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Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

561 points by diggernet 8y ago

sanimal 8y ago
I don't like the "Pay What You Want" system they have to download the OS. It feels misleading that you have to click on custom then enter 0 to download for free. I totally understand how important donations are to keep a project going but this one rubs me off the wrong way. I hope I'm not the only one.
- parf02 8y ago
  I think it's totally fair they do this to be very honest.
- xupybd 8y ago
  I don’t mind it. It’s a reminder that you’re getting something for free and that you could donate. You have to enter 0 as oppposed to by default paying nothing.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  This is a relatively recent change. I remember that they used to be much clearer about this back in Loki.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    They've had this since at least 2015, so not really all that recent.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Must have been Freya, then.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  You're definitely not the only one. They have been called out before for this exact stunt: https://liliputing.com/2015/02/elementary-os-devs-say-youre-cheating-dont-pay-free-software.html https://liliputing.com/2015/02/elementary-os-devs-say-youre-... Along with the "you're cheating if you don't give us money" (paraphrasing) quip. There are better distros out there.
- treeform 8y ago
  That is like the first thing I saw too. I was not fooled. But maybe this system works better then a free + donate button. Only data can tell... Maybe people are donating more with this system?
  - all2 8y ago
    I didn't see anything remotely like A/B/C testing. They might benefit from something like that.
- ademup 8y ago
  I love it. I feel that having the downloader physically typing the number zero ensures that the downloader understands that there is 'A' number that belongs there. It respects the downloader (no ads or pushy verbiage) while sending this message of 'yeah, it is free to use, and it costs money/time/resources to create, so your financial contribution would be appreciated.
- dymk 8y ago
  It’s just forcing you to confront the fact that you’re using software that others put a lot of effort into, for free. A simple fix to quell the bad feelings would be donate a few bucks. Win/win.
- rijoja 8y ago
  Nah .. everybody thinks that they will give contributions and are really charitable in their heads. When it comes down to reality however you never really donate. When it's pushed into your face like this there's an actual call to action to do it. If you want it for free you still get it. Remember this is for consumer oriented projects, they can't expect to get B2B support deals for keeping vital servers up and running. So why not. Maybe a slider would've done it better, because then the 0 value is made available in a different way. Like the humble bundle used to. But that's just nitpicking. And sliders with different platforms and whatever might get messy.
- dlivingston 8y ago
  This is a pretty common practice in the arts - Louis CK and Radiohead both used this to great effect. Indeed, my recollection is that Radiohead made more money on their album In Rainbows doing 'pay as much as you want' than their label paid them on previous records.
y4mi 8y ago
I'll be honest.. I tried elementary os when they first released it but never got it's charm. It always felt like an inferior version of macOS... Which I don't like. I personally prefer to develop on a Linux install... But elementary OS is not what I'd use if Linux is an option
- benologist 8y ago
  It does feel like an inferior macOS, but macOS and increasingly proprietary hardware feel like an inferior alternative to open source and open computing too.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Inferior macOS is how most of my experiences with Linux distros have felt. Maybe the desktop environments just aren’t my thing, the inconsistent UIs feel sloppy, and I always ending up needing to drop down to a command line to fix something or other is was annoying. Elementary doesn’t fix needing to drop to a command line, and the UIs are only unusually consistent and well thought when you stick with the built in software. But the overall experience of it feels like someone actually thought about it more than the alternatives I’ve tried.
  - automathematics 8y ago
    Check out Solus OS
- type0 8y ago
  MacOS is an inferior version of BSD!
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Jokes aside, I've always wondered why people don't try to get more user adoption for BSD.
    - Octoth0rpe 8y ago
matchbok 8y ago
70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot.
- willio58 8y ago
  I have no problem with an operating system that is trying to get adoption attempting to monetize. I say go for it. We’ve seen the adoption rates in the public for operating systems that take the completely free route.. near zero.
- grawprog 8y ago
  Seems like people agree with you. From what I can tell, the 117 apps on their 'store' seem to all be made by them or contributors to the project. I may be wrong about this, but at a quick glance it looked like stuff that would be mostly included in other desktop environments. This is just my impression from skimming through it.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  > 70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot. reply I wouldn't compare elementary OS's fee to that of Apple and Google. Apple and Google take that 30% and keep it as profit, while elementary put it back (some percentage of it, I assume) into the project in the form of bounties a BountySource to fix bugs and improve the project. The more the project improves, the more users it will have, the more your app will sell, etc. etc. Also, your bitter downplaying of the project by calling it an "experiment" vs. Apple and Google and the whole negative tone of your comment is pretty annoying. You're the one comparing the project to the biggest tech companies in the world, not them. Weird.
  - monochromatic 8y ago
    Oh come on. Google and Apple also reinvest money into improving their offerings.
- Alterlife 8y ago
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far the best "out of the box" experience of any Linux distro I've seen.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. Additionally, Fedora tends to adopt new technology very early. Gnome has defaulted to Wayland for over a year, and the experience was badly broken at first. These types of things require experience to work through. I don't personally use gnome, so none of this bothers me. But the defaults aren't what I would call "sane" for a new user.
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    > Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.
    - snazz 8y ago
      Same here. I've never seen one on a system that has hundreds of additional packages installed and has survived a number of upgrades.
    - Brakenshire 8y ago
kitsunesoba 8y ago
The project is interesting and I have to give it props for being one of the few Linux distros that’s put the necessary level of thought into UI/UX and made consistency a priority. That said, I question some of their technical choices, most namely the choice of Vala as the project’s official language. Not that Vala is bad, but it’s incredibly niche at best and I think it severely limits contributions. Not many are going to want to learn a new language that’s scarcely used elsewhere in order to be able to work on any kind of project.
- coleifer 8y ago
  Its not too different from c#, and it's very popular for writing gtk applications.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    Even so, it’s going to scare off a lot of potential contributors long before they investigate the language deeply simply by having a name they don’t recognize. It effectively limits the contributor pool to those who’ve previously written GTK apps, which is relatively tiny compared to the number of devs coming from more mainstream backgrounds.
    - coleifer 8y ago
      Maybe. It didn't scare off me, though. It piqued my interest!
      - jenscow 8y ago
        Oh, me too... "Familiar to anyone who's seen C#, but maintains API/ABI compatibility with C"
    - Investogician 8y ago
      I think it actually has helped. The Elementary app store is filled with nice Elementary-specific apps. Their getting started docs are quite beginner-friendly https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#getting-started https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#getting-star...
SonnyWortzik 8y ago
I used El.OS for 3 straight years and had to drop it for business reasons. The OS is excellent. Highly recommend it if you are not bound by your business needs.
tapoxi 8y ago
What advantages does Elementary have over (its upstream) Ubuntu? It just looks like a different GTK/GNOME Shell theme to me.
- a9entroy 8y ago
  Advantages: * It looks very pretty (arguably). The window theme is aesthetically very good looking. Some might prefer Gnome's look. * It is "fast". I found it to be faster than Ubuntu in terms of normal actions like opening apps, power off, power on etc. * Hassle free for the most part. If you don't do anything crazy, it works smoothly and is very low maintenance. Disadvantages: * Tons of bugs. A lot of bugs have not been fixed since a long time. So, if you find a bug, be prepared to fix it yourself. * eOS devs also make their own Code editor, Mail app, music app, videos app, photos app, calendar app. Some might say that this is a waste of time. * No minimize button. And this is a little frustrating. The devs want you to use the workflow they recommend to the point that they went through the effort to hide the key and make it so that you can't enable it.
- veddox 8y ago
  Well, for some people that is a pretty big advantage. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 now, running Unity. Despite all its bad press I love Unity - it perfectly fits my workflow and just gets out of your way. (Not like Gnome Shell, where a third of your screen real estate is gone just with various menubars, each of which you could park a truck on.) Gnome Shell on 18.04 pretty much killed Ubuntu for me. Next time I set up my computer, I'm going back to Elementary. (I used it some years ago, but it was still very buggy. I'm hoping they've fixed some of those since.)
  - smhg 8y ago
    Unity still works perfectly fine on 18.04 for me. There is still some maintenance going on, so it can be an ok choice for the near future.
    - bubblethink 8y ago
      Yeah, I'm still using unity 7 on 18.04. I see that it is still working in 18.10 and quite likely on 19.04. Hopefully, it'll last another LTS cycle. Technically, it should continue to work as long as xorg isn't dropped, which probably won't happen anytime soon. The only downside is that unity7 is so closely tied to ubuntu that you can't use it with any other distro. I generally like Fedora/RHEL like setups for servers, but I can't use anything other than unity (right now) for laptops.
