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Elementary OS 6 beta

blog.elementary.io

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Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#41

Post by wildrhythms »

lordgroff wrote: post #30
sajithdilshan wrote: post #29

Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.

I'm honestly always confused as to what makes Elementary (or Mac for that matter), so much more pleasing than the much maligned GNOME? I'd like to understand because these discussions which often include "I'd use Linux but awful desktop" always leave me feeling like people are tapped in to a dimension I'm not privy to.

The turnoff for me is usually wrt UI scaling, i.e. I have a 4k monitor and I want to scale the entire UI up to maybe 175% the normal size. On Ubuntu, with GNOME, I can do this in the settings, but at the expense of performance and sharpness. I'm not sure how Cinnamon or Elementary fare. To contrast, Mac OS X handles this without any issues- there is no blurriness, no performance degradation at any UI scale.

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#42

Post by e12e »

nehalem wrote: post #7

Somewhat off topic: Whenever I see these user-friendly Linux distributions I think they would be great for mass deployments in schools or similar. Is there any technology that gives Elementary (or similar distributions) a deployment workflow like Chrome OS; ie zero-config (for the user) to log into a central service and configuration of the user account while being easy to administer?

As mentioned by others, Debian Edu (née Skolelinux might) be closest, AFAIK it's still alive:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Buster

Then there's Canonical recent announcement that Ubuntu will support group policies via active directory - which will probably bleed into other Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#44

Post by Wowfunhappy »

_xy8h wrote: post #28
demarq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A DE is not “usable” because it doesn’t have fractional scaling? The elementary team are in so much trouble! Catastrophe!

In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurat…

This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power!

(Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resolution to cheap out.)

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#45

Post by Redoubts »

lordgroff wrote: post #30
sajithdilshan wrote: post #29

Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.

I'm honestly always confused as to what makes Elementary (or Mac for that matter), so much more pleasing than the much maligned GNOME? I'd like to understand because these discussions which often include "I'd use Linux but awful desktop" always leave me feeling like people are tapped in to a dimension I'm not privy to.

I think it’s subjective, both gnome and elementary seem like interesting designs. But Elementary is obviously inspired by macOS so it’s going to attract people who like that over Gnome’s take, or would otherwise like the windows XP end of things.

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#46

Post by sgc »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #44
_xy8h wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the age of high density displays, fractional scaling is a must. It's the first thing people will encounter that indicates that a DE is antiquated. On a 11" display at 1920x1080, the alternative is to suffer resolution mismatch (which can introduce any number of artifacts depending on how the panel handles the input, the least of which is a blurry/fuzzy display) or drop the resolution fractionally for pixel accurat…

This is why I’m totally against using such high resolutions on such small displays in the first place. Sure fractional scaling would help—but sticking to a perfectly reasonable 900p or even 768p would look even better _and_ save battery and processing power! (Remember, we’re talking about an 11" laptop. 1366x768 is perfectly reasonable at that size; totally different from the crappy 15" devices that use that resoluti…

That is only 140 ppi. It's not terrible, but it is tiring on the eyes. 1080p at 11 inches is 200ppi. That is not too much for people to ask.

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#47

Post by j-pb »

prince781 wrote: post #36
j-pb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about a simple piece of software here but an entire ecosystem which has Vala as it's language of choice. Using a certain operating system comes with the implicit assumption that I'm also gonna write programs for said operating system. And I'm not gonna learn some obscure version of C#/Java for that, just because the gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language.

> gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language. This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift…

You admittedly made me change my mind a bit about Vala. Apparently it was ahead of it's time, which is a bit sad. Nevertheless, elementary is the closest thing I know to a working open-source desktop OS, and Vala hinders it's adoption.

At some point you gotta pick the hill you're gonna die on, and that shouldn't be dev mind-share.

The horse they bet on didn't make it, why fall into the sunken cost trap, either bet on a different horse (rust), or pick a tried and true one (C) and write a decent FFI for alternative languages.

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#48

Post by adsharma »

j-pb wrote: post #6

I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off. That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche. If they wanted the mac devs for their sleek look and feel they could have switched to swift. And if they wanted to gain easy popularity they could have switched to rust. But vala... there is no developer pool to draw people from, and they're not apple where ObjC might have been an obscure…

I find it easier to develop apps in Gtk Python. But I can see how Vala might be more performant.

Towards this end I've worked on a transpiler (py2many). Any suggestions on what language Python should be transpiled to for the best Gtk runtime experience?

Re: Elementary OS 6 beta

#50

Post by prince781 »

j-pb wrote: post #47
prince781 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language. This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift…

You admittedly made me change my mind a bit about Vala. Apparently it was ahead of it's time, which is a bit sad. Nevertheless, elementary is the closest thing I know to a working open-source desktop OS, and Vala hinders it's adoption. At some point you gotta pick the hill you're gonna die on, and that shouldn't be dev mind-share. The horse they bet on didn't make it, why fall into the sunken cost trap, either bet on…

It's not sunken cost. Vala is performant, plays well with a multitude of languages, doesn't require a VM, and makes it easy to write Gtk applications. Unlike Rust it's very simple to learn and the elementaryOS project likes it for that reason since it lowers the barrier to entry for app developers. Based on this I'd say it's still got a lot of things going for it.

Now is there more to improve? Absolutely. Despite its use by users, development of the language itself suffers from chronic underinvestment. But I think that's changing a bit recently. (Full disclosure: I'm involved in developing the language and tooling. We could always use more contributors.)

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