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Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

elementary.io

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Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#31

Post by kitsunesoba »

coleifer wrote: post #18
kitsunesoba wrote: post #13

The project is interesting and I have to give it props for being one of the few Linux distros that’s put the necessary level of thought into UI/UX and made consistency a priority. That said, I question some of their technical choices, most namely the choice of Vala as the project’s official language. Not that Vala is bad, but it’s incredibly niche at best and I think it severely limits contributions. Not many are goi…

Its not too different from c#, and it's very popular for writing gtk applications.

Even so, it’s going to scare off a lot of potential contributors long before they investigate the language deeply simply by having a name they don’t recognize. It effectively limits the contributor pool to those who’ve previously written GTK apps, which is relatively tiny compared to the number of devs coming from more mainstream backgrounds.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#32

Post by ryanmarsh »

jniedrauer wrote: post #17
LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far…

Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very…

Do you use a high DPI display? How is that? I'm reticent to give up my 5k screen and crisp text when programming but I'd love to use Linux as my daily driver (as much as I like macOS).

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#33

Post by tapoxi »

jniedrauer wrote: post #17
LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far…

Fedora is my daily driver, and I think it really strikes a good balance between stability, security, and bleeding edge. Having said that, I hesitate to recommend Fedora to newbies. Some things about it can be scary and unpredictable. SELinux is enabled by default, and gnome shows audit2allow notifications every time there is an AVC denial. Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very…

I absolutely love Fedora, and I think they've even managed to make great progress on sane SELinux defaults (I haven't seen an audit2allow prompt in Fedora 29!) but I think "Workstation" is a great term. It's a wonderful experience for developers and I think it can eventually supplant the Mac as the ideal dev workstation.

But for friends/family I'll always recommend ChromeOS. A little less so these days because of the weird Android integration, but the laptops are incredibly cheap and the system is almost impossible to break. I don't need to spend Thanksgiving fixing my Mom's Chromebook, I know its already patched.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#34

Post by llIIllIIllIIl »

I tried to use the OS multiple times through the recent years, but every time there's a missing feature that breaks all bi+lingual user experience: You cannot switch the keyboard layout for each window separately. Seems like they do not care about anyone except exclusively English speaking audience.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#35

Post by NuSkooler »

I've been using Elementary OS for a few major versions now. It's become my main desktop OS.

I'm a bit worried about putting too much into the "store" and their own browser, but so far it hasn't impacted me any. Anything that applies to Ubuntu proper applies in eOS for the most part, but the UX is just much more polished.

When I first saw it I was worried of too much "MacOS" like (which I'm not a fan of), but that has't been the case for me at all.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#36

Post by Investogician »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
coleifer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not too different from c#, and it's very popular for writing gtk applications.

Even so, it’s going to scare off a lot of potential contributors long before they investigate the language deeply simply by having a name they don’t recognize. It effectively limits the contributor pool to those who’ve previously written GTK apps, which is relatively tiny compared to the number of devs coming from more mainstream backgrounds.

I think it actually has helped. The Elementary app store is filled with nice Elementary-specific apps.

Their getting started docs are quite beginner-friendly https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#getting-star...

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#38

Post by Investogician »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

I've recommended Fedora to several "I'm scared of computers" people recently and the experience has been very good. The new GNOME does require 5 minutes of tutorial, but after that they've been completely happy exploring on their own. The new "Software" app is an excellent GUI for installing new apps and updating the system. Personally I use Macs but if I didn't, Fedora would probably be my next choice. It has by far…

For the "I'm scared of computers" crowd, isn't it still a bit hands-on to get proprietary codecs so you won't run into to problems watching things like YouTube?

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#39

Post by cordite »

I am currently on this os, it’s pleasant most of the time, but it crashes 75% of the time on unlocking the lock screen. It also starts having windows flicker for a few seconds at random after a few days of uptime. I use Nvidia GTX 1080, it seems to work well otherwise.

Re: Elementary OS – Fast, open, privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS

#40

Post by kevingrahl »

saganus wrote: post #25

What kind of apps does Elementary OS support? Can I install .deb packages or other Linux-compatible ones? Otherwise it's going to be hard to adopt an OS if there are not enough of the apps I use, no?

I’ve been using elementary OS for the past two years or so; you can use everything that runs on Ubuntu which of course includes .deb packages.
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