only one who thinks the global menu is one of the MacOS interface’s killer features.
I understand why it’s been hard under the X paradigm, but those crazy dbus people are pushing entire application interfaces through IPC now.
Wow, that guy seems to be completely out of touch with desktop UI and UX. His main source of arguments is that iOS and Android doesn't do X, so Elementary shouldn't either - a what now? Is he really comparing a touchbased small screen device OS that is primarily used for casual applications to keyboard/mouse desktop that is often used in a complex professional environments?
That's one way to kill any credibility you had I guess.
I agree on the substance of your comment re: interfaces, but let’s not put too much stock in a random tweet. He might not mean any of that.
In any case, this release of Elementary isn’t any more paired down than the latest GNOME shell.
They seem to have a relatively sane approach to building GUI toolkit (though “sane” is relative given this particular domain) so I’m curious to see where they take things even if I don’t use it.
It does have global menu. Figuring out what things are called in the new language of plasma and plasmoids takes some reading to figure, but that particular part of the UI is fine on KDE once you configure it to your liking.
I value a global menu as a quality of life thing, and from what I've seen, this isn't on the roadmap for GNOME 3. There's currently one implementation out there on GitHub and the GNOME Extensions index, but it has dependencies that are either marked for deprecation or are already deprecated.
Seems like Plasma or MATE are the only real options if you want a functional global menu.
I’m kind of considering moving to this and Ardour instead of MacOS and Logic Pro due to Apple’s recent commitment to making overpriced laptops with the SSD and RAM soldered to the board, that lack the most basic ports I need to use without annoying adapters.
As a video editor, the lack of an integrated SD card slot alone kills any future purchases.
Elementary OS is really good, I think you'll like it quite a bit. Also check out Bitwig - if you've used Ableton you'll find it familiar. Guitarix is a really cool free amp emulator as well.
I really love Linux, especially on the desktop. With that said, I've stopped attempting to use it to make music. There's just too much babysitting that needs to be done [1]. A 2015 15" MBP with Ableton is the perfect machine for me and lets me stay in my creative zone. Your experience might be different though, good luck!
While I use i3 on archlinux, I think elementary OS looks great and is a great alternative for less tech savvy users. I am very grateful to the elementary OS community for it existence. One other alternative could be Cinnamon.
They absolutely do. If you're tech savvy, they're optional. If you're not, or not interested in learning this stuff, they're required.
You can absolutely be tech savvy and prefer the ease of use of Elementary OS's default options. But the converse is not true. You cannot be uninterested in tech and have a good experience running i3 on Arch Linux.
Toggles, buttons, sliders, look like they could be on a white plastic physical device. Flat for sure but more skeuomorphic than macOS in its current state imo.
To me the elementary theme looks like a slightly more flat/matte version of the Mavericks version of Aqua. It might not be in style these days but I like it a lot.
I so happen to have spent the past month working on a mostly-fruitless attempt to get Mavericks running on modern hardware, so I certainly understand the viewpoint. But I can't say I see the similarity at all. Have you looked at a Mavericks machine recently? https://512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library/os-x-...
Installed Elementary on my Dad's Laptop last week. He is 75 now, and got immediately productive with it, using Firefox for Email and Banking.
His Windows machines ALWAYS clogged up with Spy and Malware after a few months. The last time, the suspend function broke and shut-down the PC immediately, instead of suspending it. Reboot took 2minutes+ for _some_ reason.
Contrast this to the Mac Laptop of my mother which is fast, and clean after 5y+ of using it.
Looks like, Windows is untenable for the less computer literate at this point. Too easy to mess up the system.
I have high hopes that Elementary/Linux will stay fast and clean for a while. The old show-stoppers: Installation, Hardware Support and Usability are all working smoothly so far.
Unfortunately Elementary has so far struggled with the 1920x1080 screen on my Huawei Matebook D (bought a few months before the scandal). I haven't installed Hera yet, but hopefully the new text size option works as well as I'd like it to.
