As one of the people behind elementary OS, this blog posts pretty much summarises how hard of a time I have when reading online criticism on elementary OS. Feedback is good, we love it and realize how important it is. However, for the most part the complaints are not about the OS itself but instead on some of these myths (or worse even, how we're "just a blatant copy of OS X" when we have our own ideas and identity).
We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.
Perhaps it could help make it easy for visitors of your site to know what elementaryOS is, even in broad strokes. I had to go to the main page and then scroll down a few screens until I found this sentence:
"elementary OS is a free replacement for Windows on the PC and OS X on the Mac."
Not having that at the top of the first screen, people do have to find this information elsewhere.
Indeed, they give how-the-sausage-is-made first and second billing, how-pretty-it-is third billing, and what-it-is in the fourth and final slot. It's almost exactly upside down.
First of all great work on Elementary. One thing that doesn't help with the "Copy of OSX" comments is the video on the front page where the desktop uses the Mountain Lion wallpaper.
It's not exactly the same as far as I know. You can use another picture of the same Galaxy without it being the same picture. Plus it appears for 5 seconds on the video and not all the time. They are other wallpapers shown in the video.
The fact that it needs defending is kind of the point. It looks similar enough to evoke the reaction from most people that it is similar to OS X, which is more than like a goal and not an accident. It may not be the exact image, but it doesn't have to be.
These replies do not help. For people who don't want to live on Ubuntu LTS versions (and such people probably don't want to install the first version of a new OS), Luna is "over 2 years old", and it was already seriously out of date when it came out.
Elementary OS know what people mean when they say Luna is out of date (all the packages are over 2 years old), yet give an answer that completely ignores that issue.
For another viewpoint I'm running dev of a side project on an elementary laptop. Since bleeding edge of postgres and python doesn't matter much for me it is actually quite good. (relational database, no scaling problem for now and python packages are installed using virtualenv and pip. Sublime text also works nicely on two year old kernel )
Looking at it from the other side, if you have newer hardware Elementary OS may not work properly on your machine because it has an older kernel that may not have the drivers.
If the target audience is laptop users this is definitely going to be an issue.
The thing about elementary and OS X is that elementary seems a whole lot better than OS X. This wouldn't count of course if I hadn't used OS X a few years. (Then again I mostly have used Linux whenever possible for the last 5-10 years and I also think Windows 8 is great.)
Things that are better (in my view) in elementary are for example: alt-tab, standard open source apps works nicely (no need to run in an extra x), no global menu.
Of course no Mac user should switch, but for anyone like me who almost like mac except for the:"stupid" parts elementary is great.
The warning is not for me, I understand these things, but it is a disturbing trend of people thinking copy and pasting command prompts is an OK thing to do.
After seeing some demos of the new UI features in Isis, which are pretty original and amazing, I don't think it's copying OSX any more than the later and iOS are copying Microsoft's modern UI with Yosemite.
It's very impressive that a relatively small team could rewrite huge swathes of userland applications from scratch, and end up with something more polished and lighter-weight than much of the competition.
It seems like the sort of thing which could happen as a matter of course if the money was there from the community to support developers working full-time over the long term on these sorts of projects.
One thing I'd like to see would be elementary experimenting with ways of encouraging people to support development. It really should be a matter of course to donate $20-30 in exchange for something which makes your computer function substantively better, especially when many of the users are IT professionals who earn good salaries. But it doesn't appear to happen, for one reason or another.
Perhaps, open up the books, and give people real-time, kickstarter-like information about the donations as they are ongoing, where the money will be spent, and how much more is needed. I'm sure there must be a way of nudging people to get out their chequebooks.
What do you mean by this? IMO the last time I used EOS it was lacking in a lot of areas. This was only a few months ago.
Installation was fast and everything was automated, the install window had a "drop-down" terminal to watch processes, but nothing was there. I expected to be asked to re-size my partitions but never was. When I rebooted I noticed grub was a little borked, showing EOS, EOS recovery, Windows 7, and then about 30 or so entries of old kernels (I know I need to clean these up). It should have showed two more ubuntu OSs installed. I can still boot into my other two installations fine, I just had to do some guess work on what to pick in grub.
