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Elementary OS Freya Released

elementary.io

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Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#81

Post by tywkeene »

sbuk wrote: post #63
tywkeene wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well whatever it they're doing guilt tripping people into giving them money for something that's free everywhere else isn't helping.

Woa. Wait a minute. They're merely asking for a donation, which can be set to zero. What's the issue with that? This entitled attitude is what irks me about the OSS movement at large. To a larger extent it puts me and people like me off of open source. More projects should take this approach. I thought that it's free as in Liberty, not as in ride. That's what we're constantly told.

> We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.

http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments

No, their clone can bitrot, they deserve it.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#82

Post by Brakenshire »

amk_ wrote: post #40

This is the distro GNU/Linux needed in 2009. I used to be a big fan, but these days I can't help but feel they are off the mark by focusing on so heavily on creating a "beautiful" 00's desktop environment when the rest of the world has moved on to new form factors, touch screens, tight coupling with cloud services, and automatic backup and recovery options. That said, I do like the enhancements they have made to some…

I haven't used it yet, but I think this will have greater integration with online accounts, a single place to enter email accounts, calendar accounts etc which works across the system and so on.

I'm not sure about touch screens, I think most people view them as optional extras. And although of course people are shifting towards other form factors, huge numbers still use a desktop or laptop, and have no expectation of convergence between the devices.

I agree about automatic backup. I actually wonder whether that might be a route towards monetization which would be more palatable to the general community - an edition which is provided free with donations as is, and an edition which has automatic cloud backup built in, along with integration with Android and iOS devices for things like photos.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#83

Post by [deleted] »

mintplant wrote: post #22
wz1000 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the website it poorly designed, but you can download Elementary OS for free. Just enter 0 in the "Custom Amount" box. > I dug into the blog a bit and all I can tell is that it's Ubuntu with some Gnome skins. Not really. The eOS developers wrote a whole DE(Pantheon) and the included applications from scratch. The website does a very poor job of explaining that.

Their old developer website also explained some of the new technologies that Elementary OS exposes to applications: - Contractor (like Android's Intents): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024115/http://elementary... - Switchboard (unified, pluggable system settings): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024137/http://elementary... - Granite (GTK+ widget collection): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024129/http:/…

[deleted]

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#84

Post by wanda »

morbius wrote: post #70
wanda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

elementary OS have a similar mentality to the Vivaldi browser -- it's just for our friends. Despite leading with donation panhandling. Still, I'm using it now because I am tired of Slackware. I love Slack to bits but the amount of work involved in making my setup look and play nice is just silly. I'm looking for something like a one-click-pretty-usable Linux for random laptops/PCs I've accumulated. PapyrOS might be n…

I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but if you really, honestly want a no-frills, easy to set up UNIX for your personal computer, there really is no better machine than a Macintosh.

I agree. I have an iMac and a Thinkpad; I classify these as my work computers. I really like OS X. It blends the Unix operating system with the best looks/UI of the OS market. If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

At home I have a collection of misfit laptops that were discarded by others or sold very cheaply. It is these laptops on which I tend to run a Linux distro (because Windows tends to be slow and no SSH; because I'm not really in the business of Hackintoshing.)

Running eOS Freya on one of them now. It's not bad. Wifi seems a bit temperamental--which is astounding given that eOS is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu had no trouble with wifi.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#85

Post by ricardobeat »

tywkeene wrote: post #29
Trufa wrote: post #25

Only negativity in this thread. You're being offered a desktop environment for free, and all you can do is point out its problems. I think it looks pretty slick, and will give it a try, why are people so nitpicky here?

It's things like [1] that really irk me. Yes, they're working 'hard', yes they deserve compensation, no, there isn't any license conflicts (that I'm aware of) that would make selling eOS illegal, it's the fact that they wrote this justification to make you feel like a thief. Really, it's just an ubuntu clone with a pretty osx-like gui. This isn't really anything amazing or new, and it makes it seem like they're tryin…

Please take a look into the website and the history of Elementary. It's a huge undertaking, not merely 'a skin'. It has it's own HIG for design, a beautiful and consistent design language, and a nice set of custom-made default apps. Pantheon, the UI layer, is written from scratch, not based on Gnome, and has it's own API for writing apps in Vala.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#86

Post by sbuk »

tywkeene wrote: post #81
sbuk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woa. Wait a minute. They're merely asking for a donation, which can be set to zero. What's the issue with that? This entitled attitude is what irks me about the OSS movement at large. To a larger extent it puts me and people like me off of open source. More projects should take this approach. I thought that it's free as in Liberty, not as in ride. That's what we're constantly told.

> We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments No, their clone can bitrot, they deserve it.

Wow.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#87

Post by vivab0rg »

Just donated 0.04201 BTC (USD 10) and downloading Freya now. I've been using the previous version for fun and profit on a Mac mini, netbook, notebook and desktop PC since last year. Very recommended.

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#88

Post by detaro »

tormeh wrote: post #79
erokar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree. As ridiculous and disgusting Apple is as a company, OSX still offers the best UNIX experience. But I applaud any attemt to change that fact.

Yeah, but that would require the distro maintainers to sell their own computers, which they support and test their distro against before releasing. Most distro maintainers don't really like the thought of that.

Or a hardware manufacturer working with them long-term. (Dell with it's "developer" XPS versions would be an obvious candidate)

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#89

Post by overgard »

Trufa wrote: post #25

Only negativity in this thread. You're being offered a desktop environment for free, and all you can do is point out its problems. I think it looks pretty slick, and will give it a try, why are people so nitpicky here?

The default download option is $25, the only way to get it "free" is to put in a custom dollar amount. You can do that, but the message they're sending is pretty obvious.

As for the negativity, I think people wonder about the "why" of this. As far as I can tell, it's basically "Ubuntu is ugly so we'll make it look like Mac".

Re: Elementary OS Freya Released

#90

Post by dmix »

Brakenshire wrote: post #78
octref wrote: post #50

It really saddens me how much people underestimate the effort it takes to create a good UI by saying eOS is just a "pretty Ubuntu clone". I don't think their blog post[1] is offensive at all. Ubuntu does this too. [2] People consider Sublime's popup and "unregistered user" acceptable. How often do you install/download eOS? Once in a year? And you use it every-day , not only when you do text-editing. And there is no d…

Yes, elementary have put in a huge amount of work to produce an excellent product, and a major step towards where Linux needs to be to attract non technical users, and it is disappointing that so many people seem to be willing to throw them and their years of work under the bus for what amounts to poorly chosen wording. On the substance rather than the wording, surely Hacker News does not agree, as a group, that open…

I went through this entire HN thread and the only complaint is that the website has no information and something like this:

> They have rewritten the Linux desktop environment from scratch

is entirely not communicated on their homepage.

People here are not familiar with the work that they've done. And I don't blame them. In the software world being able to market/communicate your work to the public is as important as actually doing the work.

I've been in plenty of threads on HN recently where people have praised the work on Gnome for improving Linux desktop usability/design (after some initial hiccups). Gnome releases videos like this that clearly demonstrate what they are adding:

3.16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxRLa5hTGkg

3.14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p8Prlu3owc

Elementary OS should have similar information for their release.

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