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Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

blog.elementary.io

101–110 of 193 posts

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#101

Serious question time. What benefit will I get from running something like Elementary over Ubuntu? Forgive my ignorance, but honestly the whole OS looks like it's just a fork of Ubuntu with a couple of swapped in applications, and a GTK3 theme on top of GNOME trying to make it look like a ten year old version of macOS. I hate to be so negative, but the "new greeter" they are showing looks like something from Windows…

It's not running GNOME, they make their own Desktop Environment called Pantheon which is written in GTK+ and Vala.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#102
post #100

I love the idea of having a Linux distro that emulates macOS, but I see no point in copying only the vague look, when it still differs in basic functionality, like using different keyboard shortcuts. I don’t understand why (based on semi-thorough googling in the past) it is not possible to change all shortcuts to be like macOS (cmd-c instead of ctrl-c etc.)

You can go into the short cuts and set them up yourself.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#103
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition. It seems that the poster doesn't have a Linux compatible laptop so eOS or any other distro won't work well.

> Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition. This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.

This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs, so there were no drivers that one could install on a mainline Linux distribution. It's really a shame that all the Android drivers are Android specific. The machine wasn't bought with Linux in mind, so the exotic hardware not working isn't really that big of a surprise. The reason Linux was installed was because the OEM Windows 10 that came with it was designed for a different market and it also eventually borked itself - complained about updates yet wasn't capable of updating itself. I got tired of trying to debug it remotely and installed linux. Hopefully with a retail license of Windows 10, we'll be able to install a pure non-crappified Windows 10 version and let it be. And the retail license will allow us to transfer it to whatever the next hardware will be.

There really is no difference between hardware support on Debian and Fedora given that the kernels remain the same - this isn't the case most of the time of course as Debian maintains stability whilst Fedora is very close to upstream most of the time.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#104
post #100

I love the idea of having a Linux distro that emulates macOS, but I see no point in copying only the vague look, when it still differs in basic functionality, like using different keyboard shortcuts. I don’t understand why (based on semi-thorough googling in the past) it is not possible to change all shortcuts to be like macOS (cmd-c instead of ctrl-c etc.)

As much as elementary clearly takes inspiration from macOS, the developers have been quite clear that they're not trying to make a mac clone.

You can agree or disagree with that mission, but it is what it is.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition. This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.

This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs, so there were no drivers that one could install on a mainline Linux distribution. It's really a shame that all the Android drivers are Android specific. The machine wasn't bought with Linux in mind, so the exotic hardware not working isn't really that big of a surprise. The reason Linux was installed was because the OEM Windows 10 that came…

> This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs

IIRC, there was such a chipset with a PowerVR GPU. In that case, you'd pretty much be SOL. You'd have to run Windows 10 and hope that a from-scratch install of W10 can pick up the proper drivers from the "updates" channel - which I wouldn't be sure about. Most other hardware is far better behaved.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#106

Is global menu possible on Elementary yet? Searches only turn up old links for the now-dead unity style, but nothing based on libdbusmenu. Still seems to me that Plasma with libdbusmenu-qt5 is the closest interface paradigm to MacOS for people trying to swap (not that there aren’t other problems), but glib and gtk versions exist so someone out there must be working on it?

[deleted]

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#107
post #100

I love the idea of having a Linux distro that emulates macOS, but I see no point in copying only the vague look, when it still differs in basic functionality, like using different keyboard shortcuts. I don’t understand why (based on semi-thorough googling in the past) it is not possible to change all shortcuts to be like macOS (cmd-c instead of ctrl-c etc.)

Linux has 3 keybinding schemes among which you can choose: emacs, vim and cua (what IBM introduced some years later, ctrl+c etc.).

I don't see why introducing a fourth one would help?

The main reason you can't simply flick a global switch between those three but have to do it per app seems to be the license of GNU readline.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#108
post #100

I love the idea of having a Linux distro that emulates macOS, but I see no point in copying only the vague look, when it still differs in basic functionality, like using different keyboard shortcuts. I don’t understand why (based on semi-thorough googling in the past) it is not possible to change all shortcuts to be like macOS (cmd-c instead of ctrl-c etc.)

My first guess would be that the majority of keyboards that exist in the world do not have a CMD key.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#109
post #22
post #12

Every workstation in my office runs Elementary. Around half of our employees came to the company with little or no prior technical experience, and it's worked out pretty well.

Would be interesting to know what kind of work is done on these machines.

My guess is “typing stuff into a website using chrome” which I guess elementary isn’t a terrible choice.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#110
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact opposite experience - the microphone doesn't work, everything is incredibly slow, my SO is buying a Windows 10 licence this christmas. It's a shame, the user was just fine with Cinnamon on Debian 5 years ago, but that machine and software is no longer good enough.

Just FYI, if you have to buy Windows, you can get a working license key from eBay for <$5 (I've used three different keys from different sellers with no issues).

Or hwidgen the free key they gave to all the windows 8 refugees. That’s what I do in my test VMs
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