231–240 of 431 posts
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I have run exclusively Linux and mostly on laptops for 15 years and it's been about 10 years since I have had problems with packages clashing, except for python pip. (I don't use python though)
Can you give us details of laptop and distribution used? Seems hardware is still difficult i.e. trackpads, WiFi, screen resolution, external displays, etc.
Someone knows if this is a good fit for a dev machine: Rails, React, PostgreSQL & Elastisearch? VS Code?
Its based on Ubuntu, so whatever you can install on Ubuntu should work on Elementary. Only issue I've run into is while adding an apt repo(for docker I think) I needed to point it to bionic instead of juno.
Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release wi…
As someone who has actually used elementaryOS for some time(both previous versions about 6 months each) I have to disagree with your "doesn't break if you do X" claim. You can break elementaryOS' nice graphics just by putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again - say hi to at least 2 different kinds of graphics glitches and possibly a randomly appearing bug in the file manager. And I'm not sure if it was a bug…
Definitely this, unfortunately. elementaryOS 0.4.1 Loki was fairly stable for me, but then I installed 5 / Juno, and now the machine often locks up with a completely black screen, except for a handful of items visible where the top menu bar usually is. It seems to occur when it wakes from a sleep mode (though this is on a Parallels virtual machine). The only solution is to reboot and lose whatever you were working on.
elementaryOS is great and the first Linux I've really enjoyed using (I'm normally a Mac user, the kind who uses software by Panic). But it still has so far to go. It's also worrying that you can't upgrade from 0.4.1 to 5. Even with all of Microsoft's disasters with updates, they've still managed to let you upgrade from one version of Windows to the next one.
Some of the comments here feel weird. Elementary OS has picked a specific niche, and its arguably the best distribution in it. It has a really well designed and consistent UI experience, and you can't break it. I think most of you just don't realize how difficult linux is for people who barely understand how to use a Mac or Windows machine. Furthermore, linux is a world where mainstream distributions still release wi…
That said steps to achieve a relatively consistent look.
Open your configuration app and configure your gtk theme to something that looks nice. If you don't have one you can install lxappearance which is from lxde and has minimal deps so you can easily install it in a minimal environment.
Install qt4-config if you have any old qt4 apps. Set it to use gtk+ style for qt4 aps.
If you use newer qt apps install qt5ct and select gtk style.
In 5 minutes you will have a relatively consistent look.
A few notes.
- Its increasingly likely you have zero qt4 apps and could probably skip that part and not care
- qt5ct actually lets you set a custom stylesheet and or colors if you want more manual control but this is hardly required.
- firefox is really stupid about drawing website elements with dark text on a dark background when run with a dark theme. You can run individual gtk apps with a different theme like so
env GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light firefox
you can copy your firefox desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the command to ensure that this works properly automatically.
Chrome somehow figures out that a dark theme doesn't mean you want to draw webpages differently so I consider this a firefox bug that mozilla wontfix.
In a perfect world someone would create a single useful gui to configure qt4 plasma gtk2 gtk3 apps which only had settings that would effect all of the above consistently and required no tweaking.
In reality land most people don't care including those shipping distros can probably ship with or arrange a reasonable look with minimal fuss.
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I hear these every so often. Just curious if noticing or more so, even being bothered by them is the norm? Example Mint, the font heights I wouldn't have noticed and definitely something I would not be consciously aware of if I used it. And I still don't know what's wrong with the render beyond it looking at bit outdated. Am I the odd person here or is it a vocal minority that have issues with it?
You are part of the vocal, online minority that doesn't look at Mint and cringe because it looks so amateur and dated. Most people intuitively have a sense of whether the software they're using is elegant, polished, and user-friendly without necessarily being able to articulate that the "font heights", etc. are the problem. By a common user's standards, Mint looks amateur and janky compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS.
I have used macOS for 10 years[1] and I always had the same feeling about Windows 7. The icons looked ugly, apps were all over the place UI-wise. The directory structure is impenetrable for a non-expert. Etc. With Windows 8 and 10 things are even worse, discoverability is hard in the super-flat new interface, Win32 applications or universal apps look out of place (depending which one you like), and even for Windows' own settings, things are scattered between Win32 and universal applications.
The Windows UI mess doesn't drive Windows users away, so I do not see why some misaligned icons or text would drive users away from e.g. Mint. There are other reasons why people do not use Linux, but I don't think this is it (outside some niche groups, such as designers). Death by a thousand paper cuts is why most people will stop using Linux after trying.
[1] Though I am now using Linux again the majority of my time.
I'd love to have a Linux distro with the frontend of Elementary OS and the backend of Nixos. And I say that as a Microsoft employee. Are there efforts to make Nixos grandma-worthy? Or are the only pretty distros all reskins of Ubuntu?
You might be interested in this PR: "[nixpkgs] elementary: init a 5.0 Juno" https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/48637 I'm actively trying to build some cool things with Nix/NixOS and then write up a series of blog posts. Several recent discussions on the Discourse and at NixCon have been focused around Nix/NixOS user experience, at least. I've recently been building a package set of tip builds of Wayland stuff (swa…
At the moment it seems that a lot of NixOS users (including me) prefer a keyboard-centric window manager to a full desktop environment, but obviously (well I think it's obvious, anyway) there's a place for Pantheon on NixOS too. A big place, I should think.
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Been using linux for decades and have never had to do any of this. Even 15 years ago I didn't need to.
Not everybody has the same sensitivity to this 'jarring' component of the Linux desktop, I'm well aware. But I think it would really help the desktop forward if the group that is sensitive to it would be catered to more, like Elementary is trying to do.
The project is interesting and I have to give it props for being one of the few Linux distros that’s put the necessary level of thought into UI/UX and made consistency a priority. That said, I question some of their technical choices, most namely the choice of Vala as the project’s official language. Not that Vala is bad, but it’s incredibly niche at best and I think it severely limits contributions. Not many are goi…
This kind of attitude towards less popular programming languages is very damaging to the field of software engineering. Domain-specific languages are our best tool to combat the excessive complexity of software. The difficulty of learning a new programming language is overblown.
Windows has Windows Forms, WPF, and UWP; macOS has Cocoa; and Linux has … well, a lot of things, each with their own quirks, and not all of them with bindings into every language a developer might want to use.
Is it binary-compatible with Windows & Mac OS? If it's not, then it's not a replacement and the title should be changed to reflect that. I respect the idea of speed and privacy (though I'm still a minimalist - I believe in using 16/32-bit and less than 1GB RAM). But before I can "replace" Windows, I need an OS that actually works like Windows.