17 ms·

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 a

by 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.
- watermans 8y ago
  In what way has Mate become the main Linux shell? It’s not the DE of choice for the most popular distributions so it likely doesn’t have a lot of exposure among Linux environments.
- finchisko 8y ago
  It's not, it just can be ugly as some distros are showing us.
DCKing 8y ago
I agree. I would be using Linux full time if the experience was not so jarring all the time. Fonts and themes are off, stuff gets jumbled around, things are wildly inconsistent. You end up spending lots of time doing weird hacks to make everything look alright. Even Elementary will break if you move outside the core applications - it cannot be helped in this ecosystem. When Linux works for you it's so damn great but I cannot fully enjoy a UI that is so inconsistent and ugly so often.
- osrec 8y ago
  If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. Of all the Linux distros I've used in my company, it's given us almost no headaches. The fonts are crisp, and icons look fine too. Adding monitors has also been painless. And even my least technical users are able to use it (but might need a bit of help now and again). For us, it has actually been a pleasure to use because of its speed. If you're prepared to give up whizzy animations etc, do try it when you have a bit of spare time.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    > If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. I can't speak for the UI but Aptitude vomits broken dependencies every time you have to upgrade your distro. It made me absolutely despise package management (I'm a Windows guy) until I switched to Arch and realized a package manager that is a pleasure to work with is not an inherent oxymoron. Obviously UI is another story but at least this one works.
    - kungtotte 8y ago
      You can go with Manjaro if you want a better experience with pre-configured desktop environments. There are official editions for XFCE, KDE, and Gnome and there's community editions for i3, openbox, LXQT, and so on. You still have access to the AUR and the official repos mirror the official Arch repos but lag behind by a week or two.
    - iforgotpassword 8y ago
dingdingdang 8y ago
Minorly unfair on Mint since it is a 2 versions old screenshot being compared to present day version of Elementary. Personally by far prefer the Mint paradigm: it is clear what is running and what is a launch icon without studying icon shading/overlays/dots..etc.
- PakG1 8y ago
  Could you share a screenshot for Mint today then and describe how it's improved?
  - vel0city 8y ago
    Look for yourself and see if you can notice any differences. https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tara/cinnamon.png https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tara/cinnamon...
    - j_koreth 8y ago
      Is that Mate or Cinnamon?
      - lytedev 8y ago
        The URL implies cinnamon, I think.
AndrewDavis 8y ago
I hear these every so often. Just curious if noticing or more so, even being bothered by them is the norm? Example Mint, the font heights I wouldn't have noticed and definitely something I would not be consciously aware of if I used it. And I still don't know what's wrong with the render beyond it looking at bit outdated. Am I the odd person here or is it a vocal minority that have issues with it?
- DanBC 8y ago
  I dislike the Linux Mint desktop image, but that's trivially easy to swap out. I genuinely can't see the other problems with the image, and I feel that it's not a good example to illustrate the point. But I'm sure parent poster is right, and that linux desktop environments use a wierd mish-mash of icons and fonts with weird sizing and line heights.
- lazzlazzlazz 8y ago
  You are part of the vocal, online minority that doesn't look at Mint and cringe because it looks so amateur and dated. Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly without necessarily being able to articulate that the "font heights", etc. are the problem. By a common user's standards, Mint looks amateur and janky compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS.
  - AndrewDavis 8y ago
    I look at it and just think old. But I don't dislike it. I just see it as old. Like fashion, is what was popular in the 90s bad? Or is it just some perpetual need to evolve for the sake of evolving?
    - jenscow 8y ago
      I agree. It's rough around the edges, but I only need to look at it for a few seconds when changing windows, for example. Other than that, it stays out of my way and doesn't tire me with animations which stopped looking cool the by 4th time. I've tried moving away from the traditional desktop (yes, for the sake of it), but I just can't. And cinnamon seems to suck the least. (and no amount of polish will move me to mac/win)
coned88 8y ago
Weird argument. Because I have given Linux systems to the elderly before. People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine. My mother was a long time windows user. Kept getting viruses. She was converted to Ubuntu and has used it for over a decade now without issue. Linux is far easier for people than you think. My mother is a senior citizen now and this is her second computer. The UI concerns you bring up are just silly, They are about the same as you buying a new hammer and it having an inconsistent wood grain or a metal burr.
- tathougies 8y ago
  Yeah same experience here. Installed gentoo on our home computer for my mom and dad and once i showed them how to open Firefox, they were happy as clams. The only issue was when my dad wanted to install tax software
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    You mean your parents can use your gentoo computer, or that you installed gentoo for them ? The latter sounds quite unorthodox.
    - tathougies 8y ago
      I installed it for them. It was more than a decade ago, and I chose gentoo because it was one of the first distributions to support amd64. Chose gentoo over debian because it had newer kernel versions that I needed for that particular computer.
  - lerax 8y ago
    Similar history here with another distro.
  - tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
    Basically, they'll be okay as long as they only use the browser. When they need to edit a MS Excel file, or use their digital signature (mandatory for companies in my country), or use some accounting software... or anything like this, you understand that Linux isn't as ready for the mainstream desktop as we think it is.
marktangotango 8y ago
Curious how you’re using xfce, xubuntu ui is very consistent, none of the issues you noted. I have used xfce as an apt-get install (chromebook with crouton) and that was very very bad. For chromebooks galliumos is very nice as well.
moron4hire 8y ago
Is that Mint screenshot the Mate or Cinnamon DE? Last time I used Mint was about 3 years ago and it looked nice than that. I'm not an expert on Linux DEs, but that looks like what I remember of Gnome. But anyway, agree with your points in general. I'll probably end up installing ElementaryOS in a VM. I do VR development full-time so I will need Windows as my main computer, but I definitely like having a Linux system around for everything else I do.
tEMporality7 8y ago
Compare the latest Mint with Elementary. It's much cleaner.
Ar-Curunir 8y ago
I've gotten around this by minimizing my usage of graphical applications; I use Firefox, a PDF reader, (recently) Zotero to manage papers, and finally a tiling window manager to reduce graphical elements. Everything else happens in the terminal. Linux just isn't ready for GUI apps :(
- wingworks 8y ago
