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I tried eOS 5. The screenshots made it look the most user friendly of Linux distros (read: Apple knock off), and at first it feels that way. But it quickly star

I tried eOS 5. The screenshots made it look the most user friendly of Linux distros (read: Apple knock off), and at first it feels that way. But it quickly starts to show how shallow that knock off is… and it’s a huge undertaking so I don’t blame them. First is what happens once you run anything that isn’t made by them — all of the sudden totally different UIs. Linux has this problem in spades because there is no standard (gnome, kde, whatever ppl want, etc), and there’s no one setting the bar (which Apple does on its own platform). Thus there’s no consistency to anything. Their own apps similarly look ok at first, and then you go to use them and you realize it’s all very bare bones. My system also froze/locked up a lot at random, and I don’t know why. Installing Ubuntu fixed that issue. Not sure what happened there. Again I don’t blame them; not sure how many people are working for them, but creating a modern desktop and all the apps you’d expect from scratch is a huge undertaking. I hope they do well and provide Linux a real alternative experience. I’d love to see some way that they can extend into apps to make their look and feel more consistent somehow (gnome/kde skins? Something much more? Their own forks of popular apps?), and that the community ends up focusing around them so we get a distributed effort.

jcelerier 5y ago
> First is what happens once you run anything that isn’t made by them — all of the sudden totally different UIs That's a weird criticism. How many competing UI frameworks with completely different look'n'feel are there in a default win10 install ? How many control panels and file dialogs ?
- handrous 5y ago
  Sure, and everyone complains about that on Win10 because it sucks there, too. Windows the OS has improved greatly over the years, in many ways, but the UI has mostly not improved, or has even regressed, since, oh, I dunno, win98/2k. Maybe WinXP.
  - fsiefken 5y ago
    XP with the classic themes was the best. A while ago I did my best to get a decent browser that could display modern webpages running so perhaps I could use XP as a desktop. Nothing really works. Modern Java apps same thing, the JRE is frozen in time somewhere, .NET same thing. SSL isn't compatible. Perhaps one could compile a recent Wine, Mono/.NET or Java to XP and run some things. Or perhaps better, use a windows theme for a linux desktop - and stick to gtk apps. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - jeromenerf 5y ago
    No, no one really cares about homogeneity. Big name apps geared towards music, photo, video, 3D, GIS, IDE … have always looked somehow differently designed and for a good reason when compared to the browser and file manager. There is more value in design than consistency on production oriented systems. It seems the contrary is preferred for mobile.
    - e3bc54b2 5y ago
      Those big-ass different looking applications on desktop you mention are creator's tools. It makes sense they differentiate (specialize) their UX to deliver maximum utility, especially important to carry it over a decade or more of OS design transitions. Of course they look different. Mobile devices are by and large meant for and used as consumption tools. So consistency is desired there.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    No, the immense majority of windows users couldn't care less.
- kemiller 5y ago
  And this is exactly why some people prefer MacOS, which eOS is trying to emulate.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    MacOS still has anachronistic design elements. My least favorite was the Dashboard, which long outstayed it's welcome...
    - handrous 5y ago
      I prefer the Dashboard to its kind-of replacement, whatever they call the slidey-out widget sidebar thing you get when you click on the clock (which, unrelated to the comparison between those two since the Dashboard's invocation wasn't exactly sensible, either—what the hell?)
      - wlesieutre 5y ago
        They're just called "Widgets in Notification Center" now. Agreed that Dashboard was more useful, if I could put the new widgets in an overlay instead of the sidebar I would.
      - zonabey 5y ago
        Yes! You know Dashboard was a completely separate layer. I could watch a video in full screen and take notes with semi transparent stickes. Try doing that in full screen with the stickes app... You can't! The dashboard feature is totally underrated. What would be even better would be if you could actually put any window in there. Or if any window could be made semi transparent and float on top. And have that entire layer be toggleable with transitions.... It's total shame that they've removed it entirely.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      Fun fact: Apple made up the <canvas> tag for Dashboard and it was later adopted as a web standard
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  OP is clearly criticizing the entire Linux ecosystem and not just Elementary.
- outworlder 5y ago
