9 ms·

Elementary OS 6 beta

163 points by jamesponddotco 5y ago

input_sh 5y ago
Hell yeah! I'm hopeful to see some features by the time stable gets released. Notably the tasks app[0] and Nextcloud integration[1]. [0] https://github.com/elementary/tasks/ https://github.com/elementary/tasks/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63 https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63
icy 5y ago
I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the Flatpak-centric application ecosystem. Reminder: https://flatkill.org https://flatkill.org
- kaba0 5y ago
  I’m not necessarily like flatpak, but these childish websites with badly written arguments are the things that should be killed.. These are toxic and doesn’t help anyone at all
- Iolaum 5y ago
  flatkill is FUD [0] [0]: https://theevilskeleton.frama.io/2021/02/11/response-to-flatkill-org.html https://theevilskeleton.frama.io/2021/02/11/response-to-flat... Also anecdotally I quite like flatpaks as a user. For example having Lutris as a flatpak (it's in flathub beta) is quite nice because it doesn't pollute my system with all those Wine dependencies. Pro Tip: Use Flatseal to manage Flatpak permissions, e.g. give some apps access to specific folders you use that they don't have by default.
- xodice 5y ago
  Wow! I never saw that site but it is FULL of misinformation and purposely claiming misleading "facts". I like how there is absolutely no contact info, as this tool knows he's full of crap.
j-pb 5y ago
I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off. That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche. If they wanted the mac devs for their sleek look and feel they could have switched to swift. And if they wanted to gain easy popularity they could have switched to rust. But vala... there is no developer pool to draw people from, and they're not apple where ObjC might have been an obscure but in the end really productive ecosystem.
- pjerem 5y ago
  I don’t see how the langage in which is developed a software is a reason to use it or not. It’s not like you can’t install your good-old-C++Rust-javascript Firefox browser.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    Yeah I don't get it. While it's certainly not the post popular language out there, it's not like you as a user are impacted by the choice of a programming language it's written in. Default apps are mostly good. Music is the only one I don't like in general, and while Epiphany is not my preferred browser, it seems perfectly capable (hell, it even syncs with Firefox Sync). The rest of the apps feel very pleasant to use and I never had to bother with looking for an alternative.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    We're not talking about a simple piece of software here but an entire ecosystem which has Vala as it's language of choice. Using a certain operating system comes with the implicit assumption that I'm also gonna write programs for said operating system. And I'm not gonna learn some obscure version of C#/Java for that, just because the gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language.
    - prince781 5y ago
      > gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language. This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift and Rust weren't things, and they would remain unstable for at least the next decade. Today the world has changed, and while I'd argue that Rust is one of the best languages invented, Vala still has some things over it: easier to learn, binds well with C and a million other languages, faster compilation and a simpler toolchain, has built-in type annotations for Gtk and DBus, all while guaranteeing you native performance.
nehalem 5y ago
Somewhat off topic: Whenever I see these user-friendly Linux distributions I think they would be great for mass deployments in schools or similar. Is there any technology that gives Elementary (or similar distributions) a deployment workflow like Chrome OS; ie zero-config (for the user) to log into a central service and configuration of the user account while being easy to administer?
- dvdkon 5y ago
  I've got some thoughts on this. I've found that there are two approaches to centralised management of computers: Installing a pre-made all-in-one product with pre-programmed configuration options (Windows with mostly AD, GPOs) and having numerous automatable components that can be stitched together with scripts (UNIX, sometimes Windows with Powershell). I prefer the scripting approach, as it gives me much more flexibility beyond one vendor's products. The scripts can also be shared, just now I'm setting up a second "home" server and I can mostly copy-paste Ansible roles from the first. So a school admin who's somewhat familiar with Linux could start with a complete template. The problem is that familiarity with Linux, some people will run at first sight of scripting. The other problem is that I don't think there's money in developing a shiny boxed solution with marketing. Schools mostly go to Linux for cost savings, you couldn't convince them to pay enough to cover all the expenses of a SW company. A "support group" of school admins that administer Linux desktops might, though, which is where the script-sharing could come in. Less shiny, less "just buy it and we're done", but more likely in my opinion.
  - nehalem 5y ago
    I agree about the two paths and I share a preference for the non-vendor one. Yet at the very least I need an OS that out of the box accepts say an email user@org.tld as username and automatically contacts org‘s directory to check for authorisation and pull email credentials at the very least. This seems so basic to me that it should exist outside of commercial solutions.
    - dvdkon 5y ago
      Well, there is FreeIPA, best compared to AD, but it's still much more complicated than what Chrome OS offers. I agree something as zero-setup would be great.
jacek 5y ago
It looks like there is still no fractional scaling out of the box (always possible with hacks). The elementary team has defended the choice not to introduce it before [1], but it just makes it unusable for me and many other users. KDE Plasma handles fractional scaling well. Gnome does it mostly fine on Wayland. Now you can also run Gnome on X11 with fractional scaling (at least with Pop OS [2]). There's a cost of running the DE with fractional scaling of course. But I am fine with that if that makes the DE usable! [1] https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ [2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-improving-pop-os-with-fractional-scaling-now-live https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-impr...
- demarq 5y ago
  A DE is not “usable” because it doesn’t have fractional scaling? The elementary team are in so much trouble! Catastrophe!
  - techrat 5y ago