  I try every year I try a few different Linux distros and each time I notice a tonne of UI and UX issues, and leave again (I mean, even the basic things like being able to resize windows is 95% of the time a pain on most distros I try. I'm sure there is a fix for it, but the point is, you shouldn't need to fix it, it should "just work"). In my mind Ubuntu is the closest, but still far far away. I love Linux, and I use it almost every day (Debian), but only ever as GUIless servers, which it's amazing at. Just hope one day a team with design and ease of use will make a distro that "normal" people can enjoy to use. (but you would need other apps that look and work great in it too, which I fear will be the harder issue to tackle)
  - ayoisaiah 8y ago
    How is resizing windows on Linux far away from Mac or Windows? I think you're exaggerating
    - wingworks 8y ago
      Maybe it's just the way I do it, but most of the distros I've tried I always seem to have difficulty trying to click on the 1x1px spot to resize a window from the corner. Most of the time I'd miss it and have to try again. The most recent example I can think of that I had this issue with is Ubuntu MATE last week. And I get it, this is a very nitpicky issue, but in my mind, it's a basic operation that both macOS and Windows do really well and as a user switching from that, it's a little annoying.
      - michaelmrose 8y ago
        In this case you are basically missing a feature https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6963sa/plasma_tip_you_can_resize_the_window_in_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6963sa/plasma_tip_you_... If you watch the gif in plasma basically you hold down the alt key and right click and drag to resize from anywhere on the window. Likewise you hold down the alt and left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it around. Further there are hotkeys to place the window on a segment of the screen example: the left/right/top/bottom half or one of the corners. I think there is a function for sizing it to thirds as well. For me this virtually replaced any manual resizing even before I swapped to using a tiling wm where there is zero resizing. I just tested this on cinnamon and this works there too. I don't know if it works in mate.
quantummkv 8y ago
I've been using the Kde desktop (Kubuntu) for about 6 months now after switching from Windows 10 for Ruby development. The UI is damn good. Way more polished and consistent than what passes for the three way mess that the Windows 10 UI is these days. Straight out of the box you get a polished, Windows 7 type layout, complete with a start menu better than Windows, consistent fonts and smooth animations. And unlike every other desktop, the dark theme actually works as advertised. The only time I go back to windows is when is need Corel Draw for my graphics design work. And I immediately feel the difference in polish and consistency. If I could get without Corel Draw, I would definitely banish Windows from my laptop. That being said, GNOME is a clusterfk. It's what we all accused Windows 8 of beign. A wannabe tablet desktop in a world without any actual tablets. What is possessing them to remove functionality available in ALL other desktops? When this is pointed out they point to extensions written in a leaky javascript implementation, which can be broken the next gnome update because why not? If you want a modern desktop on Linux, Kde is what you want these days.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Imho, gnome is quite nice. I think I'm in the minority maybe but I would be pretty sad if gnome went away one day (or had another memory leak/slowdown issue)
  - petepete 8y ago
    The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble. GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      Also Gnome is keyboard driven to a large degree. I used dwm/dmenu for quite a time then went back to the default DE which was Gnome and it felt similar (small screen by the way so not too many tiled windows in dwm)
andrepd 8y ago
Why are you comparing Elementary OS with a version of Linux Mint that's at least 5 years old? Especially when they had such a big design shift in the last year or two. Up-to-date screenshot (still with the "old" theme Mint-X, but actually Mint-Y (based on arc) is the default as of the latest version): https://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/serena/gallery/5.jpg https://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/serena/gallery/5.... The choice isn't between ugly and Elementary. It's a false dillema. E.g. Cinnamon, which is pretty and functional.
- adar 8y ago
  With all due respect, that screenshot you linked looks straight out of 2008.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    I genuinely take that as a compliment. I wouldn't be caught dead using a monstrosity like, I don't know, windows 10 (or even the hideous interfaces of Google products) just because it's ""modern"".
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      Vista, whose look Mint (in the screenshot) is trying to emulate, was a monstrosity.
- virtualritz 8y ago
  It's almost as bad 5 years later then. - icons on task bar too low - icons on task bar vertically not aligned - task icons different size than pinned icons on task bar - task text vertically aligned too high - icons stylistically not matched - system icons unreadable (badly designed, all look the same, don't convey purpose adequately) - task bar icons on right are vertically all over the place - task bar mini icons sizing on right is not consistent - file manager icon sizes all over the place - file manager bottom bar icons are too low and lack 'breathing room' at bottom compared to top bar with buttons - file manager top/bottom bar size is mismatched - horizontal alignment/margin of icons on file manager's top and bottom bars is inconsistent I could go on and on. People who don't care about these things don't see them. Their vision is not trained for it. But for a polished experience, even to UI laypersons, they make all the difference.
nobody271 8y ago
I don't think Linux will e... okay, probably ever, be a replacement for Windows or MacOS. Linux is Linux no matter how you dress it up. The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done. Forget about the fact that they'll be running down dependencies and the programs themselves don't usually work as good. What is the benefit they get for all that time and frustration? Then one day their keyboard will randomly stop working or they wont be able to get connected to the internet because of an update. Smart people do dumb things sometimes. Trying to get the general public to use Linux is a perfect example. It's not even Linux under the hood. It is Linux.
- lewiscollard 8y ago
  > The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done. Can we put this myth to bed yet? I use Linux full-time at home and on my laptop and I can't remember the last time I had to do this. Hey, I only see a command line because I can do stuff much faster there, not because I need to (I live in a command line on my Mac at work, too).
  - nobody271 8y ago
    Between installing software, editing configuration files as sudo in vim, partitioning drives, mounting drives, copying files to a directory where you need sudo, etc. any user on a Linux system will spend plenty of time at the command line. We should do a test and see if it really is a "myth". Get 10 normal users to install 10 programs not already in the repositories and see how well that goes. Just the other day I had to unzip a .tar.xz from the command line.
    - BenjiWiebe 8y ago
      The point is, normal users will rarely/never need an application not in the repos. And installing something from a repo is simpler than installing something on Windows.
gnulinux 8y ago