So I get into EOS and things are pretty cool, the thing I like best is the speed. Everything seems instant, well except the applications menu, it was a few milliseconds slower than anything else on the DE and that was annoying as I would often end up clicking it a second time causing it to open twice, which was kind of hard on the eyes. Coming from a Gnome 3 environment, I decided to change some things on the interface around to make it more like the gnome shell. Moved the launcher to the left, assigned the top left hot corner to show all windows, things were looking pretty good.
I tried using midori but the font rendering was just not worth it so I installed chromium, and of course that came with a lot of dependencies (around 300mb), so I tried to find out exactly how much space I had left on the partition (I some how missed the partition editor in the install). I opened the file browser and really liked it. you could see how much space was being used by each partition with "progress bars", but not by the EOS partition. There was no way to right click and select "properties" on the EOS partition, so I opened up the applications menu (twice) to find the "system monitor", because on Ubuntu, the system monitor shows how much space you have. But the OS had no graphical system monitor. I'm sure top was installed, but it's not the same. I was able to right click my home folder and select properties and this showed how much space I had on my partition.
Next I opened the terminal. I forget the name of the default terminal, but it wasn't gnome-terminal. It was a very utilitarian terminal that had tabs and no menu bar. I couldn't figure out how to change the look of it or get the tabs to go away.
Overall I give EOS a 5.9/10 It's fast, but it lacks a lot of functionality I look for in an OS like this. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I feel it will be a long time before EOS is as robust and polished as Ubuntu. I realize that EOS is meant to be lighter than Ubuntu and use different programs, but at this point it's just not ready to be my work horse.
elementary OS is one of the most promising Linux distributions. This for several reasons, like having a good installer and an overall clean desktop experience. But also because of the applications they are making themselves like Noise or Files.
That being said, I don't agree with some of the design decisions, which stop me from fully supporting the project.
For example I don't like the idea of having a top panel. It is constantly there wasting space only to show some tray icons a clock and a link to a launcher menu. Personally I prefer a single panel on the bottom, think Windows 7, there is enough horizontal space to show everything in a single row. Top panels just look bad in my opinion, for a normal maximized window you have the panel layer, then the titlebar layer, then the window. If you insist on having the notification bar on top at least, please, use wingpanel-slim (with the application launcher disabled and autohide).
The 'outdated' comment stems from the fact that we depend very much on the repos. Being based on an old release means we don't have access to lots of software.
I use Elementary on the desktop and laptop and like it. Can't wait for dock improvements.
The first myth is a valid point, although it comes across as a little defensive. The person who wrote it is an elementary OS developer, I suspect, and I wonder if they are missing an important point: it would be FUCKING AWESOME if Elementary OS were "just a theme on top of Ubuntu."
It would presumably mean more frequent releases, less dependency on any given version of Ubuntu, smaller workload on the developers, and so on. Reinventing every part of the OS, including the bits that people hope to use as little as possible, might not be the best strategy at this stage. (I have no illusions as to whether they'll change their strategy)
It's kind of sad too, because the Elementary developers originally planned to release Isis (the next release) around April to prove that they can stick to schedules [0], but that now seems to have changed to the usual "It'll be done when it's done." Relevant quote below:
"Also, I think in general most of us think it would be the best idea to
release Isis (see, I'm already going with it) as closely as possible to
Ubuntu 14.04. We have a lot to prove about our ability to provide updates
in a timely manner and we're getting some negative feedback from
developers/nerds about our 12.04 base. So let's address that and make sure
that elementary is the best open platform for both users and developers
(and I guess nerds too)."
Which would be better though, a rush job, or something that has polish (which seems to be the whole goal of Elementary). I suppose it is kind of like the difference between Valve and so many other games publishers out there.
eOS has too much eye candy. Someone suggested in the comment section to install alucryd's PKGBUILDs to gain access to updated packages on Arch. If you're already thinking of Arch because of that comment, this should be enough eye candy: lightdm, cinnamon + CoverflowAltTab, plank + plank-themer, nautilus or spaceFM, themes like Numix + cinnamon-chronumix [1], awesomeWM, and reEFInd and a minimal theme [2]. Not sure why people opt in for a visual representation of applications when they need to browse to install applications...there's the list of applications in the wiki and /r/unixporn if you need visuals..