    In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurate rendering. I did not buy a 11" laptop with a FHD display to browse at 960x540.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power! (Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resolution to cheap out.)
RupertWiser 5y ago
I'm very excited for the multi gesture track pad support. It's such a small change but I just haven't been able to find good support for this outside of Mac OS. I'm tempted to install this version the second they hit their first release candidate for that feature alone.
- jacek 5y ago
  Recently released Gnome 40 also improves gesture support. I have not had a chance to test it yet though. [1] https://forty.gnome.org/ https://forty.gnome.org/
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  I wrote a multi gesture daemon for elementary os 5 (and general Linux): https://neosmart.net/blog/2020/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2020/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux...
pjmlp 5y ago
With the tiny market share I doubt many apps will bother with Gtk custom APIs.
- prince781 5y ago
  It's #7 on DistroWatch and rising, right behind Debian and Ubuntu. I don't know how well that translates to real market share, though. https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity
aquir 5y ago
Tried elementary but the hidpi scaling is useless! Also it was unable to handle different dpi for each display. Had any of this changed in this version?
rcarmo 5y ago
Quite looking forward to this as my Linux laptops all run it. I’ve found it to be a great DE with a clean, no-fuss experience, and have often considered moving to it (plus a Windows VM with pass-through graphics) for a desktop.
als0 5y ago
Where is arm64 support?
- input_sh 5y ago
  Read up on it here: https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-on-pinebook-pro/ https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-on-pinebook-pro/ This version has some experimental support for Pinebook Pro in early-access builds.
amaccuish 5y ago
I always run Elementary shortly after each release and then after a few months find myself coming back to pure Ubuntu after the rest of the ecosystem moves on and updates.
sajithdilshan 5y ago
Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.
- lordgroff 5y ago
  I'm honestly always confused as to what makes Elementary (or Mac for that matter), so much more pleasing than the much maligned GNOME? I'd like to understand because these discussions which often include "I'd use Linux but awful desktop" always leave me feeling like people are tapped in to a dimension I'm not privy to.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    I want a UX which is mostly unified (outliers will happen, but should be few), clean and crisp, and easy on the eyes. This is of course subjective, and I've never found an equal on Linux, and Windows has never measured up for me, including Windows 10. Font rendering has always looked oddly antialiased and mostly washed out on Linux. It's never felt as refined as MacOS' UX. But again, that's my personal take.
  - wildrhythms 5y ago
    The turnoff for me is usually wrt UI scaling, i.e. I have a 4k monitor and I want to scale the entire UI up to maybe 175% the normal size. On Ubuntu, with GNOME, I can do this in the settings, but at the expense of performance and sharpness. I'm not sure how Cinnamon or Elementary fare. To contrast, Mac OS X handles this without any issues- there is no blurriness, no performance degradation at any UI scale.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    I think it’s subjective, both gnome and elementary seem like interesting designs. But Elementary is obviously inspired by macOS so it’s going to attract people who like that over Gnome’s take, or would otherwise like the windows XP end of things.
christophilus 5y ago
Lots of negativity, as is expected on HN. For what it’s worth, I like Elementary OS and hope version 6 is a success. I’m going to kick the tires today.
montroser 5y ago
I very much appreciate all of the hard work that goes into striving for a consistent, beautiful UX in ElementaryOS. It feels like there is a driving vision behind all of the design and usability choices. The move to Inter as a UI font will be a good step forward, as Open Sans has not aged well. Especially as displays are higher and higher DPI, another good step forward would be to completely disable font hinting. It's subjective, but it would seem consistent with the rest of the distro's approach to visual design. But those are details that some like me deeply appreciate, while others don't see what the fuss is about one way or the other, for better or worse. What really matters is that I can throw ElementaryOS on my wife's or mom's laptop, and they can figure it all out no problem, without all of the terrible anti-user everything that is Windows.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Inter, IMO is a terrible choice for a UI font. It’s the exact reason why Apple switched from Helvetica [1]. If you want to learn more, see the difference between Apple’s SF Pro, SF Pro Display and SF Pro Text. Inter is a font that fits neither as a body text (fitting is awfully inconsistent), as a display typeface and certainly not as an interface typeface (counters are too tight, fitting needs to be redone specifically for interfaces, hinting is lacking and it is untested on various DPI settings and optimizations that someone like Apple has put effort into). For the record, I think Apple’s UI has gotten worse but they’ve hired one of the best Typographers in the world. They did several presentations in WWDC 2016. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Helvetica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Helve...
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I absolutely agree. I tried Inter the other day for my interface, and everything immediately felt wrong. However, I then tried using it on my résumé, and it looked fantastic! On the Apple note, I agree that SF is a pretty good font, but it's also not without it's issues (which are being exacerbated in updates like Big Sur).
the_greyd 5y ago
Kudos to the team, they've done an amazing job with the elementary ecosystem, considering they are just a handful of people!
happyjack 5y ago
I ran elementaryOS for a couple years when I worked in research. I switched off when I bought a intel NUC, and the skylake processor platform wasn't supported yet (not their fault) and had to run the latest kernel and never went back. I like elmentary. It's pretty, works well, etc. One thing that did irritate me was when I had to install something that wasn't "default." A gnome or QT application, and it looked to fugly. Just didn't work. I with these guys the best. I think what they are doing is really cool, and I admire all the work they've done in vala and what not.

