Looking great, I've been a long time Mac user and I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clone) better than I like Apple's in Big Sur. Tried elementary before (Luna and Freya IIRC) and while it hasn't replaced my Mac for development or my Windows desktop for gaming, I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.
Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch is a notable item now says a lot about the overall quality. Very tidy, still customizable, and a suite of built-in software that ought to cover most users. Good stuff.
Long time Mac user (1992); I think the Mac UI peaked at Mavericks (some would argue Snow Leopard due to the dumb Save workflow in Lion). As soon as Yosemite started trying too hard to be minimal it started a descent into prioritizing style over UX. I haven't touched Big Sur yet and probably won't until I'm forced to with a new Mac.
Looking at screenshots of Elementary, it's so much more obvious how things work and what widgets do than on modern Mac OS. I've been running it in various VMs for a few years but didn't seriously consider switching to it full time until Big Sur was announced. I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic, and others that prevent me from moving to Linux full time.
Another long-time Mac user, who is also increasingly frustrated with how dumbed down & bloated OSX is becoming [I'm sticking on Mavericks for the foreseeable future and only 'upgraded' from El Capitán because more and more of my apps were breaking after applying updates].
With all OSX Finder's faults and all the annoyances of the OS, I still think it's miles ahead of any Linux distro I've tried to get on with.
Two words "Quicklook" --OK. that's one word made of two. I find it incredible that no Linux desktop environment has something like this. Pressing spacebar to preview the content of a file without needing to open it first is something I do literally every single day and often multiple times. Why, in 2021, does every single Linux desktop require me to open a file first to see what's inside it?
That's my biggest bugbear with Linux desktops. Other annoyances are more vague. Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface, every Linux desktop I've tried [even the polished ones like Ubuntu & Mint] always have those annoying glitches & inconsistencies which just scream 'Designed by Committee' [which I suppose they are, to an extent].
As regards apps; a big part of what I do is graphic design and that pretty much rules Linux out for anything work-related. Whatever you think of Adobe, Photoshop and Illustrator just blow The Gimp [dire!] and Inkscape [tolerable but clunky] out of the water.
I did have high hopes that new kids on the block Affinity might bring their Photo and Designer [which actually do give Photoshop and Illustrator a run for their money] to Linux. But it seems they've decided to follow Adobe's lead and make thei offerings OSX & Windows only.
About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
> Mostly to do with the inconsistencies in the interface. Coming from something like OSX which, for all its faults, presents a completely consistent user interface,
I used Mac OS X from 2009 to 2012.
It was sold as consistent and keyboard friendly back then.
However: Describing a desktop interface where selecting a single word using the keyboard needs a different keystroke in different apps, that is - rich.
Maybe this is fixed now but back then even official applications had different ways to select a word using the keyboard: in one it was cmd+shift+arrowkey in the next it was ctrl-shift-arrowkey or even fn-shift-arrowkey.
Especially infuriating because one of the most used ones in other applications meant "navigate back" in Safari.
Meanwhile in Windows and Linux ctrl+arrowkey always moves one word and ctrl+shift+arrowkey almost always (hi Excel!) selects a full word.
Maybe it is fixed now. But I'll never let a Mac user lecture me about consistency again.
I’ve had Mac since Snow Leopard, and recently Fedora on my desktop. In macOS command+arrow jumps to the begging or end of the line and option+arrow jumps words. If you hold down shift in addition, the words get selected. It has “always” been like this consistently!
Consistency has really gone downhill in macOS, but thankfully if there are menu items for those actions you can override the binding in the settings app.
If we're doing the 'showstoppers on the Linux migration', I must yet again ask why no other file manager on any other operating system can do as Finder has been able to do since the 90s and display the total recursive size of a directory in bytes!
The combination of this feature (including sort-by this directory size when listing dir contents) and quicklook makes the Mac the only place I ever want to actually manage files, instead of dumping them in Downloads and declaring bankruptcy. Two basic features that would have me on Linux in a heartbeat. I'm begging you!
(Ironically, Windows Search is so useless compared to Spotlight that the give-up-and-dump-and-search approach works best on Mac too...)
(Though the whole thing, while useful in practice, feels like essentially a workaround for unnecessarily heavy and app-centric UIs. Having both an “Open” command and an “Open, but faster and does less” command feels like humans succumbing to the needs of computers, not computers providing an additional convenience for humans. But that is a much more complicated problem that I don’t think has ever been solved in a GUI context.)
> Though the whole thing, while useful in practice, feels like essentially a workaround for unnecessarily heavy and app-centric UIs.
Right, I'm sometimes puzzled by how people approach their personal "deal-breakers" that prevent Mac->Lin (or Win->Lin) switch. Many of the issues are presented as though they are bugs or clear-cut missing features, but are in fact subjective preference statements.
In this case the "spacebar to preview" feature might be a must-have for some, but to others it might not be important, and maybe even to some be perceived as an anti-feature. I personally see this particular feature as redundant (given there is already thumbnailing and a means to open files) and unintuitive, and thus just more clutter. But I also don't care too much, since I could always disable it if it came pre-enabled.
The worst cases of this is when some insist that not only is their particular preference the The One Way, but that stubborn Linux DE developers are somehow at fault for not implementing The One Way, and that's why Linux will never be popular. There are plenty of things that might keep "normies" from switching, but random obscure DE features are not them. People tolerate FAR worse UX disasters than any major Linux DE.
I always feel like I'm in a different plane from the rest of the universe when discussing these things.
When I read how Linux DEs are "obviously" garbage, I just generally throw up a thought bubble with few question marks above my head in confusion and go on with my day. I find Mac OS a frustrating experience personally, but assume it's mostly a result of not being used to it.
> I find Mac OS a frustrating experience personally, but assume it's mostly a result of not being used to it.
I used it at my previous job, 2014-18 -- got the choice between a Mac and IIRC a ThinkPad when I started, and never having used a Mac before I wanted to finally try it -- and got a MacBook Pro, can't recall the vintage. Broke the screen a couple years later, got a 2016. But, anyway: Took a while to get used to the OS, and certainly didn't feel all that "super-intuitive" as the hype has had it for all these years.
So, observation #1: If I could get used to it (and I got quite comfortable after a while), I can't see why people can't go the other way just as easily.
Can't recall the OS version at the beginning (one of the last of the big cats, or some US body of water?), but later it upgraded via various Californian (or Oregon, Washington?) rivers or lakes to Maverick and finally, I think (for the last few months), to El Capitan. Can't recall if it set in right away, but after a couple of years at the latest I noticed the same thing as many here have mentioned, namely
Observation #2: With every new version, the OS gets a little more limited and locked down.
> I always feel like I'm in a different plane from the rest of the universe when discussing these things.
Exactly! It really feels like there's this massive disconnect in these conversations that I can't explain.
Whenever I have to use macOS, I'm a complete mess, and to me like it's missing basic features and doesn't support my workflow without lots of 3rd party add-ons, etc. That said, I probably am using it wrong, so I don't go around saying that macOS desktop is obviously garbage. I know that other people prefer this style, so that's A-OK.
It reminds me an article from the author of Paul Buchheit (gmail's creator), when he was beta testing it internally with Google employees.
Many of them were asking for email preview popups directly from the inbox. Instead of implementing it, he realized the need wasn't for a popup but for a wait to see your email quickly. The real issue was that it was slow when you clicked on an email, so he made it fast instead.
