8 ms·

Looking great, I've been a long time Mac user and I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clon

Looking great, I've been a long time Mac user and I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clone) better than I like Apple's in Big Sur. Tried elementary before (Luna and Freya IIRC) and while it hasn't replaced my Mac for development or my Windows desktop for gaming, I'm definitely keeping an eye on it. Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch is a notable item now says a lot about the overall quality. Very tidy, still customizable, and a suite of built-in software that ought to cover most users. Good stuff.

jonpurdy 5y ago
Long time Mac user (1992); I think the Mac UI peaked at Mavericks (some would argue Snow Leopard due to the dumb Save workflow in Lion). As soon as Yosemite started trying too hard to be minimal it started a descent into prioritizing style over UX. I haven't touched Big Sur yet and probably won't until I'm forced to with a new Mac. Looking at screenshots of Elementary, it's so much more obvious how things work and what widgets do than on modern Mac OS. I've been running it in various VMs for a few years but didn't seriously consider switching to it full time until Big Sur was announced. I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic, and others that prevent me from moving to Linux full time.
- Normille 5y ago
  Another long-time Mac user, who is also increasingly frustrated with how dumbed down & bloated OSX is becoming [I'm sticking on Mavericks for the foreseeable future and only 'upgraded' from El Capitán because more and more of my apps were breaking after applying updates]. With all OSX Finder's faults and all the annoyances of the OS, I still think it's miles ahead of any Linux distro I've tried to get on with. Two words "Quicklook" --OK. that's one word made of two. I find it incredible that no Linux desktop environment has something like this. Pressing spacebar to preview the content of a file without needing to open it first is something I do literally every single day and often multiple times. Why, in 2021, does every single Linux desktop require me to open a file first to see what's inside it? That's my biggest bugbear with Linux desktops. Other annoyances are more vague. Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface, every Linux desktop I've tried [even the polished ones like Ubuntu & Mint] always have those annoying glitches & inconsistencies which just scream 'Designed by Committee' [which I suppose they are, to an extent]. As regards apps; a big part of what I do is graphic design and that pretty much rules Linux out for anything work-related. Whatever you think of Adobe, Photoshop and Illustrator just blow The Gimp [dire!] and Inkscape [tolerable but clunky] out of the water. I did have high hopes that new kids on the block Affinity might bring their Photo and Designer [which actually do give Photoshop and Illustrator a run for their money] to Linux. But it seems they've decided to follow Adobe's lead and make thei offerings OSX & Windows only. About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
  - Schlaefer 5y ago
    Maybe QuickLook outlived itself. It was a technology tailored to the HDD era of hardware, when complex apps required dozens of seconds to start. In a world were even LibreOffice cold-starts in under three seconds on middle of the road hardware QuickLook is just a familiar workflow instead of a necessity? Initially I missed QuickLook a lot after switching away from macOS, but now I haven't thought about it in years.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      I can't imagine not having access to QuickLook. It's not really about how quickly apps open so much as the UI—in a large folder of images or documents, I can use QuickLook to see what's inside each one, whereas without it I'd have to open a window for every document.
      - kitsunesoba 5y ago
        Yes, for me the killer aspect of Quicklook is being able to flip through dozens of documents in barely more time than it takes for my arrow keys to actuate. It’s wonderful for skimming through dozens of files quickly. Icons that accurately represent content on more than just images are great too. Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. ...were there other ones in classic operating systems? QuickTime <= 10.2 did let you install third-party components (I wrote one recently), but what else was there?
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  Interestingly enough, iTerm is the biggest sticking point for me in switching back to Linux: none of the Linux terminal applications have the quality of life features I depend on in iTerm
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    I would pay for iTerm to be ported to Linux, but I know it's very MacOS coupled.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      The big issue is that a lot of what makes iTerm great is that it isn't trying to be cross-platform: many of my favorite apps are intentionally single-platform and take advantage of what that platform provides.
  - harel 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what in iTerm is missing in any of the Linux terminals? (I usually use Tilix).