saganus 8y ago
What kind of apps does Elementary OS support? Can I install .deb packages or other Linux-compatible ones? Otherwise it's going to be hard to adopt an OS if there are not enough of the apps I use, no?
- kevingrahl 8y ago
  I’ve been using elementary OS for the past two years or so; you can use everything that runs on Ubuntu which of course includes .deb packages.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    Does it support snaps as easily as Ubuntu does?
    - BonesJustice 8y ago
      I’ve never used a snap, but I believe they have a snap manager in the curated section of their App Store, and it looked pretty straightforward.
    - kevingrahl 8y ago
      Not sure, I’ve only ever used snap to install VLC once to test something and after installing snap via apt all I had to do was: snap install vlc
  - saganus 8y ago
    That's great! For some reason I thought it was an incompatible new platform.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nkkollaw 8y ago
elementary is not for me because it limits configuration a little bit too much to my taste, but it's a wonderful project. One of the cons of Linux--which is the OS I use exclusively--is that most apps are made by programmers, and programmers often don't care and don't have design skills. elementary OS looks absolutely stunning, and it's perfect if you stick to curated apps and you just want something that works. Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps. On this aspect, I really don't understand the critics: people need money in life. If a project brings a little bit of money, you can keep working on it. End-users win because there are updates, less bugs, and new versions instead of abandoned projects. In addition, as for their 70/30 fee they redistribute the money (I don't know in what percentage) on BountySource, so that the project gets developed further. Honestly, other distros have a lot to learn from elementary.
- jammygit 8y ago
  "Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps." This is the most exciting part of elementary IMO: it is a model for free software to bring in some cash and fund full time development.
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Definitely. They were the first to do that, so it wasn't easy.
llIIllIIllIIl 8y ago
I tried to use the OS multiple times through the recent years, but every time there's a missing feature that breaks all bi+lingual user experience: You cannot switch the keyboard layout for each window separately. Seems like they do not care about anyone except exclusively English speaking audience.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  That's unfair. If you're not bilingual yourself, wanting to switch keyboard layout per window is extremely non-obvious. It would never have occurred to me.
  - llIIllIIllIIl 8y ago
    That's why almost all OS have this as an option. You either change the layout globally or per window (or application, doesn't make that much difference).
    - andrewflnr 8y ago
      Welp, TIL.
- amaccuish 8y ago
  It's also excruciatingly slow to switch keyboard layouts (for me between latin and russian). I moved back to macOS over this since I do it so frequently.
- solarmist 8y ago
  This. There are 1,000 of these little things that just aren't right with linux as a desktop that make me drop it in less than a week every time I try it out. * How to I switch keyboards from English to Japanese easily? * How do I run excel or Lightroom or blah software that I'm already familiar with? * How do I upgrade my OS if I don't know the difference between Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 and Linux 3.16.0-4-generic or some such? Or even the difference between Intel and AMD? Why am I picking "amd64"? I have an intel processor! (That was hypothetical don't answer that) * How do I buy a new laptop that all of the hardware just works like it's supposed to? * How can I upgrade a piece of hardware and be sure it'll work? Only macOS and Windows answer all of those questions.
NuSkooler 8y ago
I've been using Elementary OS for a few major versions now. It's become my main desktop OS. I'm a bit worried about putting too much into the "store" and their own browser, but so far it hasn't impacted me any. Anything that applies to Ubuntu proper applies in eOS for the most part, but the UX is just much more polished. When I first saw it I was worried of too much "MacOS" like (which I'm not a fan of), but that has't been the case for me at all.
- cassidyjames 8y ago
  For what it's worth, elementary does not create Epiphany; that's the GNOME browser and is largely a GUI wrapper around WebKit, the exact same engine as in Safari. AppCenter is a way to serve the app developers who were already attempting to target the OS while also enabling both them and elementary to cover (some) costs.
xaduha 8y ago
I'd recommend https://getsol.us https://getsol.us if you asked me what Desktop Linux distro to get.
- rudedogg 8y ago
  I really like Solus, but I've had issues updating it. I installed it on an old laptop for a friend, which they have occasionally used for a year or two. Recently, they wanted help setting up a USB device, so I started by trying to update. The GUI showed a progress bar like it was working on it, but it wouldn't proceed. To debug, I ran the update utility from the command line. It spit out an error that the update server JSON wouldn't load. I copied the URL and paste it into a browser - it was some sort of cache miss. It made it so I couldn't update or install anything, forcing me to reinstall the OS. This was a couple weeks ago. I also vaguely remember something similar happening when I used it for a year or so; where I couldn't get updates to work and had to reinstall.
  - xaduha 8y ago
    Well they changed stuff recently, new domain, new ISO. I hope that means they got their act together, it's a great project overall.
- ledgerdev 8y ago
  I too love solus, but I'm a bit concerned with the ongoing project stability with it's creator and technical leader(ikey) leaving the project. It's been such an amazing project. What do other think, can it continue to be relatively stable and not break things too much going forward?
  - xaduha 8y ago
    Have you read/listened to this? https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail I'm hopeful, it's great to have BDFL at the start, but community takeover should and does happen at some point. Maybe this is it.
cordite 8y ago
I am currently on this os, it’s pleasant most of the time, but it crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen. It also starts having windows flicker for a few seconds at random after a few days of uptime. I use Nvidia GTX 1080, it seems to work well otherwise.
- thrownaway954 8y ago
  How can something that "crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen" be "pleasant most of the time" to use??? If Windows, OSX or Linux did that, would we even use them? Look I like to support open source projects, but junk is junk and if this thing crashes like you say so... it's junk.
  - cordite 8y ago
    My solution was to disable the lock screen at home. But I still can’t disable accidentally pressing the lock key combination. It doesn’t seem to be configurable in the keyboard settings.
kevingrahl 8y ago
I’ve been using elementary OS since a few years on my main machine and really like it but there are a few quirks that bother me. For example I can’t use the WiFi drop down to change networks but instead have to open the network manager to scan for new networks. Also when right clicking on external disks in the file manager to mount disks the dialogue appears not where I’ve clicked but a few centimeters above. Stuff like that. I’ve come to live with all those flaws and very rarely have to boot up Windows to use software like Photoshop/Illustrator. Overall I can recommend elementary OS and have convinced some friends and family to switch from Windows to it.
type0 8y ago
Elementary is a fine distro, but short off being pretty and not afraid to ask for money what does it i really achieve that I can't get on other bigger distros?
- BonesJustice 8y ago
  At the moment, not a whole lot, but if you’re in the group of older MacBook [Pro] users who are looking to upgrade, don’t like the options from Apple, but love macOS, then it makes the transition less painful. My hope is that it will further distinguish itself with time. They’ve got the basics in place, which is no small task given they’ve essentially created their own desktop environment. They have a long road ahead of them before they catch up to distros like Mint in terms of features, but with more of the underpinnings in place (like their new cloud providers API), I’m hoping it starts to feel more complete during the next couple releases.
sneak 8y ago
To be a macOS replacement, an OS needs to work well on Apple hardware. Does Elementary OS now work well on Apple hardware? The last time I tried it, it did not.
- timbit42 8y ago
  With the T2 chip only macOS can run on Apple hardware now.
  - radicaldreamer 8y ago
    That's not true at all: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330
    - dullin 8y ago
      The lastest news about that seems that the feature is actually not working or bugged out : https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/471124 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/471124
  - sneak 8y ago
    Not true; I just booted the Elementary installer off of USB on a T2-equipped Mac. Even if that didn’t work, though, T2 Macs are a tiny minority; my question still stands for the millions of other Macs.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
scandox 8y ago
Whenever I see a skeuomorphic desktop it reminds me to make a donation to Arch.
- qazwse_ 8y ago
  Can you explain what you mean? From what I'm seeing there isn't any skeuomorphism in Elementary.
  - cnasc 8y ago
    In this case I think they meant "dimensional" rather than skeuomorphic. Elementary isn't flat, but that's a selling point in my opinion.
- scandox 8y ago
  "A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that are inherent to the original." To my mind any icon based interface qualifies. Ready to be wrong.
zwaps 8y ago
Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences with numerous typography mistakes, icons of different sizes and grid alignment imbalances everywhere. Like check out this Mint (grey theme) screenshot: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Linux_Mint_17_MATE.png/1200px-Linux_Mint_17_MATE.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Li... and compare it with elementary OS here https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/elementary-os-0-5-juno-gnu-linux-distro-could-use-ubuntu-s-snappy-technologies-518038-2.jpg https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/elementary-os-0-... Mint is great, but seriously. Look at that logo render. Even worse, look at the start bar. Every single text and logo has a different height. I mean how do you even do something like that unintentionally? I am using XFCE right now, and it's great because its much faster than KDE or Gnome on this old laptop. But it sure isn't a pretty UI. I know a MSc. designer and she claims using my laptop makes her physically sick and dizzy. I don't care as much, but I can see the point. Everything is misaligned, in the start menu, the task bar, the apps. In the window bar the buttons and the minimize arrow aren't the same size. I mean seriously, whoever did this just did not care about Ui. I don't think ElementaryOS is for everyone. If you have any interest in non-standard repos, recent kernels or doing stuff in commandline, you are just better off elsewhere. I understand their choices, but I don't use it because of how they do the app store, among other things. But if you just want a computer that runs, looks good and doesn't break if you do X, then I think ElementaryOS is the #1 choice in the Linux world, and we should be thankful that it exists.
- omnimus 8y ago
  xfce is quite beautiful the default theme is just dated. you pick something else and its fine
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Desktop Linux isn't really that difficult. It could be easier. The thing is that the people who want "really easy" probably aren't going to bother installing any new OS. Microsoft and Apple work hard, not just to make their OS easy but update their OS to whatever random hardware or software thing has come out (games and printers, say). Not being able to do "this one thing" is the main complaint I hear from friends who randomly wind-up with desktop Linux from computer recyclers mostly (it's my complaint too at times). Also, elementary OS looks a lot like the "gnome shell" and latest Ubuntu thing. Mint/Mate has become the main Linux shell by staying with Window 7-like-shell. The newer shells are easier but less powerful. So it would win for those who want easy. Except those who want easy will do nothing and stay with MS/Apple. After they are "free" too or seem like that to the average person.
chaostheory 8y ago
Elementary is a good Chrome OS alternative. I just wish Chrome OS was officially available for PCs.
ohiovr 8y ago
It’s just a window manager and not even a very good one.
lupinglade 8y ago
So it’s a replacement for macOS that looks just like macOS? Hmm...
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  I mean, that does make sense. Also lowers the learning curve if it's more than superficial.
- TheRealPomax 8y ago
  Only if you squint and ignore the rest of the sentence? It's an alternative to both macos and windows for people who not just not care about what their OS is, but have better things to do with their life than even bother to know what OS they run. As long as it's a pleasant, stable, consistent UI, and lets them do "the things they want to do" rather than "install the apps they need to do the things they want to do". And yeah, that means if at any point you might go "but it doesn't have X and that's okay, you can download the source and run make" then you're already way beyond who this OS is for. It's supposed to be "as dumb" as MacOS with the app store, or Windows with the windows store.
  - lupinglade 8y ago
    But macOS is exactly that already?
    - TheRealPomax 8y ago
      It's also prohibitively expensive due to the hardware you need to legally own before you can even use it, and is _only_ supported for that hardware instead of allowing you to use whatever you can afford?
gurtgurt 8y ago
Seems pretty interesting, I might try it out later. Does anybody have experience using this to revive an old computer (ie make it faster and more useable)?
seltzered_ 8y ago
Question: This may pertain more to GTK, but does gtk/elementary os have an equivalent to macOS's core animation libraries? Particularly to support interactive / fluid interfaces (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/ )? I did a cursory look and couldn't find much. I've been fairly familiar with macOS development particularly for trying to do more experimental UI (fluid animation) the past few years, but have been staring at linux/elementaryOS more.
- floatboth 8y ago
  libdazzle (developed for GNOME Builder) has some fancy animated widgets and whatnot https://valadoc.org/libdazzle-1.0/index.htm https://valadoc.org/libdazzle-1.0/index.htm
  - seltzered_ 8y ago
    interesting. I think the better path (for myself at least) may be to see where people have extended libcairo for uses of interactive animation, and see how cleanly Pantheon approached problems like switching desktops (not even macOS has always gotten it right - mission control's top desktop bar was sluggish in either Yosemite or El Capitan then they decided to hide it upon initial gesture later on).
    - floatboth 8y ago
      cairo is for custom drawing — if you're looking into that kind of animation, sure. If you want to animate GTK's GUI widgets, cairo probably won't be super helpful
EastSmith 8y ago
Someone knows if this is a good fit for a dev machine: Rails, React, PostgreSQL & Elastisearch? VS Code?
- tobyhinloopen 8y ago
  Get a macbook
- ganlub 8y ago
  Why not? This isn't anything out of the ordinary. Just some Docker containers and VSC. You can even find the Open Source version of VSC in some repositories.
- manch23 8y ago
  Its based on Ubuntu, so whatever you can install on Ubuntu should work on Elementary. Only issue I've run into is while adding an apt repo(for docker I think) I needed to point it to bionic instead of juno.
  - rehemiau 8y ago
    That's a common problem I had too, I often have to modify install scripts because of it
car111 8y ago
I think there are 2 fundamental problems with Desktop Linux: 1. Linux doesn't even have a rock-solid gui toolkit on which different environments can be based: a. The one which runs on Ubuntu by default and which is probably used on 90%+ installations of desktop Linux is GTK which is utterly a major nightmare to develop GUIs with. b. The Qt library which powers KDE is simply not used all that widely. The flagship desktop environment using Qt is KDE which is downright ugly in its default installation. 2. Once problem 1 is solved, people should realize that a usable desktop is not just the Window manager and 3 apps which are blessed by the desktop environment team. It is 100s of thousands of hours of using by many users. It needs stability for other apps to develop around this ecosystem, both Mac and Windows have had a rocksolid GUI library powering their ecosystems for decade+ period and apps develop around them. Without stability and a new shitty GUI library every 2 years, Elementary OS or not, the desktop environment situation on Linux will continue to be shit.
- dharma1 8y ago
  Qt was used on unity8. But it didn't (at that time, and probably not now either) have a comparable UI component library to MacOS (or iOS). I know, because we made one from scratch - which wasn't a great idea either. Flutter would look interesting if it picks up steam for desktop apps.
  - car111 8y ago
    It's very disappointing to learn that after more than 25 years of Linux being launched, there is not a single decent GUI SDK available. Much more damning is that RedHat whose entire business model was around making an enterprise ready Linux (server and Desktop) could not build a decent GUI toolkit.
sterlind 8y ago
I'd love to have a Linux distro with the frontend of Elementary OS and the backend of Nixos. And I say that as a Microsoft employee. Are there efforts to make Nixos grandma-worthy? Or are the only pretty distros all reskins of Ubuntu?
- colemickens 8y ago
  You might be interested in this PR: "[nixpkgs] elementary: init a 5.0 Juno" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637 I'm actively trying to build some cool things with Nix/NixOS and then write up a series of blog posts. Several recent discussions on the Discourse and at NixCon have been focused around Nix/NixOS user experience, at least. I've recently been building a package set of tip builds of Wayland stuff (sway, screenshot/screenrecord/notification utilities), including instructions for using them on Ubuntu via Nix. I'm also building out a set of packages and modules for Kube/Containerd/Kata-Containers for perfectly repeatable offline-first clusters. I think these two projects can be leveraged to evangelize Nix and NixOS nicely, and dovetails into UX efforts as I build my list of rough spots and fix a number of issues in nixpkgs and random OSS projects along the way. Also, Gnome-Shell and KDE work perfectly in NixOS anyway, and can be easily made to look just like they do on any other distro... I just recently switched to Sway, coming from KDE (~1.5 years) after GNOME (6+ years?). Not any significant visual differences than when I was using Arch Linux.
  - nh2 8y ago
    Awesome work! Having the ability to configure a beautiful-by-default GUI for NixOS makes it much more likely that I can maintain machines for my family with low time effort, remotely.
  - spindle 8y ago
    Great work! Thank you! At the moment it seems that a lot of NixOS users (including me) prefer a keyboard-centric window manager to a full desktop environment, but obviously (well I think it's obvious, anyway) there's a place for Pantheon on NixOS too. A big place, I should think.
  - 8y ago
LowLevelHacker 8y ago
Unpopular opinion. Any desktop os with a top menu bar is worthless.
mattycakes01 8y ago
It's basically just Pantheon with a custom skin. You can get similarly good results using the "arc" theme and any decent ubuntu-based distro.
- muthdra 8y ago
  `It's basically just ${desktopEnvironment} with a custom skin` can be humorously used for 90% of popular Linux distros but it's not really fair for any of them.
- cassidyjames 8y ago
  You realize elementary has created the entire Pantheon desktop environment, right? So, "It's just their desktop environment with their stylesheet, their apps, and the AppCenter ecosystem," is basically what you are saying. In which case, yeah, that's exactly what elementary OS is.
debt 8y ago
All I want is an OS with a lightning fast UI and ‘08 thumb drive sized footprint, idc about privacy. Gimme ultra lightning fast Casino-electronic-craps-game-level fast UI and shouldn’t weigh too much like I said Who cares about privacy? If they’re based in the US/EMEIA you can sue the pants off anyone that disrespects your privacy and win in court
- lytedev 8y ago
  Build your own! Arch Linux is a great base to start with. Check out /r/unixporn for examples!
ChefboyOG 8y ago
I ran various distros as a kid growing up, then went years as a professional running Mac. Elementary is the only distro I've not felt stupid friction running on my Chromebook. I know there are other considerations, but as a daily driver, this is easily one of the best distros I've seen
JoshuaAshton 8y ago
Shame their app store is a great meme.
bprasanna 8y ago
Looks promising. It would be great if they can offer a scaled down version (something like Lubuntu) which we can install in single board computers (like RaspberryPi).
