13 ms·

Elementary OS 6.1

184 points by bryanmikaelian 5y ago

zibzab 5y ago
Not a fan, its trying too hard to look like OSX. If you like OSX, just go use the real thing. See also this clip by Chad, I mean Nick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8
croutonwagon 5y ago
As someone that has used Elementary on my x200s for a number of years, at least since the 4.x days, I was disappointed to find the lack of support for the 11th gen/Iris Xe combo in my new laptop and was pushed back to traditional Ubuntu 21.04 with wayland. I may give it a shot again. I especially liked the ability to customize the key combos so that it acted reasonably close to a tiling Wm (I had moved to it from awesomeWM) which was very handy on an Thinkpad x200s with only a track point and no touchpad, but with the added perks of a fully baked DE. And that was in addition to the very nice aesthetics, rather than in spite of.
- bobuk 5y ago
  Honestly, the whole support of Iris Xe in modern linux is terrible painful. You have to carefully pick right kernel number and always use "disable Panel Self Refresh". And after that you have to stick to this exact kernel because "don't touch it while it works" even for Ubuntu now.
  - pxc 5y ago
    Intel gets credit for their drivers being open-source but IME their drivers are also plain bad. WiFi drivers disconnect you to scan, graphics drivers seem very poorly tested so depending on what acceleration profile you use, you get weird artifacts and other stability problems... I strongly prefer Atheros for WiFi and AMD for graphics, wherever possible.
- Naac 5y ago
  If you want a tiling WM backed by a full DE ( with sleep, volume buttons, media buttons, working automagically ) you should try Regolith[0] [0] https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/
  - folkrav 5y ago
    After rotating i3, bspwm and qtile for a while - never managing to make it "just work" as expected on every single machine I own - I gave up and went with Pop OS. Their Pop Shell extension is basically what I wanted all along - tiling without giving up the DE.
    - Naac 5y ago
      I would recommend you give Regolith a try. I was also looking for a "just works" tiling window manager solution and Regolith gives you the best of gnome, and i3.
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    I just want something like this but with Arch.
    - caslon 5y ago
      Why not take the ten minutes to set it up yourself? It's pretty trivial to get everything Naac described working.
      - beepbooptheory 5y ago
        Yes I mean that is my current set up, I am not that fast though! But it would just be nice to have the full DE backing behind i3 as a distribution. Yes I know you can do everything here with list of tools, but I just want a configuration that I know has been thought out, with best practices, and easy to modify in a reproducible way. The list of dotfiles and little adjustments alone you need to marry i3 with a power manager, menu bar, network manager, is a lot! I just want the work done for me (a DE).
- forlorn 5y ago
  Unfortunately Elementary's devs are too busy finding the right shades for the dark theme so there is no time left for your marginal features. These problems and bugs are not tackled for years.
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    Good looking design is something people tend take for granted until it's gone. If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, those details really do matter to me. I tend to be able to fix everything else on my own.
    - simion314 5y ago
      >If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, Most people would stare at an IDE and browser many hours and not at the DE control's panel or File Manager, and IMO this core apps should have had the UI fixed years ago and not have stuff still changed at each updated.
      - seph-reed 5y ago
        I'm just arguing because I feel like talking to someone. But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an obsession with visual design? Maybe your anger should be at the distros that do all the things you want but are too ugly to use?
        simion314 5y ago
        My DE, browser and IDE are themable and configurable so I set them up with whatever I think is usable >Maybe your anger should What wording in my comment can be interpreted as anger ? I did not intended that so I would like to understand and express myself better next time.
        renzo88 5y ago
        > But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an obsession with visual design? The linux desktop is a house on fire, and elementaryos is standing in the living room holding up paint to a smoldering wall.
