I don't agree with all of the design choices in Elementary OS, but I appreciate the sense of craft it has that largely vanished from mainstream software from 2012-2014 onward in favor of a dollar store version of IKEA minimalism. I hope it can continue to carry that torch until the industry finds its way back.
Elementary OS is the pinnacle of a nice-looking OS with questionable technical decisions under-the-hood. The biggest one? No upgrades. You literally can't go from 5 to 6, or 6 to 7, without a full reinstall. There's not a terminal command for the adventurous either.
That, to me, is extremely nasty. You have to take everything out of your computer, and put it back, every year to get the latest features and make sure you are secure? That's so bad, it feels like false marketing to call it "Elementary OS." You might as well download a random customized Windows ISO from the internet and disable Windows Update forever. At least Microsoft Edge would still get updates for years but Elementary OS's browser won't for very long. Unless, of course, you enjoy taking personal responsibility for updating every PC of those non-technical folks you recommend it to or install it for. I'd happily install it for quite a few relatives who would otherwise use Chromebooks, but that's a big showstopper.
I can read about how they've improved the Music app or made the App Center better for developers all day, but they have this massive hole in the ship that makes it fundamentally unsuitable for the intended purpose and they still haven't fixed it after 7 versions. Elementary users don't find pleasure in reinstalling their OS on weekends.
Yes, they lost me on the lack of upgrades. When a new version came out, I saw there were a few random blogs posts on how to do a very much unsupported upgrade through the command line. But I avoided the risk. Since I'd have to do a reinstall anyway, I downloaded stock Ubuntu and never looked back. And I was a happy Elementary OS user. Alas, I can understand where they were coming from, though, on that decision. They are/were a small, scrappy team and the QA effort for testing upgrade processes is non-trivial. They had to pick their battles on what to support. I didn't agree with their choice, but I can empathize with them on why they did it.
I 100% agree, they can prioritize however they want, but please for the love of well-meaning techies, drop the "replacement for Windows and macOS" talk, and make a pop-up warning that reinstallation is going to be necessary in the future before you download, so that you don't spread it everywhere only to discover you've just sunk everyone.
It's really not that hard, just a "Note: Elementary OS does not support in-place upgrades. You will need to reinstall Elementary OS every time a new major version comes out every 2 years. If you want to support our in-place upgrade development, please donate. < Donate > < I Understand >".
Yeah, the lack of a sane upgrade path really is a massive issue that should be labeled more clearly. (And a headline level bullet point in any written review of it.) The lack of a sane upgrade path completely undercuts their marketing message.
This is an odd critique. If it's an issue that someone cares about, they should be allowed to comment about it as long as it's within the guidelines.
There doesn't seem to be a guideline that defines the number of times someone can comment about a specific topic relative to the total number of comments within a specific amount of time.
Two of the three comments are also replies to someone who replied to the first, so it's not like the person is spamming the same message over and over again. People are allowed to have discussions.
> they should be allowed to comment (…) People are allowed to have discussions.
My comment doesn’t contradict that. On the contrary, I do think their particular experience adds value to the thread.
> it's not like the person is spamming the same message over and over again.
After reading the three comments multiple times, I disagree. The comments were (they’ve since been deleted) superficially different but none added to the conversation over the others. I would even say the repetition detracted from the point, since it made it seem like a personal gripe instead of a legitimate technical complaint.
You’re criticizing the fact that the person commented three times. While you’re not directly telling them “don’t do that”, you’re still admonishing someone for doing something well within the guidelines and even intentions of this site, to talk about things that are interesting to the user.
I have asked them to consider if the way they were going about the matter was appropriate. I have even explained to you what prompted it: I found their point valid and worthwhile, but in my view the repetition weakened their stance. Considering they deleted the extra comments a while back, perhaps they agree.
Respectfully, you seem unreasonably angry about this matter and I do not wish to continue a conversation where the other party keeps assuming the worst of my replies. There is no malice or ill intent in my post. If you see any, that is on you.