- rcarmo 8y ago
  The Raspbian distribution has recently been improved to the point where it has a decent (if less polished) experience. I have a Pi desktop for developing in Arduino, and it’s great with the newest 3B+.
truth_seeker 8y ago
I find Ubuntu 18 LTS version quite promising both as a developer and normal non-dev user of desktop.
Endy 8y ago
Is it binary-compatible with Windows & Mac OS? If it's not, then it's not a replacement and the title should be changed to reflect that. I respect the idea of speed and privacy (though I'm still a minimalist - I believe in using 16/32-bit and less than 1GB RAM). But before I can "replace" Windows, I need an OS that actually works like Windows.
- throwawaywhynot 8y ago
  wtf
  - deadlocked 8y ago
    It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day? If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS. I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in various ways that make them less useful, to me, than the apps I named above. (I've been using Linux as a daily driver for two years now, have been administrating Linux servers for nearly two decades - I know Linux).
    - Endy 8y ago
      Of course, you just know that the answer from most of the hardcore Linux people will be that you should "get involved" with the projects you named and contribute code - whether or not you actually know how to program is inconsequential. Linux, after who knows how long, is still not ready to be a primary desktop OS, and for one major reason - it's not ready for 100% ignorant end-users.
    - throwawaywhynot 8y ago
      well your's is a valid use case. I just didn't understand why OP was expecting it to be binary compatible. It's just a distro
      - 8y ago
avodonosov 8y ago
But not for Linux?
gigatexal 8y ago
If it didn’t use gnome and somehow skinned KDE to be that pretty I’d be all about it.
- TheRealPomax 8y ago
  What a weird thing to say when the whole point of this OS is a focus on consistent user experience, with a negative focus on "does it tickle a power user's tech stack fancy".
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    There’s something inherently gross about running my desktop in some sort of Frankenstein-javascript-single-threaded-modify-with-css mess that I’d rather avoid. And KDE has been faster for me. KWin is amazingly quick. What KDE lacks is the polish that the Gnome based desktops enjoy — if it has that I’d doubt a reason for Gnome to exist.
rustcharm 8y ago
It looks nice, and it may be a replacement for ChromeOS or some other limited system, but it's not a replacement for Windows and MacOS.
rubenhak 8y ago
Wow, looks cool. The background makes it feel like Mac OS X...
vermaden 8y ago
I wonder when they will introduce icons in the desktop :)
randomsearch 8y ago
I used Elementary OS for a few months this year. It’s quite nicely designed in places, but is based on Gnome 3 - which doesn’t make sense for an OS that is all about UX, because Gnome 3 makes plenty of bad decisions and Elementary inherits them. Still, they have done their best to contain them and I think it’s better designed than any other modern Linux desktop. Couple of failure points: - the mail client is buggy to the point of being unusable. You could say that about any Linux GUI mail client, but this one is particularly bad. - Alt-Tab behaviour is strange and awful. If you want OS X but can’t afford it, this is as close as you’ll get, but it’s a long way off.
throwawaywhynot 8y ago
the linux desktop landscape has really changed. Ubuntu is no longer the cool os for the newbies with the rise of manjaro,mint,solus,elementary
marcus_holmes 8y ago
Anyone tried installing this on a MacBook? I've got an older Pro that keeps running Kernel at 60%+ of CPU - apparently just one of those bugs that MacOS has that "just work" like that. I really want to install another OS, but both Ubuntu and Fedora can't see the available partition space, and can't find a wireless driver. Given that Elementary OS is advertising itself as a replacement for MacOS, has anyone tried it and got anywhere with it?
- ibnishak 8y ago
  Isn't elementary OS basically based on Ubuntu with a few ui tweaks?
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    I thought it was a different distro?
- metasyn 8y ago
  I installed it a year or so ago on an old 2014 MBP. It's battery was bulging and bending the casing so I knew it was on its way out... I used elementary os for a few months, mostly just using it for spotify, occasional programing, surfing the web. Worked fine, and in this case, added some life to some older hardware.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    cool, thanks for the info. I'll give it a try... :)
rcarmo 8y ago
I don’t get the hate, really. It’s the only distro I’ve used in the past few years with a “nice enough” desktop where my Mac instincts translate across and where I can use anything packaged for Ubuntu with zero hassles. I’ve been running it on a low-end Chromebook for a long while now, and upgraded from 0.4.1 to 5.0 via the CLI (not recommended, but feasible if you know what you’re doing), and other than the ultra-niche app ecosystem (which I don’t need, since I mostly run Firefox, Docker and VS Code on it, besides dev packages) it has zero weirdness. Well, except for the mail client. It has improved, but every single time I try to use it to send out some notes while away from my regular machines it breaks somehow, and there is zero addressbook/calendar integration (I have Thunderbird installed, but keep trying the built-in mail client after each update because I like the UI).
- thawkins 8y ago
  mail on 5.0 is just plain broken when used with gmail. refuses to log in.
  - 9712263 8y ago
    Just setup a google app password.
rushabh 8y ago
Reading the comments here, it seems we don’t realise that ElementaryOS is run by a small team of mostly volunteers, who are doing this as a “free” service to the rest of us. Lets take a moment to appreciate the immense perseverance, sacrifice, hard work put in by the team behind the project. The work done is pretty slick and complete. I hope there is a philanthropic minded HN member here who can help them with a generous funding, so they can keep building this awesome tool.
ianwalter 8y ago
I’ve been using Elementary for 2-3 weeks and it’s really good. Still far behind MacOS, but it’s the best I’ve felt about a linux distro becoming a mainstream alternative. I’ve used Pop_OS! as well and while it’s good, I wish System76 would have just backed Elementary OS. Elementary is a good base but needs a larger community and more resources to become legit.
- fgheorghe 8y ago
  Just use Ubuntu not them hipster os’ no one heard of supports
msiyer 8y ago
Linux is not ready for mass market. I think, proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs. I my opinion, OS itself has very little value to the end user. The end user needs a fertile userland. The end user should be free to trivially switch platforms without disrupting the userland one bit. This is not some pipe dream. It is very much possible. Open standards and strict adherence to them need to be enforced. Data formats need to be portable not just across platforms, but across competing software. This is our right. No one should deny this no matter how powerful.
- sjellis 8y ago
  > proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs. That certainly used to be true, but I think most of those issues have fallen away, and it's mostly just about applications and unpredictable hardware support. Despite the efforts of proprietary OS vendors to invent new whiz-bang features, most people use the OS as a launcher for their Web browser and the collection of applications that they actually care about (office suite, games, professional tools like Photoshop). Proton is a really big deal because it unblocks migration for the people whose key applications are games from Steam.
lamb_duh 8y ago
Digital products illicit emotional responses just like physical ones. Aesthetic clouds our judgement when it comes to usability—it's a well documented universal design principle and affects people's sense of usability regardless of culture, location, or education. There's a relevant XKCD for this discussion: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png Some folks value privacy and control over appearance. Their sense of value from both outweigh any cons of a bad UI. Others can't move past how a UI feels. Both positions are completely valid. OSS needs more UI design talent—if you've lodged complaints here, pick a project/distro, dig through the contribution guidelines, and improve the UI.
exabrial 8y ago
All I can say is wow, this has been missing for a long time! If there was ever a time for an Acer, Asus, Dell, etc to sponsor a new product and pitch to corp/gov, this would be it.
zzo38computer 8y ago
I use Linux without a desktop environment. Works excellent; much better than Windows.
testware 8y ago
All comments here are either: A. "I'm so glad I'm on Linux distro A and not Windows but the UX and UI is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro B, it solves the problems of A" B. "I'm on distro B and not Windows, but package management, upgrade and/or compatibility is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro C, it solves the problems of B" C. "I'm on distro C and not Windows, but it doesn't support my audio or video equipment and I need to install and/or spend a few hours searching and compiling various solutions online until my machine is a Frankensteinian monster and while it works for me, it's not for everyone" followed by "have you tried distro A, it solves problems of C" I love the flexibility of Linux in some respects, but I've had stability issues on Ubuntu and Mint, UX issues on some Fedora based ones, and Puppy Linux, compatibility issues in Elementary (and fixes that were available in Ubuntu never made it to Elementary and I got tired of waiting). I've gone through way too many distros finding the one that works for me and none have been really as pleasant as described by people. For work I have to use a Mac, and the inconsistencies in keyboard shortcuts annoys me each and every day. Not to mention non - standard UI components stand out like a sore thumb - especially window maximizing, rescaling, browser and IDE shortcuts, etc. I wouldn't be using it if I didn't have to. Honestly, the OS that I have had the least trouble with and the most enjoyment was Windows XP, closely followed by 7. 8 was a mess of UI and UX oddities, and 10 is only marginally better. If there was a version of windows that was as streamlined as XP for the modern world, I'd fork out $50-100 for it considering the time it would save me and my time being worth more than the hassle, and that my contribution might help subsidize the cheaper community or pirated editions of the OS.
JetSpiegel 8y ago
Moving my parents' PC to Elementary cut down the support time to single-digit hours per annum. That and making sure Firefox has uBlock Origin configured.