Hell yeah! I'm hopeful to see some features by the time stable gets released. Notably the tasks app[0] and Nextcloud integration[1]. [0] https://github.com/elementary/tasks/ https://github.com/elementary/tasks/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63 https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63

icy 5y ago

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the Flatpak-centric application ecosystem. Reminder: https://flatkill.org https://flatkill.org

kaba0 5y ago
I’m not necessarily like flatpak, but these childish websites with badly written arguments are the things that should be killed.. These are toxic and doesn’t help anyone at all
Iolaum 5y ago
flatkill is FUD [0] [0]: https://theevilskeleton.frama.io/2021/02/11/response-to-flatkill-org.html https://theevilskeleton.frama.io/2021/02/11/response-to-flat... Also anecdotally I quite like flatpaks as a user. For example having Lutris as a flatpak (it's in flathub beta) is quite nice because it doesn't pollute my system with all those Wine dependencies. Pro Tip: Use Flatseal to manage Flatpak permissions, e.g. give some apps access to specific folders you use that they don't have by default.
xodice 5y ago
Wow! I never saw that site but it is FULL of misinformation and purposely claiming misleading "facts". I like how there is absolutely no contact info, as this tool knows he's full of crap.

j-pb 5y ago

I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off. That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche. If they wanted the mac devs for their sleek look and feel they could have switched to swift. And if they wanted to gain easy popularity they could have switched to rust. But vala... there is no developer pool to draw people from, and they're not apple where ObjC might have been an obscure but in the end really productive ecosystem.