> Right, I'm sometimes puzzled by how people approach their personal "deal-breakers" that prevent Mac->Lin (or Win->Lin) switch. Many of the issues are presented as though they are bugs or clear-cut missing features, but are in fact subjective preference statements.
Since preference is pretty important, does it really matter? If they have a workflow they like and no significant pressure to change, why would they? You speak as though it is everyone's most pressing goal to transition to Linux Desktop for some reason.
> The worst cases of this is when some insist that not only is their particular preference the The One Way, but that stubborn Linux DE developers are somehow at fault for not implementing The One Way, and that's why Linux will never be popular.
There's a lot of reasons Linux will never be popular, developers ignoring the workflows and use cases of potential users is just one of them. The condescending attitude of many of its supposed proponents is another. Why would I want to switch to a Desktop that's as clunky and haphazard as Windows 10, just in different ways that I have to relearn?
>Having both an “Open” command and an “Open, but faster and does less” command
>I personally see this particular feature as redundant (given there is already thumbnailing and a means to open files)
I'm guessing neither of you have actually used QuickLook and/or don't use apps like Photoshop or Illustrator which, even on a fast SSD equipped laptop can take around 30 seconds to open. QuickLook is much more than just a preview.
When I'm browsing a folder of my image files and can't remember which of dozens of files is the one I actually want, QuickLook lets me pop open a screen sized modal preview window, which is as good as having that file open in the app. If it's not the file I'm looking for, I hit the up or down arrows and the next or previous file's content is displayed in the already open preview popup. If some of those other image files were created by Illustrator, I've just saved myself an additional ~30 seconds, by not having to open that app too. And, once I find the image I want, I can open it in its associated app directly from a button in the top of the preview pane.
But, even if you're not a graphic designer, QuickLook has its uses for other types of document too. It can preview the content of source code files [with syntax highlighting] preview the rendered output of things like HTML, PDF, Markdown, AsciiDoc etc. You can even scroll through the pages of a multipage document.
This is another timesaver I use all the time. Being able to check the date or bottom line on a received PDF invoice, without opening it... being able to check whether I mentioned something in a letter I sent, without firing up a text editor or word processor... being able to see a rendered representation of what an HTML file contains... etc. etc.
No, that’s not what I meant. I do in fact use the previewer I linked to, and would be worse off without it.
I just think that it the apps that make it necessary shouldn’t do so: if Photoshop (or GIMP, or LibreOffice, or whatever) takes 30 seconds to open a file, the solution shouldn’t be to layer on yet another option and make me think whether I want to suffer that delay or reduced functionality, it should be to eliminate the delay.
Yet (as I’ve also said) I don’t think anybody came up with a plausible way to do so (even a purely technical one, disregarding economic incentives for app developers).
Evince is also pretty snappy. Not as omnivorous, but let’s be honest, most of my hard drive is PDFs.
Quickly flipping between files with horizontal arrows (or something of a similar complexity) is actually the more interesting function here, I think, and maybe it does warrant a mode. Some picture viewers try to make the switch implicit (flip between files when picture fits on screen, pan horizontally when not), but my builtin mode tracker gets out of sync frequently, and I would absolutely hate to have the same error-prone controls in a PDF viewer, where I sometimes stare at a single file for hours and sometimes flip through a dozen in a minute. No idea how this should be done.
First off, thanks for the great reply! My point isn't that it's not useful as much as that it's very preference-based. The good news is though that apparently both Linux (GNOME + KDE) and macOS support this feature, despite my not using it much on any platform, so it's what we're discussing is not even a difference between mac/lin at this point, but just an abstract consideration.
> Being able to check the date or bottom line on a received PDF invoice, without opening it.
I tried double-clicking on a 43-page PDF, and it took less than a second to open on my under-powered Acer (about ~$200, mfg 4 years ago), running stock Ubuntu 20.04. This seems really fast, as it was basically instantaneous from releasing the mouse. Obviously opening up a PSD would be slower, but then again I can always just zoom in on the thumbnail in that case (Ctrl+Scroll zooms in on icons in Linux).
This is making me think perhaps the real difference is that the default programs that open are too slow, eg if Photoshop is the default associated application for all images, or Adobe Acrobat for all PDFs, then I totally would see the need to have a previewer as well, since last time I used those they were realllllly slow.
I dunno, that said, it's all really not important. Then again, what is HN but for getting grumpy about unimportant things? :p
A preview pane isn't exactly the same thing. OSX also has this in column view. But Quicklook will popup a modal window, which can be resized as big as you want, so you can get a clear view of the file content as good as actually opening it in its app, without the added overhead of actually having to launch [and quit] that app.
[and, if the file in question is a Photoshop or Illustrator document, you'll really appreciate how much time QuickLook saves you, by not having to wait for those behemoths to creak slowly into action]
There are also certain plugins which can enhance this functionality by providing extra info, such as pixel dimensions on image files, allowing browsing inside archives, syntax highlighting of source code files etc.
Maybe peoples' descriptions on here aren't doing Quicklook justice, for those who aren't familiar with it. Once you've used it for a while, you can't imagine why it's not a standard feature on any modern desktop OS.
It's not hidden in a disused lavatory behind a sign bearing the words "beware the leopard". Click menu button view panels "Information" Also F11
If remembers the state globally so if you leave it open it will always be there when you open a file manager window if you toggle it off it will be hidden next time too.
It's not open by default perhaps because not everyone regards it as maximally useful. Say I open a file manager and have it sized to 1/4 of a 24" 1080p screen. On the left hand side of the screen is a panel which lists common and places and other items. This leaves a space for 15 icons on the screen at 48px size big enough to comfortably read and note some details in a preview.
Opening the information pane reduces that to 10 icons greatly reducing the space available for the main purpose of the application.
What if I open it to the full size of the screen? I can now view 56 icons at 80px where now they actually are a pretty decent size to see whats in them in their own icon.
I think most of the time having the info panel shown would decrease the utility of the window.
> It's not open by default perhaps because not everyone regards it as maximally useful.
Indeed, I don't have any use for information or preview panes, I disable them all when encountering. IMHO they are a distraction from the content itself and make the view arrangement clumsy.
Maybe QuickLook outlived itself. It was a technology tailored to the HDD era of hardware, when complex apps required dozens of seconds to start. In a world were even LibreOffice cold-starts in under three seconds on middle of the road hardware QuickLook is just a familiar workflow instead of a necessity?
Initially I missed QuickLook a lot after switching away from macOS, but now I haven't thought about it in years.
I can't imagine not having access to QuickLook. It's not really about how quickly apps open so much as the UI—in a large folder of images or documents, I can use QuickLook to see what's inside each one, whereas without it I'd have to open a window for every document.
Yes, for me the killer aspect of Quicklook is being able to flip through dozens of documents in barely more time than it takes for my arrow keys to actuate. It’s wonderful for skimming through dozens of files quickly. Icons that accurately represent content on more than just images are great too.
Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.
> QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems.
...were there other ones in classic operating systems? QuickTime <= 10.2 did let you install third-party components (I wrote one recently), but what else was there?
There was OpenDoc on classic Mac OS, and I think maybe COM on the Microsoft side of the fence? Not as well versed on Windows stuff though so that may be a misread on my part.
I think the quicklook is available in gnome. I'm not sure how it compares to the osx one because I don't use anything apple, but selecting a file and pressing space in nautilus behaves as I expect quicklook to work. A preview of the file is shown. It doesn't work for all file types but the common ones (images, documents, videos, text files etc.) are shown.
