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One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency. It's not your typical Linux desktop experience, it's much more

One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency. It's not your typical Linux desktop experience, it's much more cohesive than Windows or even macOS. I have my main workstation booting both Windows 10 (which I do enjoy) and Elementary, and I find myself only booting into Windows to play certain Steam games that won't install on Linux. Give Elementary a go, you may be surprised.

wolfgke 10y ago
> One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency. I wrote "consistency across the entire system". I immediately believe that they did a lot of GUI polish and polishing of the default apps. But polishing the GUI of a POSIX-like system does not deliver consistency (only GUI polish). There is still the whole UNIX-like subsurface (like it or not), which delivers completely different abstractions than the GUI does (this is clearly not consistent). For example rio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system)) implements Windowing as private namespace (a central element of Plan 9) - very consistent. BeOS (for which currently under the name HaikuOS they try to reimplement it in an open source way) is another example of an OS which was designed from beginning on to have a GUI and is thus also very consistent.
- morganvachon 10y ago
  Yep, I get it, and as I said I'm still not sold on systemd and therefore use Elementary with the knowledge that if it breaks and I have to fix it, I'll have to deal with that massive tumor. The great thing about Elementary is, if all you need is a ⁎nix system with a consistent GUI for something like web development but without buying Apple's premium hardware, it really shines. The Terminal app is the best I've used on any OS, and while the text editor isn't quite a full fledged programmer's editor, it's good enough for a lackey like me. I figured out that Geany is overkill for my needs, and Scratch handles all my use cases fine. I do think they try a bit too hard to look like macOS, but if you're going for the best desktop Linux experience, why not copy the best commercial ⁎nix desktop? I agree completely about BeOS/Haiku; BeOS was my daily driver for several years until the death of the company caused me to have to move on. I have yet to find a modern OS that even comes close to that kind of cohesive, sensible, practical approach to desktop computing. Haiku is coming along well, but it's still not stable enough for daily use beyond dogfooding for Haiku devs.

wolfgke 10y ago

> One of the reasons I use Elementary OS despite my ambivalence towards systemd is the consistency. I wrote "consistency across the entire system". I immediately believe that they did a lot of GUI polish and polishing of the default apps. But polishing the GUI of a POSIX-like system does not deliver consistency (only GUI polish). There is still the whole UNIX-like subsurface (like it or not), which delivers completely different abstractions than the GUI does (this is clearly not consistent). For example rio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_(windowing_system)) implements Windowing as private namespace (a central element of Plan 9) - very consistent. BeOS (for which currently under the name HaikuOS they try to reimplement it in an open source way) is another example of an OS which was designed from beginning on to have a GUI and is thus also very consistent.

morganvachon 10y ago
Yep, I get it, and as I said I'm still not sold on systemd and therefore use Elementary with the knowledge that if it breaks and I have to fix it, I'll have to deal with that massive tumor. The great thing about Elementary is, if all you need is a ⁎nix system with a consistent GUI for something like web development but without buying Apple's premium hardware, it really shines. The Terminal app is the best I've used on any OS, and while the text editor isn't quite a full fledged programmer's editor, it's good enough for a lackey like me. I figured out that Geany is overkill for my needs, and Scratch handles all my use cases fine. I do think they try a bit too hard to look like macOS, but if you're going for the best desktop Linux experience, why not copy the best commercial ⁎nix desktop? I agree completely about BeOS/Haiku; BeOS was my daily driver for several years until the death of the company caused me to have to move on. I have yet to find a modern OS that even comes close to that kind of cohesive, sensible, practical approach to desktop computing. Haiku is coming along well, but it's still not stable enough for daily use beyond dogfooding for Haiku devs.