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

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

#141

Post by bubblethink »

tathougies wrote: post #126
coned88 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird argument. Because I have given Linux systems to the elderly before. People with little to no experience with computers. Guess what they were all fine. My mother was a long time windows user. Kept getting viruses. She was converted to Ubuntu and has used it for over a decade now without issue. Linux is far easier for people than you think. My mother is a senior citizen now and this is her second computer. The UI…

Yeah same experience here. Installed gentoo on our home computer for my mom and dad and once i showed them how to open Firefox, they were happy as clams. The only issue was when my dad wanted to install tax software

You mean your parents can use your gentoo computer, or that you installed gentoo for them ? The latter sounds quite unorthodox.

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

#142

Post by muthdra »

mattycakes01 wrote: post #140

It's basically just Pantheon with a custom skin. You can get similarly good results using the "arc" theme and any decent ubuntu-based distro.

`It's basically just ${desktopEnvironment} with a custom skin` can be humorously used for 90% of popular Linux distros but it's not really fair for any of them.

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

#143

Post by Canadauni »

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…

I had a similar perspective as you. I couldn't get past a lot of default design decisions made in many distributions and I didn't want to spend the time tweaking my machine. I installed Pop_OS after seeing the Theano release a couple of weeks ago and basically haven't booted into windows since. As a casual user I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a similar linux experience as I was.

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

#144

Post by cassidyjames »

mattycakes01 wrote: post #140

It's basically just Pantheon with a custom skin. You can get similarly good results using the "arc" theme and any decent ubuntu-based distro.

You realize elementary has created the entire Pantheon desktop environment, right? So, "It's just their desktop environment with their stylesheet, their apps, and the AppCenter ecosystem," is basically what you are saying. In which case, yeah, that's exactly what elementary OS is.

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

#145

Post by manch23 »

EastSmith wrote: post #101

Someone knows if this is a good fit for a dev machine: Rails, React, PostgreSQL & Elastisearch? VS Code?

Its based on Ubuntu, so whatever you can install on Ubuntu should work on Elementary. Only issue I've run into is while adding an apt repo(for docker I think) I needed to point it to bionic instead of juno.

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

#146

Post by cassidyjames »

NuSkooler wrote: post #35

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…

For what it's worth, elementary does not create Epiphany; that's the GNOME browser and is largely a GUI wrapper around WebKit, the exact same engine as in Safari.

AppCenter is a way to serve the app developers who were already attempting to target the OS while also enabling both them and elementary to cover (some) costs.

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

#147

Post by jenscow »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #124
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are part of the vocal, online minority that doesn't look at Mint and cringe because it looks so amateur and dated. Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly without necessarily being able to articulate that the "font heights", etc. are the problem. By a common user's standards, Mint looks amateur and janky compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS.

I look at it and just think old. But I don't dislike it. I just see it as old. Like fashion, is what was popular in the 90s bad? Or is it just some perpetual need to evolve for the sake of evolving?

I agree. It's rough around the edges, but I only need to look at it for a few seconds when changing windows, for example. Other than that, it stays out of my way and doesn't tire me with animations which stopped looking cool the by 4th time.

I've tried moving away from the traditional desktop (yes, for the sake of it), but I just can't. And cinnamon seems to suck the least.

(and no amount of polish will move me to mac/win)

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

#148

Post by car111 »

dharma1 wrote: post #116
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.

It's very disappointing to learn that after more than 25 years of Linux being launched, there is not a single decent GUI SDK available.

Much more damning is that RedHat whose entire business model was around making an enterprise ready Linux (server and Desktop) could not build a decent GUI toolkit.

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

#149

Post by cnasc »

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?

My impression is that Ikey has been more or less gone for a while, and the recent news was just confirmation that he didn't plan on coming back. I use Solus on my Thinkpad and it's been great for me (I package SBCL and Kakoune for Solus)

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

#150

Post by bubblethink »

Investogician wrote: post #38
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?

youtube specifically, no, because youtube will do vp9 fine. Other sites though, which use h264 will be a bit problematic. Still, you can install chrome for that crowd, and they'll be fine too. Alternatively, you can enable rpmfusion or other third party repos, which has become a bit easier (almost too easy unfortunately) in recent fedora releases. I'm personally not a big fan of this direction though because it blurs the lines between official good quality software, semi-official software that is mostly fine except for patent trolls, proprietary drivers, and random proprietary software delivered through flatpak/snap etc. Currently, all of these are almost enabled by default, or are just one click away.
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