- pxc 5y ago
  I've tried Elementary a few times, but the hardware support has never been good enough for me to install it because the base is always ancient as all hell for some reason.
gurkendoktor 5y ago
I love elementary, although I couldn't make 6.0 work on my Nvidia-based machine (something has changed about the driver installation?). What annoys me is that AppCenter takes up so much space in their blog posts and sponsoring campaigns, because I feel it's the worst of their apps. The navigation model never made sense to me (why is search disabled when I'm on "Installed"?). It also doesn't look good, because there are way more tiny utility apps than there are good icon designers, and often the icons are just shown on a giant, colored rectangle because apps have no banner images. I wish they'd do it more "magazine-like" as Apple does, just with more unsplash images instead of Apple's terrible Corporate Memphis illustrations.
- kodah 5y ago
  Pop OS's store also disables search when you're on "Installed". It's never made sense to me either.
  - opencl 5y ago
    The Pop OS shop is a fork of Elementary's Appcenter.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  I love elementary a lot, so it hurts for me to admit that I agree. I'm stuck on an older kernel because the nvidia drivers are borked, but worst of all the AppCenter is truly horrid. For a distro that does such a good job at making sure that there is a GUI alternative in addition to all the normal things you'd do in a CLI, the AppCenter is really crummy. Ubuntu actually does a better job of making sure you can sort out your drivers through the GUI.
- divbzero 5y ago
  I haven’t experienced issues with Nvidia drivers, but I did face this with AMD drivers which can be oddly specific in terms of Linux distro support [1]. I was forced to abandon Elementary and instead tried Ubuntu Budgie [2]. [1]: https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/radeon-pro/radeon-pro-vii/radeon-pro-vii https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/radeon-... [2]: https://ubuntubudgie.org/ https://ubuntubudgie.org/
gjsman-1000 5y ago
My problem with Elementary OS is that, it comes with a selection of apps that look beautiful but are just... really bad. For example, the Music app. Comes built-in, looks great, only works with your local music library if you copy it over and reorganize it the way the Music app wants. No online music streaming of any kind. The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it except (IIRC) it has videos from The Guardian newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that? The Maps app? Looks beautiful, again, but the last time I tried it, it could hardly handle directions. Maybe Directions work well now, but it's just... not good. Every app is like this - barely functional.
- katmannthree 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate, the apps being simple to the point of pain for power users is almost the point of the distro. If you want a distro that you can wrangle into exactly what your vision is, you'll love arch. If you want the simplest possible mostly-functional option where you don't need to change anything to get it to work, elementary isn't too bad. That said I hate using it and generally dislike their entire philosophy of taking an open program, stripping out three quarters of the code, and then calling it their own and begging for money to keep doing that. Feels gross. None of the issues you mentioned are really fixable. Online streaming is a bit of a pipe dream for linux, legal(ish?) solutions are going to be hacky and break constantly since nobody has the negotiating power to work out deals with labels. Same with videos, alphabet is not going to just allow random apps to bypass the entire point of youtube (serving ads to eyeballs and tracking said eyeballs to serve more ads). Maps does suck, and that's mostly and openstreetmap issue. You could integrate google maps but those API keys are not cheap.
  - throwawayninja 5y ago
    Arch user here who's slapped the Pantheon desktop on top of it; I don't use it often, mostly an i3 guy, but when I do it's beautiful and I love the work Elementary OS has put into it. All I need to add are those dancing icons from Cairo-Dock and I can get back to embarrassing my apple friends with how riced my desktop is.
- 5y ago
gjsman-1000 5y ago