561 points by diggernet 8y ago

I don't like the "Pay What You Want" system they have to download the OS. It feels misleading that you have to click on custom then enter 0 to download for free. I totally understand how important donations are to keep a project going but this one rubs me off the wrong way. I hope I'm not the only one.

parf02 8y ago
I think it's totally fair they do this to be very honest.
xupybd 8y ago
I don’t mind it. It’s a reminder that you’re getting something for free and that you could donate. You have to enter 0 as oppposed to by default paying nothing.
saagarjha 8y ago
This is a relatively recent change. I remember that they used to be much clearer about this back in Loki.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  They've had this since at least 2015, so not really all that recent.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Must have been Freya, then.
craftyguy 8y ago
You're definitely not the only one. They have been called out before for this exact stunt: https://liliputing.com/2015/02/elementary-os-devs-say-youre-cheating-dont-pay-free-software.html https://liliputing.com/2015/02/elementary-os-devs-say-youre-... Along with the "you're cheating if you don't give us money" (paraphrasing) quip. There are better distros out there.
treeform 8y ago
That is like the first thing I saw too. I was not fooled. But maybe this system works better then a free + donate button. Only data can tell... Maybe people are donating more with this system?
- all2 8y ago
  I didn't see anything remotely like A/B/C testing. They might benefit from something like that.
ademup 8y ago
I love it. I feel that having the downloader physically typing the number zero ensures that the downloader understands that there is 'A' number that belongs there. It respects the downloader (no ads or pushy verbiage) while sending this message of 'yeah, it is free to use, and it costs money/time/resources to create, so your financial contribution would be appreciated.
dymk 8y ago
It’s just forcing you to confront the fact that you’re using software that others put a lot of effort into, for free. A simple fix to quell the bad feelings would be donate a few bucks. Win/win.
rijoja 8y ago
Nah .. everybody thinks that they will give contributions and are really charitable in their heads. When it comes down to reality however you never really donate. When it's pushed into your face like this there's an actual call to action to do it. If you want it for free you still get it. Remember this is for consumer oriented projects, they can't expect to get B2B support deals for keeping vital servers up and running. So why not. Maybe a slider would've done it better, because then the 0 value is made available in a different way. Like the humble bundle used to. But that's just nitpicking. And sliders with different platforms and whatever might get messy.
dlivingston 8y ago
This is a pretty common practice in the arts - Louis CK and Radiohead both used this to great effect. Indeed, my recollection is that Radiohead made more money on their album In Rainbows doing 'pay as much as you want' than their label paid them on previous records.

y4mi 8y ago

I'll be honest.. I tried elementary os when they first released it but never got it's charm. It always felt like an inferior version of macOS... Which I don't like. I personally prefer to develop on a Linux install... But elementary OS is not what I'd use if Linux is an option

benologist 8y ago
It does feel like an inferior macOS, but macOS and increasingly proprietary hardware feel like an inferior alternative to open source and open computing too.
wlesieutre 8y ago
Inferior macOS is how most of my experiences with Linux distros have felt. Maybe the desktop environments just aren’t my thing, the inconsistent UIs feel sloppy, and I always ending up needing to drop down to a command line to fix something or other is was annoying. Elementary doesn’t fix needing to drop to a command line, and the UIs are only unusually consistent and well thought when you stick with the built in software. But the overall experience of it feels like someone actually thought about it more than the alternatives I’ve tried.
- automathematics 8y ago
  Check out Solus OS
type0 8y ago
MacOS is an inferior version of BSD!
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Jokes aside, I've always wondered why people don't try to get more user adoption for BSD.
  - Octoth0rpe 8y ago

matchbok 8y ago

70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot.

willio58 8y ago
I have no problem with an operating system that is trying to get adoption attempting to monetize. I say go for it. We’ve seen the adoption rates in the public for operating systems that take the completely free route.. near zero.
grawprog 8y ago
Seems like people agree with you. From what I can tell, the 117 apps on their 'store' seem to all be made by them or contributors to the project. I may be wrong about this, but at a quick glance it looked like stuff that would be mostly included in other desktop environments. This is just my impression from skimming through it.
nkkollaw 8y ago
> 70/30 split for apps is ridiculous and a non-starter. Apple and Google can demand that because of market share. This experiment cannot. reply I wouldn't compare elementary OS's fee to that of Apple and Google. Apple and Google take that 30% and keep it as profit, while elementary put it back (some percentage of it, I assume) into the project in the form of bounties a BountySource to fix bugs and improve the project. The more the project improves, the more users it will have, the more your app will sell, etc. etc. Also, your bitter downplaying of the project by calling it an "experiment" vs. Apple and Google and the whole negative tone of your comment is pretty annoying. You're the one comparing the project to the biggest tech companies in the world, not them. Weird.
- monochromatic 8y ago
  Oh come on. Google and Apple also reinvest money into improving their offerings.
Alterlife 8y ago

LeoPanthera 8y ago

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far the best "out of the box" experience of any Linux distro I've seen.

jniedrauer 8y ago
Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. Additionally, Fedora tends to adopt new technology very early. Gnome has defaulted to Wayland for over a year, and the experience was badly broken at first. These types of things require experience to work through. I don't personally use gnome, so none of this bothers me. But the defaults aren't what I would call "sane" for a new user.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  > Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.
  - snazz 8y ago
    Same here. I've never seen one on a system that has hundreds of additional packages installed and has survived a number of upgrades.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago

kitsunesoba 8y ago

The project is interesting and I have to give it props for being one of the few Linux distros that’s put the necessary level of thought into UI/UX and made consistency a priority. That said, I question some of their technical choices, most namely the choice of Vala as the project’s official language. Not that Vala is bad, but it’s incredibly niche at best and I think it severely limits contributions. Not many are going to want to learn a new language that’s scarcely used elsewhere in order to be able to work on any kind of project.

coleifer 8y ago
Its not too different from c#, and it's very popular for writing gtk applications.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Even so, it’s going to scare off a lot of potential contributors long before they investigate the language deeply simply by having a name they don’t recognize. It effectively limits the contributor pool to those who’ve previously written GTK apps, which is relatively tiny compared to the number of devs coming from more mainstream backgrounds.
  - coleifer 8y ago
    Maybe. It didn't scare off me, though. It piqued my interest!
    - jenscow 8y ago
      Oh, me too... "Familiar to anyone who's seen C#, but maintains API/ABI compatibility with C"
  - Investogician 8y ago
    I think it actually has helped. The Elementary app store is filled with nice Elementary-specific apps. Their getting started docs are quite beginner-friendly https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#getting-started https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#getting-star...

SonnyWortzik 8y ago

I used El.OS for 3 straight years and had to drop it for business reasons. The OS is excellent. Highly recommend it if you are not bound by your business needs.

tapoxi 8y ago

What advantages does Elementary have over (its upstream) Ubuntu? It just looks like a different GTK/GNOME Shell theme to me.

a9entroy 8y ago
Advantages: * It looks very pretty (arguably). The window theme is aesthetically very good looking. Some might prefer Gnome's look. * It is "fast". I found it to be faster than Ubuntu in terms of normal actions like opening apps, power off, power on etc. * Hassle free for the most part. If you don't do anything crazy, it works smoothly and is very low maintenance. Disadvantages: * Tons of bugs. A lot of bugs have not been fixed since a long time. So, if you find a bug, be prepared to fix it yourself. * eOS devs also make their own Code editor, Mail app, music app, videos app, photos app, calendar app. Some might say that this is a waste of time. * No minimize button. And this is a little frustrating. The devs want you to use the workflow they recommend to the point that they went through the effort to hide the key and make it so that you can't enable it.
veddox 8y ago
Well, for some people that is a pretty big advantage. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 now, running Unity. Despite all its bad press I love Unity - it perfectly fits my workflow and just gets out of your way. (Not like Gnome Shell, where a third of your screen real estate is gone just with various menubars, each of which you could park a truck on.) Gnome Shell on 18.04 pretty much killed Ubuntu for me. Next time I set up my computer, I'm going back to Elementary. (I used it some years ago, but it was still very buggy. I'm hoping they've fixed some of those since.)
- smhg 8y ago
  Unity still works perfectly fine on 18.04 for me. There is still some maintenance going on, so it can be an ok choice for the near future.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm still using unity 7 on 18.04. I see that it is still working in 18.10 and quite likely on 19.04. Hopefully, it'll last another LTS cycle. Technically, it should continue to work as long as xorg isn't dropped, which probably won't happen anytime soon. The only downside is that unity7 is so closely tied to ubuntu that you can't use it with any other distro. I generally like Fedora/RHEL like setups for servers, but I can't use anything other than unity (right now) for laptops.

saganus 8y ago

What kind of apps does Elementary OS support? Can I install .deb packages or other Linux-compatible ones? Otherwise it's going to be hard to adopt an OS if there are not enough of the apps I use, no?