  Although I think the criticism is also overblown, there's a difference: under windows, it's mostly about look and feel. Older apps look like garbage, or are inconsistent with the current look. Take an older app and compare with an app from the store, and they look like they came from a different OS. Interestingly, Microsoft Apps are the largest offenders, historically. They like to ship them with new versions of their common controls library, so it may take a while until you see changes in the OS itself (the ribbon being a large offender). However, things work similarly. All the keyboard shortcuts work (unless they messed up on purpose), screen readers work, most settings work across the board (even if it makes the app look even worse). Change the color scheme, everything changes. In most cases, you can use the same API functions to interact with the controls, and WM messages tend to work consistently. Not so with linux GUI toolkits. There has been a lot of effort in trying to make them look the same, but it's pretty obvious when an app is written in GTK vs QT or TK. Even the way they respond to sizing events change. Widgets work totally differently, keyboard shortcuts and conventions change. It's less of a problem than it used to be, but it is still there, and it is sometimes very jarring. I don't know how to fix it, but it has to be fixed at some point.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Windows 10 is a disaster. Not exactly something to emulate, but at least it’s going to be some vintage of windows. So copy and paste will be consistent and not change ctrl versus meta versus select & middle mouse button. Linux is all over the place. I can’t even have consistent hidpi support without manual tweaks, and even then certain apps layouts become very strange. I’m really comparing to macOS, which clearly is what eOS is trying to be.
appleiigs 5y ago
>Their own forks of popular apps? They do their own apps. It's actually one of their most frequent criticism - they recreate the wheel in building their own apps instead of focusing on the OS. And they do it for consistency, which is also goes against your other point.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  It sounds so unsustainable in the long run. It's good that we have parallel alternatives for some categories of apps, but we need better apps not more shallow copies of apps. The gnome project is doing the same thing, so the same kind of goes for them.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    How would you solve the issue where the existing apps do not fit their UX (which is one of their main "selling points")?
kemiller 5y ago
This is pretty much why all the desktop Linux experiences fail. The major linux apps were all developed for different desktop experiences and so there's no consistency, even on things as basic as copy/paste shortcuts. It's very hard to get that without a powerful dictator shepherding the overall ecosystem and it's the achilles heel of FOSS for GUIs.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  It is a crying shame that Linus, or some other benevolent dictator for life like Linus, never emerged to steer the Linux userland. If there are parallel realities and alternate timelines, then somewhere out there is the one where everyone settled on GNUStep/WindowMaker in the 90s and Linux took over the Desktop by 2005.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    GNUStep/WindowMaker are too "ugly" and many people use Linux purely out of being gaga at the beautiful window borders. Just look at any recent YouTube video about Linux, it'll likely be about how much better (KDE|Gnome|etc.) LOOK than Windows 11 (usability? That's that?)
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      To be honest, Gnome is a lot more usable than Windows in my experience. Most of the software I expect to be provided by the OS simply are better under Gnome: file browser, image viewer, terminal, windows and desktop manager (it's kind of shocking how the windows implementation of exposé is so poor). Sadly, I can run neither Excel nor PowerPoint under Gnome. So I'm stuck with windows.
      - phendrenad2 5y ago
        Gnome is in fact great, and has great usability. But my point was, for many Linux users (perhaps the most vocal), care about GUI looks over GUI usability. So GNUStep/WindowMaker are simply too "ugly" (although I think the experience of using them is superior to Gnome).
iamcreasy 5y ago
Agreed. I've always wondered if it was somewhat easier to maintain a variant of GNOME with the same features they had in mind.
stonogo 5y ago
This is a series of complaints about the project as it stood in 2018, when eOS 5 was new. You don't suspect that maybe some of your criticism might have aged out? Maybe some of your recommendations are redundant by now?
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  The complaints seem like hard things to fix. Which of them have been improved?
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
This isn’t really different from macOS. Ever tried to run a Mac GTK app, or one that uses XQuartz? It’s just that more people target macOS.
- least 5y ago
  XQuartz and GTK apps on MacOS are the exception. A bigger problem with regards to inconsistent UI/UX stems from Electron apps and apps like Firefox which implement its own context menus, for example, and don't interact with the OS with things like Applescript, which Chromium browsers and Safari do. Still, there's a lot of applications that do respect the OS paradigms for design and user experience. Interfacing with applications is fairly consistent, though this has been degrading for some time with the rise of Electron. On linux, there is no paradigm to stray from and there's no consistent design language or UX because of the fractured nature of its ecosystem. There are incredibly well made applications for KDE, GTK, and Electron, all with their own ideas of what UX should be and what UI it should look like.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Right, so Elementary is trying to enforce a consistent language. Apps that follow the language will look consistent, apps that don't, won't. The only difference with macOS is the number of apps that make at least a minimal effort to follow the OS paradigm. (We might be saying the same thing!)

