Elementary OS 5.1 Hera • Hacker News Board

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#171

Post by jacobush » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:17 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #133

jacobush wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sad they didn't decide to build it with Objective C. It would have made sense given Objective C could work well with GTK, and Apples devs would have felt half at home. Swift would be cool nowadays. https://rhx.github.io/SwiftGtk/ New apps in the Pantheon system could I guess be written in any language.

Except that is hardly any usable Objective-C tooling outside Apple platforms. GCC is stuck on a pseudo Objective-C 2.0 support. clang does support the basic stuff, but there are no libraries. Yeah, there is GNUstep, but it is like stuck on Pather level compatibility or something like that.

I wasn't even longing for the libraries, I think just the languages could lure over some Mac programmers to Elementary.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#172

Post by girvo » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

jstewartmobile wrote: post #25

benbenolson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a long-running project, and has tens of thousands of man-hours invested in it. Yet you, taking several seconds to post an Internet comment, declare it a "half-assed Linux distro," without even having properly read the website. The Elementary OS project develops many of their own applications, have multiple custom themes, does relentless work ensuring available packages are stable and usable for each rel…

Totally a valid criticism. Elementary is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, which is based on Linux. Most of the value in that chain is the work of others. Last I checked, debian.org & kernel.org don't have a " Pay What You Want " button above the fold. Debian is awesome. Linux is awesome. I'm not going to tip my hat to some guy putting skins on Debian and charging for it.

This is the quintessential “HN Middebrow Dismissal”. Good to know they’re still alive and strong here. “Just a skin” is absolute crap.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#173

Post by scythe » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 3:17 AM UTC

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #127

scythe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best things about macOS is the special character inputs, which is one place I think Apple has outshone their competitors for a while. Even if Elementary doesn’t introduce the same keybindings it would be nice to have some set up automatically without having to fiddle with the compose key settings. It’s a very common UX issue imho and also an area where you can easily “beat Windows”

Special characters through the keyboard like these? ł€æßðđŧŋ«»¢“”←ħn↓ĸ→ø Those are input from just pressing ALT(right) + The € is ALTgr + e. ¢ is ALTgr + SHIFT + e.

Mostly the Latin-1 subset (plus East Asian overlines and the Chinese ‘v’ tone mark) and other characters that appear in names, but also “”‘’–•—¿¡§ are all rather useful if you can get to them. The math symbols for partial, adjoint, sqrt, almost equal, not equal, equivalent, isomorphic, geq and leq are also nice; others like sum and integral are pretty but require too many decorations to be useful anyway. On OS X last time I used it if you press eg Option-u you get a hanging diaeresis and the next character you type will be umlautted if possible. You can enable this on X with [Compose]+:, but you usually have to fiddle with settings to enable it, and that’s not the Elementary philosophy.

Too often I want to use the proper spelling of someone’s name and I run off to Google to get the symbol.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#174

Post by cttet » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

jonny383 wrote: post #23

Serious question time. What benefit will I get from running something like Elementary over Ubuntu? Forgive my ignorance, but honestly the whole OS looks like it's just a fork of Ubuntu with a couple of swapped in applications, and a GTK3 theme on top of GNOME trying to make it look like a ten year old version of macOS. I hate to be so negative, but the "new greeter" they are showing looks like something from Windows…

Ubuntu gave up unity and just use gnome. I would like to use a distro which actively improve its UX in the future. Gnome/KDE has a history of implementing all the fancy things(animation, customization,touch support) while ignoring the basics(performance, consistency), unity had the best desktop/laptop experience but it's gone, elementary at least have a good direction to go.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#175

Post by cttet » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

flatiron wrote: post #109

leppr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to know what kind of work is done on these machines.

My guess is “typing stuff into a website using chrome” which I guess elementary isn’t a terrible choice.

What else do you need for an OS now? As a developer what I need is a browser a terminal and an IDE. Everything else just need to be fast and non-distracting.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#176

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

joshklein wrote: post #63

Is global menu possible on Elementary yet? Searches only turn up old links for the now-dead unity style, but nothing based on libdbusmenu. Still seems to me that Plasma with libdbusmenu-qt5 is the closest interface paradigm to MacOS for people trying to swap (not that there aren’t other problems), but glib and gtk versions exist so someone out there must be working on it?

I value a global menu as a quality of life thing, and from what I've seen, this isn't on the roadmap for GNOME 3. There's currently one implementation out there on GitHub and the GNOME Extensions index, but it has dependencies that are either marked for deprecation or are already deprecated.

Seems like Plasma or MATE are the only real options if you want a functional global menu.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#177

Post by nycticorax » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

I feel like the Elementary folks have a lot of the right ideas about how to build a desktop OS and a third-party software ecosystem around it. (In particular: They have a HIG, and seem to make an effort to make their platform appealing for developers.) But it sounds like they struggle with execution in some ways:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/elementary-0-4-loki-agai...

I haven't tried Elementary, but I've tried a lot of distros, and I always come back to Ubuntu because it comes the closest to just working. (It doesn't do as well as MacOS or Windows in the 'just working' department, in my experience (let the flames begin!), but it does pretty well, and better than any other Linux-based OS I've tried.)

And although reliable statistics seem to be hard to come by, my impression is that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux-based desktop OS by a pretty wide margin.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#178

Post by CameronNemo » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #6

Does anyone know if any other distros are packaging any parts of elementary OS?

I have many of the applications packaged in Void Linux.

The shell is difficult due to dependencies on old versions of gnome libraries like libmutter that nobody is maintaining.

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#179

Post by CameronNemo » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 6:28 AM UTC

ilovecaching wrote: post #7

I think Elementary should have focused on just shipping Pantheon as their end product. GNOME has had issues not only in the performance department, but it's also a very different type of minimalism for a DE that's supposed to be the mainstream pick for normal users. Elementary has adopted a far more conventional DE that feels as simple as GNOME, but far more usable. But I'm never going to use Elementary over Ubuntu o…

>Redhat employs all the systemd/kernel folks

That is not true -- IBM/Redhat is a minority kernel contributor (most are from the IBM group), and Fedora is not an IBM product or project. Fedora is independent and often considered an alpha/beta/canary version of RHEL (the latter is IBM's priority, without a doubt).

Re: Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

#180

Post by esotericn » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 12:47 PM UTC

jonny383 wrote: post #23

Serious question time. What benefit will I get from running something like Elementary over Ubuntu? Forgive my ignorance, but honestly the whole OS looks like it's just a fork of Ubuntu with a couple of swapped in applications, and a GTK3 theme on top of GNOME trying to make it look like a ten year old version of macOS. I hate to be so negative, but the "new greeter" they are showing looks like something from Windows…

Sure, that's exactly what Mint is.

Debian but with things changed a bit to be Ubuntu but with things changed a bit to be Mint.

You just draw the line differently.

Personally I'm happy with Debian Stable and Arch, and I barely use the former lately. I don't see the point in creating an entirely new distribution that is effectively just a package change.

I use Ubuntu servers for work a decent amount because it's common, that's about it.