Otherwise my experience with Elementary has been... not so bad. The speakers are too quiet for some reason, my university's Wifi won't accept my credentials (every other network is fine) and occasionally Firefox crashes the world, but that's all, so far.
Wish list: a stable, possibly read-only[-only], update of ext2fsd, and a proper Paintbrush clone. Also, .txt files should not automatically open in Code, which would probably scare my mom.
I'm happy to report that the annoying text size issue is fixed in the new version of Elementary. However, the Firefox crashes still happen, and are the biggest issue with the system. I can't recommend it as long as it's still panicking every few days. (Firefox is not the only app, but certainly the most likely, for me to be using when it freezes; no, I haven't delved too far into this, nor have I made any strange modifications to the system.)
It works with the Wifi chip, speakers are too quiet (?), suspend/power is fine (yay!), graphics seem to work. Overall a very near miss.
I feel like the Elementary folks have a lot of the right ideas about how to build a desktop OS and a third-party software ecosystem around it. (In particular: They have a HIG, and seem to make an effort to make their platform appealing for developers.) But it sounds like they struggle with execution in some ways:
I haven't tried Elementary, but I've tried a lot of distros, and I always come back to Ubuntu because it comes the closest to just working. (It doesn't do as well as MacOS or Windows in the 'just working' department, in my experience (let the flames begin!), but it does pretty well, and better than any other Linux-based OS I've tried.)
And although reliable statistics seem to be hard to come by, my impression is that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux-based desktop OS by a pretty wide margin.
I think Elementary should have focused on just shipping Pantheon as their end product. GNOME has had issues not only in the performance department, but it's also a very different type of minimalism for a DE that's supposed to be the mainstream pick for normal users. Elementary has adopted a far more conventional DE that feels as simple as GNOME, but far more usable.
But I'm never going to use Elementary over Ubuntu or Fedora, and I wouldn't install it on a non-tech person's computer. Redhat employs all the systemd/kernel folks so you're getting a super stable system with lots of updates and vanilla packages. Ubuntu has lots of documentation and a huge community. In terms of just gettting shit done as a programmer or a normal user Elementary is fighting an uphill battle. Now if I could get Fedora or Ubuntu with Pantheon as the default choice over GNOME - sign me up.
Since you mention the day-to-day for programmers, what are you missing?
For me, I consider this essential: terminal emulator, editor, compiler and related stuff, browser.
All of that is independent of your desktop environment. I personally don't use any gnome or similar, just use a normal WM like its the 90s, with xterm as a very important piece.
He is wrong. They shouldn't have focused on throwing a layer on top of a bloated base-image. They wanted cohesion, and cohesion doesn't come from Canonical or Red Hat.
That is not true -- IBM/Redhat is a minority kernel contributor (most are from the IBM group), and Fedora is not an IBM product or project. Fedora is independent and often considered an alpha/beta/canary version of RHEL (the latter is IBM's priority, without a doubt).
I'm never going to use Elementary either but I dont think its really targeted towards current Linux users, especially experienced ones. Its targeted towards Windows/macOS users.
How useful is Elementary OS for people who are more familiar with technology and things like Ubuntu? Would I be able to install Nvidia drivers and CUDA, build my own ffmpeg binaries, etc? or is it more aimed at installing on machines for non-technical people?
I was trying to figure out why the laptop in the header image looks so huge, and I think I did. The UI scaling is really really small for a normal ~15 inch laptop. If that laptop is supposed to be about 13 inches, the dock should probably be 50-100% bigger. A small issue, but it bugged me.
I have been using Elementary OS for a while. It's nice to use, but the biggest issue is that there is no way to upgrade it to a newer distro version when it comes.
I am stuck to elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki and only way to upgrade to the latest version is to reinstall the whole thing.
According to their article it sounds like you should be receiving updates. I'm not sure if that was different during Loki though.
> Due to the rolling nature of elementary OS updates, users of elementary OS 5 Juno get the update to 5.1 Hera alongside regular system updates from AppCenter.
