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ElementaryOs Luna released

elementaryos.org

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Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#161

Post by munchor »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #99
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…

Hello. I'm super late to this party, it looks like. I only have one question: will my retina display (on a MacBook Pro) do all the right things, just as it does under MacOS and MacOS programs?

elementary OS Developer here, I believe GTK 3.10 (and we use GTK+ for all our apps) will be the first GTK version with High DPI support, so I'm not 100% sure retina will work perfectly (you'd have to try).

Also, I'm no pro on this, I'm not even sure if retina is that high DPI feature they keep talking about. However, if it is, Luna+1 (code name for next version of elementary OS) will use GTK 3.10 (or a newer one) for sure.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#162

Post by munchor »

aroman wrote: post #88
jalcine wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to nudge in one thing: option flexibility. I'm still downloading and about to try it out; but I hope that the setting does allow the user to tweak everything they can tweak and not hide options away for the sake of hiding things. My personal thing, but it's shared with many, is that flexibility can lead to a personally complete design.

Flexibility is definitely something we try to be opinionated about. We don't offer a lot of easy GUI customization out of the box, but you'll find that there's quite a bit hidden beneath the surface or is easy to code up yourself. If you're really interested in a completely customizable and hand-tailored OS, I'd honestly suggest you look into something like ArchLinux or Gentoo[2]. Both platforms have made available m…

Pantheon's Arch Linux support is not finished - I'm pretty sure you can't run Pantheon on it. However, on Gentoo I'm sure you can.

Besides that, we do offer some customization, you just have to use dconf-editor to change the configuration keys and not a GUI for several things. And there's also "elementary Tweak" which adds even more configuration.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#163

Post by Ecio78 »

autotravis wrote: post #106

Just installed this on an acer aspire one. Really nice out of the box. Seems very refined.

How is the performance? My wife owns an old Acer Aspire One A150 and it has become really slow (even if it's running Windows XP) so I'm thinking about installing Linux Mint or.. something else like this?

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#164

Post by munchor »

pdknsk wrote: post #29

I have a question to the developers. If they like Mac OS X so much, why not just use it, rather than clone? I don't understand it. To make it slightly less obvious, they could've at least picked a different desktop picture. PS. I'm happy they chose Super Hexagon to show gaming.

elementary OS is most certainly not a Mac OS X clone unlike "Pear Linux". We have an identity of our one and when designing and writing our applications we are so not making a clone.

As a dev, I agree it might look similar here and there, but it is not a clone and I'd never use Mac OS X, we are a free software project, support other free software and plan to keep it that way.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#165

Post by anonymous »

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…

Speaking as a user, the problem is one of marketing and first impressions. In the video, the guy shows a laptop that looks a lot like a MacBook and shows an OS that looks a lot like MacOS. This gives me the impression that Elementary is the equivalent of Adibas-branded shoes - some cheap knockoff aping some of the look, a little bit of the feel and not being anywhere near the functionality.

Personally, if I wanted to make an OS look like MacOS, I'd advertise it as "We wanted MacOS on the PC, but Apple don't give it. So we made an OS based on Linux that follows the same attention to design."

Or better yet - change the look. I doubt that stylish grey is the only possible colour. I can see that it's not MacOS, but it feels dirty when it looks a lot like MacOS, down to using a Mac look-alike laptop in the ad, and you claim to have made something original.

It may be. But it doesn't feel like it.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#166

Post by anonymous »

e12e wrote: post #113
aroman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about 4. Rebase to Debian (Aka: which probably would mean stick with Wayland/follow Gnome) ?

Or 5. package wayland for ubuntu.

Kubuntu have already said that they will be using wayland and not switching to Mir, so you may want to talk with them, too. It doesn't seem like anything but stock Ubuntu will be using Mir.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#167

Post by munchor »

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…

Aroman, the general plan is to move to Wayland, GNOME has made an impressive amount of work on it and many of the devs like me, Daniel and Shnatsel are fans of the Wayland project too.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#169

Post by rcarmo »

anonymous wrote: post #165
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…

Speaking as a user, the problem is one of marketing and first impressions. In the video, the guy shows a laptop that looks a lot like a MacBook and shows an OS that looks a lot like MacOS. This gives me the impression that Elementary is the equivalent of Adibas-branded shoes - some cheap knockoff aping some of the look, a little bit of the feel and not being anywhere near the functionality. Personally, if I wanted to…

I'm positive Lenovo will be thrilled to think people are mistaking their stuff for Apple's :)

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#170

Post by StavrosK »

aroman wrote: post #152
msutherl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a certain downside to mimicking the OS X design that you may not be taken full account of, which is that for people who have used OS X, your designs look like a not-quite-perfected copy. It's a sort of uncanny valley thing that manifests itself likewise in the common discussion of whether something feels "native", or whether you should use the OS-provided UI elements vs. re-invent the wheel when writing an ap…

I appreciate the input. All I can really say is that you have to remember elementary is not a business. We don't have investors. We don't aim for market share or target X number of users by X date. Fundamentally, we build what we think is best, and if other people find it valuable too, they use it. So far, it's worked. So "user acquisition" isn't really a concern for us, though frankly, I believe it should be. And un…

I don't really know what people are complaining about. You're making something amazing that people really really need, you are doing it with donations (as far as I understand, anyway), and it's not like you set out to copy Apple wholesale.

I think the benefits far outweigh any drawbacks (I can't really see any), so you'd probably do well to ignore the negative feedback and keep doing what you're doing.

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