When it comes to problems with Linux as a personal desktop OS, the appearance of the GUI is among my lowest concerns. What prevents me from considering Linux as a desktop or laptop OS includes: horrible battery life times (worse than half for a friend's thinkpad when compared to it running Windows), how difficult it is to get Bluetooth and Wifi working, really bad multi-touch for trackpads.
The problems with Linux as a replacement for Windows or Mac are that the fundamentals are not there. Recent hardware support is non-existent as volunteers have to write drivers so you're likely stuck with old hardware. You'll get anecdotes of people who are happy with what they have, but any such person that I've known long enough I've seen them gripe on IRC about things that are completely trivial or just not even issues on Windows or a Mac.
Linux needs a hero with deep pockets that builds their own hardware and drivers. I thought Dell might have been that hero once, but it never became a priority for them.
If you could get elementary OS working on a nice slim, powerful Samsung or Thinkpad laptop, with good battery life and driver support then I'd think you'd really have something.
> What prevents me from considering Linux as a desktop or laptop OS includes: horrible battery life times (worse than half for a friend's thinkpad when compared to it running Windows), how difficult it is to get Bluetooth and Wifi working, really bad multi-touch for trackpads.
Not sure where you are coming from, to be honest.
Bluetooth and Wifi have unerringly worked out of the box for me since 2009 or so.
While multi-touch, and the trackpad in general, is _horrible_ on my Asus UX31E Zenbook in Windows, it is very pleasant to use in Linux.
How much work did you have to put into configuring TLP to get it to work? How many different settings before you got it where it was comparable to Windows, or did you just install it and it just worked? Because that's how it works on my Macboook, it just worked. I didn't have to read TLP docs. This is what I'm talking about, Linux is a hobby, it's not something you get that just works. This is just battery life. Bluetooth worked for you, it doesn't for others. Every little thing can be a painful can of worms. Go through the comments here and just see the variety of responses. Avoid nvidia, 802.11ac chipset problems, bluetooth problems, editing pulseaudio settings.
It doesn't "just work." A Macbook Pro, you turn it on, it "just works." Linux, is not like this.
Personally I recently had more problems with windows that with linux.
I have a dell l502x of 2012. In linux all work perfectly (except obviously the nvidia card that require bumblebee)
In windows8 my touchpad has not good driver. Those for win7 runs but the multitouch is broken and the "deactive touchpad" button does not work, so I keep clicking it while writing.
Also the wifi card keep stoping randomly while on linux all work smoothly.
Long story short: I think linux has made really enough improvements firmware side to be considered as main os for all days.
This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows installation.
> The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works".
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.
Both my Windows and OSX machines know that if I connect my bluetooth speaker to them, to play the sound through the speaker. Likewise, they know that if I plug in a Logitech USB dongle into the machine, that the sound and mic should go through the dongle.
Elementary is better than most at having some sort of easy to use, functioning bluetooth setup, but every time I use one of these devices I have to go into sound settings and switch them to the device. It's a pain in the ass that other companies have figured out.
Linux has worked very well on the business-class thinkpad machines for more than 15 years. Look for the T or X series, for example. These days you need to avoid machines with nVidia graphics.
A T-series thinkpad with intel graphics will just work out of the box on any linux distribution.
> Linux has worked very well on the business-class thinkpad machines for more than 15 years.
What does "worked very well" mean? That's an unhelpful subjective statement. How does the battery life compare? Can you get the full 10 hours of thinkpad battery life time running Linux if not what percentage? Do the Bluedriver work out of the box? Does it wake up from sleep and connect to wifi correctly? I don't think they've worked "very well" at all, but if you have some objective facts or experience please share, I would appreciate it because a Linux desktop that actually works would be awesome.
I don't have multitouch (completely unaware whether the hardware supports it, not terribly interested), but I have bluetooth, wifi, and tremendous battery life that all worked out of the box on my System76 laptop.
Which OS? For some reason Arch's Gnome handles hiDPI terribly, but Gnome Ubuntu is very good. So I stopped fighting it and just installed Gnome Ubuntu.
We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.