kevingrahl 8y ago
I’ve been using elementary OS for the past two years or so; you can use everything that runs on Ubuntu which of course includes .deb packages.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Does it support snaps as easily as Ubuntu does?
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    I’ve never used a snap, but I believe they have a snap manager in the curated section of their App Store, and it looked pretty straightforward.
  - kevingrahl 8y ago
    Not sure, I’ve only ever used snap to install VLC once to test something and after installing snap via apt all I had to do was: snap install vlc
- saganus 8y ago
  That's great! For some reason I thought it was an incompatible new platform.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

nkkollaw 8y ago

elementary is not for me because it limits configuration a little bit too much to my taste, but it's a wonderful project. One of the cons of Linux--which is the OS I use exclusively--is that most apps are made by programmers, and programmers often don't care and don't have design skills. elementary OS looks absolutely stunning, and it's perfect if you stick to curated apps and you just want something that works. Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps. On this aspect, I really don't understand the critics: people need money in life. If a project brings a little bit of money, you can keep working on it. End-users win because there are updates, less bugs, and new versions instead of abandoned projects. In addition, as for their 70/30 fee they redistribute the money (I don't know in what percentage) on BountySource, so that the project gets developed further. Honestly, other distros have a lot to learn from elementary.

jammygit 8y ago
"Most importantly, they were able to finally find a way for devs to get paid, so that they can continue working and debugging their apps." This is the most exciting part of elementary IMO: it is a model for free software to bring in some cash and fund full time development.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  Definitely. They were the first to do that, so it wasn't easy.

llIIllIIllIIl 8y ago

I tried to use the OS multiple times through the recent years, but every time there's a missing feature that breaks all bi+lingual user experience: You cannot switch the keyboard layout for each window separately. Seems like they do not care about anyone except exclusively English speaking audience.

andrewflnr 8y ago
That's unfair. If you're not bilingual yourself, wanting to switch keyboard layout per window is extremely non-obvious. It would never have occurred to me.
- llIIllIIllIIl 8y ago
  That's why almost all OS have this as an option. You either change the layout globally or per window (or application, doesn't make that much difference).
  - andrewflnr 8y ago
    Welp, TIL.
amaccuish 8y ago
It's also excruciatingly slow to switch keyboard layouts (for me between latin and russian). I moved back to macOS over this since I do it so frequently.
solarmist 8y ago
This. There are 1,000 of these little things that just aren't right with linux as a desktop that make me drop it in less than a week every time I try it out. * How to I switch keyboards from English to Japanese easily? * How do I run excel or Lightroom or blah software that I'm already familiar with? * How do I upgrade my OS if I don't know the difference between Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 and Linux 3.16.0-4-generic or some such? Or even the difference between Intel and AMD? Why am I picking "amd64"? I have an intel processor! (That was hypothetical don't answer that) * How do I buy a new laptop that all of the hardware just works like it's supposed to? * How can I upgrade a piece of hardware and be sure it'll work? Only macOS and Windows answer all of those questions.

NuSkooler 8y ago

I've been using Elementary OS for a few major versions now. It's become my main desktop OS. I'm a bit worried about putting too much into the "store" and their own browser, but so far it hasn't impacted me any. Anything that applies to Ubuntu proper applies in eOS for the most part, but the UX is just much more polished. When I first saw it I was worried of too much "MacOS" like (which I'm not a fan of), but that has't been the case for me at all.

cassidyjames 8y ago
For what it's worth, elementary does not create Epiphany; that's the GNOME browser and is largely a GUI wrapper around WebKit, the exact same engine as in Safari. AppCenter is a way to serve the app developers who were already attempting to target the OS while also enabling both them and elementary to cover (some) costs.

xaduha 8y ago

I'd recommend https://getsol.us https://getsol.us if you asked me what Desktop Linux distro to get.

rudedogg 8y ago
I really like Solus, but I've had issues updating it. I installed it on an old laptop for a friend, which they have occasionally used for a year or two. Recently, they wanted help setting up a USB device, so I started by trying to update. The GUI showed a progress bar like it was working on it, but it wouldn't proceed. To debug, I ran the update utility from the command line. It spit out an error that the update server JSON wouldn't load. I copied the URL and paste it into a browser - it was some sort of cache miss. It made it so I couldn't update or install anything, forcing me to reinstall the OS. This was a couple weeks ago. I also vaguely remember something similar happening when I used it for a year or so; where I couldn't get updates to work and had to reinstall.
- xaduha 8y ago
  Well they changed stuff recently, new domain, new ISO. I hope that means they got their act together, it's a great project overall.
ledgerdev 8y ago
I too love solus, but I'm a bit concerned with the ongoing project stability with it's creator and technical leader(ikey) leaving the project. It's been such an amazing project. What do other think, can it continue to be relatively stable and not break things too much going forward?
- xaduha 8y ago
  Have you read/listened to this? https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail I'm hopeful, it's great to have BDFL at the start, but community takeover should and does happen at some point. Maybe this is it.

cordite 8y ago

I am currently on this os, it’s pleasant most of the time, but it crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen. It also starts having windows flicker for a few seconds at random after a few days of uptime. I use Nvidia GTX 1080, it seems to work well otherwise.

thrownaway954 8y ago
How can something that "crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen" be "pleasant most of the time" to use??? If Windows, OSX or Linux did that, would we even use them? Look I like to support open source projects, but junk is junk and if this thing crashes like you say so... it's junk.
- cordite 8y ago
  My solution was to disable the lock screen at home. But I still can’t disable accidentally pressing the lock key combination. It doesn’t seem to be configurable in the keyboard settings.

kevingrahl 8y ago

I’ve been using elementary OS since a few years on my main machine and really like it but there are a few quirks that bother me. For example I can’t use the WiFi drop down to change networks but instead have to open the network manager to scan for new networks. Also when right clicking on external disks in the file manager to mount disks the dialogue appears not where I’ve clicked but a few centimeters above. Stuff like that. I’ve come to live with all those flaws and very rarely have to boot up Windows to use software like Photoshop/Illustrator. Overall I can recommend elementary OS and have convinced some friends and family to switch from Windows to it.

type0 8y ago

Elementary is a fine distro, but short off being pretty and not afraid to ask for money what does it i really achieve that I can't get on other bigger distros?

BonesJustice 8y ago
At the moment, not a whole lot, but if you’re in the group of older MacBook [Pro] users who are looking to upgrade, don’t like the options from Apple, but love macOS, then it makes the transition less painful. My hope is that it will further distinguish itself with time. They’ve got the basics in place, which is no small task given they’ve essentially created their own desktop environment. They have a long road ahead of them before they catch up to distros like Mint in terms of features, but with more of the underpinnings in place (like their new cloud providers API), I’m hoping it starts to feel more complete during the next couple releases.

sneak 8y ago

To be a macOS replacement, an OS needs to work well on Apple hardware. Does Elementary OS now work well on Apple hardware? The last time I tried it, it did not.

timbit42 8y ago
With the T2 chip only macOS can run on Apple hardware now.
- radicaldreamer 8y ago
  That's not true at all: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330
  - dullin 8y ago
    The lastest news about that seems that the feature is actually not working or bugged out : https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/471124 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/471124
- sneak 8y ago
  Not true; I just booted the Elementary installer off of USB on a T2-equipped Mac. Even if that didn’t work, though, T2 Macs are a tiny minority; my question still stands for the millions of other Macs.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

scandox 8y ago

Whenever I see a skeuomorphic desktop it reminds me to make a donation to Arch.

qazwse_ 8y ago
Can you explain what you mean? From what I'm seeing there isn't any skeuomorphism in Elementary.
- cnasc 8y ago
  In this case I think they meant "dimensional" rather than skeuomorphic. Elementary isn't flat, but that's a selling point in my opinion.
scandox 8y ago
"A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that are inherent to the original." To my mind any icon based interface qualifies. Ready to be wrong.

zwaps 8y ago

Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences with numerous typography mistakes, icons of different sizes and grid alignment imbalances everywhere. Like check out this Mint (grey theme) screenshot: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Linux_Mint_17_MATE.png/1200px-Linux_Mint_17_MATE.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Li... and compare it with elementary OS here https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/elementary-os-0-5-juno-gnu-linux-distro-could-use-ubuntu-s-snappy-technologies-518038-2.jpg https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/elementary-os-0-... Mint is great, but seriously. Look at that logo render. Even worse, look at the start bar. Every single text and logo has a different height. I mean how do you even do something like that unintentionally? I am using XFCE right now, and it's great because its much faster than KDE or Gnome on this old laptop. But it sure isn't a pretty UI. I know a MSc. designer and she claims using my laptop makes her physically sick and dizzy. I don't care as much, but I can see the point. Everything is misaligned, in the start menu, the task bar, the apps. In the window bar the buttons and the minimize arrow aren't the same size. I mean seriously, whoever did this just did not care about Ui. I don't think ElementaryOS is for everyone. If you have any interest in non-standard repos, recent kernels or doing stuff in commandline, you are just better off elsewhere. I understand their choices, but I don't use it because of how they do the app store, among other things. But if you just want a computer that runs, looks good and doesn't break if you do X, then I think ElementaryOS is the #1 choice in the Linux world, and we should be thankful that it exists.

omnimus 8y ago
xfce is quite beautiful the default theme is just dated. you pick something else and its fine
joe_the_user 8y ago
Desktop Linux isn't really that difficult. It could be easier. The thing is that the people who want "really easy" probably aren't going to bother installing any new OS. Microsoft and Apple work hard, not just to make their OS easy but update their OS to whatever random hardware or software thing has come out (games and printers, say). Not being able to do "this one thing" is the main complaint I hear from friends who randomly wind-up with desktop Linux from computer recyclers mostly (it's my complaint too at times). Also, elementary OS looks a lot like the "gnome shell" and latest Ubuntu thing. Mint/Mate has become the main Linux shell by staying with Window 7-like-shell. The newer shells are easier but less powerful. So it would win for those who want easy. Except those who want easy will do nothing and stay with MS/Apple. After they are "free" too or seem like that to the average person.

chaostheory 8y ago

Elementary is a good Chrome OS alternative. I just wish Chrome OS was officially available for PCs.

ohiovr 8y ago

It’s just a window manager and not even a very good one.

lupinglade 8y ago

So it’s a replacement for macOS that looks just like macOS? Hmm...