I'm starting to think the whole is plotting this weird conspiracy against me... I think linux is very comfortable, I think it looks pretty, it gives me power to make it prettier. Windows comes with fucking ads in the UI how is that any prettier? OSX is supposed to be polished, but I constantly experience problems like my screen randomly flickers, it forces me to login twice every time, sometimes all windows suddenly lose focus and the only way to come to a good state is to go to a non full screen window... I don't know man, having used all three I'll take linux any day and it's because it's prettier, UI is more functional, and the system actually doesn't have handcuffs.
- MattRix 8y ago
  If you think Linux is prettier you need your eyes checked. You're confusing functionality and reliability with prettyness.
  - angelsl 8y ago
    What? Some GTK themes are really good nowadays. See Materia. And if you mean some (many) non-DE applications have really bad UI, then that's true on Windows too.
  - ayoisaiah 8y ago
    I don't have a Mac, but I've used one for non-trivial amounts of time. I don't think it's significantly prettier than my Ubuntu + Gnome setup, but I'd agree there's a more consistent feel in the UI.
- xur17 8y ago
  I'm in the same boat - I used a Mac at my last job for ~4 years, and if given the choice I'll choose linux hands down. I find it more comfortable, but maybe that's just because I'm used to it?
alpaca128 8y ago
As someone who has actually used elementaryOS for some time(both previous versions about 6 months each) I have to disagree with your "doesn't break if you do X" claim. You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again - say hi to at least 2 different kinds of graphics glitches and possibly a randomly appearing bug in the file manager. And I'm not sure if it was a bug or a feature, but last time I used eOS I didn't enjoy the default video player's "fullscreen mode" in which it still didn't overlap the lower part of the desktop with the dock. But keep in mind I haven't tried the most recent version which came out not long ago, I'd be surprised if some of the problems weren't fixed yet. I think elementaryOS is on the right track, but it's definitely not more stable than the average distro, including the ones with rolling-release update models.
- SyneRyder 8y ago
  > You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again... Definitely this, unfortunately. elementaryOS 0.4.1 Loki was fairly stable for me, but then I installed 5 / Juno, and now the machine often locks up with a completely black screen, except for a handful of items visible where the top menu bar usually is. It seems to occur when it wakes from a sleep mode (though this is on a Parallels virtual machine). The only solution is to reboot and lose whatever you were working on. elementaryOS is great and the first Linux I've really enjoyed using (I'm normally a Mac user, the kind who uses software by Panic). But it still has so far to go. It's also worrying that you can't upgrade from 0.4.1 to 5. Even with all of Microsoft's disasters with updates, they've still managed to let you upgrade from one version of Windows to the next one.
  - ianwalter 8y ago
    I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve been trying to use Elementary OS for years but it has always turned out to be unusable until 5 which I’ve been using for a couple weeks with only very minor complaints.
- graposaymaname 8y ago
  Used Loki for 6+ months here, In my case the main problem was that it took too much time to shutdown the system. I don't know if that's an elementary specific issue, but I've noticed it on multiple systems with the OS. Again, I've seen hardisk issues propping up while using elementary. It was really easy to use but then it had issues. (Did anyone else have these issues?)
michaelmrose 8y ago
If you haven't noticed 90% of people are running windows which is quite frankly ugly by default. Further it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp. It's probably accurate to say that most people aren't terribly concerned with aesthetics as much as functionality. That said steps to achieve a relatively consistent look. Open your configuration app and configure your gtk theme to something that looks nice. If you don't have one you can install lxappearance which is from lxde and has minimal deps so you can easily install it in a minimal environment. Install qt4-config if you have any old qt4 apps. Set it to use gtk+ style for qt4 aps. If you use newer qt apps install qt5ct and select gtk style. In 5 minutes you will have a relatively consistent look. A few notes. - Its increasingly likely you have zero qt4 apps and could probably skip that part and not care - qt5ct actually lets you set a custom stylesheet and or colors if you want more manual control but this is hardly required. - firefox is really stupid about drawing website elements with dark text on a dark background when run with a dark theme. You can run individual gtk apps with a different theme like so env GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light firefox you can copy your firefox desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the command to ensure that this works properly automatically. Chrome somehow figures out that a dark theme doesn't mean you want to draw webpages differently so I consider this a firefox bug that mozilla wontfix. In a perfect world someone would create a single useful gui to configure qt4 plasma gtk2 gtk3 apps which only had settings that would effect all of the above consistently and required no tweaking. In reality land most people don't care including those shipping distros can probably ship with or arrange a reasonable look with minimal fuss.
- ivm 8y ago
  > it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp It was a decade ago. The world has moved on since then and the expectations are much higher nowadays. For example, see software landing pages today vs. 2008. Even modern Instagram photos look like they were professionally edited for a magazine.
JetSetWilly 8y ago
On the other hand the elementary OS screenshot has the designer’s disease of using poor contrast text - grey on white? Yuk.
dmix 8y ago
> linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences I disagree, recent Gnome versions from the last few years have been amazing. Nearly on par with Elementary.
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
I recently installed kubuntu with the latest version of KDE Plasma and was blown away. This is by far the most polished linux experience I've ever had. My girlfriend who is definitely not a linux user forced me to install it on her laptop too after seeing it. Everything "just works", even more than macOS IMO, and you can configure everything to your hearts content. Animations are smooth, UI is very polished and consistent. Definitely recommend checking it out.
- BenjiWiebe 8y ago
  I've had the same experience installing the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, minus the girlfriend.
z3t4 8y ago
It seems your designer friend has occupational injury, eg she is trained to spot those issues, but it can give problems in real life, where not everything is perfectly aligned.
- deleted 8y ago
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iforgotpassword 8y ago
Agree, and this is why I don't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't a techie. It's just plain ugly and that's the first thing people notice. There have been improvements and exceptions here and there, but the UI sector seems so volatile that just because current GNOME or KDE look consistent and usable, I can't expect the next iteration to be good as well. Since starting to primarily use Linux in 2008, I've consecutively moved to simpler and simpler DEs, to the point where I'm currently running i3 everywhere for about 4 years. Less ui = fewer things to fuck up.
- deleted 8y ago
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Folcon 8y ago
