Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons.
Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.
Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
> Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users
Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure.
It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such.
With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
Elementary was/is perfectly positioned to adopt Objective C and now that Swift is open source, it too.
Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.
Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.
I used it in an old EEE PC laptop because of its lower resource usage compared with Ubuntu.
Elementary is (or was at the time of testing) wasteful of screen real state, there are huge spacers on the toolbars and in a low resolution screen it's just ridiculous.
It could look good and also have sensible design. It only looked good and had IMHO bad design.
alephnerd|5 months ago
Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.
Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
cosmic_cheese|5 months ago
Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure.
It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such.
With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
actionfromafar|5 months ago
Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.
Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.
Shorel|5 months ago
Elementary is (or was at the time of testing) wasteful of screen real state, there are huge spacers on the toolbars and in a low resolution screen it's just ridiculous.
It could look good and also have sensible design. It only looked good and had IMHO bad design.