I will probably do the same - I tried using the last release (Juno) as a daily driver and found it to be a little more effort than stock Ubuntu (mostly around getting PPAs going, Flatpak support may make that less necessary). I suppose the obvious competitor at this point for "beautiful Ubuntu derivative" is Deepin[1] but I found it to be even more difficult to configure and install stuff on.
Serious question time. What benefit will I get from running something like Elementary over Ubuntu? Forgive my ignorance, but honestly the whole OS looks like it's just a fork of Ubuntu with a couple of swapped in applications, and a GTK3 theme on top of GNOME trying to make it look like a ten year old version of macOS.
I hate to be so negative, but the "new greeter" they are showing looks like something from Windows 98, and worst of all, functionally no better than Ubuntu. What purpose doe s this actually serve if it's neither aesthetics nor functionality?
I would feel a lot safer recommending either Ubuntu or Linux Mint...
The majority of Linux distros are just forks of other major distros with swapped apps/DEs, so no need to expect magic.
Elementary definitely has a nicer software center UI and I personally love their terminal application more than others (even though I currently use Kubuntu). Many people like it because it reminds them of macOS, even though you don't.
And you're kind of right about GTK, but elementaryOS uses the Pantheon desktop environment built on top of GTK.
Elementary has the most gorgeous look for my taste.
Unfortunately, at least when I last tried during Loki, it's also extremely limited. I couldn't even install Firefox. Software in general seems to be limited solely to their bespoke storefront, which I'm not opposed to on principle, but (at the time anyway) it was pretty limited.
You said it, the biggest difference is in the UI and UX, and while you do not like it, many do.
Like explaining to people who dislike veggie why veggie is delicious, it's difficult to explain why you like things to people who don't share the same view for something so subjective.
As a mac user and web developper, I really appreciate the attention to detail elementary tries to put into their UI/UX.
I'm not very found of Mac OS, and my next machine is most probably going to be a Thinkpad. I've tried several distros on VMs on my Windows PC, including Debian, Mint, Arch, MX Linux, and elementary. Out of all these, the two I liked the most were MX Linux and Elementary. I think I'm going to stick to Elementary though as it feels more premium and I like the slow update pace.
I think it's worse than other Ubuntu distros as they lock it down "for my own safety". But for parents and other people not too good with computers it's a good windows alternative
This. When my FIL died he had about 10 versions of Thinkpads in his apartment of various ages and capabilities. I installed Juno and gave them to many of the family with limited computer experience (think 75-90 year olds). Their experience has been great!
Now the only problem is when they find out there's a new version I'll be spending Christmas week in NY updating a whole bunch of computers.
This did not work to me - I just got kicked back to the login screen. It changed my background picture though :)
Also tried running eOS in VirtualBox - after installing and reboot all I get is a black screen. I can get the live version running though, so not great, not terrible!
I've used Elementary for a while, beginning in it's beta, Luna and ending in Juno. These days, I just use Windows, as recent changes introduced quite a bit of instability and uncertainty into Desktop Linux environments.
Elementary does one thing and does it well: do UX right. Before getting to know Elementary, I've tried many Linux distros, you name it. I'd always have to spend quite a bit of time tweaking my new install, so it would actually look good and be useful. Elementary has good defaults, you can install a web browser, your favorite productivity tools, and call it a day.
The efforts of team behind the project have resulted into a quite consistent and coherent UI, something all other Linux distros lack. Distros maintainers have less control as they use DEs developed by other people. You can install Pantheon (Elementary's DE) into another distro but it wont feel as good as it does in Elementary. Finally, the other famous DEs, namely KDE and GNOME3, have awful design principles: GNOME3 with it's everything-big-tablet-like, lack of intuitiveness and excess of antifeatures; KDE with it's awful looks.
Debian but with things changed a bit to be Ubuntu but with things changed a bit to be Mint.
You just draw the line differently.
Personally I'm happy with Debian Stable and Arch, and I barely use the former lately. I don't see the point in creating an entirely new distribution that is effectively just a package change.
I use Ubuntu servers for work a decent amount because it's common, that's about it.