So one thing I don't understand is why window managers in linux never seem to have ways to let the user tweak the UI? I mean it's something to add, but I find it odd that no one has thought to add it? Or is it just a feature hidden somewhere? I've thought on several occasions that I'd be pretty happy if I could just hijack how the UI layer was rendering some program, tweak text sizes, adjust colours and make that a user specific choice that can be done at the OS level. It would make linux far more accessible in my opinion and give the average user a way to fix issues that as you say may make some feel physically sick and dizzy. Users could then start sharing fixes and tweaks and devs who are interested could pull in these settings into the main program, the work could be shared and these OS's could get better! =)... It just seems such a prefect example of give power to your user and everything is editable, many people don't have time to dig into the internals of everything, but they'd be happy using a relatively straightforward tool (or at least one with tons of tutorials) to adjust the programs they use to their liking, and I'd wager they'd be pretty happy sharing the tweaks they made too. Maybe this already exists? If it does please tell me! It's the one major thing that keeps me coming back to macs/windows machines. I find it pretty funny, most of my linux time is lived in servers and when I was a teen I ran ubuntu desktop for some time, but I just couldn't deal with it after a while. Which is a shame in my book, and I could certainly see something like this being in the community spirit of linux. PS: If anyone is thinking of doing this and want's to talk to me for some reason, I'll be happy to discuss this further =)...
- secure 8y ago
  The look & feel of applications can be changed by using GTK or Qt themes and there’s entire websites dedicated to sharing these. Isn’t this what you describe? Side note: Window managers are only responsible for the window decoration, i.e. the frame around the contents and the title bar. Not a lot to tweak there, but most window managers do actually allow changing pretty much every aspect of it. GTK/Qt are toolkits, not window managers.
  - Folcon 8y ago
    Right, but that seems to be something that requires the user specifically to be a dev? And to know how to compile each program they need to tweak? I'm thinking of something where say I load up a program UI Tweak, I don't need to know anything about the software I'm working with, I just select the element that I want to adjust, the label sizes for text in the dialogue, or the colour of the text by clicking on it. Think Autohotkey's spy tool[0], when using Autohotkey with the spy tool, I just select the elements that I want to manipulate and then choose what I want to do with them. In my opinion, this significantly lowers barriers to entry for users wanting to change things to suit them. Then the developers of such software can work out ways of making apps work better with such a system. Maybe linux based UI apps need to improve their api so that they can take instructions to adjust it? Or they just add some simple hooks the UI Tweak can understand and use to adjust behaviour? I don't know what users will want, but allowing users to describe what they want, letting them know it's possible, and giving them an avenue to share and communicate their needs can only help improve the quality of the software, as well as provide an avenue for devs that care about user experience to have a channel to understand what needs might not be being met by existing offerings. - [0] Image example here => https://stackoverflow.com/a/45680175 https://stackoverflow.com/a/45680175
agumonkey 8y ago
When I used it 2-3 years ago the UI was slick, lean, responsive .. above ubuntu in terms of average user appeal.
finchisko 8y ago
I totally agree. Linux pro users seems not care much about the detail. I'm the exception. Can live with Ubuntu, but most distros have terrible ui (you can see the misaligned items from miles away).
finchisko 8y ago
I'm terrible person, but I couldn't resist to get example of very ugly and visually inconsistent linux distro. And that guy reviewing it, is saying the dream distro in video title. What? Just watch the video and wait for settings app to get what I'm talking about. If it miss-aligned items don't bothers you, then you're weird (or maybe I'am) :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCsRMLhVL8Y&t=418s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCsRMLhVL8Y&t=418s
- dsego 8y ago
  I mean, even now in ubuntu gnome, a right-click menu has a gap (gutter?) on the left side, probably left for icons which aren't enabled by default. This is just lazy coding in my opinion.
raylangivens 8y ago
There is a plethora of Linux based distros out there. I recently bought a Lenovo L480 with DOS. I ended up trying out Elementary since I liked the UX. A day or two after using it, it already started hanging on me and wouldn't boot. There was this super weird bug as well because of which the first time I opened Google Chrome, the close button on top right would freeze and I'd have to close that and reopen Chrome. I hated being part of these "edge cases". I then ended up using Ubuntu and that has been stable as rock. No surprises, rock solid. I used it back in college. There are very few Linux based distros that are battle tested, Ubuntu is certainly one of them, on account of being backed by Canonical, which actually gets paid to develop the OS unlike most other linux based distros that have to work on "donations" or "foundation money". Anyway, I'm happy with Ubuntu for my needs, I don't have super fancy needs and I don't want Arch level of customization. All I want something that works out of box and has a UNIX like CLI (I'm a programmer). Another thing that sucks about Linux based OS's is that the power management is just repugnant. There are so many OS's out there and so many laptop models that I understand it is a herculean task to get maximum performance on every possible laptop. Which is why, I decided that my next laptop is going to be an MBP, the Retina display is mind blowing, has a UNIX like interface, great battery life, a bit pricey but when it comes to being more productive as a programmer, I'm willing to pay more.
saint-loup 8y ago
As as person of average linux savviness, I applaude Elementary OS ambition and really wanted to like it, but the UX is really weird to me. It's really not file-centered (no file on the desktop IIRC, weird file selection in the explorer...) and there are oddities like maximise and close buttons being at opposite sides in a windows. Disclaimer: I only used it for a few hours.
Teknoman117 8y ago
I've been using Linux for 15 years, and I definitely agree with these points. I'm not particularly sensitive to the UI clunkiness, but I do try and use applications that use the same GUI toolkit to have some basic consistency. It definitely shows when you compare it to even mediocre macOS apps. At this point though, most of my professional life is spent in a terminal emulator (alacritty), Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, qpdfview, and pcmanfm-qt. I also switched to a tiling wm (i3) with window decorations shut off, so basically my consistency comes from being super simplistic (graphically atleast). Been toying with the idea of picking up a few design books and taking a hack at writing a GUI toolkit using Rust with something like the react/redux ideology of GUI app development and seeing where that goes (would be for Wayland). Would try the flux model because unidirectional data flow maps very nicely to Rust as I don't want to deal with any refcell shenanigans.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  That’d be very cool! There’s a psuedo-stealth project to build a GUI toolkit using vaguely ECS principles in Rust for similar reasons. I’d love to see how a flux approach works too!

