Myths about ElementaryOS

I use it, but have gone to using nautilus on it as the default file manager keeps crashing every few days. Generally I find it pretty good though.

It's kind of sad too, because the Elementary developers originally planned to release Isis (the next release) around April to prove that they can stick to schedules [0], but that now seems to have changed to the usual "It'll be done when it's done." Relevant quote below:

"Also, I think in general most of us think it would be the best idea to release Isis (see, I'm already going with it) as closely as possible to Ubuntu 14.04. We have a lot to prove about our ability to provide updates in a timely manner and we're getting some negative feedback from developers/nerds about our 12.04 base. So let's address that and make sure that elementary is the best open platform for both users and developers (and I guess nerds too)."

[0] https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-community/msg0257...

It's very impressive that a relatively small team could rewrite huge swathes of userland applications from scratch, and end up with something more polished and lighter-weight than much of the competition.

It seems like the sort of thing which could happen as a matter of course if the money was there from the community to support developers working full-time over the long term on these sorts of projects.

One thing I'd like to see would be elementary experimenting with ways of encouraging people to support development. It really should be a matter of course to donate $20-30 in exchange for something which makes your computer function substantively better, especially when many of the users are IT professionals who earn good salaries. But it doesn't appear to happen, for one reason or another.

Perhaps, open up the books, and give people real-time, kickstarter-like information about the donations as they are ongoing, where the money will be spent, and how much more is needed. I'm sure there must be a way of nudging people to get out their chequebooks.

> something more polished

What do you mean by this? IMO the last time I used EOS it was lacking in a lot of areas. This was only a few months ago.

Installation was fast and everything was automated, the install window had a "drop-down" terminal to watch processes, but nothing was there. I expected to be asked to re-size my partitions but never was. When I rebooted I noticed grub was a little borked, showing EOS, EOS recovery, Windows 7, and then about 30 or so entries of old kernels (I know I need to clean these up). It should have showed two more ubuntu OSs installed. I can still boot into my other two installations fine, I just had to do some guess work on what to pick in grub.

So I get into EOS and things are pretty cool, the thing I like best is the speed. Everything seems instant, well except the applications menu, it was a few milliseconds slower than anything else on the DE and that was annoying as I would often end up clicking it a second time causing it to open twice, which was kind of hard on the eyes. Coming from a Gnome 3 environment, I decided to change some things on the interface around to make it more like the gnome shell. Moved the launcher to the left, assigned the top left hot corner to show all windows, things were looking pretty good.

I tried using midori but the font rendering was just not worth it so I installed chromium, and of course that came with a lot of dependencies (around 300mb), so I tried to find out exactly how much space I had left on the partition (I some how missed the partition editor in the install). I opened the file browser and really liked it. you could see how much space was being used by each partition with "progress bars", but not by the EOS partition. There was no way to right click and select "properties" on the EOS partition, so I opened up the applications menu (twice) to find the "system monitor", because on Ubuntu, the system monitor shows how much space you have. But the OS had no graphical system monitor. I'm sure top was installed, but it's not the same. I was able to right click my home folder and select properties and this showed how much space I had on my partition.

Next I opened the terminal. I forget the name of the default terminal, but it wasn't gnome-terminal. It was a very utilitarian terminal that had tabs and no menu bar. I couldn't figure out how to change the look of it or get the tabs to go away.

Overall I give EOS a 5.9/10 It's fast, but it lacks a lot of functionality I look for in an OS like this. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I feel it will be a long time before EOS is as robust and polished as Ubuntu. I realize that EOS is meant to be lighter than Ubuntu and use different programs, but at this point it's just not ready to be my work horse.

After seeing some demos of the new UI features in Isis, which are pretty original and amazing, I don't think it's copying OSX any more than the later and iOS are copying Microsoft's modern UI with Yosemite.