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      A bunch of little things: iTerm’s jump/mark feature is really useful, especially combined with shell integration and triggers. iTerm can detect soft splits (e.g. tmux or vim splits) and confine the selection to one side of them. Also it’s split-pane navigation functionality is pretty smooth.
      - harel 5y ago
        Try this for mark/jump : https://gist.github.com/harel/25569bda00f7260923fdbc38e256f56b https://gist.github.com/harel/25569bda00f7260923fdbc38e256f5... It's not "mine" but I adopted it years ago and cannot live without it. I don't know about detecting soft-splits, but tilix has a really nice split pane setup.
  - 5y ago
- bitwize 5y ago
  The beauty and elegance of Mac OS died with Mac OS X, when they foolishly decided to keep the NeXT-isms instead of sticking with tried and true Mac principles like the spatial Finder.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Is that you, John Siracusa?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic See uLauncher, AutoHotKey and Darkroom, respectively. They're not 1:1 in terms of feature parity, but you can get pretty close for free.
- kall 5y ago
  For me macOS design peaked when they moved from the super readable Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue because it looked hot on retina displays. I'm not sure which version that was exactly. Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together. Not so happy about the non-visual aspects though, like all the unlabeled, barely distinct line icons.
  - Normille 5y ago
    The trouble with Lucida Grande was that it didn't have an Italic variant. Which was a bit of a glaring oversight for a default font
    - kall 5y ago
      Ha, I had no idea. That's kind of a problem, yeah. They REALLY fixed that with San Francisco which has, by my count, a crazy 18 cuts across 8 variants, counting only generic sans serifs.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      Eh, in a UI font though? I appreciate the lack of italics in the UI of my system (which is running Mavericks, so has Lucida Grande), it keeps the menus clean and there are better ways to add emphasis where truly needed.
      - Normille 5y ago
        Not necessarily in the UI. But, as the default font, it was the one that a lot of apps would er... 'default' to. So, if you were writing a text document in such an app and then went to make some text italic you'd realise it wasn't available so would have to change fronts.... which could then affect the layout, no. of pages required etc.
        Wowfunhappy 5y ago
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  I’ll be that one person who will say that the peak of desktop environment design is currently gnome (with guake for a drop down terminal and top panel workspace scroll). It’s extremely keyboard driven and working with 4 different workspaces is just extremely pleasant. Using super for both overview and search is a really nice touch too. Just my opinion - avoiding using the mouse really is nice
  - zonabey 5y ago
    Gnome is actually quite good I find myself at odds with some of their defaults for workspaces but they're in the right ball park when it comes to aesthetics and organising the UI. I would very much like to have a guake like terminal for mac os. That and a workspace persistent file explorer. But I think that kind of desktop enhancement that is bug free and feature full is hard to come by. Also since you're on Linux I'm looking for a linux alternative for this tool. https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose It's a gui chooser I don't know if such a thing exists for linux. I suspect it might be quite easy to implement one with electron. By the way what I'm not looking for is something like alfred for linux. That would be an overkill.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Gnome 3 absolutely wasn't horrible last I used it, I only had to fix the wildly inefficient alt-tab implementation and thta took a few minutes searching and clicking one checkbox I think. (I think there was a nunber of issues with extensions but I guess that is fixed now.)
cxr 5y ago
> Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch I think it was meant to be perhaps not necessarily noticed but at least deliberately positioned like that, and not a UI glitch. Look how it's situated directly between the microphone and speaker indicators on the top bar, and the screenshot appears in a section that says, "the indicator now shows both input and output devices right in the popover". > I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clone) better than I like Apple's I'm a lifelong freedesktop user who doesn't even own a Mac but will nonetheless defend OS X's UI, from around the time of Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion or so, as the best visual design ever with respect to graphics for a conventional desktop operating system and utterly timeless—with some notable exceptions. One of those exceptions was Apple's longterm insistence on its terrible tab look—with tabs shown detached from the content its associated with and attached to the window chrome above. It's really irking that Elementary copied that tab look, because absent any admiration, it's basically indefensible. Elementary's copying it strikes me as an example of the kind of irrationality that originates from conservatism-for-the-sake-of-it mixed with how people come to take pleasure in idiosyncrasies and other incidentals. (Similar to how when Pluto was designated not to be a planet, it led to people sort of staking their identity on choosing to insist that it be treated as one and publicly aligning themselves with "Team Pluto" for the quirkiness.) It's one of the things that they should have deliberately opted to break with the influence in order to be "better than Apple's".