by zwaps 8y ago

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.

watermans 8y ago
In what way has Mate become the main Linux shell? It’s not the DE of choice for the most popular distributions so it likely doesn’t have a lot of exposure among Linux environments.
finchisko 8y ago
It's not, it just can be ugly as some distros are showing us.

DCKing 8y ago

I agree. I would be using Linux full time if the experience was not so jarring all the time. Fonts and themes are off, stuff gets jumbled around, things are wildly inconsistent. You end up spending lots of time doing weird hacks to make everything look alright. Even Elementary will break if you move outside the core applications - it cannot be helped in this ecosystem. When Linux works for you it's so damn great but I cannot fully enjoy a UI that is so inconsistent and ugly so often.

osrec 8y ago
If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. Of all the Linux distros I've used in my company, it's given us almost no headaches. The fonts are crisp, and icons look fine too. Adding monitors has also been painless. And even my least technical users are able to use it (but might need a bit of help now and again). For us, it has actually been a pleasure to use because of its speed. If you're prepared to give up whizzy animations etc, do try it when you have a bit of spare time.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. I can't speak for the UI but Aptitude vomits broken dependencies every time you have to upgrade your distro. It made me absolutely despise package management (I'm a Windows guy) until I switched to Arch and realized a package manager that is a pleasure to work with is not an inherent oxymoron. Obviously UI is another story but at least this one works.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    You can go with Manjaro if you want a better experience with pre-configured desktop environments. There are official editions for XFCE, KDE, and Gnome and there's community editions for i3, openbox, LXQT, and so on. You still have access to the AUR and the official repos mirror the official Arch repos but lag behind by a week or two.
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago

dingdingdang 8y ago

Minorly unfair on Mint since it is a 2 versions old screenshot being compared to present day version of Elementary. Personally by far prefer the Mint paradigm: it is clear what is running and what is a launch icon without studying icon shading/overlays/dots..etc.

PakG1 8y ago
Could you share a screenshot for Mint today then and describe how it's improved?
- vel0city 8y ago
  Look for yourself and see if you can notice any differences. https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tara/cinnamon.png https://www.linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/tara/cinnamon...
  - j_koreth 8y ago
    Is that Mate or Cinnamon?
    - lytedev 8y ago
      The URL implies cinnamon, I think.

AndrewDavis 8y ago

I hear these every so often. Just curious if noticing or more so, even being bothered by them is the norm? Example Mint, the font heights I wouldn't have noticed and definitely something I would not be consciously aware of if I used it. And I still don't know what's wrong with the render beyond it looking at bit outdated. Am I the odd person here or is it a vocal minority that have issues with it?

DanBC 8y ago
I dislike the Linux Mint desktop image, but that's trivially easy to swap out. I genuinely can't see the other problems with the image, and I feel that it's not a good example to illustrate the point. But I'm sure parent poster is right, and that linux desktop environments use a wierd mish-mash of icons and fonts with weird sizing and line heights.
lazzlazzlazz 8y ago
You are part of the vocal, online minority that doesn't look at Mint and cringe because it looks so amateur and dated. Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly without necessarily being able to articulate that the "font heights", etc. are the problem. By a common user's standards, Mint looks amateur and janky compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS.
- AndrewDavis 8y ago
  I look at it and just think old. But I don't dislike it. I just see it as old. Like fashion, is what was popular in the 90s bad? Or is it just some perpetual need to evolve for the sake of evolving?
  - jenscow 8y ago
    I agree. It's rough around the edges, but I only need to look at it for a few seconds when changing windows, for example. Other than that, it stays out of my way and doesn't tire me with animations which stopped looking cool the by 4th time. I've tried moving away from the traditional desktop (yes, for the sake of it), but I just can't. And cinnamon seems to suck the least. (and no amount of polish will move me to mac/win)

coned88 8y ago

Weird argument. Because I have given Linux systems to the elderly before. People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine. My mother was a long time windows user. Kept getting viruses. She was converted to Ubuntu and has used it for over a decade now without issue. Linux is far easier for people than you think. My mother is a senior citizen now and this is her second computer. The UI concerns you bring up are just silly, They are about the same as you buying a new hammer and it having an inconsistent wood grain or a metal burr.

tathougies 8y ago
Yeah same experience here. Installed gentoo on our home computer for my mom and dad and once i showed them how to open Firefox, they were happy as clams. The only issue was when my dad wanted to install tax software
- bubblethink 8y ago
  You mean your parents can use your gentoo computer, or that you installed gentoo for them ? The latter sounds quite unorthodox.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    I installed it for them. It was more than a decade ago, and I chose gentoo because it was one of the first distributions to support amd64. Chose gentoo over debian because it had newer kernel versions that I needed for that particular computer.
- lerax 8y ago
  Similar history here with another distro.
- tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
  Basically, they'll be okay as long as they only use the browser. When they need to edit a MS Excel file, or use their digital signature (mandatory for companies in my country), or use some accounting software... or anything like this, you understand that Linux isn't as ready for the mainstream desktop as we think it is.

marktangotango 8y ago

Curious how you’re using xfce, xubuntu ui is very consistent, none of the issues you noted. I have used xfce as an apt-get install (chromebook with crouton) and that was very very bad. For chromebooks galliumos is very nice as well.

moron4hire 8y ago

Is that Mint screenshot the Mate or Cinnamon DE? Last time I used Mint was about 3 years ago and it looked nice than that. I'm not an expert on Linux DEs, but that looks like what I remember of Gnome. But anyway, agree with your points in general. I'll probably end up installing ElementaryOS in a VM. I do VR development full-time so I will need Windows as my main computer, but I definitely like having a Linux system around for everything else I do.

tEMporality7 8y ago

Compare the latest Mint with Elementary. It's much cleaner.

