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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

#421

Post by petepete »

Sylos wrote: post #405
petepete wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble. GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.

> KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble. I'm not too deep into GNOME's architecture, but I don't see that at all. KDE is the KF5 Frameworks on top of Qt on top of QML and C++. Desktop widgets, panel widgets etc. are all architecturally the same thing, "Plasmoids". Settings screens are all isolated and also architecturally the same thing, "KCMs". On…

Yes, I agree that GNOME under the hood isn't the most sensible or consistent of designs. But 'over the hood' that's all hidden away, if you use it as-intended it works just fine. KDE/Plasma has a much better design and is built on more stable technologies, but there are just too many options and too much configuration.

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

#422

Post by throwawaywhynot »

deadlocked wrote: post #407
throwawaywhynot wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wtf

It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day? If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS. I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in vario…

well your's is a valid use case. I just didn't understand why OP was expecting it to be binary compatible. It's just a distro

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

#423

Post by KozmoNau7 »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #383
petepete wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble. GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.

You should really try out KDE Neon, it is by far the best and most consistent DE available for Linux, and is so far ahead of Win10 it's sort of embarrassing for MS. The default settings are very sensible, I only change one or two things myself, most noticably focus follows mouse, which requires a silly gconf tweak and is considered "broken" by the devs.

That last bit should have read "requires a silly gconf tweak in Gnome/Cinnamon", of course.

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

#424

Post by Endy »

throwawaywhynot wrote: post #422
deadlocked wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a valid comment. Most of the 'replacement for macOS' comments here essentially pre-suppose that people only use macOS because it looks pretty and...? What? That people just play with Finder and TextEdit all day? If I can't run Lightroom or Affinity Photo on ElementaryOS (hint: I can't) then it isn't a replacement for macOS. I know I can use DarkTable or GIMP, but I don't want to because they are lacking in vario…

well your's is a valid use case. I just didn't understand why OP was expecting it to be binary compatible. It's just a distro

Because it's being called a "replacement for Windows and MacOS". I take issue with that, because it's provably not. All use cases are valid. It doesn't matter if you're using it for work or play, there is no invalid use case as long as it works for that user. And if you're touting an OS as a replacement, you have to take that into account.

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

#425

Post by zapzupnz »

babahoyo wrote: post #402
typhoidharry wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with MacOS is that much of its refinements for power users are so different from Windows (and Linux desktops modeled after it), that people don't expect they can do things the easy way. Suppose you have a document open. You want to attach it to an email you started writing. In MacOS, you drag the icon from the window's title bar into the email. That's it. No need to browse to the same thing you already ha…

I've been looking for blog posts and content about macOS UX design and testing. Because it really is stellar. I'm curious what kind of stuff the elementaryOS team is reading that informs their design choices. Any ideas where to look?

Bit late replying, but I think the WWDC videos, especially old ones, relating to user interface design, what's new in Cocoa (not Cocoa Touch), and accessibility are great places to see macOS' interface decisions explained and justified.

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

#426

Post by koffiezet »

black-tea wrote: post #371
typhoidharry wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with MacOS is that much of its refinements for power users are so different from Windows (and Linux desktops modeled after it), that people don't expect they can do things the easy way. Suppose you have a document open. You want to attach it to an email you started writing. In MacOS, you drag the icon from the window's title bar into the email. That's it. No need to browse to the same thing you already ha…

Trouble is, at the end of the day nothing is more powerful or more efficient than the command line and once you've accepted that fact (which more and more people are there days) you might as well just use Linux.

Why choose between CLI and GUI if you can have both? I have a shell on my osx and use it for a large majority of my work, but I also have decent CLI GUI interaction (pbcopy, mdfind, screencapture, open, osascript, ...), and the most consistent, easy to use but yet powerful GUI.

And two things OSX is absolutely unmatched in: spotlight and preview.

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

#427

Post by derin »

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).

Been using Linux as my daily driver for the past ~7 years or so. I use Elementary and Arch as my two go to systems - one for work/stability, other for Wayland/playing around.

Contrary to what people here are saying, HiDpi support really isn't ready for the mainstream in my opinion, solely because of the fact that mixed dpi really isn't possible under X or Wayland. If you're using a single monitor, however, HiDpi support is just fine.

That is: If you have a 4k primary display (such as an XPS 13, like I have) and 1080p external display (like the one in my office), then it's basically impossible to work with both.

Under wayland: Native wayland apps (what your DE provides, usually, and QT apps) work fine. Everything else (the majority of programs I find myself using, including Firefox, Chromium, Electron apps, basically anything using Xwayland) will not scale properly when moving from display to display, meaning you can usually only run them on one screen. Once more apps start supporting wayland, I think things will get much better, but that's still a few months (if not a year or so) away.

Under X: You can use some Xrandr hacks to get the second screen working properly, but it either introduces viewport problems (an issue I couldn't get past, but I'm sure others have solved) or screen tearing and general blurriness (another issue I couldn't get past)

So I'd say stick with something else for the coming months. Elementary itself is trash when it comes to supporting external displays: the GUI Settings app - Switchboard - basically bugs out if you try to change external display settings when using a 4k primary monitor, and will render one of the displays unusable. This happens every time. You'll have to use xrandr to configure your monitors by hand, which isn't too bad, but not conducive to the experience Elementary claims to provide.

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

#428

Post by babahoyo »

zapzupnz wrote: post #425
babahoyo wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking for blog posts and content about macOS UX design and testing. Because it really is stellar. I'm curious what kind of stuff the elementaryOS team is reading that informs their design choices. Any ideas where to look?

Bit late replying, but I think the WWDC videos, especially old ones, relating to user interface design, what's new in Cocoa (not Cocoa Touch), and accessibility are great places to see macOS' interface decisions explained and justified.

ah thanks! Yeah these are super interesting

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

#429

Post by lupinglade »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #202
lupinglade wrote: post #91

So it’s a replacement for macOS that looks just like macOS? Hmm...

Only if you squint and ignore the rest of the sentence? It's an alternative to both macos and windows for people who not just not care about what their OS is, but have better things to do with their life than even bother to know what OS they run. As long as it's a pleasant, stable, consistent UI, and lets them do "the things they want to do" rather than "install the apps they need to do the things they want to do". A…

But macOS is exactly that already?

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

#430

Post by ZeikJT »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #417
markatkinson wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude... I was reading all these comments mega confused. I installed Pop_OS a few months back and it's a million times easier to use than Windows. From installing applications to changing my background. One terrible experience I had was when Windows did something to the Linux bootloader and I had to try work out how to fix that, but I can't really blame Linux for that. Honestly I am so much more productive on Pop than…

> I can spend more time actually doing my job and less time manually creating PATH variables for every package I install. I don't see how this is a Windows issue. Windows, just like Linux, provides the capability to update the PATH both per-user and per-computer; many tools use it and work. NodeJS is a popular such tool that adds its bin folder to the PATH. If a tool isn't updating its path, then it's on the tool's i…

It's an issue because adding a directory to the path just isn't as common of a pattern on Windows. Whether or not it's Microsoft's fault is irrelevant because the fact is still that you have to do it manually a lot of the time.

This is all from my own past experience using video editing, audio editing, and image editing utilities where you usually just get a binary and have to do the legwork yourself.

Node is the exception, not the rule.

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