>About the only quality graphic design app I've seen available for Linux is Krita. But it's more of a digital painting app than an image manipulation one. And, of course, no vector graphics.
Well there's the web based Figma, somebody even created an unofficial desktop app for Linux. Figma has plugins, tons of them for many graphic design tasks. It blows the Affinity stuff out of the water imo.
The big caveat with Figma is that you don’t full own your data with it. It technically lets you export, but the file format is undocumented and subject to change at any time.
Additionally, it’s very much geared specifically toward UI design and prototyping, whereas something like Affinity Designer or Sketch also work well for generic screen-targeted vector work.
I've been using PenPot[1] in lieu of Figma all this year, which is an free/libre Figma-clone. For my particular usage it's been great, I prefer it to the others I've tried recently. However, it's still in heavy development, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are missing features compared to more mature offerings.
> The big caveat with Figma is that you don’t full own your data with it. It technically lets you export, but the file format is undocumented and subject to change at any time.
True for project files, but you can export images and SVGs.
> it’s very much geared specifically toward UI design and prototyping, whereas something like Affinity Designer or Sketch also work well for generic screen-targeted vector work.
That's where the plugin ecosystem comes in. It's quite usable for simple/modern vector work that's more component oriented graphic design than hands on illustration.
I gained NVME drivers for using larger SSDs, so tolerated the changes, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to make the leap to ARM M1 if Big Sur is holding me back so much.
All I need from a filesystem is to be able to mount it and read and write files.
APFS isn't writeable on Linux or Windows without additional drivers. Nor is HFS+. It's quite inconvenient. If ZFS was usable in that way, I'd consider it! But for now I still have to keep my boot volume as HFS+ so I can at least read files, and use FAT32 to shuttle data around.
For me macOS design peaked when they moved from the super readable Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue because it looked hot on retina displays. I'm not sure which version that was exactly.
Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together. Not so happy about the non-visual aspects though, like all the unlabeled, barely distinct line icons.
Ha, I had no idea. That's kind of a problem, yeah. They REALLY fixed that with San Francisco which has, by my count, a crazy 18 cuts across 8 variants, counting only generic sans serifs.
Eh, in a UI font though? I appreciate the lack of italics in the UI of my system (which is running Mavericks, so has Lucida Grande), it keeps the menus clean and there are better ways to add emphasis where truly needed.
Not necessarily in the UI. But, as the default font, it was the one that a lot of apps would er... 'default' to. So, if you were writing a text document in such an app and then went to make some text italic you'd realise it wasn't available so would have to change fronts.... which could then affect the layout, no. of pages required etc.
> Purely from a visual standpoint I like the Big Sur redesign way more than I expected. It looks like it was made for dark mode, unlike previous versions where dark mode was kind of an add on. The whole material/translucency thing is really coming together.
Yeah, I actually like Big Sur more than I expected to, and it's the first version of macOS with a dark mode that I actually stuck with. Most of my quibbles stem from choosing minimalism over discoverability, e.g., hiding the document proxy icon, making all the keyboard shortcuts in menus grey because somebody clearly decided that looked prettier and more subtle rather, etc. But in practice, all the shirt-rending over how the excessive transparency would make everything unreadable and illegible just hasn't matched my experience.
Interestingly enough, iTerm is the biggest sticking point for me in switching back to Linux: none of the Linux terminal applications have the quality of life features I depend on in iTerm
Yeah, I recently switched my main machine from macOS to Pop!_OS 21.04 (another "install and forget" distro based on Ubuntu, so kinda similar to Elementary OS) and I miss iTerm so much that I sometimes slide my chair over to the music workstation (which is still a Mac) and SSH in from iTerm just to do stuff in the terminal.
I think iTerm is probably not just the best terminal on any platform, but also one of the best software applications ever made, period. I would looove to have something like it on Linux, but I've spent several evening beers googling it, after switching to Linux, and there just aren't any.
Random things I like about iTerm, off the top of my head:
- not only is it extremely customizable, it can sync those settings across multiple machine easily via any shared-folder mechanism (I use Syncthing, but you could use iCloud Disk or Dropbox or anything)
- infinite history/scrollback retention, even across restarts
- extremely good performance, regardless of having dozens of windows open (maybe only on high-spec Macs? that's the only kind of Mac I use, since macOS is so crazy slow generally)
- timestamps on every line, hidden by default but can be shown after the fact whenever you want (e.g. hmm... when did this script output this line of text? oh, last night at 1AM, it must be hung then, kill it)
- detaches your sessions when it updates itself, then restarts and re-attaches them
- scriptable, so each project can have a little script that opens iTerm and opens a tab that runs a local dev server, another tab with REPL, another tab with unit tests in watch mode, another tab with whatever... and so on
I recently migrated to Kitty because of iTerm’s abysmal performance issues, and it’s quite better. The performance is top-notch, the terminal’s scripting APIs are (for my use cases) better than iTerm’s python API, and the config uses plain text.
A bunch of little things: iTerm’s jump/mark feature is really useful, especially combined with shell integration and triggers. iTerm can detect soft splits (e.g. tmux or vim splits) and confine the selection to one side of them. Also it’s split-pane navigation functionality is pretty smooth.
The big issue is that a lot of what makes iTerm great is that it isn't trying to be cross-platform: many of my favorite apps are intentionally single-platform and take advantage of what that platform provides.
The beauty and elegance of Mac OS died with Mac OS X, when they foolishly decided to keep the NeXT-isms instead of sticking with tried and true Mac principles like the spatial Finder.
I’ll be that one person who will say that the peak of desktop environment design is currently gnome (with guake for a drop down terminal and top panel workspace scroll). It’s extremely keyboard driven and working with 4 different workspaces is just extremely pleasant. Using super for both overview and search is a really nice touch too. Just my opinion - avoiding using the mouse really is nice
Gnome is actually quite good I find myself at odds with some of their defaults for workspaces but they're in the right ball park when it comes to aesthetics and organising the UI.
I would very much like to have a guake like terminal for mac os. That and a workspace persistent file explorer. But I think that kind of desktop enhancement that is bug free and feature full is hard to come by.
Also since you're on Linux I'm looking for a linux alternative for this tool. https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose It's a gui chooser I don't know if such a thing exists for linux. I suspect it might be quite easy to implement one with electron.
By the way what I'm not looking for is something like alfred for linux. That would be an overkill.
Gnome 3 absolutely wasn't horrible last I used it, I only had to fix the wildly inefficient alt-tab implementation and thta took a few minutes searching and clicking one checkbox I think.
(I think there was a nunber of issues with extensions but I guess that is fixed now.)
> Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch
I think it was meant to be perhaps not necessarily noticed but at least deliberately positioned like that, and not a UI glitch. Look how it's situated directly between the microphone and speaker indicators on the top bar, and the screenshot appears in a section that says, "the indicator now shows both input and output devices right in the popover".
> I think I actually like elementary's evolution of the UI styling (from when it started as a pretty direct clone) better than I like Apple's
I'm a lifelong freedesktop user who doesn't even own a Mac but will nonetheless defend OS X's UI, from around the time of Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion or so, as the best visual design ever with respect to graphics for a conventional desktop operating system and utterly timeless—with some notable exceptions. One of those exceptions was Apple's longterm insistence on its terrible tab look—with tabs shown detached from the content its associated with and attached to the window chrome above.