jcelerier 5y ago

> First is what happens once you run anything that isn’t made by them — all of the sudden totally different UIs That's a weird criticism. How many competing UI frameworks with completely different look'n'feel are there in a default win10 install ? How many control panels and file dialogs ?

handrous 5y ago
Sure, and everyone complains about that on Win10 because it sucks there, too. Windows the OS has improved greatly over the years, in many ways, but the UI has mostly not improved, or has even regressed, since, oh, I dunno, win98/2k. Maybe WinXP.
- fsiefken 5y ago
  XP with the classic themes was the best. A while ago I did my best to get a decent browser that could display modern webpages running so perhaps I could use XP as a desktop. Nothing really works. Modern Java apps same thing, the JRE is frozen in time somewhere, .NET same thing. SSL isn't compatible. Perhaps one could compile a recent Wine, Mono/.NET or Java to XP and run some things. Or perhaps better, use a windows theme for a linux desktop - and stick to gtk apps. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- jeromenerf 5y ago
  No, no one really cares about homogeneity. Big name apps geared towards music, photo, video, 3D, GIS, IDE … have always looked somehow differently designed and for a good reason when compared to the browser and file manager. There is more value in design than consistency on production oriented systems. It seems the contrary is preferred for mobile.
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    Those big-ass different looking applications on desktop you mention are creator's tools. It makes sense they differentiate (specialize) their UX to deliver maximum utility, especially important to carry it over a decade or more of OS design transitions. Of course they look different. Mobile devices are by and large meant for and used as consumption tools. So consistency is desired there.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  No, the immense majority of windows users couldn't care less.
kemiller 5y ago
And this is exactly why some people prefer MacOS, which eOS is trying to emulate.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  MacOS still has anachronistic design elements. My least favorite was the Dashboard, which long outstayed it's welcome...
  - handrous 5y ago
    I prefer the Dashboard to its kind-of replacement, whatever they call the slidey-out widget sidebar thing you get when you click on the clock (which, unrelated to the comparison between those two since the Dashboard's invocation wasn't exactly sensible, either—what the hell?)
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      They're just called "Widgets in Notification Center" now. Agreed that Dashboard was more useful, if I could put the new widgets in an overlay instead of the sidebar I would.
    - zonabey 5y ago
      Yes! You know Dashboard was a completely separate layer. I could watch a video in full screen and take notes with semi transparent stickes. Try doing that in full screen with the stickes app... You can't! The dashboard feature is totally underrated. What would be even better would be if you could actually put any window in there. Or if any window could be made semi transparent and float on top. And have that entire layer be toggleable with transitions.... It's total shame that they've removed it entirely.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    Fun fact: Apple made up the <canvas> tag for Dashboard and it was later adopted as a web standard
phendrenad2 5y ago
OP is clearly criticizing the entire Linux ecosystem and not just Elementary.
outworlder 5y ago
Although I think the criticism is also overblown, there's a difference: under windows, it's mostly about look and feel. Older apps look like garbage, or are inconsistent with the current look. Take an older app and compare with an app from the store, and they look like they came from a different OS. Interestingly, Microsoft Apps are the largest offenders, historically. They like to ship them with new versions of their common controls library, so it may take a while until you see changes in the OS itself (the ribbon being a large offender). However, things work similarly. All the keyboard shortcuts work (unless they messed up on purpose), screen readers work, most settings work across the board (even if it makes the app look even worse). Change the color scheme, everything changes. In most cases, you can use the same API functions to interact with the controls, and WM messages tend to work consistently. Not so with linux GUI toolkits. There has been a lot of effort in trying to make them look the same, but it's pretty obvious when an app is written in GTK vs QT or TK. Even the way they respond to sizing events change. Widgets work totally differently, keyboard shortcuts and conventions change. It's less of a problem than it used to be, but it is still there, and it is sometimes very jarring. I don't know how to fix it, but it has to be fixed at some point.
azinman2 5y ago
Windows 10 is a disaster. Not exactly something to emulate, but at least it’s going to be some vintage of windows. So copy and paste will be consistent and not change ctrl versus meta versus select & middle mouse button. Linux is all over the place. I can’t even have consistent hidpi support without manual tweaks, and even then certain apps layouts become very strange. I’m really comparing to macOS, which clearly is what eOS is trying to be.