If you didn't want people to assume the worst, then maybe you should reconsider that how your write and what you say could be interpreted in many ways, and not sound so negative and admonishing when you criticize others?
Notice that I didn't tell you what to do, I simply asked you to consider if the way you were going about the matter was appropriate.
It's not just inconvenient, I've been personally burned by this issue and am livid that Elementary OS markets itself in this way without a warning. Imagine installing Elementary OS on a bunch of PCs for charity only to discover that those users are going to be completely insecure in 2 years because you weren't informed. You might never meet those people again, and who knows what will happen to them. It's reasonable to assume a user knows how to update their computer once in a while; it is not reasonable to assume an "elementary" user knows how to reinstall their OS.
@pacifika: The Ubuntu LTS core will not help the built-in apps that won't receive updates (i.e. Mail, Web, Music, the Parthenon desktop environment), and the LTS core for version 6 (which was current until yesterday) is 20.04 LTS, so it will be obsolete in about 2 years. If you installed Elementary OS for a friend a week ago, that's not what you expected. So, you got 3 1/2 years on the long end of support and 2 years on the short end between releases.
I'd bet that money and humanpower would have fixed the problem, but they didn't have enough of either. The problem was that Elementary OS was a very ambitious project, but they didn't have the same people and money resources that an Ubuntu or Red Hat has. Has that's changed? (I don't know.) And maybe this is a communication issue on their part. They innovated with adding a payment button on their downloads page years ago, which ruffled a lot of feathers. Maybe they should have gone bolder and added larger payment tiers. "Want free upgrades? Click here to pay $600,000 to fund a team of 3 for two years!"
It's interesting that this is regarded as a problem for Elementary OS but the far-and-away market leader in Linux, Red Hat, makes the same decision. There is no supported upgrade path between RHEL major versions besides reinstallation.
This makes me wonder... is the policy itself problematic, or the support window the problem? If Elementary offered five- or seven-year support cycles, would the objection remain?
Upgrades? I just make a backup of my homedir to an external SSD. Flatpaks are recognized straight after reinstalling the (upgraded) OS, and the odd .deb package I install takes seconds.
I once tried to make its DE work on another distro and it wasn't great, but it wasn't a full effort. Wish that could be easier, because as you say, the no upgrades thing bugs.
I’m not sure that’s bad per se.. people should keep their OS separate from the data. Applications should be self-contained but the bigger issue would be app upgrades to run on the new OS.
That is maybe a facet of the change, but there's more to it.
It's also a certain attention to detail with regard to things like use of whitespace, the layout and flow of widgets, the types of widgets used, and user experience in general. These things have become increasingly phoned-in, with little thought applied; just dump it all into a grid and apply copious padding and you're done. Things that don't fit get removed or buried in dialog tunnels and there is no effort to make anything clear to the user.
There have been flat designs in the past that don't suffer these issues, like the earlier designs of Mac OS (System 1.0-7.5), which worked fine on 1-bit and grayscale displays but had a lot of thought and research put into their user experience.
This all got thrown out in the transition to flat design. Not only was skeumorphism discarded, but so was care for UI/UX in general. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
I liked elementary, but progress has slowed to a crawl since the two co-founders had a falling out [1]. Of course as outsiders we probably don't know everything but the other founder's (the one who left) offer to keep working on the project for free without payment sounded pretty good, and it's disappointing that Danielle Foré seemingly didn't accept it (Although I might be missing some things here, this is just what it sounded like to me). A shame, they really had something good going with the overall design and attention to detail!
That being said, the changes in this release look cool and promising, hoping they can get back on track!
I fully believe that Elementary survives only because 99% of those purported 400,000 downloads are really just YouTubers racing each other to apply some anime wallpaper and show it off on YouTube.
I firmly believe that Elementary OS has no utility over Arch/Fedora/Ubuntu and that any income they receive from donors is money ill-spent.
I like some of the built-in apps they have. They're nicely done and they're fast, I just wish regular Ubuntu would of adopted them into their ecosystem officially. I have no sane way to pull them into POP OS which I prefer for the OOTB experience I have.