My biggest gripe against Elementary OS 6, that I think everyone thinking about using it should consider: There is currently no upgrade path from Elementary OS 5 that is officially supported. You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall. Considering that Elementary OS is somewhat marketed as being ideal for, say, elderly folks or people less experienced with their PC, as something that a Linux user might install for non-techie friends, this is beyond unacceptable and also shows a certain lack of technical competence for the folks running it. Edit: Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe? I'm trying to avoid using profanity...
- bitigchi 5y ago
  Elementary OS is anything but suitable for elderly or non-techie folks.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    I agree now, fully, but that's not what their marketing would say. It's literally called "Elementary OS"!
    - bitigchi 5y ago
      It's DoA for this reason. :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Maybe i'm not up to par, but I was under the impression that even ubuntu wasn't mature to upgrade between major versions. I never dabbled much but upgrade failure are not unheard of.
gclawes 5y ago
I'm dying for installer support for Pinebook Pro. I can flash an image today, but as far as I know there's no way to do full-disk encryption yet.
smoldesu 5y ago
I used Elementary on my desktop for a little bit, and while it's definitely better than modern GNOME in many respects, the developers are similarly stuck in a pearls-before-swine mindset. The more you ask from it, the quicker you start to find it's edges; if you're just browsing the web and listening to Spotify, you're not likely to find any issues. Turning it into a proper development machine has more rough edges than it has any right to though, and while I generally like their approach to customization and tweaking better than GNOME, it's still a pretty barren little desktop. You'll end up replacing most of the out-of-the-box software within a few hours. So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.
- greggh 5y ago
  From the link: "AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers—and since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond!"
jszymborski 5y ago
I run elementary on my desktop and I really like it. This looks like a welcomed minor release, but here are some things that are currently on my wish list: - Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into DavMail all the time - A Mail app that lets me view emails in plain text first, or some kind of option to avoid downloading images and trackers in HTML mode. - The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs. - A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one works fine) A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love about elementary: - It looks fantastic. - The terminal, code, and files apps are where I live and they are great. Code isn't a replacement for VS Code, but it's quick and light and fantastic when I don't need e.g.: a linter. - Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable. - The OS truly feels unified; not some hodgepodge of poorly conceived UI elements and metaphors.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I love the unified feel too, and i wonder if linux can reconcile it's bazaar nature with the ergonomic/mental need for simple systemic parts
Accacin 5y ago
Heh, it's funny (to me) that their new 'Quick Window Switcher' is just... A window switcher that's been used forever and works well. Why did they bother trying to redesign a window switcher of all things?
roshansingh 5y ago
I used Elementary 5.1 for over 2 years and then switched to Elementary 6. It was very buggy and slow on Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 with very good hardware. I switched to Ubuntu 21.04 and everything worked really well. I dont think I will hop distro again.
kiawe_fire 5y ago
Elementary OS is in a strange place for me. Coming from MacOS, it does so many things right and Danielle and the other contributors have such a great mindset focusing on accessibility and platform building. With their dev conference, they’re doing great work encouraging people towards native app development with an eye to performance and HIG. Everything looks so good. And yet, as a daily driver for development, it’s just never quite there. The edge cases stand out enough that I always want to reach for Manjaro or Zorin or the like instead. But I love their approach and think it’s ultimately “the right one”, so even when I’m not using it, I can only support them and cheer them on.
- ddtaylor 5y ago
  It for sure has a "death by a thousand papercuts" vibe to it. One of those papercuts is that they have modified the GTK theme so heavily that when you run Eclipse IDE on it the text and background are the same color.
