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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

#71

Post by Brakenshire »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #19
jniedrauer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Someone coming from windows will be scared by seeing dozens of errors the very first time they boot into a clean OS. I'm not sure what you're describing here. I've never seen one error after a new install, let alone dozens. The SELinux errors must be pretty rare because I've never had any complaints about them.

I have seen them and been confused, maybe a couple of errors every few months.

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

#72

Post by jniedrauer »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #32
jniedrauer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I use sway and it handles HiDPI fairly well. Any native wayland apps work great. XWayland still has scaling issues unfortunately, but the list of XWayland apps I still use grows shorter every day.

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

#73

Post by xaduha »

ledgerdev wrote: post #63
xaduha wrote: post #37

I'd recommend https://getsol.us if you asked me what Desktop Linux distro to get.

I too love solus, but I'm a bit concerned with the ongoing project stability with it's creator and technical leader(ikey) leaving the project. It's been such an amazing project. What do other think, can it continue to be relatively stable and not break things too much going forward?

Have you read/listened to this? https://getsol.us/2018/10/27/in-full-sail

I'm hopeful, it's great to have BDFL at the start, but community takeover should and does happen at some point. Maybe this is it.

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

#74

Post by computerex »

hawski wrote: post #29
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…

Learning Vala is still far better than GObject-C. Rust GTK bindings are probably not yet there. So what's left? Python and JavaScript. If you care about native performance the way I believe they are these will also not cut it. Vala seems then a logical choice, especially at the time they were deciding. The question I have is: will Vala be supported further by Gnome in foreseeable future? I heard some time ago that it…

Vala is more or less dead.

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

#75

Post by automathematics »

wlesieutre wrote: post #28
y4mi wrote: post #5

I'll be honest.. I tried elementary os when they first released it but never got it's charm. It always felt like an inferior version of macOS... Which I don't like. I personally prefer to develop on a Linux install... But elementary OS is not what I'd use if Linux is an option

Inferior macOS is how most of my experiences with Linux distros have felt. Maybe the desktop environments just aren’t my thing, the inconsistent UIs feel sloppy, and I always ending up needing to drop down to a command line to fix something or other is was annoying. Elementary doesn’t fix needing to drop to a command line, and the UIs are only unusually consistent and well thought when you stick with the built in sof…

Check out Solus OS

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

#77

Post by weberc2 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #48
weberc2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I briefly flirted with contributing to the project, but the code was a horrendous mess and the build system was worse (CMake mess; most of the dependencies were implicit; etc). Vala aims to be intuitive for C# developers, which is a nice goal but everything is built on the trashfire that is GObject and the Vala abstraction leaks like a seive. Hopefully much of that was fixed with time, but I doubt GObject is any bett…

What exactly do you mean by implicit dependencies with CMake? Do you mean that they just linking libraries without searching for them via find_package or find_library?

Yes.

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

#79

Post by freedomben »

jcelerier wrote: post #42
ryanmarsh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

can't speak for OP but I've been using a retina MBP since 2014 until this year and I'm typing this from a 4k screen (both running ArchLinux) - everything is fine except the occasional 1997 TCL/Tk app not updated for hidpi

Agree. I've been running Fedora as my daily driver for 7 or 8 years now, and for a while avoided HiDPI like the plague because it was so terrible. These days tho, it's mostly fine except the occasional app that hasn't been updated to support it. Oh, that and the pseudo-terminal (you'll have to squint to see that. Luckily Fedora is so dang stable that I haven't even needed that in years).

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

#80

Post by BonesJustice »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #32
jniedrauer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’m running elementary OS on a new ThinkPad with a 4K HiDPI screen. GTK scaling looked beautiful right out of the box.

I had to set an environment variable on startup before Qt apps started scaling properly. Out of the box, the scaling was similar to WinXP—text elements looked good, images were usually too small. With the ‘improved’ auto-scaling switched on, Qt apps also look great.

Wine and Steam handle DPI scaling just fine too. It wasn’t automatically turned on, so you have to squint your way to the appropriate checkbox or slider, but then it’s crisp awesomeness from that point forward.

The JetBrains IDEs that I use for development are all based on Java Swing, and they looked perfect on the first launch.

Color me impressed with HiDPI Linux. The only thing that took a bit of effort was setting up a larger console font and configuring grub to use it in the boot menu. I can’t speak to Fedora, but I suspect it’s similar: a couple setup hurdles, but once you get everything configured right, it looks glorious.

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