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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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
I'm surprised they spend so much (presumably) time and effort on applications, especially 'Web' and 'Terminal'. How many users are actually going to use 'Web' as their browser?
That said, I wish them all the best, because I use 'Files' (but not the distro) since it's the best I've found for the odd occasion where I think using a GUI file manager will be easier than the command line. I still wouldn't say it's good, just the best I've found. (Not opening everything on a single-click is a vast improvement!)
This is a big update for a relatively small community distro. Kudos to the team.
A summary of some of the cooler features:
Performance: General performance improvements on all hardware resulting from optimizing for Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi - namely, reducing and asynchronizing inter-process communication between desktop components, removing unused code, and reducing disk I/O.
Firmware: Linux Vendor Firmware Service now built-in, enabling firmware updates from within the OS.
Flatpak: all-in on flatpak, all AppCenter apps are flatpaks, as well as some Elementary apps like Web.
Portals: apps must explicitly request permission to get access to files or interact with other apps. Can tweak these permissions in System Settings.
Mail: The Mail app now sandboxes html emails.
Multi-Touch: Extended from supporting just desktop to various apps now too.
Multi-Tasking: Better hot corners + new window and workspace controls.
CalDav: Tasks and Calendar now designed around the CalDav format, making importing and sharing of tasks and calendar items with other CalDav apps easier.
Dark Theme: system-wide, applies to GTK apps too.
Terminal: smart-paste protection extended from sudo pastes to multi-line pastes.
More OEM/Vendor friendly:
- Installer is simplified and streamlined - network connectivity, user account creation, and updates moved out of the installer and into the installed OS. Better for vendors & OEMs.
- Startup is intentionally non-Elementary-branded, better enabling OEM/Vendor branded startup splash screen — "we don’t need to constantly advertise your operating system to you".
Elementary is great, the couple times I've tried it, I wasn't into the desktop paradigm it was encouraging me to use (e.g., no minimize button, native apps that are pretty and consistent but less functional). Will look forward to giving it another spin.
Having recently begun using a Mac for the first time, and after having had to suffer with Win10 for a few years, I have to say that I didn't appreciate that several out-of-box linux desktop experiences are now superior to commercial options.
Ubuntu for example is quite stable, has attractive defaults that aren't garish or trying to be too unfamiliar, and otherwise never does anything I don't expect. Especially when it comes to finder/explorer/nautilus.
All major desktops now have a dock, some tray icons, and a notification area.
To me the differentiator is just staying out of my way.
> Elementary is great, the couple times I've tried it, I wasn't into the desktop paradigm it was encouraging me to use (e.g., no minimize button, native apps that are pretty and consistent but less functional).
I installed it on one machine, and the missing "minimize" button drove me mad, otherwise it's a very nice environment (I generally use Ubuntu LTS).
- Can't publish closed-source apps on their AppCenter. "To ensure reproducible builds, transparency, and auditability, binaries cannot be uploaded or included alongside the source code to be installed on users' devices." So that precludes my apps, and probably most other devs I know. I'd guess because of this restriction, their app store is going nowhere as a business.
- Their 70/30 split is higher than what Apple currently offers (85/15) for revenue less than 1m (which is going to be everyone on eOS)
- While I like macOS, I think it's a shame they chose to (more or less) copy it, rather than try a new direction. But perhaps that would be too risky.
I've been using it since the weekend and it's so great!
My favourite feature is that it's all flatpak, allowing smartphone-like permissions for each desktop app — both first-party and any third-party from Flathub.
I like it way more than snap and am glad there's an Ubuntu fork that works so wonderfully with it.
Flatpaks, as well as snaps and appimages to a lesser extent, are a true godsend to the linux desktop. I can finally have a stable system and software released yesterday.
Elementary is starting to actually look nicer than macOS. There's still some janky details here and there, but the overall design language is very nice.
It's a sign of how crappy mainstream UI design has gotten that the thing that is really drawing me to elementary OS are the gradients, shadows, and edges that give its UI sense of depth -- not the Linux underpinnings, multitouch, or "App Store". It makes the UI 1000x easier to grok at a glance than the flat crap Microsoft and Apple have been pushing out over the past few years, and just plain looks good! I'd love for it to kick off a move back to that kind of design, but sadly it doesn't look like that's the direction things are heading.
Wow looks great. This fell off my radar for a bit, looking pretty nice now. Not gonna lie, having Gnome + Flatpak on Ubuntu LTS base already puts it near the top of my list, the styling and added usability features puts it over the top.
Ubuntu LTS base is also great for developers, as it seems most cloud images these days are just that. I've tried installing/building tools on other distros that I like more than Ubuntu but they always seem to use wonky options, libraries that are too old/new or in strange places, and I end up back at Ubuntu.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
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?