It's really irking that Elementary copied that tab look, because absent any admiration, it's basically indefensible. Elementary's copying it strikes me as an example of the kind of irrationality that originates from conservatism-for-the-sake-of-it mixed with how people come to take pleasure in idiosyncrasies and other incidentals. (Similar to how when Pluto was designated not to be a planet, it led to people sort of staking their identity on choosing to insist that it be treated as one and publicly aligning themselves with "Team Pluto" for the quirkiness.) It's one of the things that they should have deliberately opted to break with the influence in order to be "better than Apple's".
You're totally right about the mic + speaker icons. I wonder why they did that, if clicking either of them apparently opens this shared menu. A speaker as a representation of "Sound" with both mic/speaker settings inside doesn't strike me as too abstract. Or if they really want separate symbols, maybe they could be visually joined somehow.
And none of the other screenshots show the microphone icon, it's only in that one. Only shows up with a mic connected I assume.
Or could the mic be there to give a "something is currently using your mic" indicator?
The problem I consistently run into isn't the pixels on the screen being the wrong color or shape. Rather it's other things which are less obvious on my Mac-replacement platforms that make them so distracting and frustrating to use by comparison:
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Drag-n-drop behavior.
- Menus and menu item organization.
- Application interoperability.
If I ever had the money to invest, I'd finance the making of a legitimate replacement for macOS out of KDE or something where the dulling the thousand paper cuts was the focus, not the landing page screenshots.
I’ve made Linux my daily driver going on 6 months now, and it’s mostly great.
I knew that MacOS’ menu organization was a bit better on average and application interop more common (especially with things like Automater) but the keyboard shortcuts thing really surprised me.
Consistently at the system level and application levels, shortcuts seem so much more natural and easier to learn on MacOS. Use of the super key, a letter, and maybe a modifier is the norm, whereas Linux seems to have heavy use of control plus multiple modifiers and even function keys for just about everything.
Moreover, the super key feels so much better placed than control for common shortcuts.
I've been all Linux on desktop and mobile for a few years now after decades of primarily Mac use, due to accidentally giving my MacBook swimming lessons that it absolutely didn't pass. After trying every DE under the sun, I eventually found KDE Plasma 5.x to be featureful and configurable enough to mostly work for me.
The problem that persists is related to what you mention. Nearly every application seems like it was making it a point of pride to be a maverick about application menus and shortcuts. I think a lot of it stems from decades of trying to be like Windows in some attempt to lure Windows users over to Linux. The result instead was still a persistent lack of commercially popular/essential software that gives Windows its value and a user experience in terms of consistency and execution that's no better than Windows. It ends up being the worst of both worlds, but... it is free, and basically a miracle that any of it exists and works at all considering the arduous and meandering way it tends to all come together.
So, on the one hand I'm in bewildered awe of it and on the other I'm constantly frustrated by it thinking, "Ugh. What? Why? It doesn't have to be like this." If I were ever in a position to do so, I'd gladly drop $10+ Million on creating a Linux Distro that was little more than KDE Neon or Kubuntu, plus popular applications, all patched and built with menu organization and keyboard shortcuts that follow Apple's HIG from ~2005.
I agree, the styling is great, and makes me feel much more comfortable to transition to Elementary than other OSes (even new versions of macOS). Thank you to the Elementary designers who put so much effort into this UX polish!
I put Elementary onto an external SSD with about 20 other Linux versions, yet it's the one I choose to use most often. It's some combination of familiarity, discoverability, and compatibility that made me like it most.
In practice I still use macOS 10.13 for myself (I really like the AppleScript API into every process) and Windows 10 at work (because my boss tells me to), but Elementary would be my choice of Linux distro if/when the day comes when I need to move.
It's one of the issues with a company that's based so much of its marketing around its style. They have to be seen to be innovating to keep the interest, which unfortunately means that they have to overhaul their UI once every few years for better or worse.
Elementary doesn't have that issue and so can iterate with small quality of life improvements, without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater
I'm surprised they spend so much (presumably) time and effort on applications, especially 'Web' and 'Terminal'. How many users are actually going to use 'Web' as their browser?
That said, I wish them all the best, because I use 'Files' (but not the distro) since it's the best I've found for the odd occasion where I think using a GUI file manager will be easier than the command line. I still wouldn't say it's good, just the best I've found. (Not opening everything on a single-click is a vast improvement!)
> I'm surprised they spend so much (presumably) time and effort on applications, especially 'Web' and 'Terminal'. How many users are actually going to use 'Web' as their browser?
Linux distros used to love to do this (maybe some still do?). They'd put whatever the "native" browser was for a desktop in as the default, and do the same for a bunch of other stuff.
Early Ubuntu's success was partly due to ignoring that crap and just installing whatever the user'd almost certainly actually want. Its defaults were way better—actually somewhat helpful, rather than harmful—as a result. Browser, on Linux in 2006? 95+% chance you want Firefox, so here you go. And so on.
I keep wondering about this too, perhaps the intent is that there's some known component that works well with the ux goals - so if someone builds a native application (with vala), they can reference the eos 'web' app when implementing a web view.
It's still something I'm leary about. I switched from a mac to ubuntu (gnome) recently, and wonder how much lack of facilitation/communication leads to so many separate or incomplete apps. For example, I may use the gnome calendar app but also still have thunderbird setup to handle calendar links. Or evince (akin to preview.app) doesn't support drag/drop editing of pages so I have to also install 'pdf arranger' to do this.
I think there's a chaos tolerance one has to have in approaching linux, which is fine! On the plus side I've really appreciated hearing quickly from developers when filing bugs.
>I'm surprised they spend so much (presumably) time and effort on applications, especially 'Web' and 'Terminal'. How many users are actually going to use 'Web' as their browser?
Elementary is aimed in part at non-power-users, moreso than most other distros besides Ubuntu. Most of them don't care or even know what browser they're using.
I find it a little hilarious that any distro is aimed at non-power users. The middle of the Venn diagram of “non-power user” and “will install an OS that isn’t the one that came with their computer” must be vanishingly small.
I see that as "I set my mom up with a nice linux distro that works for her instead of driving her back to her (ransom/ad/whateveriship)ware filled windows life"
So yeah, there's definitely a value IMO. In fact, I know for a fact that my mother in law has been using linux for years because they just set it up for her and installed whatever she needed to get stuff done (libreoffice, zoom, whatever).
Further, I would argue that every user is a potential power user and part of the job of personal computing software should be to be an onramp to power-user-dom.
Based on how they redesign the installation process, its seem vendor-installed OS is the move here. So this might be the OS that came with the computer
But isn't it pretty likely that most of their users will be more tech savvy regardless of who they aim towards, just due to most Linux distros having to be seeked out instead of coming preinstalled and therefore mostly being used by the more technically inclined people?
To that end, why not just go with Firefox, which would appease the more technical users, would be closer to what most other distros out there are doing and would also have a higher chance of it being familiar software to all users?
I think that for the most part custom browsers are only good when you want to include something functional, yet minimal in your distro and want to save space or something like that.
Edit: admittedly, an argument could also be made about having software look and feel consistent with the rest of the OS, where such a solution could be better than off the shelf browsers, at least without heavy modifications.
If this helps maintain GNOME Web then that is very good and important. I use Web to test websites for WebKit support on Linux, so that I don't have to operate a macOS/iOS install to run Safari. There are a few other options such as Nyxt https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ which also support WebKit, but Web seems the simplest, easiest to install, and most mature / best maintained.
..ok. So they didn't have to put much/any effort in? Still though, how many users are actually going to use 'GNOME Web'?
If I installed this, even for an elderly relative or whatever rather than myself, probably my next step would be to install Firefox. (And for others it might be Chrome of course.)