Ar-Curunir 8y ago

I've gotten around this by minimizing my usage of graphical applications; I use Firefox, a PDF reader, (recently) Zotero to manage papers, and finally a tiling window manager to reduce graphical elements. Everything else happens in the terminal. Linux just isn't ready for GUI apps :(

wingworks 8y ago
I try every year I try a few different Linux distros and each time I notice a tonne of UI and UX issues, and leave again (I mean, even the basic things like being able to resize windows is 95% of the time a pain on most distros I try. I'm sure there is a fix for it, but the point is, you shouldn't need to fix it, it should "just work"). In my mind Ubuntu is the closest, but still far far away. I love Linux, and I use it almost every day (Debian), but only ever as GUIless servers, which it's amazing at. Just hope one day a team with design and ease of use will make a distro that "normal" people can enjoy to use. (but you would need other apps that look and work great in it too, which I fear will be the harder issue to tackle)
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  How is resizing windows on Linux far away from Mac or Windows? I think you're exaggerating
  - wingworks 8y ago
    Maybe it's just the way I do it, but most of the distros I've tried I always seem to have difficulty trying to click on the 1x1px spot to resize a window from the corner. Most of the time I'd miss it and have to try again. The most recent example I can think of that I had this issue with is Ubuntu MATE last week. And I get it, this is a very nitpicky issue, but in my mind, it's a basic operation that both macOS and Windows do really well and as a user switching from that, it's a little annoying.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      In this case you are basically missing a feature https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6963sa/plasma_tip_you_can_resize_the_window_in_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/6963sa/plasma_tip_you_... If you watch the gif in plasma basically you hold down the alt key and right click and drag to resize from anywhere on the window. Likewise you hold down the alt and left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it around. Further there are hotkeys to place the window on a segment of the screen example: the left/right/top/bottom half or one of the corners. I think there is a function for sizing it to thirds as well. For me this virtually replaced any manual resizing even before I swapped to using a tiling wm where there is zero resizing. I just tested this on cinnamon and this works there too. I don't know if it works in mate.

quantummkv 8y ago

I've been using the Kde desktop (Kubuntu) for about 6 months now after switching from Windows 10 for Ruby development. The UI is damn good. Way more polished and consistent than what passes for the three way mess that the Windows 10 UI is these days. Straight out of the box you get a polished, Windows 7 type layout, complete with a start menu better than Windows, consistent fonts and smooth animations. And unlike every other desktop, the dark theme actually works as advertised. The only time I go back to windows is when is need Corel Draw for my graphics design work. And I immediately feel the difference in polish and consistency. If I could get without Corel Draw, I would definitely banish Windows from my laptop. That being said, GNOME is a clusterfk. It's what we all accused Windows 8 of beign. A wannabe tablet desktop in a world without any actual tablets. What is possessing them to remove functionality available in ALL other desktops? When this is pointed out they point to extensions written in a leaky javascript implementation, which can be broken the next gnome update because why not? If you want a modern desktop on Linux, Kde is what you want these days.

jammygit 8y ago
Imho, gnome is quite nice. I think I'm in the minority maybe but I would be pretty sad if gnome went away one day (or had another memory leak/slowdown issue)
- petepete 8y ago
  The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble. GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    Also Gnome is keyboard driven to a large degree. I used dwm/dmenu for quite a time then went back to the default DE which was Gnome and it felt similar (small screen by the way so not too many tiled windows in dwm)

andrepd 8y ago

Why are you comparing Elementary OS with a version of Linux Mint that's at least 5 years old? Especially when they had such a big design shift in the last year or two. Up-to-date screenshot (still with the "old" theme Mint-X, but actually Mint-Y (based on arc) is the default as of the latest version): https://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/serena/gallery/5.jpg https://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/serena/gallery/5.... The choice isn't between ugly and Elementary. It's a false dillema. E.g. Cinnamon, which is pretty and functional.

adar 8y ago
With all due respect, that screenshot you linked looks straight out of 2008.
- andrepd 8y ago
  I genuinely take that as a compliment. I wouldn't be caught dead using a monstrosity like, I don't know, windows 10 (or even the hideous interfaces of Google products) just because it's ""modern"".
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Vista, whose look Mint (in the screenshot) is trying to emulate, was a monstrosity.
virtualritz 8y ago
It's almost as bad 5 years later then. - icons on task bar too low - icons on task bar vertically not aligned - task icons different size than pinned icons on task bar - task text vertically aligned too high - icons stylistically not matched - system icons unreadable (badly designed, all look the same, don't convey purpose adequately) - task bar icons on right are vertically all over the place - task bar mini icons sizing on right is not consistent - file manager icon sizes all over the place - file manager bottom bar icons are too low and lack 'breathing room' at bottom compared to top bar with buttons - file manager top/bottom bar size is mismatched - horizontal alignment/margin of icons on file manager's top and bottom bars is inconsistent I could go on and on. People who don't care about these things don't see them. Their vision is not trained for it. But for a polished experience, even to UI laypersons, they make all the difference.

nobody271 8y ago

I don't think Linux will e... okay, probably ever, be a replacement for Windows or MacOS. Linux is Linux no matter how you dress it up. The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done. Forget about the fact that they'll be running down dependencies and the programs themselves don't usually work as good. What is the benefit they get for all that time and frustration? Then one day their keyboard will randomly stop working or they wont be able to get connected to the internet because of an update. Smart people do dumb things sometimes. Trying to get the general public to use Linux is a perfect example. It's not even Linux under the hood. It is Linux.

lewiscollard 8y ago
> The first time a non-crazy person has to decompress and unpack a .tar.gz to install a program that usually comes in a .msi they're done. Can we put this myth to bed yet? I use Linux full-time at home and on my laptop and I can't remember the last time I had to do this. Hey, I only see a command line because I can do stuff much faster there, not because I need to (I live in a command line on my Mac at work, too).
- nobody271 8y ago
  Between installing software, editing configuration files as sudo in vim, partitioning drives, mounting drives, copying files to a directory where you need sudo, etc. any user on a Linux system will spend plenty of time at the command line. We should do a test and see if it really is a "myth". Get 10 normal users to install 10 programs not already in the repositories and see how well that goes. Just the other day I had to unzip a .tar.xz from the command line.
  - BenjiWiebe 8y ago
    The point is, normal users will rarely/never need an application not in the repos. And installing something from a repo is simpler than installing something on Windows.

gnulinux 8y ago

I'm starting to think the whole is plotting this weird conspiracy against me... I think linux is very comfortable, I think it looks pretty, it gives me power to make it prettier. Windows comes with fucking ads in the UI how is that any prettier? OSX is supposed to be polished, but I constantly experience problems like my screen randomly flickers, it forces me to login twice every time, sometimes all windows suddenly lose focus and the only way to come to a good state is to go to a non full screen window... I don't know man, having used all three I'll take linux any day and it's because it's prettier, UI is more functional, and the system actually doesn't have handcuffs.