Yes, it's based on Ubuntu, but it's not a remix. It's too different to be one:
- no Snap
- Flatpak instead
- Most standard Ubuntu apps missing
- In-house replacements for many Ubuntu standard components: their own browser, their own email client, their own calendar, their own media player, etc.
You can install the Pantheon desktop environment on standard Ubuntu.
* would _have_ adopted. "Would've" is short for "would have" not "would of" which never ever occurs in English. This is a common error but it drives me crazy.
English surprisingly (to most) is a second language for me so apologies, I always seem to forget the little nuance.
Also, I really just want their "Code" editor, but I don't want the headache of compiling it, I want it installed as a package, but its a pain to find it for me, not sure if I'm Googling incorrectly, but their editors name is not SEO friendly at all.
Yep! That's the one, its really nicely done, I'm surprised no other distro has adopted it or pulled it into their package management. It's not an overtly complicated editor I don't think, looks to be using standard GTK components which is actually really nice.
It seems to me it never took off which I partly blame on the direction. It's beautiful but a bit too simple and I had a locked in feeling I haven't felt before while using Linux (to the contrary in fact). As long as I remained within the ecosystem it was fine, but otherwise it was like jumping off a cliff. That strains the ecosystem and emphasizes available software a lot. How fun the OS is to use becomes a factor of everything besides the OS.
I couldn't really use it like that and I didn't need to anymore either as GNOME had caught up and I'm now a happy Fedora + GNOME user. It also shares a "simple" and macOS like design language/goals, but with many advantages from technical, development backing, and community size standpoints.
Where is Wayland support standing for Elementary? I'm glad the project is still around, but the dream of a Mac-like HID experience won't be complete without gesture support and smooth windowing. Now that KDE and GNOME are both using Wayland sessions and implement 1:1 touchpad gestures, it's hard to recommend the Pantheon desktop (even if a lot of the apps are excellent!)
I hate to add even more of a wishlist, but in addition to moving towards a Wayland environment, it would be nice to see an immutable root as well. SteamOS on deck has sold me on this concept; as long as there's plenty of escape hatches and the ability to disable it, I view it as a plus, and no doubt it makes updates excellent. These two features would make Elementary OS the very obvious recommendation for anyone curious about Linux but wanting an environment that actually works and looks nice. Today on Linux, it feels like you are more often than not stuck between choosing one or the other...
Regarding Wayland, it looks like it has been hacked on here and there but doesn't seem to be a priority yet:
As a NixOS user I'll generally agree, as long as there are still options for people who want to use Pantheon on a more traditional OS. Immutable roots are cool, but feel like a novelty when so much software breaks under it. Great to have as an option for sure though.
> Hopefully by the time it is, NVIDIA's driver will have better stability with Wayland compositors.
I think Nvidia's support is pretty much complete. Plasma fixed almost all of it's Wayland/Nvidia bugs (as far as I can see on my desktop) and Mutter has an Nvidia rewrite on the roadmap IIRC. Still not perfect, but the new drivers have stopped 95% of the major glitching caused with the old ones.
We still have to contend with the implicit sync issues when dealing with NVIDIA drivers; there has been work to untangle the mess there, but it's not done yet to my knowledge.
Edit: also a NixOS user, BUT: I am suggesting something more like SteamOS with ABRoot. It's not exactly a solved problem, but I think that future solutions should be focused on not needing to modify the root to deal with things like drivers and system configuration.
Hoping that mutter rewrite comes sooner than later. Currently running GNOME on a Fedora/Nvidia box and it's frustrating to lose features like Night Light when running Wayland with proprietary drivers, as is the glitchiness of Electron apps under GNOME+Wayland+Nvidia (for instance, VS Code is a flickery mess with that setup).
Here's hoping. Things are much smoother on KDE for me, the developers really hauled ass to get the Plasma session working nicely. As of 5.26, I think the only remaining major issue is that it doesn't keep track of monitor configuration, which is due to be solved in 3 weeks with the release of 5.27.