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
I mean, that does make sense. Also lowers the learning curve if it's more than superficial.
TheRealPomax 8y ago
Only if you squint and ignore the rest of the sentence? It's an alternative to both macos and windows for people who not just not care about what their OS is, but have better things to do with their life than even bother to know what OS they run. As long as it's a pleasant, stable, consistent UI, and lets them do "the things they want to do" rather than "install the apps they need to do the things they want to do". And yeah, that means if at any point you might go "but it doesn't have X and that's okay, you can download the source and run make" then you're already way beyond who this OS is for. It's supposed to be "as dumb" as MacOS with the app store, or Windows with the windows store.
- lupinglade 8y ago
  But macOS is exactly that already?
  - TheRealPomax 8y ago
    It's also prohibitively expensive due to the hardware you need to legally own before you can even use it, and is _only_ supported for that hardware instead of allowing you to use whatever you can afford?

gurtgurt 8y ago

Seems pretty interesting, I might try it out later. Does anybody have experience using this to revive an old computer (ie make it faster and more useable)?

seltzered_ 8y ago

Question: This may pertain more to GTK, but does gtk/elementary os have an equivalent to macOS's core animation libraries? Particularly to support interactive / fluid interfaces (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/ )? I did a cursory look and couldn't find much. I've been fairly familiar with macOS development particularly for trying to do more experimental UI (fluid animation) the past few years, but have been staring at linux/elementaryOS more.

floatboth 8y ago
libdazzle (developed for GNOME Builder) has some fancy animated widgets and whatnot https://valadoc.org/libdazzle-1.0/index.htm https://valadoc.org/libdazzle-1.0/index.htm
- seltzered_ 8y ago
  interesting. I think the better path (for myself at least) may be to see where people have extended libcairo for uses of interactive animation, and see how cleanly Pantheon approached problems like switching desktops (not even macOS has always gotten it right - mission control's top desktop bar was sluggish in either Yosemite or El Capitan then they decided to hide it upon initial gesture later on).
  - floatboth 8y ago
    cairo is for custom drawing — if you're looking into that kind of animation, sure. If you want to animate GTK's GUI widgets, cairo probably won't be super helpful

EastSmith 8y ago

Someone knows if this is a good fit for a dev machine: Rails, React, PostgreSQL & Elastisearch? VS Code?

tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Get a macbook
ganlub 8y ago
Why not? This isn't anything out of the ordinary. Just some Docker containers and VSC. You can even find the Open Source version of VSC in some repositories.
manch23 8y ago
Its based on Ubuntu, so whatever you can install on Ubuntu should work on Elementary. Only issue I've run into is while adding an apt repo(for docker I think) I needed to point it to bionic instead of juno.
- rehemiau 8y ago
  That's a common problem I had too, I often have to modify install scripts because of it

car111 8y ago

I think there are 2 fundamental problems with Desktop Linux: 1. Linux doesn't even have a rock-solid gui toolkit on which different environments can be based: a. The one which runs on Ubuntu by default and which is probably used on 90%+ installations of desktop Linux is GTK which is utterly a major nightmare to develop GUIs with. b. The Qt library which powers KDE is simply not used all that widely. The flagship desktop environment using Qt is KDE which is downright ugly in its default installation. 2. Once problem 1 is solved, people should realize that a usable desktop is not just the Window manager and 3 apps which are blessed by the desktop environment team. It is 100s of thousands of hours of using by many users. It needs stability for other apps to develop around this ecosystem, both Mac and Windows have had a rocksolid GUI library powering their ecosystems for decade+ period and apps develop around them. Without stability and a new shitty GUI library every 2 years, Elementary OS or not, the desktop environment situation on Linux will continue to be shit.

dharma1 8y ago
Qt was used on unity8. But it didn't (at that time, and probably not now either) have a comparable UI component library to MacOS (or iOS). I know, because we made one from scratch - which wasn't a great idea either. Flutter would look interesting if it picks up steam for desktop apps.
- car111 8y ago
  It's very disappointing to learn that after more than 25 years of Linux being launched, there is not a single decent GUI SDK available. Much more damning is that RedHat whose entire business model was around making an enterprise ready Linux (server and Desktop) could not build a decent GUI toolkit.

sterlind 8y ago

I'd love to have a Linux distro with the frontend of Elementary OS and the backend of Nixos. And I say that as a Microsoft employee. Are there efforts to make Nixos grandma-worthy? Or are the only pretty distros all reskins of Ubuntu?

colemickens 8y ago
You might be interested in this PR: "[nixpkgs] elementary: init a 5.0 Juno" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637 I'm actively trying to build some cool things with Nix/NixOS and then write up a series of blog posts. Several recent discussions on the Discourse and at NixCon have been focused around Nix/NixOS user experience, at least. I've recently been building a package set of tip builds of Wayland stuff (sway, screenshot/screenrecord/notification utilities), including instructions for using them on Ubuntu via Nix. I'm also building out a set of packages and modules for Kube/Containerd/Kata-Containers for perfectly repeatable offline-first clusters. I think these two projects can be leveraged to evangelize Nix and NixOS nicely, and dovetails into UX efforts as I build my list of rough spots and fix a number of issues in nixpkgs and random OSS projects along the way. Also, Gnome-Shell and KDE work perfectly in NixOS anyway, and can be easily made to look just like they do on any other distro... I just recently switched to Sway, coming from KDE (~1.5 years) after GNOME (6+ years?). Not any significant visual differences than when I was using Arch Linux.
- nh2 8y ago
  Awesome work! Having the ability to configure a beautiful-by-default GUI for NixOS makes it much more likely that I can maintain machines for my family with low time effort, remotely.
- spindle 8y ago
  Great work! Thank you! At the moment it seems that a lot of NixOS users (including me) prefer a keyboard-centric window manager to a full desktop environment, but obviously (well I think it's obvious, anyway) there's a place for Pantheon on NixOS too. A big place, I should think.
- 8y ago

LowLevelHacker 8y ago

Unpopular opinion. Any desktop os with a top menu bar is worthless.

mattycakes01 8y ago

It's basically just Pantheon with a custom skin. You can get similarly good results using the "arc" theme and any decent ubuntu-based distro.

muthdra 8y ago
`It's basically just ${desktopEnvironment} with a custom skin` can be humorously used for 90% of popular Linux distros but it's not really fair for any of them.
cassidyjames 8y ago
You realize elementary has created the entire Pantheon desktop environment, right? So, "It's just their desktop environment with their stylesheet, their apps, and the AppCenter ecosystem," is basically what you are saying. In which case, yeah, that's exactly what elementary OS is.

debt 8y ago

All I want is an OS with a lightning fast UI and ‘08 thumb drive sized footprint, idc about privacy. Gimme ultra lightning fast Casino-electronic-craps-game-level fast UI and shouldn’t weigh too much like I said Who cares about privacy? If they’re based in the US/EMEIA you can sue the pants off anyone that disrespects your privacy and win in court

lytedev 8y ago
Build your own! Arch Linux is a great base to start with. Check out /r/unixporn for examples!

ChefboyOG 8y ago

I ran various distros as a kid growing up, then went years as a professional running Mac. Elementary is the only distro I've not felt stupid friction running on my Chromebook. I know there are other considerations, but as a daily driver, this is easily one of the best distros I've seen

JoshuaAshton 8y ago

Shame their app store is a great meme.

bprasanna 8y ago

Looks promising. It would be great if they can offer a scaled down version (something like Lubuntu) which we can install in single board computers (like RaspberryPi).

rcarmo 8y ago
The Raspbian distribution has recently been improved to the point where it has a decent (if less polished) experience. I have a Pi desktop for developing in Arduino, and it’s great with the newest 3B+.

truth_seeker 8y ago

I find Ubuntu 18 LTS version quite promising both as a developer and normal non-dev user of desktop.

