As much as it brightens my day to see a project I worked on (I'm actually the guy who filmed that video in the article) make it to HN's front page, it also makes me sad a bit.
It makes me sad because of the usual troupe of folks who complain that we don't have the right to go around calling ourselves an "OS", we don't bring anything original or innovative into the world, or that we are plainly just OS X clones.
I was extremely active on the thread[0] posted to HN when Luna launched (which was at #1 for the better part of that evening), but I don't think I'm going to do that same level of in depth responding here.
Instead, I'm simply going to leave you a link to the below article[0]. Please read my comment if you want to understand how we as elementary evaluate and understand our design process and the criticism which seems to come with it.
I can't imagine that people making those silly comments have 1) RTFA, or 2) done anything remotely like what you guys are doing. You guys are doing some amazing things with the Linux desktop, don't let the peanut gallery get you down.
PS - I fervently hate the word "exciting" and think it is by far the most overused and diluted word in contemporary US English these days, at least in the business and startup realm. Too many people seem to think that calling something "exciting" actually makes it so, and call everything they want investment or traction for "exciting". Almost none of it actually is.
eOS is one of the few exceptions. The first project I've seen where reading your blog posts about it feels like reading folklore.org, and for a Linux fan at least, truly is exciting. So please keep doing what you're doing, ignore the negative nancies.
I think the nature of innovation is to have heavy criticism. You guys are doing an amazing job. You have reached the level of design apple has, and now the only way is forward.
I expect great things from you as a team. You guys have brought back the passion to linux and you have pulled me back to linux from Mac and Windows.
You guys have an amazing product. Keep moving forward. Keep being hungry and bring that passion back to the open source community.
Be proud. I have been showing Luna around and it has been met with nearly universal praise. One of my friends switched his Ubuntu desktop within 24 hours and won't stop going on about how amazed he is how everything just works, how clean it is, etc. I'd also Luna can absolutely be called an OS, using the current vernacular.
Don't be sad. Be proud of what you guys have accomplished so far.
I've never spent a few days thinking about a Linux distro except for ElementaryOS: Luna. I spent 3 days including burning multiple CD of the 64-bit image (I don't know why but it seems to me that your 32-bit image works better) and finally got mine setup a few hours ago today.
I've imported my pictures. Installed a few other software (VLC, Chrome) and even thinking of learning Vala! (got MonoDevelop with Vala plugin installed). It's very unusual of me to jump into an obscure language (mind you I do Java for work and I'm spoiled with the tools, the best practices, the mature 3rd-party libraries).
Mind to share some tips of Vala development (project structures, IDE/editor, unit-testing, continuous-integration, etc)?
PS: I might be the minority but I never like launchpad and secretly wish you guys move out of it. Their UI is very confusing and in most cases I can't even see a screenshot for some of the projects that link back to Launchpad.
I have yet to test it, but having seen the video, "haters" probably lack knowledge about desktops, user interface or simply history (how many desktop systems have been made that lacked the integration, speed and polish ?). Hoping you don't take it too hard and keep on experimenting and growing.
A lot of people here fervently complaining about eOS again.
The most important thing is that there's finally a linux distro with a team behind it that really cares about design. I think it's a huge step forward, and when eOS gains in popularity, I hope other teams follow in their footsteps.
No, distros like Linux Mint aren't the right way forward. Stripping off everything until what you have left is a taskbar isn't exactly my idea of good design.
Completely agree. Their focus on design as all of how-it-looks, how-it-works, and performance-is-a-feature is very promising for a Linux Desktop, as are the hard work and sacrifices they're willing to go to get that - rewriting everything in Vala and GTK3 namely.
Their app-data-sharing component, Contractor, is also interesting. I've had at least one idea I wanted to try in the past but couldn't figure out how to implement it b/c apps are not aware of other running apps. I wonder if Contractor will make that possible.
These guys have created a really strong base to build upon, and appear to be innovative problem solvers. They're also tuned into the problems of power users, referencing the whole Gnome2/3 brouhaha. Really looking forward to seeing how this develops, and to it getting to a point I can completely replace Ubuntu desktop with it.
I'm glad to see that the top comment is a positive one. I haven't personally used eOS, but I'm also glad to see they are focused on usability and design. I switched from a decade of Linux to OSX a few years ago and have been pretty happy with my choice - OSX is unix-y enough, and tends to just get out of the way when necessary (some of Apple's more recent Gatekeeper changes withstanding).