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  You're totally right about the mic + speaker icons. I wonder why they did that, if clicking either of them apparently opens this shared menu. A speaker as a representation of "Sound" with both mic/speaker settings inside doesn't strike me as too abstract. Or if they really want separate symbols, maybe they could be visually joined somehow. And none of the other screenshots show the microphone icon, it's only in that one. Only shows up with a mic connected I assume. Or could the mic be there to give a "something is currently using your mic" indicator?
  - DanRabbit 5y ago
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
The problem I consistently run into isn't the pixels on the screen being the wrong color or shape. Rather it's other things which are less obvious on my Mac-replacement platforms that make them so distracting and frustrating to use by comparison: - Keyboard shortcuts. - Drag-n-drop behavior. - Menus and menu item organization. - Application interoperability. If I ever had the money to invest, I'd finance the making of a legitimate replacement for macOS out of KDE or something where the dulling the thousand paper cuts was the focus, not the landing page screenshots.
- kiawe_fire 5y ago
  I’ve made Linux my daily driver going on 6 months now, and it’s mostly great. I knew that MacOS’ menu organization was a bit better on average and application interop more common (especially with things like Automater) but the keyboard shortcuts thing really surprised me. Consistently at the system level and application levels, shortcuts seem so much more natural and easier to learn on MacOS. Use of the super key, a letter, and maybe a modifier is the norm, whereas Linux seems to have heavy use of control plus multiple modifiers and even function keys for just about everything. Moreover, the super key feels so much better placed than control for common shortcuts.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    I've been all Linux on desktop and mobile for a few years now after decades of primarily Mac use, due to accidentally giving my MacBook swimming lessons that it absolutely didn't pass. After trying every DE under the sun, I eventually found KDE Plasma 5.x to be featureful and configurable enough to mostly work for me. The problem that persists is related to what you mention. Nearly every application seems like it was making it a point of pride to be a maverick about application menus and shortcuts. I think a lot of it stems from decades of trying to be like Windows in some attempt to lure Windows users over to Linux. The result instead was still a persistent lack of commercially popular/essential software that gives Windows its value and a user experience in terms of consistency and execution that's no better than Windows. It ends up being the worst of both worlds, but... it is free, and basically a miracle that any of it exists and works at all considering the arduous and meandering way it tends to all come together. So, on the one hand I'm in bewildered awe of it and on the other I'm constantly frustrated by it thinking, "Ugh. What? Why? It doesn't have to be like this." If I were ever in a position to do so, I'd gladly drop $10+ Million on creating a Linux Distro that was little more than KDE Neon or Kubuntu, plus popular applications, all patched and built with menu organization and keyboard shortcuts that follow Apple's HIG from ~2005.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
I agree, the styling is great, and makes me feel much more comfortable to transition to Elementary than other OSes (even new versions of macOS). Thank you to the Elementary designers who put so much effort into this UX polish! I put Elementary onto an external SSD with about 20 other Linux versions, yet it's the one I choose to use most often. It's some combination of familiarity, discoverability, and compatibility that made me like it most. In practice I still use macOS 10.13 for myself (I really like the AppleScript API into every process) and Windows 10 at work (because my boss tells me to), but Elementary would be my choice of Linux distro if/when the day comes when I need to move.
ChrisRR 5y ago
It's one of the issues with a company that's based so much of its marketing around its style. They have to be seen to be innovating to keep the interest, which unfortunately means that they have to overhaul their UI once every few years for better or worse. Elementary doesn't have that issue and so can iterate with small quality of life improvements, without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater

jonpurdy 5y ago

Long time Mac user (1992); I think the Mac UI peaked at Mavericks (some would argue Snow Leopard due to the dumb Save workflow in Lion). As soon as Yosemite started trying too hard to be minimal it started a descent into prioritizing style over UX. I haven't touched Big Sur yet and probably won't until I'm forced to with a new Mac. Looking at screenshots of Elementary, it's so much more obvious how things work and what widgets do than on modern Mac OS. I've been running it in various VMs for a few years but didn't seriously consider switching to it full time until Big Sur was announced. I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic, and others that prevent me from moving to Linux full time.

Normille 5y ago
Another long-time Mac user, who is also increasingly frustrated with how dumbed down & bloated OSX is becoming [I'm sticking on Mavericks for the foreseeable future and only 'upgraded' from El Capitán because more and more of my apps were breaking after applying updates]. With all OSX Finder's faults and all the annoyances of the OS, I still think it's miles ahead of any Linux distro I've tried to get on with. Two words "Quicklook" --OK. that's one word made of two. I find it incredible that no Linux desktop environment has something like this. Pressing spacebar to preview the content of a file without needing to open it first is something I do literally every single day and often multiple times. Why, in 2021, does every single Linux desktop require me to open a file first to see what's inside it? That's my biggest bugbear with Linux desktops. Other annoyances are more vague. Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface, every Linux desktop I've tried [even the polished ones like Ubuntu & Mint] always have those annoying glitches & inconsistencies which just scream 'Designed by Committee' [which I suppose they are, to an extent]. As regards apps; a big part of what I do is graphic design and that pretty much rules Linux out for anything work-related. Whatever you think of Adobe, Photoshop and Illustrator just blow The Gimp [dire!] and Inkscape [tolerable but clunky] out of the water. I did have high hopes that new kids on the block Affinity might bring their Photo and Designer [which actually do give Photoshop and Illustrator a run for their money] to Linux. But it seems they've decided to follow Adobe's lead and make thei offerings OSX & Windows only. About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
- Schlaefer 5y ago
  Maybe QuickLook outlived itself. It was a technology tailored to the HDD era of hardware, when complex apps required dozens of seconds to start. In a world were even LibreOffice cold-starts in under three seconds on middle of the road hardware QuickLook is just a familiar workflow instead of a necessity? Initially I missed QuickLook a lot after switching away from macOS, but now I haven't thought about it in years.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I can't imagine not having access to QuickLook. It's not really about how quickly apps open so much as the UI—in a large folder of images or documents, I can use QuickLook to see what's inside each one, whereas without it I'd have to open a window for every document.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      Yes, for me the killer aspect of Quicklook is being able to flip through dozens of documents in barely more time than it takes for my arrow keys to actuate. It’s wonderful for skimming through dozens of files quickly. Icons that accurately represent content on more than just images are great too. Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        > QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. ...were there other ones in classic operating systems? QuickTime <= 10.2 did let you install third-party components (I wrote one recently), but what else was there?
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Interestingly enough, iTerm is the biggest sticking point for me in switching back to Linux: none of the Linux terminal applications have the quality of life features I depend on in iTerm
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  I would pay for iTerm to be ported to Linux, but I know it's very MacOS coupled.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    The big issue is that a lot of what makes iTerm great is that it isn't trying to be cross-platform: many of my favorite apps are intentionally single-platform and take advantage of what that platform provides.
