ElementaryOs Luna released • Hacker News Board

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#121

Post by rob05c » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:27 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

I don't have nearly the problem of an OSX-lookalike as some. I used OSX for years because it was basically the prettiest POSIX system available.

And like you say, a lot is simply good design. Apple didn't invent nearly as much as their marketing department (and legal) would have us believe.

Tangentially, I've fallen in love with tiling WMs, but they all seem mediocre at best. @aroman it'd be awesome if you guys made an alternative tiling WM that was as sleek as your windowing manager.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#122

Post by aroman » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:32 AM UTC

rob05c wrote: post #121

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

I don't have nearly the problem of an OSX-lookalike as some. I used OSX for years because it was basically the prettiest POSIX system available. And like you say, a lot is simply good design. Apple didn't invent nearly as much as their marketing department (and legal) would have us believe. Tangentially, I've fallen in love with tiling WMs, but they all seem mediocre at best. @aroman it'd be awesome if you guys made…

In fact we are very very interested in investigating tiling WM capabilities for the next release of our window manager, Gala. As someone who suffers from the lack of good touchpad drivers for my primary computer, a Macbook Air, I am very excited for tiling support as well :)

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#123

Post by TheLegace » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:34 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

I was really interested in developing something like this. But I see you have made a ton more progress. I am working on plans to design a Linux Laptop(and I mean a very sweet laptop), but I had plans of trying to make it accessible to people like my mom and basically everyone. I would love to collaborate on such a product. I am really glad I'm not the only one thinking about these things.

Can we work on making optimized hardware in the same way Apple products are. Can we work on optimizing power consumption, apparent load time etc etc. I can't wait to give this OS a shot.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#124

Post by aroman » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:36 AM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #120

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

There are a million and one themes for GTK. I wish they had picked one - anything except the OSX clone. What they don't realize is that there are a bunch of howtos out there around customizing Ubuntu to "look like OSX" and this looks like one more. I wish this discussion could be around performance enhancements and innovations in usability, but I cannot get past the OSX clone-ness. In an admittedly egoistic sense, I…

I appreciate your honesty. You should know that we didn't "pick" our GTK+ theme. In fact, it predates the OS itself and is the result of (seriously) 100+ man hours of refinement and tweaking, including working with GTK+ theme engine developers.

It was created to be beautiful and usable, not as an OS X clone. I can assure you OS X was used (along with Windows, iOS, and Android) purely as inspiration -- not as a target or design guide. There are only so many neutral window control colors. We use silver and black (apps can request to use the dark variant), Windows uses transparency, Ubuntu uses a muddy brown, and OS X uses chrome.

If you really feel opposed, as you pointed out, there are dozens of excellent GTK+ themes. Some people have even written them specifically with elementary in mind[1]. Feel free to use them :)

[1] http://www.elementaryupdate.com/2013/07/5-new-awesome-elemen...

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#125

Post by synchronise » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:38 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #96

pilgrim689 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard of elementaryOS but it looks great at first glance. I have a specific question I was wondering: how will distributions using non-Unity DEs/WMs such as elementary handle the replacement of X with Mir? I'm not familiar with how child distros handle divergent dependencies in general so I'd love to hear what elementary is doing.

Great question. The simple answer is: we don't know yet. We actually had a conference call with some folks from Canonical a few weeks ago discussing this very issue. At present, it seems like there are three options (I'm taking these points mostly from the minutes from that call): 1. Port everything to Qt and use Mir (because GTK+ might not work under pure Mir -- they've been backing Wayland so far). This would requi…

It's good to see another distribution approaching Mir as a viable replacement to X11. Keep up the good work guys.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#126

Post by aroman » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:39 AM UTC

TheLegace wrote: post #123

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

I was really interested in developing something like this. But I see you have made a ton more progress. I am working on plans to design a Linux Laptop(and I mean a very sweet laptop), but I had plans of trying to make it accessible to people like my mom and basically everyone. I would love to collaborate on such a product. I am really glad I'm not the only one thinking about these things. Can we work on making optimi…

We too would love to build hardware to market along those lines, though, of course, such initiatives require talent we don't have access to right now and costs we can't afford. One day though... :)

By the way, I'd definitely encourage you to get involved with elementary. New collaborators are always welcome, and it seems like you've got a lot of our same design principles in mind.

Have a look here: http://elementaryos.org/get-involved

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#127

Post by sandGorgon » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #87

clockwork_189 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit confused. A lot of it looks like Ubuntu, but with slightly different GUI. At first I thought it was just a variant of Ubuntu(like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc)...is it? How does it differ from it? Sorry if this seems like a naive question. I am really interested in trying it out...will do so shortly after I am done my exams :P

Hi, thanks for the interest! Our desktop interface and apps are actually quite different from Ubuntu, though we are an Ubuntu-based distribution. To give some concrete examples: - We use our own desktop environment and window manager, Pantheon and Gala, respectively.[1] - We write many of our own apps in-house or work closely with the third-party apps we ship with. For example, our music player, settings application,…

Why browser and mail program ? I mean I can understand usability considerations of photo apps and music player, but you can do so much more by dropping effort on those two apps.

I dont mean it in a "resistance is futile" kind of way - but more in terms of not-immediately-needed kind of way. Especially the browser. Webmail suffices for now - I know people want a Sparrow-like mail app on the desktop, but there is so much more effort that can be put in on projects like color calibration, Redshift-like functionality [1], etc.

You are off to a decent start - I really, really hope that you guys dont start building Twitter apps. Instead you should expose API guidelines for things like Contractor (OSX Services?) and have something like extensions.gnome.org - but maybe in Vala for performance.

Just my $0.02.

[1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#128

Post by clockwork_189 » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #87

clockwork_189 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit confused. A lot of it looks like Ubuntu, but with slightly different GUI. At first I thought it was just a variant of Ubuntu(like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc)...is it? How does it differ from it? Sorry if this seems like a naive question. I am really interested in trying it out...will do so shortly after I am done my exams :P

Hi, thanks for the interest! Our desktop interface and apps are actually quite different from Ubuntu, though we are an Ubuntu-based distribution. To give some concrete examples: - We use our own desktop environment and window manager, Pantheon and Gala, respectively.[1] - We write many of our own apps in-house or work closely with the third-party apps we ship with. For example, our music player, settings application,…

Thank you for the reply! :) I will definitely give it a whirl. I have been playing around with the rasp Pi and given that your OS is approx 200MB, I wanna try seeing if I can make the two work together(or if someone else has, do let me know).

Good job btw!

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#129

Post by TheLegace » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:54 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #126

TheLegace wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really interested in developing something like this. But I see you have made a ton more progress. I am working on plans to design a Linux Laptop(and I mean a very sweet laptop), but I had plans of trying to make it accessible to people like my mom and basically everyone. I would love to collaborate on such a product. I am really glad I'm not the only one thinking about these things. Can we work on making optimi…

We too would love to build hardware to market along those lines, though, of course, such initiatives require talent we don't have access to right now and costs we can't afford. One day though... :) By the way, I'd definitely encourage you to get involved with elementary. New collaborators are always welcome, and it seems like you've got a lot of our same design principles in mind. Have a look here: http://elementaryo…

Thanks I will.

Right now I have some experience in PCB design and I am just building my skills to design full blown ARM and i7 based laptops to cover both low/high end markets.

We'll see where things so. Good luck.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#130

Post by millstone » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 5:54 AM UTC

aroman wrote: post #62

I have been a developer for elementary for 3 years, and I am part of the elementary core team. I am also personally close friends with much of the design and development team, including the project's founder and lead designer, Daniel Foré. There seems to be a lot of feedback here which basically says "this trying to rip off OS X". I would like to offer you some insight into our internal assessment of these claims. Is…

OS X System Preferences screenshot: http://imgur.com/RLB8JZp

ElementaryOS settings screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/vnjmHrQ.png

It's got the same left-aligned, bolded categories, in the same order, with almost identical text. It even senselessly copied the choice of the Apple Magic Mouse as the mouse icon. That tiny smudge at the bottom represents the Apple logo!

I don't mean to suggest that an ElementaryOS designer is responsible for this instance. A similar layout and icon is used in Xubuntu. But Linux is clearly doing more than "building on ideas" in its relation to OS X.