MattRix 8y ago
If you think Linux is prettier you need your eyes checked. You're confusing functionality and reliability with prettyness.
- angelsl 8y ago
  What? Some GTK themes are really good nowadays. See Materia. And if you mean some (many) non-DE applications have really bad UI, then that's true on Windows too.
- ayoisaiah 8y ago
  I don't have a Mac, but I've used one for non-trivial amounts of time. I don't think it's significantly prettier than my Ubuntu + Gnome setup, but I'd agree there's a more consistent feel in the UI.
xur17 8y ago
I'm in the same boat - I used a Mac at my last job for ~4 years, and if given the choice I'll choose linux hands down. I find it more comfortable, but maybe that's just because I'm used to it?

alpaca128 8y ago

As someone who has actually used elementaryOS for some time(both previous versions about 6 months each) I have to disagree with your "doesn't break if you do X" claim. You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again - say hi to at least 2 different kinds of graphics glitches and possibly a randomly appearing bug in the file manager. And I'm not sure if it was a bug or a feature, but last time I used eOS I didn't enjoy the default video player's "fullscreen mode" in which it still didn't overlap the lower part of the desktop with the dock. But keep in mind I haven't tried the most recent version which came out not long ago, I'd be surprised if some of the problems weren't fixed yet. I think elementaryOS is on the right track, but it's definitely not more stable than the average distro, including the ones with rolling-release update models.

SyneRyder 8y ago
> You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again... Definitely this, unfortunately. elementaryOS 0.4.1 Loki was fairly stable for me, but then I installed 5 / Juno, and now the machine often locks up with a completely black screen, except for a handful of items visible where the top menu bar usually is. It seems to occur when it wakes from a sleep mode (though this is on a Parallels virtual machine). The only solution is to reboot and lose whatever you were working on. elementaryOS is great and the first Linux I've really enjoyed using (I'm normally a Mac user, the kind who uses software by Panic). But it still has so far to go. It's also worrying that you can't upgrade from 0.4.1 to 5. Even with all of Microsoft's disasters with updates, they've still managed to let you upgrade from one version of Windows to the next one.
- ianwalter 8y ago
  I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve been trying to use Elementary OS for years but it has always turned out to be unusable until 5 which I’ve been using for a couple weeks with only very minor complaints.
graposaymaname 8y ago
Used Loki for 6+ months here, In my case the main problem was that it took too much time to shutdown the system. I don't know if that's an elementary specific issue, but I've noticed it on multiple systems with the OS. Again, I've seen hardisk issues propping up while using elementary. It was really easy to use but then it had issues. (Did anyone else have these issues?)

michaelmrose 8y ago

If you haven't noticed 90% of people are running windows which is quite frankly ugly by default. Further it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp. It's probably accurate to say that most people aren't terribly concerned with aesthetics as much as functionality. That said steps to achieve a relatively consistent look. Open your configuration app and configure your gtk theme to something that looks nice. If you don't have one you can install lxappearance which is from lxde and has minimal deps so you can easily install it in a minimal environment. Install qt4-config if you have any old qt4 apps. Set it to use gtk+ style for qt4 aps. If you use newer qt apps install qt5ct and select gtk style. In 5 minutes you will have a relatively consistent look. A few notes. - Its increasingly likely you have zero qt4 apps and could probably skip that part and not care - qt5ct actually lets you set a custom stylesheet and or colors if you want more manual control but this is hardly required. - firefox is really stupid about drawing website elements with dark text on a dark background when run with a dark theme. You can run individual gtk apps with a different theme like so env GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light firefox you can copy your firefox desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the command to ensure that this works properly automatically. Chrome somehow figures out that a dark theme doesn't mean you want to draw webpages differently so I consider this a firefox bug that mozilla wontfix. In a perfect world someone would create a single useful gui to configure qt4 plasma gtk2 gtk3 apps which only had settings that would effect all of the above consistently and required no tweaking. In reality land most people don't care including those shipping distros can probably ship with or arrange a reasonable look with minimal fuss.

ivm 8y ago
> it was pretty hard to get people to give up fisher price windows xp It was a decade ago. The world has moved on since then and the expectations are much higher nowadays. For example, see software landing pages today vs. 2008. Even modern Instagram photos look like they were professionally edited for a magazine.

JetSetWilly 8y ago

On the other hand the elementary OS screenshot has the designer’s disease of using poor contrast text - grey on white? Yuk.

dmix 8y ago

> linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release with horrible UI experiences I disagree, recent Gnome versions from the last few years have been amazing. Nearly on par with Elementary.

mcjiggerlog 8y ago

I recently installed kubuntu with the latest version of KDE Plasma and was blown away. This is by far the most polished linux experience I've ever had. My girlfriend who is definitely not a linux user forced me to install it on her laptop too after seeing it. Everything "just works", even more than macOS IMO, and you can configure everything to your hearts content. Animations are smooth, UI is very polished and consistent. Definitely recommend checking it out.

BenjiWiebe 8y ago
I've had the same experience installing the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, minus the girlfriend.

z3t4 8y ago

It seems your designer friend has occupational injury, eg she is trained to spot those issues, but it can give problems in real life, where not everything is perfectly aligned.

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iforgotpassword 8y ago

Agree, and this is why I don't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't a techie. It's just plain ugly and that's the first thing people notice. There have been improvements and exceptions here and there, but the UI sector seems so volatile that just because current GNOME or KDE look consistent and usable, I can't expect the next iteration to be good as well. Since starting to primarily use Linux in 2008, I've consecutively moved to simpler and simpler DEs, to the point where I'm currently running i3 everywhere for about 4 years. Less ui = fewer things to fuck up.