Ubuntu gave up unity and just use gnome. I would like to use a distro which actively improve its UX in the future. Gnome/KDE has a history of implementing all the fancy things(animation, customization,touch support) while ignoring the basics(performance, consistency), unity had the best desktop/laptop experience but it's gone, elementary at least have a good direction to go.
Every single bit of the desktop is nicer than stock GNOME. Preferences, the terminal, the dock, window decorations, you name it. It’s just visually polished and _consistent_ to a degree I haven’t found in any other distro yet.
I agree. It's the tiniest things, like math operations in the search bar, autosaving in the text editor, terminal knowing that I want to copy something when I select the text and press Ctrl + C...
+ NO MENU BARS. I'm allergic to locating things in a drop down within a drop down within a drop down.
Also the preinstalled terminal has case-insensitive tab completion which is nice as well.
I've had some technical problems with past eOS versions but it's one of few distros where you get the feeling the developers are actually trying to make it more usable and polished. It starts with a consistent, nice-looking UI and doesn't stop with details like great default wallpapers.
Copyright attaches to the literal code, text, or art. Making something that looks vaguely similar cannot infringe on the owners copyright.
Trademark covers the idea of knock offs but honestly similarities are skin deep and would be trying to protect vague similarities where there exists no confusion.
Even if it were possible to make a case Apple owes more to open source than vice versa and it would be terrible publicity
This is quite a long-running project, and has tens of thousands of man-hours invested in it. Yet you, taking several seconds to post an Internet comment, declare it a "half-assed Linux distro," without even having properly read the website.
The Elementary OS project develops many of their own applications, have multiple custom themes, does relentless work ensuring available packages are stable and usable for each release, and they have their own DE. Also, many of the applications that weren't specifically made by the project were inspired by the project to be further developed-- thus boosting their userbase and volunteer developers.
Now, think what you will about the project, but this isn't a valid criticism.
Everything is ultimately built on the work of others. Do you call Brave or Vivaldi "half-assed" because they didn't write their own browser engine from scratch?
The fact that they didn't start at zero doesn't make their contribution any less meaningful.
If you are going to contribute to a Linux Desktop Environment, you are not the target audience for Elementary.
Elementary wants to be “the Apple of Linux”, to attract less-technical users and switchers from other OSes. Their development philosophy is similarly top-down: someone sets a “vision” and a small group of people gets to implement it. If you are a coder and you value bottom-up development, you should really look elsewhere.
Yep, that page is perfectly ordered by priority: funding, free labour for annoying tasks, and only towards the end, if you really really have to, you can give us a hand under the hood or even (dead last! Why are you still here?!?) help with design.
Vala is probably the easiest way to work with Gtk+ anyway, so might as well be Vala if the stack is Gtk. I don't know Vala well, but wouldn't mind jumping in with it, scares me a lot less than Gtk in C.
Be that as it may, it was a mistake to roll a different language for this in the first place. It's not really useful for anything else, so unless you're totally dying to contribute to GNOME (very few people do), there's no reason whatsoever to learn it.
Vala is about as easy to learn as any language could ever be. If you have experience with Java, C++, C# or D you can probably already read 97% of Vala code. And if it’s your first statically typed language, it’s one of the simplest.
Plus, most people don’t know most languages, so no matter what you choose, most devs have a language barrier. Vala, again, is very easy to pick up — certainly easier than C or C++ and probably easier than Java/C#/D.
I am sad they didn't decide to build it with Objective C. It would have made sense given Objective C could work well with GTK, and Apples devs would have felt half at home. Swift would be cool nowadays. https://rhx.github.io/SwiftGtk/
New apps in the Pantheon system could I guess be written in any language.
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted, as this is a legitimate issue. If the authors want someone else but themselves to contribute to this MacOS clone, they should use a more common language.
Why would they actually log out of one user and log in as another? Wouldn't it benefit the parents to have all family members on the same user so they can actually see what their kids are up to?
Yet another demented linux thread where everyone doesn't use arch. Arch is no more than pacman -Syu unless you've done something retarded. Arch is the least demanding distro, unless you're totally useless or clueless. I use arch by the way.