I got Electron apps working nicely by forcing GPU acceleration, but even still I prefer to use the web versions of Discord and Spotify. Firefox has really nice Wayland support, replacing most of my Electron apps besides VS Code and Obsidian.
According to their Github, it hasn't progressed much since 2020-2021[1]. Apparently, there is still a Gala issue and bugs related to Plank Dock/Wingpanel holding it back[2]. There's also a proposal for a Wayland Dock for Elementary OS 7[3] that doesn't seem to have advanced much.
It seems like it was scheduled to be released by version 7, but priorities have changed. Let's hope they can polish it for 8.
Information that wasn't quickly groked from their website but some digging(thanks Wikipedia) revealed.
It's based on Ubuntu LTS, so a Debian-descendant.
I appreciate they're trying to provide a specific type of experience, and it's not really a criticism but as a 30+ year Linux user -- with any new distro that's my first question.
> Sideloading apps and using alt stores like Flathub is a major feature of elementary OS and a competitive edge over closed platforms that only let you install apps from a locked down store.
Unless elementary suddenly competes with iOS, I don’t know which platform they’re actually referring to, all while actually regressing the experience with Vista-style "are you sure" dialogs.
Their dark pattern compelling you to "buy" instead of simply download elementary (for which I doubt many $$$ go to for example the Linux kernel) is still present, too.
It's also weird how they call it "Sideloading" rather than just... installing apps. This is how modern operating systems should work, it's baffling that they bend the rules to make room for the exception.
That being said, I do think it's fine for them to charge for their software experience here. What they're really asking you to pay for is the development of the Pantheon UI, and the desktop/OS portion of it. There's not really any reason to pay that back to the Linux kernel besides good will.
>Their dark pattern compelling you to "buy" instead of simply download elementary (for which I doubt many $$$ go to for example the Linux kernel) is still present, too.
Give them a break! They put their hard work into something that could be useful for a lot of people and on top of that let the user name their price. There's nothing "dark" about that.
The sideloading dialogs are a bit extreme, I agree. But in general I don't see what's wrong with guiding users towards the "happy path" for package management. It's an opinionated system so it might not be everyone's thing but if it makes sense, sure, why not.
Regarding pricing, even if we say they're basically charging money for it, why is that bad? You get the thing under a free license which is still better than commercial proprietary software that doesn't share any of its revenue. And because they allow you to choose how much you pay you can always pay them less and donate to the Linux Foundation yourself (or any of the other underlying software projects that are taking donations). Granted, folks who are new to the Linux universe won't know about this stuff, so a default split would help.
At this point in my life I'm just not willing to look at a desktop environment besides macOS and Windows unless it is completely different. Is there anything out there that is trying radical new concepts and not just trying to emulate macOS/Windows/Gnome/KDE et al?
I noticed in one of your comments in this thread that you are looking for new ideas for UI. As other commenters have said, you might be interested in tiling window managers like i3 [0] or sway [1]. They really are a gem for productivity and sometimes for the eye [2].
However, I love the concept of a scrollable window manager like PaperWM [3]. When I had a smaller screen (24" 16:9) I complained a lot about the unused space on my screen. With PaperWM I was finally happy with its dimensions, because I could have a huge IDE on the left and a small part of terminal on the right. This way I could see if something was being printed to the terminal, while my editor took up 80% of the screen.
PaperWM is interesting. My only experience with scrolling desktops has been bad - because it was a remote desktop connection on a too-small monitor. You're fighting with windows-within-a-window quirkcs and guest/host issues. But when the entire local desktop experience is based around the idea that could change things.
I may try it out. It sounds a bit like playing a real time strategy game with a large scrollable map, something I'm very used to.
Depends on what you mean by completely different. For many, libre/FOSS is a fundamentally different paradigm as you can tweak it ad infinitum and also rely on it being stable (as in: not changing) for a long time. This is a niche, but it's important for some people.
If you mean the UI, then tiling window managers like Sway are quite different.
But I don't think UIs will ever be factor that draws people to Linux et al., it'll mostly be the feeling of freedom.
Do you have much experience with tiling window managers?