symlinkk 5y ago
I don’t know why this distro even exists, Fedora and vanilla GNOME does everything this does but better. I feel the same way about Ubuntu by the way. The theme and tweaks that are added on top of vanilla GNOME in both cases only makes it worse.
Improvotter 5y ago
> You can currently find over 90 curated apps in AppCenter, [...] I don't think this is as impressive as they think it is. On the contrary, this seems to be a very very small number that I wonder why it's mentioned in the first place. I don't use these GUI frontends, but if we ever want any Linux distro to be more user-friendly. Almost everything should be available. Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high. We have been complaining about Apple and Google, yet "we"(?) cannot seem to be doing better ourselves. It's a bit disappointing.
- _zooted 5y ago
  I just tried elementaryOS and the selection of apps is terrible. There is almost nothing there that you actually need and of the apps that were there I found either unusable or so lacking in functionality compared to other apps it wasn't worth trying to compromise. > Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high It does seem really high considering they are just taking from one Stripe account to another.
xd1936 5y ago
I've been using Elementary OS since 0.3 as my main OS at work (Higher Education IT) and it's my favorite distro. The lack of Ayatana indicators is annoying, but overall, the polish and look/feel of their desktop environment is really nice and has only gotten better with each version.
tlhunter 5y ago
I tried Elementary for a week recently but just couldn't make it stick. The Calendar app doesn't work with Google Calendar as a backend; or, at least not with a ton of hacks, which is what one chooses Elementary to avoid. Overall the Pantheon WM feels rather sluggish, even on modern hardware. Managing windows just feels so clunky compared to KDE or even Windows. To be fair, macOS is their direct competitor. I paid a bug bounty ages ago to get streaming audio to work in their Music app but I don't think that went anywhere. I think they might be able to get something solid in the next few years.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
Elementary OS is ok but I have issues with the stability of its window manager, lock screen, and other core UI replacements that often lock up (on 5.x and now on 6.x) and require a hard reset (or killing X). On my laptop and even w/ proprietary drivers installed, I cannot get eOS to hardware accelerate videos with either my embedded Intel graphics card or my discrete nVidia card in Firefox or Chromium. The UI is full of really weird inconsistencies and is extremely opinionated without any way of changing some basic things (previously adjustable via `gsettings` but it seems that has been intentionally deprecated). For example, the elementary File Manager forces single-click-to-open ("web-style") behavior for any folders, but then switches to double-click-to-open for any files within those folders, so you can select a file but not open it but you cannot do the same with a folder. If it weren't for elementary tweaks (neutered as it has become for eOS 6), elementary would be completely unusable. The decision to not even have an official upgrade path besides "nuke everything and reinstall" makes me question the clarity of vision of elementary OS developers/decision makers. You want to be the macOS of the Linux world but you have a worse upgrade experience than any other Linux distro bar none? You purposely advertise to "less techy" users that are exactly the kind of users that won't be able to handle a "back up your files, wipe everything, and clean install" upgrade path? They added multitouch gesture support... but the only gestures available are for interacting with the desktop window manager (show all windows, move to prev/next virtual desktop)? Fortunately my `syngestures` that I wrote for elementary OS 5 works just fine alongside eOS 6's so-called "multitouch support" but for something that was going to be their killer feature, you'd think they would integrate some of the TouchEgg configuration into their touchpad gestures control panel UI, wouldn't you?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
superos 5y ago
I just can't get used to that search field in the title bar (you can see it in several applications e.g AppCenter first screenshot). IMHO it should be more prominent centered top in the main content area, not (almost greyed out?) in the title bar next to the maximize/restore button (why?). Just weird. What GUI guidelines are stipulating this?