I love elementary OS and would use it on all my computers if I didn't love NixOS even more (and sometimes I use NixOS with Pantheon, elementary's window manager).
> all AppCenter apps are now packaged and distributed as Flatpaks, a modern container format that keeps apps siloed away from each other—and your sensitive data
All apps are siloed from your sensitive data? That is a little um simplified or misleading or something. They may have done a great job with security now that they have Portals, but it is surely a much more complicated story than the above quote suggests.
I have tried Linux desktop. One of the couple things I can’t get over with is remote. It seems there’s no straight and reliable way to remote to the same session of the host desktop. In addition, Windows RDP can also reliably adjust to client screen setup.
Hmm, VNC would normally be the way to handle that on Linux? If you have a session going and fire up your VNC server of choice, you should be able to connect to it from another machine (I can't say I do that much personally, though I did set up a little fanless box as dashboard kiosk that way for my team a while back).
Serious question. Do you have to use a GUI? Windows RDP is more polished because generally the only way to interact with a server is through a GUI. Even powershell didn't move the needle that much.
On Linux, interaction is overwhelmingly through SSH. Or a client/server app.
Of course, the canonical answer to that is remote Xorg. It needs a high performance connection and X running on both sides, but it works. And the most Windows-like answer is VNC.
For cloud workloads, I prefer alpine on Amazon Linux 2 hosts. For desktop, I prefer Elementary. It's great to see an update on the best (imho) desktop distro.
That trackpad gesture support where it actually tracks with your finger movement looks really nice. Is this typical in Linux distros now, or is elementary going above and beyond the rest with that?
It’s not typical at all. Only in the recently released version 40 Gnome has shipped what feels like a prototype of this.
Before then only the obscure Wayfire had a similar gesture for desktop switching (actually good) and there were a few projects hacking it up with simulated keyboard shortcuts (obviously not the same at all).
Honestly I think this is the most exciting thing, and I'm very glad to see support for it from the DE itself. Currently I think as someone else mentioned it's only GNOME that does it, otherwise you have to use hacky third party programs like touchegg which essentially just emulate certain keyboard shortcuts. So don't even think about finger movement tracking
I always wondered how an open-source project develops from scratch so many different apps (e.g. Web, Mail, Calendar, etc). Why not focusing more on the OS rather than wasting resources on apps that there are mature open-source alternatives (e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox, etc)?
I love the look and feel of elementary, but I'm always skeptical of trying new Linux DEs. I want them to work well, and they often do, but 4K and scaling support is very hit or miss with the ones I've used. I'm currently using Gnome and not impressed at all, just settling on it. Does anyone have experience with other DEs recently with this? Either KDE or Pantheon, or something else? I just want good 4K support and scaling that doesn't causes awful tearing or window bugs.
I really like elementary and the ecosystem-like, but open approach they're taking to desktop linux.
One aspect of it I feel often goes underappreciated is how lightweight it is. Provided you have a reasonable amount of RAM for the tasks you're trying to do, e.g. 4GB+ for normal desktop usage and an SSD, you can run it on fairly old CPUs and it will be blazing fast still.
Can't wait to give this version a whirl!
As I've said before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26661615), we use Elementary OS as our point-of-sale terminals in a small chain of resale stores, and it's been super solid. It's been a good choice for us.
That sounds fantastic to see that sort of thing being used out in the open. Aside from using the Ember-electron POS app can customers access other parts of the UI or elementary OS applications? What made you choose elementary OS in particular? I'd imagine the advantage of using it over ubuntu gnome would be fairly minimised if the user would be locked to just a single application.
Been using Elementary for a couple months and it's pretty comfortable.
Every new version, however, I look to see if they've added support to increase mouse scroll wheel speed with no success. Sadly, it's still in the limbo circle of blame between GNOME,libinput,x,wayland,etc.
This is a great looking release and I really don’t think enough attention is being drawn to just how lovely the elementaryOS desktop looks and feels on a hi-DPI display, which is not something I can say for most Linux desktops. Also the font hinting/text rendering looks excellent too.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cxr|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] im_down_w_otp|4 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
That said, I wish them all the best, because I use 'Files' (but not the distro) since it's the best I've found for the odd occasion where I think using a GUI file manager will be easier than the command line. I still wouldn't say it's good, just the best I've found. (Not opening everything on a single-click is a vast improvement!)
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|4 years ago|reply
A summary of some of the cooler features:
Performance: General performance improvements on all hardware resulting from optimizing for Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi - namely, reducing and asynchronizing inter-process communication between desktop components, removing unused code, and reducing disk I/O.
Firmware: Linux Vendor Firmware Service now built-in, enabling firmware updates from within the OS.
