5 ms·

Well to be honest, you're not completely wrong. elementary OS _is_ trying to make as much decisions as possible for the user - To make it "just work". I agree t

by embik 11y ago

Well to be honest, you're not completely wrong. elementary OS _is_ trying to make as much decisions as possible for the user - To make it "just work". I agree that this is annoying to people accustomed to tweaking their system or desktop. No doubt. elementary OS is - at least partially - targetted at people with minimal technical knowledge. And there _are_ some design decisions I might not really agree with. The minize button, well, uhh ... I didn't get it back via elementary-tweaks on my machines, but I understand people missing and re-activating it. Now here's the thing though: There's a different between Apple's walled-garden and elementary OS. You are very much able to tweak your elementary OS setup in any way you want. It's Linux after all. It's your system. We try to discourage tweaking a newcomer's system via commands learned on a blog post because they're old, outdated or plain wrong / bad. elementary-tweaks was not maintained at all for a long time as well. And there are quite a bit customizability options out there hidden in dconf. That's what elementary-tweaks is a frontend to after all, basically. I understand it's a bit frustrating to not see the customizability in a Linux distribution you're used to from others. You're not exactly the target audience for elementary OS and I'm sorry for that. And to be honest, there's another spin to it: More customizability means more features maintained in the source code. And quite frankly, sometimes we're really short of developers (I'm not contributing anything at all currently as I'm kind of busy with my apprenticeship). If nobody is going to maintain a new feature, it's not going to be in the code because it will break one fine day and it's adding work to the "to-fix" list.

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
So who is the target audience, if you don't mind my asking? Because from my perspective, I am someone who likes the idea of Linux and is not afraid to get his hands dirty, but at the same time is generally disappointed with most Linux distros insofar as their GUIs usually feel like an afterthought. So something with a nice frontend but the ability to nonetheless tinker and throw up a terminal when I need to sounds ideal. That is the attractive element of ElementaryOS, to me: an attractive frontend and a Linux backend. I could always go for Cinnamon Mint, I guess, but eOS certainly did seem to buck the trend as far as distros go. The idea of the easy-to-use "just works" setup for the non-tinkerers, on the other hand, starts to resemble Apple; unfortunately, I don't think you can out-Apple Apple. That's their thing. The "stunning," almost condescendingly simple GUI that people "not good with computers" flock to. It's almost as though your target audience is my mother, or the people on whose behalf I will install this OS onto their aging desktop/laptop because they found re-learning Windows 8.1/10 too confusing.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  To me eOS looks like glossy crap. But then i sit here writing this using a minimal XFCE on Gobolinux, so what do i know? ;)

by embik 11y ago

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago

So who is the target audience, if you don't mind my asking? Because from my perspective, I am someone who likes the idea of Linux and is not afraid to get his hands dirty, but at the same time is generally disappointed with most Linux distros insofar as their GUIs usually feel like an afterthought. So something with a nice frontend but the ability to nonetheless tinker and throw up a terminal when I need to sounds ideal. That is the attractive element of ElementaryOS, to me: an attractive frontend and a Linux backend. I could always go for Cinnamon Mint, I guess, but eOS certainly did seem to buck the trend as far as distros go. The idea of the easy-to-use "just works" setup for the non-tinkerers, on the other hand, starts to resemble Apple; unfortunately, I don't think you can out-Apple Apple. That's their thing. The "stunning," almost condescendingly simple GUI that people "not good with computers" flock to. It's almost as though your target audience is my mother, or the people on whose behalf I will install this OS onto their aging desktop/laptop because they found re-learning Windows 8.1/10 too confusing.

digi_owl 11y ago
To me eOS looks like glossy crap. But then i sit here writing this using a minimal XFCE on Gobolinux, so what do i know? ;)