- harel 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what in iTerm is missing in any of the Linux terminals? (I usually use Tilix).
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    A bunch of little things: iTerm’s jump/mark feature is really useful, especially combined with shell integration and triggers. iTerm can detect soft splits (e.g. tmux or vim splits) and confine the selection to one side of them. Also it’s split-pane navigation functionality is pretty smooth.
    - harel 5y ago
      Try this for mark/jump : https://gist.github.com/harel/25569bda00f7260923fdbc38e256f56b https://gist.github.com/harel/25569bda00f7260923fdbc38e256f5... It's not "mine" but I adopted it years ago and cannot live without it. I don't know about detecting soft-splits, but tilix has a really nice split pane setup.
- 5y ago
bitwize 5y ago
The beauty and elegance of Mac OS died with Mac OS X, when they foolishly decided to keep the NeXT-isms instead of sticking with tried and true Mac principles like the spatial Finder.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Is that you, John Siracusa?
smoldesu 5y ago
> I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic See uLauncher, AutoHotKey and Darkroom, respectively. They're not 1:1 in terms of feature parity, but you can get pretty close for free.
kall 5y ago
For me macOS design peaked when they moved from the super readable Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue because it looked hot on retina displays. I'm not sure which version that was exactly. Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together. Not so happy about the non-visual aspects though, like all the unlabeled, barely distinct line icons.
- Normille 5y ago
  The trouble with Lucida Grande was that it didn't have an Italic variant. Which was a bit of a glaring oversight for a default font
  - kall 5y ago
    Ha, I had no idea. That's kind of a problem, yeah. They REALLY fixed that with San Francisco which has, by my count, a crazy 18 cuts across 8 variants, counting only generic sans serifs.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Eh, in a UI font though? I appreciate the lack of italics in the UI of my system (which is running Mavericks, so has Lucida Grande), it keeps the menus clean and there are better ways to add emphasis where truly needed.
    - Normille 5y ago
      Not necessarily in the UI. But, as the default font, it was the one that a lot of apps would er... 'default' to. So, if you were writing a text document in such an app and then went to make some text italic you'd realise it wasn't available so would have to change fronts.... which could then affect the layout, no. of pages required etc.
      - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Rd6n6 5y ago
I’ll be that one person who will say that the peak of desktop environment design is currently gnome (with guake for a drop down terminal and top panel workspace scroll). It’s extremely keyboard driven and working with 4 different workspaces is just extremely pleasant. Using super for both overview and search is a really nice touch too. Just my opinion - avoiding using the mouse really is nice
- zonabey 5y ago
  Gnome is actually quite good I find myself at odds with some of their defaults for workspaces but they're in the right ball park when it comes to aesthetics and organising the UI. I would very much like to have a guake like terminal for mac os. That and a workspace persistent file explorer. But I think that kind of desktop enhancement that is bug free and feature full is hard to come by. Also since you're on Linux I'm looking for a linux alternative for this tool. https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose It's a gui chooser I don't know if such a thing exists for linux. I suspect it might be quite easy to implement one with electron. By the way what I'm not looking for is something like alfred for linux. That would be an overkill.
- eitland 5y ago
  Gnome 3 absolutely wasn't horrible last I used it, I only had to fix the wildly inefficient alt-tab implementation and thta took a few minutes searching and clicking one checkbox I think. (I think there was a nunber of issues with extensions but I guess that is fixed now.)