Not a fan, its trying too hard to look like OSX. If you like OSX, just go use the real thing. See also this clip by Chad, I mean Nick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8

croutonwagon 5y ago

As someone that has used Elementary on my x200s for a number of years, at least since the 4.x days, I was disappointed to find the lack of support for the 11th gen/Iris Xe combo in my new laptop and was pushed back to traditional Ubuntu 21.04 with wayland. I may give it a shot again. I especially liked the ability to customize the key combos so that it acted reasonably close to a tiling Wm (I had moved to it from awesomeWM) which was very handy on an Thinkpad x200s with only a track point and no touchpad, but with the added perks of a fully baked DE. And that was in addition to the very nice aesthetics, rather than in spite of.

bobuk 5y ago
Honestly, the whole support of Iris Xe in modern linux is terrible painful. You have to carefully pick right kernel number and always use "disable Panel Self Refresh". And after that you have to stick to this exact kernel because "don't touch it while it works" even for Ubuntu now.
- pxc 5y ago
  Intel gets credit for their drivers being open-source but IME their drivers are also plain bad. WiFi drivers disconnect you to scan, graphics drivers seem very poorly tested so depending on what acceleration profile you use, you get weird artifacts and other stability problems... I strongly prefer Atheros for WiFi and AMD for graphics, wherever possible.
Naac 5y ago
If you want a tiling WM backed by a full DE ( with sleep, volume buttons, media buttons, working automagically ) you should try Regolith[0] [0] https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/
- folkrav 5y ago
  After rotating i3, bspwm and qtile for a while - never managing to make it "just work" as expected on every single machine I own - I gave up and went with Pop OS. Their Pop Shell extension is basically what I wanted all along - tiling without giving up the DE.
  - Naac 5y ago
    I would recommend you give Regolith a try. I was also looking for a "just works" tiling window manager solution and Regolith gives you the best of gnome, and i3.
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  I just want something like this but with Arch.
  - caslon 5y ago
    Why not take the ten minutes to set it up yourself? It's pretty trivial to get everything Naac described working.
    - beepbooptheory 5y ago
      Yes I mean that is my current set up, I am not that fast though! But it would just be nice to have the full DE backing behind i3 as a distribution. Yes I know you can do everything here with list of tools, but I just want a configuration that I know has been thought out, with best practices, and easy to modify in a reproducible way. The list of dotfiles and little adjustments alone you need to marry i3 with a power manager, menu bar, network manager, is a lot! I just want the work done for me (a DE).
forlorn 5y ago
Unfortunately Elementary's devs are too busy finding the right shades for the dark theme so there is no time left for your marginal features. These problems and bugs are not tackled for years.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  Good looking design is something people tend take for granted until it's gone. If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, those details really do matter to me. I tend to be able to fix everything else on my own.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, Most people would stare at an IDE and browser many hours and not at the DE control's panel or File Manager, and IMO this core apps should have had the UI fixed years ago and not have stuff still changed at each updated.
    - seph-reed 5y ago
      I'm just arguing because I feel like talking to someone. But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an obsession with visual design? Maybe your anger should be at the distros that do all the things you want but are too ugly to use?
      - simion314 5y ago
        My DE, browser and IDE are themable and configurable so I set them up with whatever I think is usable >Maybe your anger should What wording in my comment can be interpreted as anger ? I did not intended that so I would like to understand and express myself better next time.
      - renzo88 5y ago
        > But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an obsession with visual design? The linux desktop is a house on fire, and elementaryos is standing in the living room holding up paint to a smoldering wall.
pxc 5y ago
I've tried Elementary a few times, but the hardware support has never been good enough for me to install it because the base is always ancient as all hell for some reason.

gurkendoktor 5y ago

I love elementary, although I couldn't make 6.0 work on my Nvidia-based machine (something has changed about the driver installation?). What annoys me is that AppCenter takes up so much space in their blog posts and sponsoring campaigns, because I feel it's the worst of their apps. The navigation model never made sense to me (why is search disabled when I'm on "Installed"?). It also doesn't look good, because there are way more tiny utility apps than there are good icon designers, and often the icons are just shown on a giant, colored rectangle because apps have no banner images. I wish they'd do it more "magazine-like" as Apple does, just with more unsplash images instead of Apple's terrible Corporate Memphis illustrations.

kodah 5y ago
Pop OS's store also disables search when you're on "Installed". It's never made sense to me either.
- opencl 5y ago
  The Pop OS shop is a fork of Elementary's Appcenter.
jszymborski 5y ago
I love elementary a lot, so it hurts for me to admit that I agree. I'm stuck on an older kernel because the nvidia drivers are borked, but worst of all the AppCenter is truly horrid. For a distro that does such a good job at making sure that there is a GUI alternative in addition to all the normal things you'd do in a CLI, the AppCenter is really crummy. Ubuntu actually does a better job of making sure you can sort out your drivers through the GUI.
divbzero 5y ago
I haven’t experienced issues with Nvidia drivers, but I did face this with AMD drivers which can be oddly specific in terms of Linux distro support [1]. I was forced to abandon Elementary and instead tried Ubuntu Budgie [2]. [1]: https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/radeon-pro/radeon-pro-vii/radeon-pro-vii https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/radeon-... [2]: https://ubuntubudgie.org/ https://ubuntubudgie.org/

gjsman-1000 5y ago

My problem with Elementary OS is that, it comes with a selection of apps that look beautiful but are just... really bad. For example, the Music app. Comes built-in, looks great, only works with your local music library if you copy it over and reorganize it the way the Music app wants. No online music streaming of any kind. The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it except (IIRC) it has videos from The Guardian newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that? The Maps app? Looks beautiful, again, but the last time I tried it, it could hardly handle directions. Maybe Directions work well now, but it's just... not good. Every app is like this - barely functional.