In the meantime, I'm disappointed that Hacker News commenters continue to bring out constant negativity against new projects. What happened to original HN ethos that celebrated people _doing things_? Seriously: if you feel like you have to complain about somebody's hard work, try being constructive and giving feedback, or not commenting and just doing it better instead.
They don't care about design. If they did they would have created something original. Or at least they would have more than one source of inspiration to pick from. If they wanted to take the whole shape of OSX applications, at least they should have picked a different color theme. Here they stole the functionalities, the shapes, the colors and the metal textures that Apple's designers chose. eOS is designed by Apple, there's no one who care about design in the eOS team, at least not for the apps shown in the video. They're receiving bad critics because thieves receive bad critics. Hopefully they'll learn and their next version will have its own identity.
Why do you guys make a big deal of Contractor in the article when actual development of the service is rather neglected looking at your milestones for your next release's beta[0] and Contractor's revision history[1]?
On your mailing list you guys are already getting ready to update your Ubuntu Precise base to a more recent release[2], but why? Precise is stable and will be continue to be so long enough for you guys to spend time developing the developer-facing treasures of your platform, and yet it seems you're a little too focused on user-facing niceties. Or maybe the better question is when will you guys sit down and start making the stuff that'll entice third-party developers?
Let me know if I'm getting things confused, I'm actually a big fan of the project.
Regarding Contractor, its big proponent is on vacations and we still need to move some of the blueprints about it to the appropriated milestones. In fact, we still have to report many bugs about it, but in time I'm sure it'll be done.
Regarding the new release, we get a lot of criticism from all kinds of users saying they want us to be based on a more modern version of Ubuntu and as so, we plan to be based on 14.04 for next release. We aim to release shortly after Ubuntu 14.04 comes out and that's the plan we're sticking to. I'm sure 14.04 will be just as stable, we can't be stuck in the past and moving is a lot of work - we need to start working on it as soon as possible!
Besides, we also need many new GTK+, Vala and other libraries' features.
I like the idea of a new competitor in this space, however I was a bit disappointed in their direction. Not sure of others but I don't need another gnome3-like (dumbed-down, grandma-friendly, immature paradigm, rather be a tablet) interface. These linux-based desktops will never be popular; that ship sailed long ago.
However, I desperately need a professional, stable, feature-complete, mostly bug-free workstation GUI with modern capabilities at least as good as Win2000/XP, Irix, NeXT like I had 10+ years ago.
Something like Xfce polished to OSX-level quality.
If one of the design-goals is that "menus are too difficult" there is no market available for that product. The people that would benefit use Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android already.
It seems like KDE already handles your needs: it's well-integrated, stable and has all the modern capabilities you could want. Certainly far better than XP! I've used KDE a fair bit, and the recent versions have been superb. Sure, it's heavyweight compared to some of its bare-bones competitors, but that's the only way to fulfill all your conditions.
Of course, the truly "professional" choice would be XMonad layered over something minimal. But that's a different discussion for a different time :P.
>there is no market available for that product. The people that would benefit use Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android already.
There's a huge market for that product - everyone already using Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android. Talk about validation (minus Windows at least, where it's not clear what portion use it b/c they have to vs want to).
Even though the comparisions to OS X seem inevitable due to the launch bar, I like the snappiness of the OS, and one of the few distros I felt playing around. I am a primary windows user, who tinkers and plays around with Linux and OS X, I definitely like the OS. My wireless drivers being proprietary could not work with Luna, so as much as I want to have Luna - I could not use on the old laptop, but I will definitely consider installing it on my VM.
It's a really cool OS. The only thing I don't like is that they force their own applications. I always install Firefox and Thunderbird, and then it's a real thing.
Elementary OS looks like a OS X knock off. Which is a shame, in my opinion. They say they reached the same conclusion as Apple's designers, but I think they just have a bias. They should be taking inspiration from apps like Fantastical, Soulver, etc. and building in those concepts to the O.S. They should try and set themselves apart from OS X. It just looks too similar. Remember what Picasa said: "Good artist copy. Great artist steal." Elementary OS is just copying. They should be stealing. I'd love to see something along the lines of this Dribbble shot, honestly.
While I agree with your premise that Elementary is nothing more than a repetitive clone of a well trodden trope, I could not disagree more with the "steal" aspect.
Instead, I would suggest that any further designs should drop the privileged terms of "intuitive" and other such rubbish[1] and instead focus on designing a system that specifically meets the needs of a very particular demographic / audience.
Finally, there is little to no evidence to suggest that Picasso said that infamous line. It was likely misattributed by Mr. Jobs from a biography.
It is instead a mangling of the words of T.S. Eliot[2] that seriously detracts from Eliot's original (and relevant to this discourse) intention.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." So by Steve Jobs (and Picasso's) own definition, the eOS guys are merely good, not yet great. They've still got some catching up to do.
I emailed support a question and never received a reply back. Using Geary, once deleted/archived, emails almost always come back. Sometimes, they come back after several attempts.
If nobody seems to have a conclusive answer for you (mind you, Geary is not an app we wrote in house, so there's liable to be less Geary developers hanging around our support channels), I'd ask you (on behalf of the community) to report a bug here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/geary
How can they name their mostly visual customizations of the existing projects "OS" and be accepted as serious? Such things were called skins and themes.
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just one more derivative GNU/Linux distro?
So by that characterization, virtally no GNU/Linux distro is actually worthy of being called an OS.
That's fine if you want to say that, but you have to understand what that actually means.
As for differences beyond the "visual", we wrote our entire desktop environment and a number of our apps from scratch. We did't just skin things and make opinionated decisions about design. We actually write code (apps, libraries, our DE), as this article expresses.
Full disclosure: I am an elementary team member and I helped edit the linked article.
"Apple. How can they name their mostly API-level visual customizations of the existing projects "OS X" and be accepted as serious? Such things were called skins and themes.
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just a derivative BSD/Mach distro?"
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
It makes me sad because of the usual troupe of folks who complain that we don't have the right to go around calling ourselves an "OS", we don't bring anything original or innovative into the world, or that we are plainly just OS X clones.
I was extremely active on the thread[0] posted to HN when Luna launched (which was at #1 for the better part of that evening), but I don't think I'm going to do that same level of in depth responding here.
Instead, I'm simply going to leave you a link to the below article[0]. Please read my comment if you want to understand how we as elementary evaluate and understand our design process and the criticism which seems to come with it.
Thanks for listening.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6193148
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|12 years ago|reply
PS - I fervently hate the word "exciting" and think it is by far the most overused and diluted word in contemporary US English these days, at least in the business and startup realm. Too many people seem to think that calling something "exciting" actually makes it so, and call everything they want investment or traction for "exciting". Almost none of it actually is.
eOS is one of the few exceptions. The first project I've seen where reading your blog posts about it feels like reading folklore.org, and for a Linux fan at least, truly is exciting. So please keep doing what you're doing, ignore the negative nancies.
[+] [-] aespinoza|12 years ago|reply
I expect great things from you as a team. You guys have brought back the passion to linux and you have pulled me back to linux from Mac and Windows.
You guys have an amazing product. Keep moving forward. Keep being hungry and bring that passion back to the open source community.
[+] [-] macco|12 years ago|reply
I don't agree on everything you did, but I really appreciate what you did.
And you design consideration about how applications should interact with the users are ground breaking - at least a bit.
Sending minimize to hell is a smart move.
Kudos
[+] [-] rwl4|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|12 years ago|reply
I've never spent a few days thinking about a Linux distro except for ElementaryOS: Luna. I spent 3 days including burning multiple CD of the 64-bit image (I don't know why but it seems to me that your 32-bit image works better) and finally got mine setup a few hours ago today.
I've imported my pictures. Installed a few other software (VLC, Chrome) and even thinking of learning Vala! (got MonoDevelop with Vala plugin installed). It's very unusual of me to jump into an obscure language (mind you I do Java for work and I'm spoiled with the tools, the best practices, the mature 3rd-party libraries).
Mind to share some tips of Vala development (project structures, IDE/editor, unit-testing, continuous-integration, etc)?
PS: I might be the minority but I never like launchpad and secretly wish you guys move out of it. Their UI is very confusing and in most cases I can't even see a screenshot for some of the projects that link back to Launchpad.
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterWebz|12 years ago|reply
The most important thing is that there's finally a linux distro with a team behind it that really cares about design. I think it's a huge step forward, and when eOS gains in popularity, I hope other teams follow in their footsteps.
No, distros like Linux Mint aren't the right way forward. Stripping off everything until what you have left is a taskbar isn't exactly my idea of good design.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|12 years ago|reply
Their app-data-sharing component, Contractor, is also interesting. I've had at least one idea I wanted to try in the past but couldn't figure out how to implement it b/c apps are not aware of other running apps. I wonder if Contractor will make that possible.
These guys have created a really strong base to build upon, and appear to be innovative problem solvers. They're also tuned into the problems of power users, referencing the whole Gnome2/3 brouhaha. Really looking forward to seeing how this develops, and to it getting to a point I can completely replace Ubuntu desktop with it.
[+] [-] mmastrac|12 years ago|reply
In the meantime, I'm disappointed that Hacker News commenters continue to bring out constant negativity against new projects. What happened to original HN ethos that celebrated people _doing things_? Seriously: if you feel like you have to complain about somebody's hard work, try being constructive and giving feedback, or not commenting and just doing it better instead.
[+] [-] hrvbr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
Actually there are multiple distros which care about design, but they have different ideas about what to try to optimize for.
[+] [-] lists|12 years ago|reply
On your mailing list you guys are already getting ready to update your Ubuntu Precise base to a more recent release[2], but why? Precise is stable and will be continue to be so long enough for you guys to spend time developing the developer-facing treasures of your platform, and yet it seems you're a little too focused on user-facing niceties. Or maybe the better question is when will you guys sit down and start making the stuff that'll entice third-party developers?
Let me know if I'm getting things confused, I'm actually a big fan of the project.
[0]: https://launchpad.net/elementaryos/+milestone/isis-beta1
[1]: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~contractor-dev/contractor/trunk...
[2]: https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-community/msg0257...
[+] [-] munchor|12 years ago|reply
Regarding Contractor, its big proponent is on vacations and we still need to move some of the blueprints about it to the appropriated milestones. In fact, we still have to report many bugs about it, but in time I'm sure it'll be done.
Regarding the new release, we get a lot of criticism from all kinds of users saying they want us to be based on a more modern version of Ubuntu and as so, we plan to be based on 14.04 for next release. We aim to release shortly after Ubuntu 14.04 comes out and that's the plan we're sticking to. I'm sure 14.04 will be just as stable, we can't be stuck in the past and moving is a lot of work - we need to start working on it as soon as possible!
Besides, we also need many new GTK+, Vala and other libraries' features.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|12 years ago|reply
However, I desperately need a professional, stable, feature-complete, mostly bug-free workstation GUI with modern capabilities at least as good as Win2000/XP, Irix, NeXT like I had 10+ years ago.
Something like Xfce polished to OSX-level quality.
If one of the design-goals is that "menus are too difficult" there is no market available for that product. The people that would benefit use Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android already.
[+] [-] tikhonj|12 years ago|reply
Of course, the truly "professional" choice would be XMonad layered over something minimal. But that's a different discussion for a different time :P.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|12 years ago|reply
There's a huge market for that product - everyone already using Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android. Talk about validation (minus Windows at least, where it's not clear what portion use it b/c they have to vs want to).
[+] [-] infinita740|12 years ago|reply
ps: not trolling but I gave to my grandma a linux laptop (ubuntu and unity) and I think it's always great to have alternatives
[+] [-] phpnode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sremani|12 years ago|reply
Crunchbang and Luna are the distros I am liking.
[+] [-] joleX|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quarterto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cransa|12 years ago|reply
http://dribbble.com/shots/576250-Windows-UI-Concept/attachme...
[+] [-] foolrush|12 years ago|reply
Instead, I would suggest that any further designs should drop the privileged terms of "intuitive" and other such rubbish[1] and instead focus on designing a system that specifically meets the needs of a very particular demographic / audience.
Finally, there is little to no evidence to suggest that Picasso said that infamous line. It was likely misattributed by Mr. Jobs from a biography.
It is instead a mangling of the words of T.S. Eliot[2] that seriously detracts from Eliot's original (and relevant to this discourse) intention.
[1] http://www.uigarden.net/english/easy-intuitive-and-metaphor [2] http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tuananh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|12 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
[+] [-] MWil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how exactly you "emailed support" because we don't have a support email address, but I would encourage you to check out our support landing page here: http://elementaryos.org/support and specifically search/ask a question here: http://elementaryos.org/answers/+/all/solved/highest
If nobody seems to have a conclusive answer for you (mind you, Geary is not an app we wrote in house, so there's liable to be less Geary developers hanging around our support channels), I'd ask you (on behalf of the community) to report a bug here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/geary
Thanks :)
[+] [-] acqq|12 years ago|reply
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just one more derivative GNU/Linux distro?
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
That's fine if you want to say that, but you have to understand what that actually means.
As for differences beyond the "visual", we wrote our entire desktop environment and a number of our apps from scratch. We did't just skin things and make opinionated decisions about design. We actually write code (apps, libraries, our DE), as this article expresses.
Full disclosure: I am an elementary team member and I helped edit the linked article.
[+] [-] macco|12 years ago|reply
Who are you, to define what a operating system is?
[+] [-] kunai|12 years ago|reply
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just a derivative BSD/Mach distro?"