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Folcon 8y ago

So one thing I don't understand is why window managers in linux never seem to have ways to let the user tweak the UI? I mean it's something to add, but I find it odd that no one has thought to add it? Or is it just a feature hidden somewhere? I've thought on several occasions that I'd be pretty happy if I could just hijack how the UI layer was rendering some program, tweak text sizes, adjust colours and make that a user specific choice that can be done at the OS level. It would make linux far more accessible in my opinion and give the average user a way to fix issues that as you say may make some feel physically sick and dizzy. Users could then start sharing fixes and tweaks and devs who are interested could pull in these settings into the main program, the work could be shared and these OS's could get better! =)... It just seems such a prefect example of give power to your user and everything is editable, many people don't have time to dig into the internals of everything, but they'd be happy using a relatively straightforward tool (or at least one with tons of tutorials) to adjust the programs they use to their liking, and I'd wager they'd be pretty happy sharing the tweaks they made too. Maybe this already exists? If it does please tell me! It's the one major thing that keeps me coming back to macs/windows machines. I find it pretty funny, most of my linux time is lived in servers and when I was a teen I ran ubuntu desktop for some time, but I just couldn't deal with it after a while. Which is a shame in my book, and I could certainly see something like this being in the community spirit of linux. PS: If anyone is thinking of doing this and want's to talk to me for some reason, I'll be happy to discuss this further =)...

secure 8y ago
The look & feel of applications can be changed by using GTK or Qt themes and there’s entire websites dedicated to sharing these. Isn’t this what you describe? Side note: Window managers are only responsible for the window decoration, i.e. the frame around the contents and the title bar. Not a lot to tweak there, but most window managers do actually allow changing pretty much every aspect of it. GTK/Qt are toolkits, not window managers.
- Folcon 8y ago
  Right, but that seems to be something that requires the user specifically to be a dev? And to know how to compile each program they need to tweak? I'm thinking of something where say I load up a program UI Tweak, I don't need to know anything about the software I'm working with, I just select the element that I want to adjust, the label sizes for text in the dialogue, or the colour of the text by clicking on it. Think Autohotkey's spy tool[0], when using Autohotkey with the spy tool, I just select the elements that I want to manipulate and then choose what I want to do with them. In my opinion, this significantly lowers barriers to entry for users wanting to change things to suit them. Then the developers of such software can work out ways of making apps work better with such a system. Maybe linux based UI apps need to improve their api so that they can take instructions to adjust it? Or they just add some simple hooks the UI Tweak can understand and use to adjust behaviour? I don't know what users will want, but allowing users to describe what they want, letting them know it's possible, and giving them an avenue to share and communicate their needs can only help improve the quality of the software, as well as provide an avenue for devs that care about user experience to have a channel to understand what needs might not be being met by existing offerings. - [0] Image example here => https://stackoverflow.com/a/45680175 https://stackoverflow.com/a/45680175

agumonkey 8y ago

When I used it 2-3 years ago the UI was slick, lean, responsive .. above ubuntu in terms of average user appeal.

finchisko 8y ago

I totally agree. Linux pro users seems not care much about the detail. I'm the exception. Can live with Ubuntu, but most distros have terrible ui (you can see the misaligned items from miles away).

finchisko 8y ago

I'm terrible person, but I couldn't resist to get example of very ugly and visually inconsistent linux distro. And that guy reviewing it, is saying the dream distro in video title. What? Just watch the video and wait for settings app to get what I'm talking about. If it miss-aligned items don't bothers you, then you're weird (or maybe I'am) :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCsRMLhVL8Y&t=418s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCsRMLhVL8Y&t=418s

dsego 8y ago
I mean, even now in ubuntu gnome, a right-click menu has a gap (gutter?) on the left side, probably left for icons which aren't enabled by default. This is just lazy coding in my opinion.

raylangivens 8y ago

There is a plethora of Linux based distros out there. I recently bought a Lenovo L480 with DOS. I ended up trying out Elementary since I liked the UX. A day or two after using it, it already started hanging on me and wouldn't boot. There was this super weird bug as well because of which the first time I opened Google Chrome, the close button on top right would freeze and I'd have to close that and reopen Chrome. I hated being part of these "edge cases". I then ended up using Ubuntu and that has been stable as rock. No surprises, rock solid. I used it back in college. There are very few Linux based distros that are battle tested, Ubuntu is certainly one of them, on account of being backed by Canonical, which actually gets paid to develop the OS unlike most other linux based distros that have to work on "donations" or "foundation money". Anyway, I'm happy with Ubuntu for my needs, I don't have super fancy needs and I don't want Arch level of customization. All I want something that works out of box and has a UNIX like CLI (I'm a programmer). Another thing that sucks about Linux based OS's is that the power management is just repugnant. There are so many OS's out there and so many laptop models that I understand it is a herculean task to get maximum performance on every possible laptop. Which is why, I decided that my next laptop is going to be an MBP, the Retina display is mind blowing, has a UNIX like interface, great battery life, a bit pricey but when it comes to being more productive as a programmer, I'm willing to pay more.

saint-loup 8y ago

As as person of average linux savviness, I applaude Elementary OS ambition and really wanted to like it, but the UX is really weird to me. It's really not file-centered (no file on the desktop IIRC, weird file selection in the explorer...) and there are oddities like maximise and close buttons being at opposite sides in a windows. Disclaimer: I only used it for a few hours.

Teknoman117 8y ago

I've been using Linux for 15 years, and I definitely agree with these points. I'm not particularly sensitive to the UI clunkiness, but I do try and use applications that use the same GUI toolkit to have some basic consistency. It definitely shows when you compare it to even mediocre macOS apps. At this point though, most of my professional life is spent in a terminal emulator (alacritty), Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, qpdfview, and pcmanfm-qt. I also switched to a tiling wm (i3) with window decorations shut off, so basically my consistency comes from being super simplistic (graphically atleast). Been toying with the idea of picking up a few design books and taking a hack at writing a GUI toolkit using Rust with something like the react/redux ideology of GUI app development and seeing where that goes (would be for Wayland). Would try the flux model because unidirectional data flow maps very nicely to Rust as I don't want to deal with any refcell shenanigans.

steveklabnik 8y ago
That’d be very cool! There’s a psuedo-stealth project to build a GUI toolkit using vaguely ECS principles in Rust for similar reasons. I’d love to see how a flux approach works too!