katmannthree 5y ago
To play devil's advocate, the apps being simple to the point of pain for power users is almost the point of the distro. If you want a distro that you can wrangle into exactly what your vision is, you'll love arch. If you want the simplest possible mostly-functional option where you don't need to change anything to get it to work, elementary isn't too bad. That said I hate using it and generally dislike their entire philosophy of taking an open program, stripping out three quarters of the code, and then calling it their own and begging for money to keep doing that. Feels gross. None of the issues you mentioned are really fixable. Online streaming is a bit of a pipe dream for linux, legal(ish?) solutions are going to be hacky and break constantly since nobody has the negotiating power to work out deals with labels. Same with videos, alphabet is not going to just allow random apps to bypass the entire point of youtube (serving ads to eyeballs and tracking said eyeballs to serve more ads). Maps does suck, and that's mostly and openstreetmap issue. You could integrate google maps but those API keys are not cheap.
- throwawayninja 5y ago
  Arch user here who's slapped the Pantheon desktop on top of it; I don't use it often, mostly an i3 guy, but when I do it's beautiful and I love the work Elementary OS has put into it. All I need to add are those dancing icons from Cairo-Dock and I can get back to embarrassing my apple friends with how riced my desktop is.
5y ago

gjsman-1000 5y ago

My biggest gripe against Elementary OS 6, that I think everyone thinking about using it should consider: There is currently no upgrade path from Elementary OS 5 that is officially supported. You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall. Considering that Elementary OS is somewhat marketed as being ideal for, say, elderly folks or people less experienced with their PC, as something that a Linux user might install for non-techie friends, this is beyond unacceptable and also shows a certain lack of technical competence for the folks running it. Edit: Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe? I'm trying to avoid using profanity...

bitigchi 5y ago
Elementary OS is anything but suitable for elderly or non-techie folks.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I agree now, fully, but that's not what their marketing would say. It's literally called "Elementary OS"!
  - bitigchi 5y ago
    It's DoA for this reason. :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
Maybe i'm not up to par, but I was under the impression that even ubuntu wasn't mature to upgrade between major versions. I never dabbled much but upgrade failure are not unheard of.

gclawes 5y ago

I'm dying for installer support for Pinebook Pro. I can flash an image today, but as far as I know there's no way to do full-disk encryption yet.

smoldesu 5y ago

I used Elementary on my desktop for a little bit, and while it's definitely better than modern GNOME in many respects, the developers are similarly stuck in a pearls-before-swine mindset. The more you ask from it, the quicker you start to find it's edges; if you're just browsing the web and listening to Spotify, you're not likely to find any issues. Turning it into a proper development machine has more rough edges than it has any right to though, and while I generally like their approach to customization and tweaking better than GNOME, it's still a pretty barren little desktop. You'll end up replacing most of the out-of-the-box software within a few hours. So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.

greggh 5y ago
From the link: "AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers—and since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond!"

jszymborski 5y ago

I run elementary on my desktop and I really like it. This looks like a welcomed minor release, but here are some things that are currently on my wish list: - Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into DavMail all the time - A Mail app that lets me view emails in plain text first, or some kind of option to avoid downloading images and trackers in HTML mode. - The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs. - A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one works fine) A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love about elementary: - It looks fantastic. - The terminal, code, and files apps are where I live and they are great. Code isn't a replacement for VS Code, but it's quick and light and fantastic when I don't need e.g.: a linter. - Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable. - The OS truly feels unified; not some hodgepodge of poorly conceived UI elements and metaphors.

agumonkey 5y ago
I love the unified feel too, and i wonder if linux can reconcile it's bazaar nature with the ergonomic/mental need for simple systemic parts

Accacin 5y ago

Heh, it's funny (to me) that their new 'Quick Window Switcher' is just... A window switcher that's been used forever and works well. Why did they bother trying to redesign a window switcher of all things?

roshansingh 5y ago

I used Elementary 5.1 for over 2 years and then switched to Elementary 6. It was very buggy and slow on Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 with very good hardware. I switched to Ubuntu 21.04 and everything worked really well. I dont think I will hop distro again.

kiawe_fire 5y ago

Elementary OS is in a strange place for me. Coming from MacOS, it does so many things right and Danielle and the other contributors have such a great mindset focusing on accessibility and platform building. With their dev conference, they’re doing great work encouraging people towards native app development with an eye to performance and HIG. Everything looks so good. And yet, as a daily driver for development, it’s just never quite there. The edge cases stand out enough that I always want to reach for Manjaro or Zorin or the like instead. But I love their approach and think it’s ultimately “the right one”, so even when I’m not using it, I can only support them and cheer them on.