cxr 5y ago

> Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch I think it was meant to be perhaps not necessarily noticed but at least deliberately positioned like that, and not a UI glitch. Look how it's situated directly between the microphone and speaker indicators on the top bar, and the screenshot appears in a section that says, "the indicator now shows both input and output devices right in the popover". > I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clone) better than I like Apple's I'm a lifelong freedesktop user who doesn't even own a Mac but will nonetheless defend OS X's UI, from around the time of Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion or so, as the best visual design ever with respect to graphics for a conventional desktop operating system and utterly timeless—with some notable exceptions. One of those exceptions was Apple's longterm insistence on its terrible tab look—with tabs shown detached from the content its associated with and attached to the window chrome above. It's really irking that Elementary copied that tab look, because absent any admiration, it's basically indefensible. Elementary's copying it strikes me as an example of the kind of irrationality that originates from conservatism-for-the-sake-of-it mixed with how people come to take pleasure in idiosyncrasies and other incidentals. (Similar to how when Pluto was designated not to be a planet, it led to people sort of staking their identity on choosing to insist that it be treated as one and publicly aligning themselves with "Team Pluto" for the quirkiness.) It's one of the things that they should have deliberately opted to break with the influence in order to be "better than Apple's".

wlesieutre 5y ago
You're totally right about the mic + speaker icons. I wonder why they did that, if clicking either of them apparently opens this shared menu. A speaker as a representation of "Sound" with both mic/speaker settings inside doesn't strike me as too abstract. Or if they really want separate symbols, maybe they could be visually joined somehow. And none of the other screenshots show the microphone icon, it's only in that one. Only shows up with a mic connected I assume. Or could the mic be there to give a "something is currently using your mic" indicator?
- DanRabbit 5y ago

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

The problem I consistently run into isn't the pixels on the screen being the wrong color or shape. Rather it's other things which are less obvious on my Mac-replacement platforms that make them so distracting and frustrating to use by comparison: - Keyboard shortcuts. - Drag-n-drop behavior. - Menus and menu item organization. - Application interoperability. If I ever had the money to invest, I'd finance the making of a legitimate replacement for macOS out of KDE or something where the dulling the thousand paper cuts was the focus, not the landing page screenshots.

kiawe_fire 5y ago
I’ve made Linux my daily driver going on 6 months now, and it’s mostly great. I knew that MacOS’ menu organization was a bit better on average and application interop more common (especially with things like Automater) but the keyboard shortcuts thing really surprised me. Consistently at the system level and application levels, shortcuts seem so much more natural and easier to learn on MacOS. Use of the super key, a letter, and maybe a modifier is the norm, whereas Linux seems to have heavy use of control plus multiple modifiers and even function keys for just about everything. Moreover, the super key feels so much better placed than control for common shortcuts.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  I've been all Linux on desktop and mobile for a few years now after decades of primarily Mac use, due to accidentally giving my MacBook swimming lessons that it absolutely didn't pass. After trying every DE under the sun, I eventually found KDE Plasma 5.x to be featureful and configurable enough to mostly work for me. The problem that persists is related to what you mention. Nearly every application seems like it was making it a point of pride to be a maverick about application menus and shortcuts. I think a lot of it stems from decades of trying to be like Windows in some attempt to lure Windows users over to Linux. The result instead was still a persistent lack of commercially popular/essential software that gives Windows its value and a user experience in terms of consistency and execution that's no better than Windows. It ends up being the worst of both worlds, but... it is free, and basically a miracle that any of it exists and works at all considering the arduous and meandering way it tends to all come together. So, on the one hand I'm in bewildered awe of it and on the other I'm constantly frustrated by it thinking, "Ugh. What? Why? It doesn't have to be like this." If I were ever in a position to do so, I'd gladly drop $10+ Million on creating a Linux Distro that was little more than KDE Neon or Kubuntu, plus popular applications, all patched and built with menu organization and keyboard shortcuts that follow Apple's HIG from ~2005.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

I agree, the styling is great, and makes me feel much more comfortable to transition to Elementary than other OSes (even new versions of macOS). Thank you to the Elementary designers who put so much effort into this UX polish! I put Elementary onto an external SSD with about 20 other Linux versions, yet it's the one I choose to use most often. It's some combination of familiarity, discoverability, and compatibility that made me like it most. In practice I still use macOS 10.13 for myself (I really like the AppleScript API into every process) and Windows 10 at work (because my boss tells me to), but Elementary would be my choice of Linux distro if/when the day comes when I need to move.

ChrisRR 5y ago

It's one of the issues with a company that's based so much of its marketing around its style. They have to be seen to be innovating to keep the interest, which unfortunately means that they have to overhaul their UI once every few years for better or worse. Elementary doesn't have that issue and so can iterate with small quality of life improvements, without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater