Elementary OS. People who have apparently only seen MacOS in screenshots went to a lot of trouble to copy it poorly.
edit: I was expecting to get more than a couple of downvotes, or maybe at least one person asking me what I don’t like about Elementary OS. So I preemptively downloaded the latest stable version, installed it in a VM and used it for 30 minutes or so before posting this comment. It had been a few years since I looked at it, and continues to be exactly what I have come to expect.
So I didn't suffer for nothing, a few observations:
The big “e” logo on the boot screen of this very-polished OS overlaps the throbber animation. We’re off to a good start.
The keyboard shortcut list quotes shortcuts with ⌘. I’m not even running this on a Mac.
There was something I genuinely couldn’t figure out, I think maybe in the file manager? So I ended up pressing F1 and also trying that in a few of the preinstalled applications (I don’t remember which was which) to see if there was some help available. One application actually popped up a traditional help file. I was impressed! In another application F1 did nothing. In a third application it opened the web browser and started loading a StackOverflow page (lol). I mean, if minimalism is your software ideology, how hard is it to document all four of the features?
I had a few applications open on the main workspace and another one open on a second workspace. On that second workspace I tried launching a settings panel, idk, maybe Keyboard or something. Nothing happens. I try it again and still nothing happens. It turns out that because I had left the settings window open on the other workspace, trying to launch another settings thingy just appears to silently fail. How would I have even known the search result was part of the application I had open? (Not that that makes it user-error.)
I was curious to see if there was a task (process) manager and how they would implement a very basic one. I also wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t include one. But Elementary OS was like, “Cool, here’s htop.” Oh boy. I mean, it’s not exactly noob-friendly, but it’s something. I try launching it and… nothing happens. Maybe don’t suggest CLI apps in the launcher if they’re impossible to launch?
The functionality of the music playing application is inscrutable. There’s no way to add a folder to “watch” as your library. Okay, so maybe it’s not library-based (though the included photos application is). Dragging mp3 files into the window looks like it’s going to work (I think a “+” badge appears over the icon?) but dropping it in results in a generic error. (“File can’t be read” or something.) But double-clicking the same file in the file manager enqueues it and it can actually be played, so…
The included text editor is called “code editor” or something. It has a few extra IDE-like features, nice. One of the features is: you can type a number in a box and quickly skip to that line number. Except that always results in ending up on the wrong line. Like, enter “3” and the box changes to display “3-decimalpoint-randomdigits” but you end up on… line 2. Enter 6 and you end up on line 5 with 6.something showing in the box. What?
In the file manager, with a file selected, beginning to type doesn’t select a file in your current folder, doesn’t start a recursive search beginning at your current folder, but starts a recursive search of your entire system. With a completely fresh system, no extra files or applications, I had to wait like 15 seconds to find out what was going on, and the top search result was something other than the matching file that was right there in the current directory.
This represents maybe half of the issues I came across doing really basic stuff for 30 minutes.
When people complain about duplication of effort within the free software world, I usually don’t agree. I think it’s usually fine if people want to spend their time writing a whole new thing for a specific or niche use-case! But if this is where things are after (checks Wikipedia) 12 years…
I’m saddened by how the once great Elementary OS has fallen from grace. I hope they will be able to bounce back to former glory and beyond, but I’m skeptical at best…
if you want desktop icons just configure and install something to do that. that’s the best part about Linux is that your distro literally doesn’t matter, it’s just a good starting point to jump off and customize
What is the kind of program called that manages desktop icons?
I’m pretty sure that such a program would need to get integrated to the desktop environment somehow, like with a plugin or something, but then this seems like a feature that should be a very basic part of common desktop environments. Even opensuse with KDE supports it by default.
I think you’re judging a bit too harsh. Elementary has it’s faults, but it is (was) an interesting OS with a lot of unique ideas:
The UI was gorgeous for its time, and in my opinion, their theme still looks better today than Adwaita and Breeze. They were among the first to offer global settings for light/dark modes, accent colors, and night light. It’s very consistent between applications, with a lot of attention to detail. Like they even had a custom icon theme for LibreOffice, just so it would fit in. In short, Elementary is much more than a simple “MacOS copycat”. This took a LOT of effort and it shows.
The “pay what you want” appstore was a novel idea, and I am sad that it didn’t work out.
The developer experience was quite good. They have excellent documentation that’s very accessible for newcomers, and for a while there were a number of interesting 3rd-party applications developed specifically for Elementary OS.
They cooperated with competing and upstream projects, mostly through freedesktop.org, and heavily invested in Vala. They maintained the GNOME email app when upstream lost interest, and contributed to Gnome Web.
Their included applications were really not that bad, and offered some unique features. For example, the file manager is probably the only one on Linux with Miller columns. And the terminal app is smart about CTRL+C, copying text when you want to copy text, and terminating the running process when that’s what you intended. I’m not exactly sure how it decides this, but it works perfectly.
They ran out of funding last year, and their lead developer left. I think that explains the drop in quality that you encountered. Elementary used to be a coherent and polished OS, in a time when most Linux distributions were still a bit messy. I was a happy user for quite a while. Sadly, many of their innovations turned out to be a dead end. Their appstore mostly contains toy apps that nobody wants to pay for, Vala has lost traction, their “Code” IDE lacks LSP integration, and GNOME or KDE apps look out of place, and it’s impossible to upgrade to new releases. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore, but I hope that they will find their way back up again.
I appreciate your thoughtful and insightful reply, and you’re definitely better-versed in Elementary OS than I’ve ever been! To be clear, my comments weren’t coming from a place of dislike but frustration, because there had been a time when I found myself drawn to the project and hoped it could be something I could actually use.
Even as my ideas about functionality and minimalism completely flipped (these days I really prefer the KDE approach) I held onto the hope that Elementary could still become the best that the Linux world had to offer newcomers arriving with no preconceived ideas about what software should be able to do. (If such people actually exist, but that’s another discussion.)
But my various pokings around the surface of Elementary OS over the years always reveal bugs, iffy UX, etc. To use your terms, it always seemed coherent to me, but far from polished. I don’t see the upside to having such a limited feature set when it doesn’t lead to basic stability, good documentation and so on. (By the way, I learned via Wikipedia yesterday that one of Elementary OS’s core principles is “minimal documentation”.)
P.S. I’m glad you brought up Miller columns. I didn’t know the term, but they’re actually a perfect example of what I’ll call the “Mac but sucky” quality of Elementary OS. Try this exercise: if you’re browsing an empty folder, switch to columns view. You get three empty panes, possibly leaving a typical user unsure of what this unfamiliar mode even meant to be. (I think this was the experience I alluded to yesterday, where I thought to press F1 for help and took me to a StackOverflow tag.) For an example of what the file manager should do when switching to columns in an empty folder… I mean, all the devs needed to do is try the same thing on a Mac. And just copy that. It’s clear they’re familiar with the looks, but not the “works.”
I tried to like elementary and used for it for months awhile ago. But it was missing so many basic features for an OS. Eg, they only just added bulk rename to the file manager.
Elementary OS. People who have apparently only seen MacOS in screenshots went to a lot of trouble to copy it poorly.
edit: I was expecting to get more than a couple of downvotes, or maybe at least one person asking me what I don’t like about Elementary OS. So I preemptively downloaded the latest stable version, installed it in a VM and used it for 30 minutes or so before posting this comment. It had been a few years since I looked at it, and continues to be exactly what I have come to expect.
So I didn't suffer for nothing, a few observations:
⌘. I’m not even running this on a Mac.htop.” Oh boy. I mean, it’s not exactly noob-friendly, but it’s something. I try launching it and… nothing happens. Maybe don’t suggest CLI apps in the launcher if they’re impossible to launch?This represents maybe half of the issues I came across doing really basic stuff for 30 minutes.
When people complain about duplication of effort within the free software world, I usually don’t agree. I think it’s usually fine if people want to spend their time writing a whole new thing for a specific or niche use-case! But if this is where things are after (checks Wikipedia) 12 years…
I’m saddened by how the once great Elementary OS has fallen from grace. I hope they will be able to bounce back to former glory and beyond, but I’m skeptical at best…
Agreed. It may look kind of like macOS, but it’s nowhere near as functional. Also: No. Desktop. Icons. Just why.
if you want desktop icons just configure and install something to do that. that’s the best part about Linux is that your distro literally doesn’t matter, it’s just a good starting point to jump off and customize
What is the kind of program called that manages desktop icons?
I’m pretty sure that such a program would need to get integrated to the desktop environment somehow, like with a plugin or something, but then this seems like a feature that should be a very basic part of common desktop environments. Even opensuse with KDE supports it by default.
I think you’re judging a bit too harsh. Elementary has it’s faults, but it is (was) an interesting OS with a lot of unique ideas:
They ran out of funding last year, and their lead developer left. I think that explains the drop in quality that you encountered. Elementary used to be a coherent and polished OS, in a time when most Linux distributions were still a bit messy. I was a happy user for quite a while. Sadly, many of their innovations turned out to be a dead end. Their appstore mostly contains toy apps that nobody wants to pay for, Vala has lost traction, their “Code” IDE lacks LSP integration, and GNOME or KDE apps look out of place, and it’s impossible to upgrade to new releases. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore, but I hope that they will find their way back up again.
I appreciate your thoughtful and insightful reply, and you’re definitely better-versed in Elementary OS than I’ve ever been! To be clear, my comments weren’t coming from a place of dislike but frustration, because there had been a time when I found myself drawn to the project and hoped it could be something I could actually use.
Even as my ideas about functionality and minimalism completely flipped (these days I really prefer the KDE approach) I held onto the hope that Elementary could still become the best that the Linux world had to offer newcomers arriving with no preconceived ideas about what software should be able to do. (If such people actually exist, but that’s another discussion.)
But my various pokings around the surface of Elementary OS over the years always reveal bugs, iffy UX, etc. To use your terms, it always seemed coherent to me, but far from polished. I don’t see the upside to having such a limited feature set when it doesn’t lead to basic stability, good documentation and so on. (By the way, I learned via Wikipedia yesterday that one of Elementary OS’s core principles is “minimal documentation”.)
P.S. I’m glad you brought up Miller columns. I didn’t know the term, but they’re actually a perfect example of what I’ll call the “Mac but sucky” quality of Elementary OS. Try this exercise: if you’re browsing an empty folder, switch to columns view. You get three empty panes, possibly leaving a typical user unsure of what this unfamiliar mode even meant to be. (I think this was the experience I alluded to yesterday, where I thought to press F1 for help and took me to a StackOverflow tag.) For an example of what the file manager should do when switching to columns in an empty folder… I mean, all the devs needed to do is try the same thing on a Mac. And just copy that. It’s clear they’re familiar with the looks, but not the “works.”
eOS is the only Linux distribution my girlfriend liked…
Ngl I kinda miss eOS, but at this point being so away from Linux (only used with my NAS), I’d install any distro if I could 🤣
I tried to like elementary and used for it for months awhile ago. But it was missing so many basic features for an OS. Eg, they only just added bulk rename to the file manager.
Not being able to upgrade to next version if you dont reinstall it from a live usb, is what made it the worst distro for me.