pjerem 5y ago
I don’t see how the langage in which is developed a software is a reason to use it or not. It’s not like you can’t install your good-old-C++Rust-javascript Firefox browser.
- input_sh 5y ago
  Yeah I don't get it. While it's certainly not the post popular language out there, it's not like you as a user are impacted by the choice of a programming language it's written in. Default apps are mostly good. Music is the only one I don't like in general, and while Epiphany is not my preferred browser, it seems perfectly capable (hell, it even syncs with Firefox Sync). The rest of the apps feel very pleasant to use and I never had to bother with looking for an alternative.
- j-pb 5y ago
  We're not talking about a simple piece of software here but an entire ecosystem which has Vala as it's language of choice. Using a certain operating system comes with the implicit assumption that I'm also gonna write programs for said operating system. And I'm not gonna learn some obscure version of C#/Java for that, just because the gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language.
  - prince781 5y ago
    > gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language. This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift and Rust weren't things, and they would remain unstable for at least the next decade. Today the world has changed, and while I'd argue that Rust is one of the best languages invented, Vala still has some things over it: easier to learn, binds well with C and a million other languages, faster compilation and a simpler toolchain, has built-in type annotations for Gtk and DBus, all while guaranteeing you native performance.

nehalem 5y ago

Somewhat off topic: Whenever I see these user-friendly Linux distributions I think they would be great for mass deployments in schools or similar. Is there any technology that gives Elementary (or similar distributions) a deployment workflow like Chrome OS; ie zero-config (for the user) to log into a central service and configuration of the user account while being easy to administer?

dvdkon 5y ago
I've got some thoughts on this. I've found that there are two approaches to centralised management of computers: Installing a pre-made all-in-one product with pre-programmed configuration options (Windows with mostly AD, GPOs) and having numerous automatable components that can be stitched together with scripts (UNIX, sometimes Windows with Powershell). I prefer the scripting approach, as it gives me much more flexibility beyond one vendor's products. The scripts can also be shared, just now I'm setting up a second "home" server and I can mostly copy-paste Ansible roles from the first. So a school admin who's somewhat familiar with Linux could start with a complete template. The problem is that familiarity with Linux, some people will run at first sight of scripting. The other problem is that I don't think there's money in developing a shiny boxed solution with marketing. Schools mostly go to Linux for cost savings, you couldn't convince them to pay enough to cover all the expenses of a SW company. A "support group" of school admins that administer Linux desktops might, though, which is where the script-sharing could come in. Less shiny, less "just buy it and we're done", but more likely in my opinion.
- nehalem 5y ago
  I agree about the two paths and I share a preference for the non-vendor one. Yet at the very least I need an OS that out of the box accepts say an email user@org.tld as username and automatically contacts org‘s directory to check for authorisation and pull email credentials at the very least. This seems so basic to me that it should exist outside of commercial solutions.
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Well, there is FreeIPA, best compared to AD, but it's still much more complicated than what Chrome OS offers. I agree something as zero-setup would be great.

jacek 5y ago

It looks like there is still no fractional scaling out of the box (always possible with hacks). The elementary team has defended the choice not to introduce it before [1], but it just makes it unusable for me and many other users. KDE Plasma handles fractional scaling well. Gnome does it mostly fine on Wayland. Now you can also run Gnome on X11 with fractional scaling (at least with Pop OS [2]). There's a cost of running the DE with fractional scaling of course. But I am fine with that if that makes the DE usable! [1] https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/ [2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-improving-pop-os-with-fractional-scaling-now-live https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-impr...

demarq 5y ago
A DE is not “usable” because it doesn’t have fractional scaling? The elementary team are in so much trouble! Catastrophe!
- techrat 5y ago
  In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurate rendering. I did not buy a 11" laptop with a FHD display to browse at 960x540.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power! (Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resolution to cheap out.)

RupertWiser 5y ago

I'm very excited for the multi gesture track pad support. It's such a small change but I just haven't been able to find good support for this outside of Mac OS. I'm tempted to install this version the second they hit their first release candidate for that feature alone.

jacek 5y ago
Recently released Gnome 40 also improves gesture support. I have not had a chance to test it yet though. [1] https://forty.gnome.org/ https://forty.gnome.org/
ComputerGuru 5y ago
I wrote a multi gesture daemon for elementary os 5 (and general Linux): https://neosmart.net/blog/2020/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2020/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux...

pjmlp 5y ago

With the tiny market share I doubt many apps will bother with Gtk custom APIs.

prince781 5y ago
It's #7 on DistroWatch and rising, right behind Debian and Ubuntu. I don't know how well that translates to real market share, though. https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity

aquir 5y ago

Tried elementary but the hidpi scaling is useless! Also it was unable to handle different dpi for each display. Had any of this changed in this version?