Because I've heard of it before this evening, trust it'll get updates, it has a decent privacy/security record, I know where things are if I'm asked for help, ...
But mostly it's the first, I couldn't possibly have picked GNOME Web before this conversation, I didn't know it existed!
This is a big update for a relatively small community distro. Kudos to the team.
A summary of some of the cooler features:
Performance: General performance improvements on all hardware resulting from optimizing for Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi - namely, reducing and asynchronizing inter-process communication between desktop components, removing unused code, and reducing disk I/O.
Firmware: Linux Vendor Firmware Service now built-in, enabling firmware updates from within the OS.
Flatpak: all-in on flatpak, all AppCenter apps are flatpaks, as well as some Elementary apps like Web.
Portals: apps must explicitly request permission to get access to files or interact with other apps. Can tweak these permissions in System Settings.
Mail: The Mail app now sandboxes html emails.
Multi-Touch: Extended from supporting just desktop to various apps now too.
Multi-Tasking: Better hot corners + new window and workspace controls.
CalDav: Tasks and Calendar now designed around the CalDav format, making importing and sharing of tasks and calendar items with other CalDav apps easier.
Dark Theme: system-wide, applies to GTK apps too.
Terminal: smart-paste protection extended from sudo pastes to multi-line pastes.
More OEM/Vendor friendly:
- Installer is simplified and streamlined - network connectivity, user account creation, and updates moved out of the installer and into the installed OS. Better for vendors & OEMs.
- Startup is intentionally non-Elementary-branded, better enabling OEM/Vendor branded startup splash screen — "we don’t need to constantly advertise your operating system to you".
"- Startup is intentionally non-Elementary-branded, better enabling OEM/Vendor branded startup splash screen — "we don’t need to constantly advertise your operating system to you"."
Dang, I really like their logo and it sorta feels nice to see it on bootup. I'm sure there is some way to bring it back though, and it's a tiny thing that, like they said, will probably be far outweighed by the benefit it brings to OEMs.
>- Installer is simplified and streamlined - network connectivity, user account creation, and updates moved out of the installer and into the installed OS. Better for vendors & OEMs.
Maybe the awkward stretched out time zone map is gone too?
Elementary is great, the couple times I've tried it, I wasn't into the desktop paradigm it was encouraging me to use (e.g., no minimize button, native apps that are pretty and consistent but less functional). Will look forward to giving it another spin.
Having recently begun using a Mac for the first time, and after having had to suffer with Win10 for a few years, I have to say that I didn't appreciate that several out-of-box linux desktop experiences are now superior to commercial options.
Ubuntu for example is quite stable, has attractive defaults that aren't garish or trying to be too unfamiliar, and otherwise never does anything I don't expect. Especially when it comes to finder/explorer/nautilus.
All major desktops now have a dock, some tray icons, and a notification area.
To me the differentiator is just staying out of my way.
> Elementary is great, the couple times I've tried it, I wasn't into the desktop paradigm it was encouraging me to use (e.g., no minimize button, native apps that are pretty and consistent but less functional).
I installed it on one machine, and the missing "minimize" button drove me mad, otherwise it's a very nice environment (I generally use Ubuntu LTS).
Interesting expectation given that on Windows, OSX and the other Linux file explorers I've tried, typing selects from the list of files in the current folder, with a behavior similar to an HTML "select" element.
I hardly ever minimize/hide windows, and I don't use virtual desktops/spaces either.
My workflow is based on two main hotkeys plus some extras:
1. Alt+Tab to change between applications. Set it up so it ONLY switches between applications (never between windows of the same application). If you keep alt pressed the icons for the open applications stay on screen, and you can click on them to go straight to that app.
2. Alt+` (the key below "esc"). This rotates between open windows of the same application. It is basically alt+tab but for windows of the same app (that you have focused).
Extras:
- Window-resizing keywords (make the current window occupy the left half of the screen, maximize it, etc.)
- Tabs on some applications (like the browser or vscode). I still use several windows though.
- Disable all animations. Just make things appear/disappear as fast as they can. It sounds silly but it really enables faster "ops, not that window, switch again" when you don't nail it the first time.
This workflow is ingrained in my brain already. I somehow seem to mentally (without noticing) keep track of the window and app switching stacks, so most of the times I know how many times I have to hit tab or ` to reach the window I want.
For a few persistent applications (terminal, calendar, chat client, email, ticket dashboard, wireframing tool, etc) I have them tiled on specific workspaces/monitors and I use a keyboard shortcut to jump to the relevant workspace. (I don't know about Elementary, but workspaces is what Gnome recommends for this kind of thing.)
In cases of transient windows (reference materials, docs I'm reviewing, internal wiki pages, screenshots) I just let them pile up willy-nilly on my desktop. When I need to find a specific window that is no longer visible I either tab through the application switcher or select it from the multitasking view.
It may sound like a "messy" approach to window management, but finding an open window using an app switcher or multitasking view seems neither more nor less efficient than finding that same window minimized in a taskbar/dock.
When I'm on my Mac I don't really use a minimize button ever. I organize all my windows between virtual desktops. One for calendar/notes, one for browsers and maybe the downloads folder open, one for IDE and terminal, one for chat apps, etc.
I think wanting to minimize is related to working with non-maximized, mouse-managed windows. I was a heavy minimizer on Windows back when I used it for things other than gaming (so... some time before Win7) and on Linux back in the day, but on macOS with Spectacle, I never minimize. Everything is almost always maximized, half-screen (top or bottom, left or right), or quarter-screen. I rarely move a window with my mouse, I just toss them to different regions (or maximize them) with key combos. I don't get visual clutter without minimizing, because my screen's usually completely filled with whichever things I'm working on.
I second this.
Minimising windows in mac os is a nuisance because they can auto restore unexpectedly when switching back to the application or clicking on the dock icon.
Ironically, the Mac dock that this dock emulates does support both "minimizing" and "hiding" (and always has, as far as I remember).
It's one of those little functionality gaps that keeps people on closed/non-free systems. Is it at least on their roadmap? I'd gladly donate/pay just to get a Mac-like minimize/hide experience.
Ah, okay. Thanks. That's not as bad as I thought, using the click on the dock (that would otherwise do nothing) is clever. Thinking about it, my dock does this as well :)
- Can't publish closed-source apps on their AppCenter. "To ensure reproducible builds, transparency, and auditability, binaries cannot be uploaded or included alongside the source code to be installed on users' devices." So that precludes my apps, and probably most other devs I know. I'd guess because of this restriction, their app store is going nowhere as a business.
- Their 70/30 split is higher than what Apple currently offers (85/15) for revenue less than 1m (which is going to be everyone on eOS)
- While I like macOS, I think it's a shame they chose to (more or less) copy it, rather than try a new direction. But perhaps that would be too risky.
Programmers have got to be the only people who think giving away hard, creative work for free is the only right way to do things. We all gotta eat and programs take time and expertise to build and maintain. Wouldn’t you like to be able to make a living from something you built rather than having a boss and working for a company where your future will never be in your control? I sure would. If people can pay for literally every other product/service in the world they can pay for programs too. There’s nothing wrong with charging for your labor.
I have no idea what you’re getting at. How are movies a counterpoint? Movies and streaming services are paid products. And no one is forcing you to make software that spies on people as an indie dev? In fact if you are able to make a living through selling software you have less incentive to collect user data and sell it as a revenue stream. Most products that are free are those where the your data is being sold for is exactly that reason.