While not flashy, I really appreciate the keyboard-driven/instant approach they offer. The killer thing for me: I never guess where something will open
edit: hah, look at all these window manager posts - hi friends
I'm not necessarily looking for anything in particular, just new concepts and ideas. I know I can't go back to the 1960s and experience a completely different evolutionary path... There's certain things that have to exist now no matter what (like... windows)... but I'm very interested in novelty.
I mean, not really, not if you compare it to something like i3, sway or awesomewm. I think when someone is asking for something radically different, then Gnome is not that different from the rest of the ones you listed.
Rather than macOS, as a long time Mac user I actually find GNOME most similar to iPadOS. It's almost exactly what one would get if they were asked to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS.
- Default windowing support amounts to split-screen
- App "icon" style launcher, even using the same sliding-widget model people loathe on iPad
- Quick-settings menu pane in the top corner, almost identical to the iOS/iPad one in GNOME 40
I could go on, but I think it's safe to say that GNOME (especially GNOME 40) is derivative of iPad UI design. Other visual cues (dock, lockscreen, stylesheet, calendar, etc.) are pretty plainly inspired by the Mac UI.
Sigh! --I've said it before and I'll say it again: I know choice is great and all that but, fer feck's sake, why can't the "Linux world" [for want of a better phrase] get their heads round the fact that the problem with Linux is not a lack of alternate file managers, preference panels, installer screen animations or window dressing for the software store.... but the fact that the software store itself is glaringly empty.
I'm not a Linux hater. I use it on all my servers, my media centre and one of my desktops. I'd love to use it as my daily driver,as I loathe Apple and Microsoft. But, when I need to get work done, I use OSX because the applications I need don't exist on Linux and their Linux equivalents are piss-poor.
I imagine many people who use Windows are in the same boat.
As regards the operating system [in my case OSX], I very occasionally open System Preferences to adjust a system setting. And I use the Finder to move the odd file around. But for my actual day to day work, I hardly rub up against the OS at all. It's just the utility that runs in the background and lets me access other "stuff" I need to work with in the applications I actually use.
Given the number of Linux variants that exist, there must be hundreds of talented Linux programmers out there. Why [seemingly] do none of them turn these talents to coming up with something that actually serves a purpose and fills an application gap --rather than endlessly re-inventing the same basic utility applications as already exist in the eleventy billion other Linux distros already out there?
Also, it ships with bunch of Gnome applications, Archive Manager, Document Viewer, GNOME Web are the ones mentioned in this release, but there is more as well.
Elementary reimagines the desktop experience which can take a few days getting used to, however once you do it does a lot of things consistently and intuitively. So much more responsive than macOS and with nice apps, on top of Ubuntu LTS HWE kernel.
It's come to the point where the single deciding factor when I decide on which Linux distribution I select is whether it has decent support for fractional scaling. AFAIK, Pop! is the only one that almost gets it right.
I gave Elementary a try, unfortunately it's just too simplified. You can eventually get gnome-tweaks up and fix things like font-scaling on high dpi displays, but Pantheon is too basic.
I used to find elementary OS extremely good looking a few years ago, now it just looks bad to me. I guess I'm used to all the modern ui designs I see out there.
I was once a elementary os user but once I realised the elementary model is stuck and there is no big changes since version 5.
If you look to active DE you see some commercial contributers e.g. GNOME from Red Hat and Cosmic from System76 (which started a way later)
But as the founder see itself as a communist, I dont think, something will change (not to mention the moral ignorance of communist anyway). I liked the whole experience approach, "apple like", but now I use Gnome.
IMO, GNOME 3's version of Adwaita was evocative of the old "Platinum" UI for Mac. Very clean and professional, and aged much better than Aqua for my money.
GNOME 3 Adwaita had some commonalities with Platinum, but in comparison it's a bit too bright in light mode and has much worse information density with how hard it leans into margins and padding.
In those ways I think Elementary's theme is a bit more similar to Platinum. It's not nearly as afraid of mid-grays and while it still has a lot of padding, it's less excessive than Adwaita's.