rcarmo 5y ago

Quite looking forward to this as my Linux laptops all run it. I’ve found it to be a great DE with a clean, no-fuss experience, and have often considered moving to it (plus a Windows VM with pass-through graphics) for a desktop.

als0 5y ago

Where is arm64 support?

input_sh 5y ago
Read up on it here: https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-on-pinebook-pro/ https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-on-pinebook-pro/ This version has some experimental support for Pinebook Pro in early-access builds.

amaccuish 5y ago

I always run Elementary shortly after each release and then after a few months find myself coming back to pure Ubuntu after the rest of the ecosystem moves on and updates.

sajithdilshan 5y ago

Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.

lordgroff 5y ago
I'm honestly always confused as to what makes Elementary (or Mac for that matter), so much more pleasing than the much maligned GNOME? I'd like to understand because these discussions which often include "I'd use Linux but awful desktop" always leave me feeling like people are tapped in to a dimension I'm not privy to.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  I want a UX which is mostly unified (outliers will happen, but should be few), clean and crisp, and easy on the eyes. This is of course subjective, and I've never found an equal on Linux, and Windows has never measured up for me, including Windows 10. Font rendering has always looked oddly antialiased and mostly washed out on Linux. It's never felt as refined as MacOS' UX. But again, that's my personal take.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  The turnoff for me is usually wrt UI scaling, i.e. I have a 4k monitor and I want to scale the entire UI up to maybe 175% the normal size. On Ubuntu, with GNOME, I can do this in the settings, but at the expense of performance and sharpness. I'm not sure how Cinnamon or Elementary fare. To contrast, Mac OS X handles this without any issues- there is no blurriness, no performance degradation at any UI scale.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  I think it’s subjective, both gnome and elementary seem like interesting designs. But Elementary is obviously inspired by macOS so it’s going to attract people who like that over Gnome’s take, or would otherwise like the windows XP end of things.

christophilus 5y ago

Lots of negativity, as is expected on HN. For what it’s worth, I like Elementary OS and hope version 6 is a success. I’m going to kick the tires today.

montroser 5y ago

I very much appreciate all of the hard work that goes into striving for a consistent, beautiful UX in ElementaryOS. It feels like there is a driving vision behind all of the design and usability choices. The move to Inter as a UI font will be a good step forward, as Open Sans has not aged well. Especially as displays are higher and higher DPI, another good step forward would be to completely disable font hinting. It's subjective, but it would seem consistent with the rest of the distro's approach to visual design. But those are details that some like me deeply appreciate, while others don't see what the fuss is about one way or the other, for better or worse. What really matters is that I can throw ElementaryOS on my wife's or mom's laptop, and they can figure it all out no problem, without all of the terrible anti-user everything that is Windows.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Inter, IMO is a terrible choice for a UI font. It’s the exact reason why Apple switched from Helvetica [1]. If you want to learn more, see the difference between Apple’s SF Pro, SF Pro Display and SF Pro Text. Inter is a font that fits neither as a body text (fitting is awfully inconsistent), as a display typeface and certainly not as an interface typeface (counters are too tight, fitting needs to be redone specifically for interfaces, hinting is lacking and it is untested on various DPI settings and optimizations that someone like Apple has put effort into). For the record, I think Apple’s UI has gotten worse but they’ve hired one of the best Typographers in the world. They did several presentations in WWDC 2016. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Helvetica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Helve...
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I absolutely agree. I tried Inter the other day for my interface, and everything immediately felt wrong. However, I then tried using it on my résumé, and it looked fantastic! On the Apple note, I agree that SF is a pretty good font, but it's also not without it's issues (which are being exacerbated in updates like Big Sur).

the_greyd 5y ago

Kudos to the team, they've done an amazing job with the elementary ecosystem, considering they are just a handful of people!

happyjack 5y ago

I ran elementaryOS for a couple years when I worked in research. I switched off when I bought a intel NUC, and the skylake processor platform wasn't supported yet (not their fault) and had to run the latest kernel and never went back. I like elmentary. It's pretty, works well, etc. One thing that did irritate me was when I had to install something that wasn't "default." A gnome or QT application, and it looked to fugly. Just didn't work. I with these guys the best. I think what they are doing is really cool, and I admire all the work they've done in vala and what not.