> And no one is forcing you to make software that spies on people as an indie dev?
This is the problem with your argument. You're looking at it from the developer's perspective, rather than the user's. As the developer you have this choice, and you know which choice you've made. As a user, all I have is your word (which is worth nothing if I don't already have a good reason to trust you).
As a user, source code access is important, for a number of reasons:
1. It gives both users and third parties a way to verify your claims
2. As it turns out, transparency tends to discourage bad behaviour in the first place
3. Users can fork if you no longer maintain the project according to their standards (abandonment, price hikes, bundling malware, and so on)
None of those reasons are direct improvements for you as a developer, but they're a big part of why I am reluctant to adopt proprietary software (free or paid).
> How are movies a counterpoint? Movies and streaming services are paid products.
Yes? I am less reluctant to pay for a movie because they don't demand the same privileges.
> In fact if you are able to make a living through selling software you have less incentive to collect user data and sell it as a revenue stream. Most products that are free are those where the your data is being sold for is exactly that reason.
On the other hand, reality shows that many (most) commercial developers are perfectly happy to pick both.
> This is the problem with your argument. You're looking at it from the developer's perspective, rather than the user's
The developers need to make the apps, otherwise there's no marketplace. Gotta satisfy both, albeit imperfectly.
> As a user, all I have is your word (which is worth nothing if I don't already have a good reason to trust you).
That's not true at all. Experts can audit closed-source software to see if it's phoning home, etc. An App Store (like Apple's) can have strict rules where developers will be banned if they do malicious things. You can install tools to monitor apps. Apps are sandboxed to prevent access. You have much more to go on than just the developer's word.
> As a user, source code access is important, for a number of reasons
Sure, it would be nice as a user to have the code. Most app developers simply won't give it to you.
> The developers need to make the apps, otherwise there's no marketplace.
Why is publishing the source code such a burden, when the apparent target are unsophisticated users? Are developers afraid that users will start cloning repos and build their own binaries?
> An App Store (like Apple's) can have strict rules where developers will be banned if they do malicious things.
Apple will rat you out to the cops if you take a picture of human skin on "your own" phone, why should they be a benchmark for anything security or privacy related?
Totally ignoring the developers POV is not healthy either.
Something matching the quality of Excel/Final Cut/Photoshop/90% of games/(lots of my favorite misc. iPad/Mac apps) does not exist in the FOSS world because they have been built on millions of hours of work (and not only by developers, but people spanning many industries and skillsets), which needs payment. In the only FOSS model, huge classes of software (e.g a AAA game) simply won't exist because they will be economically impossible. There's TONS of software requiring cross-domain teams to build, that is unglamorous and unfun to build/maintain, and those kinds of things don't get built to free. This whole purist FOSS model dates back to a very different time that honestly makes no sense today.
In fact by your argument, we can extend to many other things that should be completely open source and free. There should be no need for any intellectual property - the proprietary ingredients and manufacturing processes of Coke (and 80% of everything else in a grocery store) should be free (how can I trust whats in it otherwise?), the complete schematics of every car and airplane should be open (how will I know its safe otherwise?), the innards of every piece of electronic that could conceivably contain a mic/speaker/GPS should be free (what if they track me?). You think this would lead to a utopia of free and awesome stuff. I think it would lead to 90% of that stuff never being built in the first place.
I guess you are one of those purists who somehow uses ONLY FOSS software and is satisfied with it so I won't argue further. To me and many others the quality and breadth of commercial software is orders of magnitude better than free software, and we recognize that's because we pay people to work on it, even if that work is not fun enough to do for free.
Sure, you can have a for-pay open source app, but if it's a consumer product (as opposed to, say, some B2B thing with special licensing), then it isn't going anywhere as a business. Many people will just download the code and compile it instead of paying you (or find someone else who packaged it up). That's why open source has been more successful with software-as-service.
??? Maybe if your userbase is tiny. As soon as it reaches even a 100-200 people someone will compile the source and distribute it for free or copy and resell it cheaper. they sure as heck aren’t orthogonal concepts in practice.
if you live/sell in a country that respects software copyright/license, then you can sue them or get a cease and desist for using it against your license (say prohibiting commercial derivative or violating your copyright without authorization)
and your software, if popular or lucrative, its going to get ripped off anyways like in the real app store (just look at the many clones of many apps), or just plain pirated like the myriad apps (photoshop, word et all) have since basically forever
> if you live/sell in a country that respects software copyright/license, then you can sue them or get a cease and desist for using it against your license (say prohibiting commercial derivative or violating your copyright without authorization)
Prohibition of derivative makes your software not open source
But you can use trademark, instead of copyright to prevent someone else to sell copies of your app. Sort of what Red hat does but that doesn't prevent clones with a different name to pop up.
> Prohibition of derivative makes your software not open source
hmmm right, maybe my understanding was a little different, i was assuming "if you pay me, ill give you the source if you ask for it" would make it "open source" but that would be incorrect ...
As a user I am usually disappointed by open source software when paid alternatives exist (adobe CC, games, office, 3d CAD) with few exceptions (blender), so no.
I have used eOS at the past and while from a superficial quick look it looks like a copy of macOS, also having used macOS for a long time i can easily say that it is far from a copy. For all intents and purposes it is doing its own thing.
I installed it at one point. There were so many things they just happened to do the same way as macOS for UX (not the windows way), it just didn't seem very original. I see in V6 they've copied the light/dark mode of macOS and put the setting in roughly the same place, with the same sort of icon. Oh, and it's right above the same set of accent colors on macOS, which also are shown as circles (not squares, or rounded rectangles, or a menu). There's a dock, not a task bar. And the finder windows are laid out roughly the same as some older version of macOS. The left sidebar looks like practically the same icons. App Center is laid out the same way as the Mac App Store. I could go on.
(I know that the dev environment is quite different)
They seem to be taking more from Apple's take a look at the continuous mission control animations and list view context actions.
I honestly don't think these are the best of Apple's stuff. When I think about these features I can't really see why they decided they were important enough to implement.
Perhaps they're trying to generate some excitement about the desktop environment I don't know.
One way to "fix" this IMO would be to allow proprietary apps, but keeping the 30/70 split for those to account for increased monitoring and having them confined by the same flatpak permissions as everything else, and lowering the split to 12/88 for open source apps.
Good idea. Not inline with their extreme stance of calling other OSes, and presumably closed-source, unethical though. "The thoughtful, capable, and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS"
I've been using it since the weekend and it's so great!
My favourite feature is that it's all flatpak, allowing smartphone-like permissions for each desktop app — both first-party and any third-party from Flathub.
I like it way more than snap and am glad there's an Ubuntu fork that works so wonderfully with it.
There's also Flatseal (https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal) as a user-friendly way of managing permissions for flatpak apps. This version of elementary OS comes with its own permission manager, but with my limited experience with both, it seems like it allows tweaking less permissions than Flatseal.
Everything in that reference basically says "yep the criticism is valid" and in a few cases the author expands on that with "but it's ok because..." and then lists various reasons why it's fine that it's still a problem but that's it's being worked on. They also had to correct a good chunk of just outright incorrect information they were supplying mid-post about system updates.
One item was addressed, which was that flatpak now notifies the user that sandbox escapes are possible based on the app's configuration.
As a response to the criticisms, it's not a great one.
Consider also, there are better ways that some of these issues could have been tackled. Why not have flatpak prompt for permissions as they're used, e.g.: "This app wants to open your home directory" rather than at install-time. That would make it abundantly clearer to the end users this is aimed at.