appleiigs 5y ago

>Their own forks of popular apps? They do their own apps. It's actually one of their most frequent criticism - they recreate the wheel in building their own apps instead of focusing on the OS. And they do it for consistency, which is also goes against your other point.

kzrdude 5y ago
It sounds so unsustainable in the long run. It's good that we have parallel alternatives for some categories of apps, but we need better apps not more shallow copies of apps. The gnome project is doing the same thing, so the same kind of goes for them.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  How would you solve the issue where the existing apps do not fit their UX (which is one of their main "selling points")?

kemiller 5y ago

This is pretty much why all the desktop Linux experiences fail. The major linux apps were all developed for different desktop experiences and so there's no consistency, even on things as basic as copy/paste shortcuts. It's very hard to get that without a powerful dictator shepherding the overall ecosystem and it's the achilles heel of FOSS for GUIs.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
It is a crying shame that Linus, or some other benevolent dictator for life like Linus, never emerged to steer the Linux userland. If there are parallel realities and alternate timelines, then somewhere out there is the one where everyone settled on GNUStep/WindowMaker in the 90s and Linux took over the Desktop by 2005.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  GNUStep/WindowMaker are too "ugly" and many people use Linux purely out of being gaga at the beautiful window borders. Just look at any recent YouTube video about Linux, it'll likely be about how much better (KDE|Gnome|etc.) LOOK than Windows 11 (usability? That's that?)
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    To be honest, Gnome is a lot more usable than Windows in my experience. Most of the software I expect to be provided by the OS simply are better under Gnome: file browser, image viewer, terminal, windows and desktop manager (it's kind of shocking how the windows implementation of exposé is so poor). Sadly, I can run neither Excel nor PowerPoint under Gnome. So I'm stuck with windows.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      Gnome is in fact great, and has great usability. But my point was, for many Linux users (perhaps the most vocal), care about GUI looks over GUI usability. So GNUStep/WindowMaker are simply too "ugly" (although I think the experience of using them is superior to Gnome).

iamcreasy 5y ago

Agreed. I've always wondered if it was somewhat easier to maintain a variant of GNOME with the same features they had in mind.

stonogo 5y ago

This is a series of complaints about the project as it stood in 2018, when eOS 5 was new. You don't suspect that maybe some of your criticism might have aged out? Maybe some of your recommendations are redundant by now?

phendrenad2 5y ago
The complaints seem like hard things to fix. Which of them have been improved?

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

This isn’t really different from macOS. Ever tried to run a Mac GTK app, or one that uses XQuartz? It’s just that more people target macOS.

least 5y ago
XQuartz and GTK apps on MacOS are the exception. A bigger problem with regards to inconsistent UI/UX stems from Electron apps and apps like Firefox which implement its own context menus, for example, and don't interact with the OS with things like Applescript, which Chromium browsers and Safari do. Still, there's a lot of applications that do respect the OS paradigms for design and user experience. Interfacing with applications is fairly consistent, though this has been degrading for some time with the rise of Electron. On linux, there is no paradigm to stray from and there's no consistent design language or UX because of the fractured nature of its ecosystem. There are incredibly well made applications for KDE, GTK, and Electron, all with their own ideas of what UX should be and what UI it should look like.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Right, so Elementary is trying to enforce a consistent language. Apps that follow the language will look consistent, apps that don't, won't. The only difference with macOS is the number of apps that make at least a minimal effort to follow the OS paradigm. (We might be saying the same thing!)