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ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

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Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently installed it on a 13 year old old MacBook, haven't had any issues.

I am still a sponsor or elementary and used it for years, and often the first few months are fine until you hit a wall or need to upgrade it. recently switched to Fedora and have been much happier.

> often the first few months are fine until you hit a wall or need to upgrade it.

This is a common theme with Ubuntu and every Ubuntu-based distro - they all eventually break when doing updates.

Eg: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/05/done-with-ubuntu/

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#83
post #45
post #4

Elementary has been around for a long time. From what I recall, it tries to ape the Mac style on Linux the same way that KDE has been accused of aping Windows. The original founder (Cassidy James Blaede) is now a designer for GNOME: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJq8Cq9LixE I wonder why this is on the front page today.

It’s on the front page because Apple dropped the ball so hard with Tahoe that people are willing to entertain the thought of switching to just about anything other than macOS

It's very tempting… but first our Logitech peripherals would have to work reliably after sleep. I can put up with the other nonsense. Not being able to use the keyboard and mouse is what's preventing the home computer from being a Linux machine.

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#84
post #17

Cannot recommend. The software center immediately broke itself into a loop of god-knows-what error that rendered itself unable to update the system. The system generally suffered from poor usability as well. Cannot comment much further because I didn't use it very long. I paid $20 for it and wish the project well, but it's a pass from me for the time being.

Similar issues here with software center. There are some updates that continue working fine, but I'll often have to drop to the command line and use apt to do the full system update... which is not very "elementaryOS-like", when you consider how much it focuses on usability and UI and making a system where users won't need the command line.

EDIT: Tried again today, and the specific error I get when trying to update via Software Center, which then prevents any further updating:

http:// archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 libsmbclient amd64 2:4.15.13+dfsg-0ubuntu1.8 is not (yet) available (404 Not Found)

I've mostly stayed on elementaryOS 7.x, which is actually the best Linux I've ever tried for my use case. It's the closest Linux to what I would like my computer to feel like, and for a while I was running it almost as a daily driver for about 50% of my work (with Windows / mac for the rest). But the elementaryOS 8.x series was far too buggy on my system, even the dock was unusable for too long (though apparently now resolved). Having to reinstall the OS with each major version is awkward too, even when I run my Linux installs off a USB stick for easy switching.

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#85
post #83
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s on the front page because Apple dropped the ball so hard with Tahoe that people are willing to entertain the thought of switching to just about anything other than macOS

It's very tempting… but first our Logitech peripherals would have to work reliably after sleep. I can put up with the other nonsense. Not being able to use the keyboard and mouse is what's preventing the home computer from being a Linux machine.

I have experienced none of those specific issues myself, yet I still feel like you have described my overall Linux experience perfectly

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#86

I'm not sure if anything about this has changed since I last tried ElementaryOS an unknown number of years ago, but one of the issues I remember encountering was that applications that weren't built-in had inconsistent styling. I think you get a better more consistent and featureful experience just by using KDE. Even the list of applications on AppCenter is woefully limited, compared to using Flatpack and being able…

Isn't that just a Linux problem, where someone could be using GTK or Kirigami or Iced for widgets? Most Mac developers use Cocoa/SwiftUI, so they get whatever widgets the UXEs at Apple have produced. Adobe famously did their post-2000 UIs in Java, so they have a nonstandard design system; you can tell they don't use Cocoa just by looking at their apps. Since there's no Apple to make an official toolkit for Linux, eac…

You can tell the Adobe UI isn't native but it's actually pretty good. In fact, I believe they had the right call since Apple frameworks are too limiting for complexe software like that and they needed the cross-platform compatibility anyway. Serif does the same with their suite of Apps and it's fine as well. Blender is custom as well...

Apple aficionados tend to get worked up about it (and I used to be this type) but they need to understand that there is always a necessary power balance to maintain, and going all-in with Apple tools is not a very good decision for a large software. They have proven time and time again that they will just mess up stuff when it suits them and companies with such big software endeavors cannot submit totally to the Apple agenda.

And even as an end user I would argue that UI uniformity is not very relevant, how the software works / what it allows is much more important. Relying too much on Apple software is also a losing strategy, as they have shown with Aperture and their office suite, they have basically rewritten from scratch every time with a newer incompatible format creating a lot of headaches and somehow managing to take years to give back functionality that existed before.

Apple focuses way too much on looks at the expense of many other properties (as they have shown again recently with the Liquid Glass) and its basically fashion at this point. And since Apple cannot cater to every single use case, plenty of devs end up having to work up a custom UI on top of their framework, so if there is a complexe use case, you might as well cut the middle man from the get go...

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#87
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling release & stable are mutually exclusive…

GP probably means stable in the sense of "not buggy" as opposed to "won't change".

But more change always leads to more bugs, because more new bugs are introduced, and there is less time to fix them.

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#88
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly still recommend it. Too bad the evolution & development of Vala itself has stagnated mostly.

IMHO they missed the boat - they should have pushed Objective C and later Swift. Lots of Mac / iOS developers were curious about Elementary when it was new.

They forked off from Gnome, and thus used Gobject/Gtk, which probably wouldn't fit so well with Objective C & its decendents…

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#89
post #85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very tempting… but first our Logitech peripherals would have to work reliably after sleep. I can put up with the other nonsense. Not being able to use the keyboard and mouse is what's preventing the home computer from being a Linux machine.

I have experienced none of those specific issues myself, yet I still feel like you have described my overall Linux experience perfectly

It's baffling. If you move the dongle to another USB port things work again. But!, the dongle can never go back to that same port. So after 4 sleeps we run out of ports and have to hard shutdown with the power button.

Re: ElementaryOS – Thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows/macOS

#90
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure he wants a rolling release? If so, then Manjaro. If not, I always say: From Windows? > Mint. From MacOS? > Ubuntu. The answer is almost always one of those two for non-technical people.

Basically he doesn't bother updating his computer, so I want something that will auto-update to fairly modern versions, that's why I mentioned stability as a requirement. What's wrong with rolling release?

I would say rather "are regular updates really necessary"? Personally, I'm not sure they are (for most users). To paraphrase Debian, there's a lot of value in stability.
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