> Why not have flatpak prompt for permissions as they're used, e.g.: "This app wants to open your home directory" rather than at install-time. That would make it abundantly clearer to the end users this is aimed at.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that it is because that's what is done in mobile, and it's usage in mobile has re-taught everyone the lesson that constant dialog prompts just train users to click through dialog prompts without reading them. That's bad, and annoying.
I do still think there are better solutions to that problem, but it would require more effort from users to get applications working if they weren't designed with sandboxing in mind, which is the vast majority of applications, which in turn means that Flatpak probably wouldn't have grown as quickly.
While that's true, at least some users are protected. I've never really bought into that particular criticism of mobile. Users are going to click through regardless until they've been burned a bunch of times. The users who pay attention to those prompts are the ones you want to benefit, and hopefully eventually those other users will be trained into the safer behaviour. (Yeah I hear myself)
As it stands though, flatpak out of the box has all the security issues of running old unpatched systems in order to mostly have compatible runtime environments, which, in my experience, don't actually buy me that much. The few times my distro hasn't already shipped a copy of an application, AppImage, Flatpak, or Snap haven't had the solution either.
This entire experiment we're doing with "ship the developer's box" as the new standard of software delivery and the different warring philosophies employed to turn that into a reality are interesting. My money is on the least secure, least safe, least functional, but best marketed thing winning out.
On the other hand my family learned the opposite lesson (without assistance from me).
They essentially deny every such permission request and for the few they actually care about (getting notifications from 2 or 3 of the 50 apps that want notification access) they come and asked for assistance.
One of the nice things about the iOS ecosystem is that apps aren’t allowed to be nonfunctional if you deny them access to something.
Flatpaks, as well as snaps and appimages to a lesser extent, are a true godsend to the linux desktop. I can finally have a stable system and software released yesterday.
Unfortunately each has its own drawbacks and, in typical Linux Desktop fashion, it's 3 fragmented solutions to roughly the same problem with none of them being standard or enjoying a particularly de-facto status.
The end result being that you can't get everything in any one of them, and often can't get a particular application in any of them.
As someone who's released commercial software on linux before - having only 3 solutions to target is actually pretty delightful (We still build .deb and .rpm as well, so 5 really, after snap, flatpak and appimage)
Plus I find the general sandbox approach to be a LOT more stable - distro upgrades rarely causes issues, and dependencies are much easier to wrangle.
Definitely still some hiccups, but overall it feels like it's moving in a direction that I find easier to work with - both as a user and a developer.
Plus the markets are generally fairly large - sure I still dip into aur every now and then, but I mostly find the "Software I need at work" stuff available
In what sense? If you mean the fact there are multiple solutions, I don't think it's anything to do with Linux Desktop. I don't think that's even to do with Linux. More the plethora of alternatives in general when using FOSS. But that to some is its strength, not failure.
I disagree. Now to ensure I can install software I need not just one package manager, but at least 2 or 3 (atp, flatpak, snap). Of course that doesn't cover all the bases either, I'm still occasionally going to have to compile something from source because the developer didn't even bother making a binary because they don't want to build it for 5+ different packaging formats, several of which will need constant maintenance.
When it comes to platforms[0], you need to be able to depend on certain things being there and working a certain way. Fragmentation of a platform is bad, and Linux Desktop is so fragmented the various distros style themselves as entirely different OSs!
[0] As opposed to applications. Part of the problem is that historically there has never been a clear delineation in Linux Desktop.
> Fragmentation of a platform is bad, and Linux Desktop is so fragmented
This is the point I'm making though. There is fragmentation on the desktop (even if we just stick to window managers, display managers, desktop environments). But there's fragmentation EVERYWHERE. I can choose from thousands of distros, in numerous package formats, with different opinions on that collection of software and its default configuration.
Linux Desktop is fragmented but no worse, IMHO, than elsewhere. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but some people do like the choice otherwise those other choices wouldn't exist.
Android is also a prime example of the same thing.
I think there may be some misunderstanding. I'm using "Linux Desktop" to denote the collection of all software for Linux that provides the desktop experience. That includes all the distros, packaging formats, and whatnot.
If you compare Linux Desktop to other desktop operating systems it is catastrophically fragmented by comparison.
> Android is also a prime example of the same thing.
No, it really isn't, because I only have one package format that I have to package Android applications in and the only API I have to deal with is the Android API. Though of course that's a headache because of how new permissions and older APIs interact, but that's still a lot more straight-forward.
The point of the statement wasn't to badmouth developers for not making a Linux binary, it was to criticize the state of application deployment on Linux being so terrible that a developer didn't want to bother making a binary for it. That's true regardless of the cost of the software. Linux Desktop doesn't get to be all "please use me, I'm great!" and "well, what do you want for free?" at the same time.
Can't say I've stumbled upon a lot of desktop apps (not terminal utilities) that are not on Flathub. The list is pretty long: https://flathub.org/apps/category/All
From my experience, most of the popular proprietary ones (think: Slack, Discord, Spotify, whatever) are distributed both as a flatpak and as a snap, while more niche desktop apps are usually flatpak-exclusive (out of those options).
> Can't say I've stumbled upon a lot of desktop apps (not terminal utilities) that are not on Flathub.
Perhaps you just don't use that many things that aren't really popular or well known? I can't find PuTTY and KeePass (though obviously there are alternatives in those cases), applications that both have Linux versions and that I use every day (and aren't even that unknown).
Also, unfortunately the limitations of Flatpak mean even if what you want is there, say Wireshark, it often won't have full functionality because it is impossible to give it the permissions it needs. In Wireshark's case, it can't actually capture any packets. If you want to actually use it you'll still need to resort to a different installation method.
Window management. It's basically a way to segregate a general terminal (usually used for local stuff) from a window specifically for SSH.
For me this was a much bigger issue when I was on Windows, but also in Ubuntu which groups programs together similarly to the Windows taskbar. I'm on i3 now mostly and just use a normal terminal for ssh, but for quite some time I was using putty on linux specifically for window management.
Hi AnIdiotOnTheNet! I really appreciate your comments against linux. I'm true. Since I don't have much knowledge about NT's strengths, the comments I like the most are the ones where you highlight advantages of the NT kernel over linux.
It's been some time since I last read anything like that from you. Would you mind to comment if ebpf usage and the possible new futex2 syscall helps to close the gap between linux and NT with regards to async primitives?
Elementary is starting to actually look nicer than macOS. There's still some janky details here and there, but the overall design language is very nice.
It's a sign of how crappy mainstream UI design has gotten that the thing that is really drawing me to elementary OS are the gradients, shadows, and edges that give its UI sense of depth -- not the Linux underpinnings, multitouch, or "App Store". It makes the UI 1000x easier to grok at a glance than the flat crap Microsoft and Apple have been pushing out over the past few years, and just plain looks good! I'd love for it to kick off a move back to that kind of design, but sadly it doesn't look like that's the direction things are heading.
pop os puts a big ass orange line around the active window. its probably a bit gaudy but i love it.
it makes it so much easier to see where you're at, even at it the corner of your eye. i don't know if i could go back to other os's where the active window only gets a slightly darker drop shadow than the other windows.
Most tiling WMs have a similar feature, and you can adjust the size/color of the border and if it appears on all sides of the window or just some of them. I use Sway and have my border set to an aquamarine color. The border also gets used to show which way your container is split / where a new window will appear if you're focused on that window.