Flatpak: all-in on flatpak, all AppCenter apps are flatpaks, as well as some Elementary apps like Web.
Portals: apps must explicitly request permission to get access to files or interact with other apps. Can tweak these permissions in System Settings.
Mail: The Mail app now sandboxes html emails.
Multi-Touch: Extended from supporting just desktop to various apps now too.
Multi-Tasking: Better hot corners + new window and workspace controls.
CalDav: Tasks and Calendar now designed around the CalDav format, making importing and sharing of tasks and calendar items with other CalDav apps easier.
Dark Theme: system-wide, applies to GTK apps too.
Terminal: smart-paste protection extended from sudo pastes to multi-line pastes.
More OEM/Vendor friendly:
- Installer is simplified and streamlined - network connectivity, user account creation, and updates moved out of the installer and into the installed OS. Better for vendors & OEMs.
- Startup is intentionally non-Elementary-branded, better enabling OEM/Vendor branded startup splash screen — "we don’t need to constantly advertise your operating system to you".
There's a separate blog post on hardware-specific improvements here: https://blog.elementary.io/hardware-improvements-coming-to-e...
[+] [-] trts|4 years ago|reply
Having recently begun using a Mac for the first time, and after having had to suffer with Win10 for a few years, I have to say that I didn't appreciate that several out-of-box linux desktop experiences are now superior to commercial options.
Ubuntu for example is quite stable, has attractive defaults that aren't garish or trying to be too unfamiliar, and otherwise never does anything I don't expect. Especially when it comes to finder/explorer/nautilus.
All major desktops now have a dock, some tray icons, and a notification area.
To me the differentiator is just staying out of my way.
[+] [-] jll29|4 years ago|reply
I installed it on one machine, and the missing "minimize" button drove me mad, otherwise it's a very nice environment (I generally use Ubuntu LTS).
[+] [-] leppr|4 years ago|reply
You expect typing letters while having the file explorer window focused to launch a full recursive file search?
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tayistay|4 years ago|reply
- Their 70/30 split is higher than what Apple currently offers (85/15) for revenue less than 1m (which is going to be everyone on eOS)
- While I like macOS, I think it's a shame they chose to (more or less) copy it, rather than try a new direction. But perhaps that would be too risky.
[+] [-] input_sh|4 years ago|reply
My favourite feature is that it's all flatpak, allowing smartphone-like permissions for each desktop app — both first-party and any third-party from Flathub.
I like it way more than snap and am glad there's an Ubuntu fork that works so wonderfully with it.
[+] [-] imglorp|4 years ago|reply
Eg - https://flatkill.org/2020/
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbylarrybobby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unicornporn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|4 years ago|reply
Ubuntu LTS base is also great for developers, as it seems most cloud images these days are just that. I've tried installing/building tools on other distros that I like more than Ubuntu but they always seem to use wonky options, libraries that are too old/new or in strange places, and I end up back at Ubuntu.
[+] [-] azinman2|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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 ?
[+] [-] kemiller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] appleiigs|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iamcreasy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonogo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spindle|4 years ago|reply
> all AppCenter apps are now packaged and distributed as Flatpaks, a modern container format that keeps apps siloed away from each other—and your sensitive data
All apps are siloed from your sensitive data? That is a little um simplified or misleading or something. They may have done a great job with security now that they have Portals, but it is surely a much more complicated story than the above quote suggests.
[+] [-] temp8964|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|4 years ago|reply
On Linux, interaction is overwhelmingly through SSH. Or a client/server app.
Of course, the canonical answer to that is remote Xorg. It needs a high performance connection and X running on both sides, but it works. And the most Windows-like answer is VNC.
[+] [-] nineteen999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markofzen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabereiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Flex247A|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlesieutre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|4 years ago|reply
Before then only the obscure Wayfire had a similar gesture for desktop switching (actually good) and there were a few projects hacking it up with simulated keyboard shortcuts (obviously not the same at all).
[+] [-] amilios|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mssdvd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcyrax|4 years ago|reply
I always wondered how an open-source project develops from scratch so many different apps (e.g. Web, Mail, Calendar, etc). Why not focusing more on the OS rather than wasting resources on apps that there are mature open-source alternatives (e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox, etc)?
[+] [-] jjice|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schmorptron|4 years ago|reply
One aspect of it I feel often goes underappreciated is how lightweight it is. Provided you have a reasonable amount of RAM for the tasks you're trying to do, e.g. 4GB+ for normal desktop usage and an SSD, you can run it on fairly old CPUs and it will be blazing fast still.
Congrats to the team!
[+] [-] _spduchamp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zonabey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HerbMcM|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilalexander|4 years ago|reply