Endy 8y ago

Is it binary-compatible with Windows & Mac OS? If it's not, then it's not a replacement and the title should be changed to reflect that. I respect the idea of speed and privacy (though I'm still a minimalist - I believe in using 16/32-bit and less than 1GB RAM). But before I can "replace" Windows, I need an OS that actually works like Windows.

throwawaywhynot 8y ago
wtf
- deadlocked 8y ago
  It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day? If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS. I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in various ways that make them less useful, to me, than the apps I named above. (I've been using Linux as a daily driver for two years now, have been administrating Linux servers for nearly two decades - I know Linux).
  - Endy 8y ago
    Of course, you just know that the answer from most of the hardcore Linux people will be that you should "get involved" with the projects you named and contribute code - whether or not you actually know how to program is inconsequential. Linux, after who knows how long, is still not ready to be a primary desktop OS, and for one major reason - it's not ready for 100% ignorant end-users.
  - throwawaywhynot 8y ago
    well your's is a valid use case. I just didn't understand why OP was expecting it to be binary compatible. It's just a distro
    - 8y ago

avodonosov 8y ago

But not for Linux?

gigatexal 8y ago

If it didn’t use gnome and somehow skinned KDE to be that pretty I’d be all about it.

TheRealPomax 8y ago
What a weird thing to say when the whole point of this OS is a focus on consistent user experience, with a negative focus on "does it tickle a power user's tech stack fancy".
- gigatexal 8y ago
  There’s something inherently gross about running my desktop in some sort of Frankenstein-javascript-single-threaded-modify-with-css mess that I’d rather avoid. And KDE has been faster for me. KWin is amazingly quick. What KDE lacks is the polish that the Gnome based desktops enjoy — if it has that I’d doubt a reason for Gnome to exist.

rustcharm 8y ago

It looks nice, and it may be a replacement for ChromeOS or some other limited system, but it's not a replacement for Windows and MacOS.

rubenhak 8y ago

Wow, looks cool. The background makes it feel like Mac OS X...

vermaden 8y ago

I wonder when they will introduce icons in the desktop :)

randomsearch 8y ago

I used Elementary OS for a few months this year. It’s quite nicely designed in places, but is based on Gnome 3 - which doesn’t make sense for an OS that is all about UX, because Gnome 3 makes plenty of bad decisions and Elementary inherits them. Still, they have done their best to contain them and I think it’s better designed than any other modern Linux desktop. Couple of failure points: - the mail client is buggy to the point of being unusable. You could say that about any Linux GUI mail client, but this one is particularly bad. - Alt-Tab behaviour is strange and awful. If you want OS X but can’t afford it, this is as close as you’ll get, but it’s a long way off.

throwawaywhynot 8y ago

the linux desktop landscape has really changed. Ubuntu is no longer the cool os for the newbies with the rise of manjaro,mint,solus,elementary

marcus_holmes 8y ago

Anyone tried installing this on a MacBook? I've got an older Pro that keeps running Kernel at 60%+ of CPU - apparently just one of those bugs that MacOS has that "just work" like that. I really want to install another OS, but both Ubuntu and Fedora can't see the available partition space, and can't find a wireless driver. Given that Elementary OS is advertising itself as a replacement for MacOS, has anyone tried it and got anywhere with it?

ibnishak 8y ago
Isn't elementary OS basically based on Ubuntu with a few ui tweaks?
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  I thought it was a different distro?
metasyn 8y ago
I installed it a year or so ago on an old 2014 MBP. It's battery was bulging and bending the casing so I knew it was on its way out... I used elementary os for a few months, mostly just using it for spotify, occasional programing, surfing the web. Worked fine, and in this case, added some life to some older hardware.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  cool, thanks for the info. I'll give it a try... :)

rcarmo 8y ago

I don’t get the hate, really. It’s the only distro I’ve used in the past few years with a “nice enough” desktop where my Mac instincts translate across and where I can use anything packaged for Ubuntu with zero hassles. I’ve been running it on a low-end Chromebook for a long while now, and upgraded from 0.4.1 to 5.0 via the CLI (not recommended, but feasible if you know what you’re doing), and other than the ultra-niche app ecosystem (which I don’t need, since I mostly run Firefox, Docker and VS Code on it, besides dev packages) it has zero weirdness. Well, except for the mail client. It has improved, but every single time I try to use it to send out some notes while away from my regular machines it breaks somehow, and there is zero addressbook/calendar integration (I have Thunderbird installed, but keep trying the built-in mail client after each update because I like the UI).

thawkins 8y ago
mail on 5.0 is just plain broken when used with gmail. refuses to log in.
- 9712263 8y ago
  Just setup a google app password.

rushabh 8y ago

Reading the comments here, it seems we don’t realise that ElementaryOS is run by a small team of mostly volunteers, who are doing this as a “free” service to the rest of us. Lets take a moment to appreciate the immense perseverance, sacrifice, hard work put in by the team behind the project. The work done is pretty slick and complete. I hope there is a philanthropic minded HN member here who can help them with a generous funding, so they can keep building this awesome tool.

ianwalter 8y ago

I’ve been using Elementary for 2-3 weeks and it’s really good. Still far behind MacOS, but it’s the best I’ve felt about a linux distro becoming a mainstream alternative. I’ve used Pop_OS! as well and while it’s good, I wish System76 would have just backed Elementary OS. Elementary is a good base but needs a larger community and more resources to become legit.

fgheorghe 8y ago
Just use Ubuntu not them hipster os’ no one heard of supports

msiyer 8y ago

Linux is not ready for mass market. I think, proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs. I my opinion, OS itself has very little value to the end user. The end user needs a fertile userland. The end user should be free to trivially switch platforms without disrupting the userland one bit. This is not some pipe dream. It is very much possible. Open standards and strict adherence to them need to be enforced. Data formats need to be portable not just across platforms, but across competing software. This is our right. No one should deny this no matter how powerful.

sjellis 8y ago
> proprietary file formats, vendor lock-in, monopolistic and restrictive trade practices etc. are reasons why users dread switching OSs. That certainly used to be true, but I think most of those issues have fallen away, and it's mostly just about applications and unpredictable hardware support. Despite the efforts of proprietary OS vendors to invent new whiz-bang features, most people use the OS as a launcher for their Web browser and the collection of applications that they actually care about (office suite, games, professional tools like Photoshop). Proton is a really big deal because it unblocks migration for the people whose key applications are games from Steam.

lamb_duh 8y ago

Digital products illicit emotional responses just like physical ones. Aesthetic clouds our judgement when it comes to usability—it's a well documented universal design principle and affects people's sense of usability regardless of culture, location, or education. There's a relevant XKCD for this discussion: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png Some folks value privacy and control over appearance. Their sense of value from both outweigh any cons of a bad UI. Others can't move past how a UI feels. Both positions are completely valid. OSS needs more UI design talent—if you've lodged complaints here, pick a project/distro, dig through the contribution guidelines, and improve the UI.

exabrial 8y ago

All I can say is wow, this has been missing for a long time! If there was ever a time for an Acer, Asus, Dell, etc to sponsor a new product and pitch to corp/gov, this would be it.

zzo38computer 8y ago

I use Linux without a desktop environment. Works excellent; much better than Windows.

testware 8y ago

All comments here are either: A. "I'm so glad I'm on Linux distro A and not Windows but the UX and UI is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro B, it solves the problems of A" B. "I'm on distro B and not Windows, but package management, upgrade and/or compatibility is terrible", followed by "have you tried distro C, it solves the problems of B" C. "I'm on distro C and not Windows, but it doesn't support my audio or video equipment and I need to install and/or spend a few hours searching and compiling various solutions online until my machine is a Frankensteinian monster and while it works for me, it's not for everyone" followed by "have you tried distro A, it solves problems of C" I love the flexibility of Linux in some respects, but I've had stability issues on Ubuntu and Mint, UX issues on some Fedora based ones, and Puppy Linux, compatibility issues in Elementary (and fixes that were available in Ubuntu never made it to Elementary and I got tired of waiting). I've gone through way too many distros finding the one that works for me and none have been really as pleasant as described by people. For work I have to use a Mac, and the inconsistencies in keyboard shortcuts annoys me each and every day. Not to mention non - standard UI components stand out like a sore thumb - especially window maximizing, rescaling, browser and IDE shortcuts, etc. I wouldn't be using it if I didn't have to. Honestly, the OS that I have had the least trouble with and the most enjoyment was Windows XP, closely followed by 7. 8 was a mess of UI and UX oddities, and 10 is only marginally better. If there was a version of windows that was as streamlined as XP for the modern world, I'd fork out $50-100 for it considering the time it would save me and my time being worth more than the hassle, and that my contribution might help subsidize the cheaper community or pirated editions of the OS.

JetSpiegel 8y ago

Moving my parents' PC to Elementary cut down the support time to single-digit hours per annum. That and making sure Firefox has uBlock Origin configured.