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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

#111

Post by PakG1 »

dingdingdang wrote: post #103
zwaps wrote: post #81

Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release wi…

Minorly unfair on Mint since it is a 2 versions old screenshot being compared to present day version of Elementary. Personally by far prefer the Mint paradigm: it is clear what is running and what is a launch icon without studying icon shading/overlays/dots..etc.

Could you share a screenshot for Mint today then and describe how it's improved?

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

#112

Post by Upper_Onion »

mepian wrote: post #89
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…

This kind of attitude towards less popular programming languages is very damaging to the field of software engineering. Domain-specific languages are our best tool to combat the excessive complexity of software. The difficulty of learning a new programming language is overblown.

Keeps it competitive. We don't want hundreds of millions of people being able to program. You want to put food on the table or not?

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

#116

Post by dharma1 »

car111 wrote: post #102

I think there are 2 fundamental problems with Desktop Linux: 1. Linux doesn't even have a rock-solid gui toolkit on which different environments can be based: a. The one which runs on Ubuntu by default and which is probably used on 90%+ installations of desktop Linux is GTK which is utterly a major nightmare to develop GUIs with. b. The Qt library which powers KDE is simply not used all that widely. The flagship desk…

Qt was used on unity8. But it didn't (at that time, and probably not now either) have a comparable UI component library to MacOS (or iOS). I know, because we made one from scratch - which wasn't a great idea either.

Flutter would look interesting if it picks up steam for desktop apps.

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

#117

Post by colemickens »

sterlind wrote: post #105

I'd love to have a Linux distro with the frontend of Elementary OS and the backend of Nixos. And I say that as a Microsoft employee. Are there efforts to make Nixos grandma-worthy? Or are the only pretty distros all reskins of Ubuntu?

You might be interested in this PR: "[nixpkgs] elementary: init a 5.0 Juno" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637

I'm actively trying to build some cool things with Nix/NixOS and then write up a series of blog posts. Several recent discussions on the Discourse and at NixCon have been focused around Nix/NixOS user experience, at least.

I've recently been building a package set of tip builds of Wayland stuff (sway, screenshot/screenrecord/notification utilities), including instructions for using them on Ubuntu via Nix. I'm also building out a set of packages and modules for Kube/Containerd/Kata-Containers for perfectly repeatable offline-first clusters. I think these two projects can be leveraged to evangelize Nix and NixOS nicely, and dovetails into UX efforts as I build my list of rough spots and fix a number of issues in nixpkgs and random OSS projects along the way.

Also, Gnome-Shell and KDE work perfectly in NixOS anyway, and can be easily made to look just like they do on any other distro... I just recently switched to Sway, coming from KDE (~1.5 years) after GNOME (6+ years?). Not any significant visual differences than when I was using Arch Linux.

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

#119

Post by truncate »

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've Dell XPS 13 4k display and its perfect for single screen (or if all your screen have same resolution). The only issue is when you are using multiple screen, it wont scale properly, i.e. stuff on one screen would look unproportionally larger or smaller.

Yes you can use `xrandr --scale` or something on particular screen, but it just spins my CPU like crazy and makes fonts blurry. So if I've to use multiple screen, I use only Emacs/Terminal on the weird one (which I spent most time on working) and start chrome with custom scaling factor.

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

#120

Post by osrec »

DCKing wrote: post #99
zwaps wrote: post #81

Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release wi…

I agree. I would be using Linux full time if the experience was not so jarring all the time. Fonts and themes are off, stuff gets jumbled around, things are wildly inconsistent. You end up spending lots of time doing weird hacks to make everything look alright. Even Elementary will break if you move outside the core applications - it cannot be helped in this ecosystem. When Linux works for you it's so damn great but…

If you want a no frills experience that just works, give Lubuntu a try. Of all the Linux distros I've used in my company, it's given us almost no headaches. The fonts are crisp, and icons look fine too. Adding monitors has also been painless. And even my least technical users are able to use it (but might need a bit of help now and again). For us, it has actually been a pleasure to use because of its speed.

If you're prepared to give up whizzy animations etc, do try it when you have a bit of spare time.

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