ddtaylor 5y ago
It for sure has a "death by a thousand papercuts" vibe to it. One of those papercuts is that they have modified the GTK theme so heavily that when you run Eclipse IDE on it the text and background are the same color.

symlinkk 5y ago

I don’t know why this distro even exists, Fedora and vanilla GNOME does everything this does but better. I feel the same way about Ubuntu by the way. The theme and tweaks that are added on top of vanilla GNOME in both cases only makes it worse.

Improvotter 5y ago

> You can currently find over 90 curated apps in AppCenter, [...] I don't think this is as impressive as they think it is. On the contrary, this seems to be a very very small number that I wonder why it's mentioned in the first place. I don't use these GUI frontends, but if we ever want any Linux distro to be more user-friendly. Almost everything should be available. Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high. We have been complaining about Apple and Google, yet "we"(?) cannot seem to be doing better ourselves. It's a bit disappointing.

_zooted 5y ago
I just tried elementaryOS and the selection of apps is terrible. There is almost nothing there that you actually need and of the apps that were there I found either unusable or so lacking in functionality compared to other apps it wasn't worth trying to compromise. > Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high It does seem really high considering they are just taking from one Stripe account to another.

xd1936 5y ago

I've been using Elementary OS since 0.3 as my main OS at work (Higher Education IT) and it's my favorite distro. The lack of Ayatana indicators is annoying, but overall, the polish and look/feel of their desktop environment is really nice and has only gotten better with each version.

tlhunter 5y ago

I tried Elementary for a week recently but just couldn't make it stick. The Calendar app doesn't work with Google Calendar as a backend; or, at least not with a ton of hacks, which is what one chooses Elementary to avoid. Overall the Pantheon WM feels rather sluggish, even on modern hardware. Managing windows just feels so clunky compared to KDE or even Windows. To be fair, macOS is their direct competitor. I paid a bug bounty ages ago to get streaming audio to work in their Music app but I don't think that went anywhere. I think they might be able to get something solid in the next few years.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

Elementary OS is ok but I have issues with the stability of its window manager, lock screen, and other core UI replacements that often lock up (on 5.x and now on 6.x) and require a hard reset (or killing X). On my laptop and even w/ proprietary drivers installed, I cannot get eOS to hardware accelerate videos with either my embedded Intel graphics card or my discrete nVidia card in Firefox or Chromium. The UI is full of really weird inconsistencies and is extremely opinionated without any way of changing some basic things (previously adjustable via `gsettings` but it seems that has been intentionally deprecated). For example, the elementary File Manager forces single-click-to-open ("web-style") behavior for any folders, but then switches to double-click-to-open for any files within those folders, so you can select a file but not open it but you cannot do the same with a folder. If it weren't for elementary tweaks (neutered as it has become for eOS 6), elementary would be completely unusable. The decision to not even have an official upgrade path besides "nuke everything and reinstall" makes me question the clarity of vision of elementary OS developers/decision makers. You want to be the macOS of the Linux world but you have a worse upgrade experience than any other Linux distro bar none? You purposely advertise to "less techy" users that are exactly the kind of users that won't be able to handle a "back up your files, wipe everything, and clean install" upgrade path? They added multitouch gesture support... but the only gestures available are for interacting with the desktop window manager (show all windows, move to prev/next virtual desktop)? Fortunately my `syngestures` that I wrote for elementary OS 5 works just fine alongside eOS 6's so-called "multitouch support" but for something that was going to be their killer feature, you'd think they would integrate some of the TouchEgg configuration into their touchpad gestures control panel UI, wouldn't you?

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superos 5y ago

I just can't get used to that search field in the title bar (you can see it in several applications e.g AppCenter first screenshot). IMHO it should be more prominent centered top in the main content area, not (almost greyed out?) in the title bar next to the maximize/restore button (why?). Just weird. What GUI guidelines are stipulating this?