I just use the Arc GTK theme and use the kvantum Qt theme’s Arc preset. Makes both look pretty much the same. Qogir is another one that’s kind of cross-desktop.
Wow looks great. This fell off my radar for a bit, looking pretty nice now. Not gonna lie, having Gnome + Flatpak on Ubuntu LTS base already puts it near the top of my list, the styling and added usability features puts it over the top.
Ubuntu LTS base is also great for developers, as it seems most cloud images these days are just that. I've tried installing/building tools on other distros that I like more than Ubuntu but they always seem to use wonky options, libraries that are too old/new or in strange places, and I end up back at Ubuntu.
I tried eOS 5. The screenshots made it look the most user friendly of Linux distros (read: Apple knock off), and at first it feels that way. But it quickly starts to show how shallow that knock off is… and it’s a huge undertaking so I don’t blame them. First is what happens once you run anything that isn’t made by them — all of the sudden totally different UIs. Linux has this problem in spades because there is no standard (gnome, kde, whatever ppl want, etc), and there’s no one setting the bar (which Apple does on its own platform). Thus there’s no consistency to anything.
Their own apps similarly look ok at first, and then you go to use them and you realize it’s all very bare bones.
My system also froze/locked up a lot at random, and I don’t know why. Installing Ubuntu fixed that issue. Not sure what happened there.
Again I don’t blame them; not sure how many people are working for them, but creating a modern desktop and all the apps you’d expect from scratch is a huge undertaking. I hope they do well and provide Linux a real alternative experience. I’d love to see some way that they can extend into apps to make their look and feel more consistent somehow (gnome/kde skins? Something much more? Their own forks of popular apps?), and that the community ends up focusing around them so we get a distributed effort.
> First is what happens once you run anything that isn’t made by them — all of the sudden totally different UIs
That's a weird criticism. How many competing UI frameworks with completely different look'n'feel are there in a default win10 install ? How many control panels and file dialogs ?
Sure, and everyone complains about that on Win10 because it sucks there, too. Windows the OS has improved greatly over the years, in many ways, but the UI has mostly not improved, or has even regressed, since, oh, I dunno, win98/2k. Maybe WinXP.
No, no one really cares about homogeneity. Big name apps geared towards music, photo, video, 3D, GIS, IDE … have always looked somehow differently designed and for a good reason when compared to the browser and file manager.
There is more value in design than consistency on production oriented systems. It seems the contrary is preferred for mobile.
Those big-ass different looking applications on desktop you mention are creator's tools. It makes sense they differentiate (specialize) their UX to deliver maximum utility, especially important to carry it over a decade or more of OS design transitions. Of course they look different.
Mobile devices are by and large meant for and used as consumption tools. So consistency is desired there.
XP with the classic themes was the best. A while ago I did my best to get a decent browser that could display modern webpages running so perhaps I could use XP as a desktop. Nothing really works. Modern Java apps same thing, the JRE is frozen in time somewhere, .NET same thing. SSL isn't compatible. Perhaps one could compile a recent Wine, Mono/.NET or Java to XP and run some things.
I remember trying to make Dashboard widgets and got really hung up on trying to wrap my head around the canvas API. I didn't know that's where the current API is based off of though, very cool. :)
I prefer the Dashboard to its kind-of replacement, whatever they call the slidey-out widget sidebar thing you get when you click on the clock (which, unrelated to the comparison between those two since the Dashboard's invocation wasn't exactly sensible, either—what the hell?)
Yes!
You know Dashboard was a completely separate layer. I could watch a video in full screen and take notes with semi transparent stickes. Try doing that in full screen with the stickes app... You can't!
The dashboard feature is totally underrated. What would be even better would be if you could actually put any window in there.
Or if any window could be made semi transparent and float on top. And have that entire layer be toggleable with transitions....
It's total shame that they've removed it entirely.
They're just called "Widgets in Notification Center" now. Agreed that Dashboard was more useful, if I could put the new widgets in an overlay instead of the sidebar I would.
The Dashboard has been disabled by default since 2014’s OS X Yosemite, they kept it around because there was no reason not to, some people liked it. (Including me.)
Although I think the criticism is also overblown, there's a difference: under windows, it's mostly about look and feel. Older apps look like garbage, or are inconsistent with the current look. Take an older app and compare with an app from the store, and they look like they came from a different OS.
Interestingly, Microsoft Apps are the largest offenders, historically. They like to ship them with new versions of their common controls library, so it may take a while until you see changes in the OS itself (the ribbon being a large offender).
However, things work similarly. All the keyboard shortcuts work (unless they messed up on purpose), screen readers work, most settings work across the board (even if it makes the app look even worse). Change the color scheme, everything changes. In most cases, you can use the same API functions to interact with the controls, and WM messages tend to work consistently.
Not so with linux GUI toolkits. There has been a lot of effort in trying to make them look the same, but it's pretty obvious when an app is written in GTK vs QT or TK. Even the way they respond to sizing events change. Widgets work totally differently, keyboard shortcuts and conventions change.
It's less of a problem than it used to be, but it is still there, and it is sometimes very jarring. I don't know how to fix it, but it has to be fixed at some point.
Windows 10 is a disaster. Not exactly something to emulate, but at least it’s going to be some vintage of windows. So copy and paste will be consistent and not change ctrl versus meta versus select & middle mouse button. Linux is all over the place. I can’t even have consistent hidpi support without manual tweaks, and even then certain apps layouts become very strange.
I’m really comparing to macOS, which clearly is what eOS is trying to be.
This is pretty much why all the desktop Linux experiences fail. The major linux apps were all developed for different desktop experiences and so there's no consistency, even on things as basic as copy/paste shortcuts. It's very hard to get that without a powerful dictator shepherding the overall ecosystem and it's the achilles heel of FOSS for GUIs.
It is a crying shame that Linus, or some other benevolent dictator for life like Linus, never emerged to steer the Linux userland.
If there are parallel realities and alternate timelines, then somewhere out there is the one where everyone settled on GNUStep/WindowMaker in the 90s and Linux took over the Desktop by 2005.
GNUStep/WindowMaker are too "ugly" and many people use Linux purely out of being gaga at the beautiful window borders. Just look at any recent YouTube video about Linux, it'll likely be about how much better (KDE|Gnome|etc.) LOOK than Windows 11 (usability? That's that?)
To be honest, Gnome is a lot more usable than Windows in my experience. Most of the software I expect to be provided by the OS simply are better under Gnome: file browser, image viewer, terminal, windows and desktop manager (it's kind of shocking how the windows implementation of exposé is so poor).
Sadly, I can run neither Excel nor PowerPoint under Gnome. So I'm stuck with windows.
Gnome is in fact great, and has great usability. But my point was, for many Linux users (perhaps the most vocal), care about GUI looks over GUI usability. So GNUStep/WindowMaker are simply too "ugly" (although I think the experience of using them is superior to Gnome).
They do their own apps. It's actually one of their most frequent criticism - they recreate the wheel in building their own apps instead of focusing on the OS. And they do it for consistency, which is also goes against your other point.
It sounds so unsustainable in the long run. It's good that we have parallel alternatives for some categories of apps, but we need better apps not more shallow copies of apps. The gnome project is doing the same thing, so the same kind of goes for them.
This is a series of complaints about the project as it stood in 2018, when eOS 5 was new. You don't suspect that maybe some of your criticism might have aged out? Maybe some of your recommendations are redundant by now?
XQuartz and GTK apps on MacOS are the exception. A bigger problem with regards to inconsistent UI/UX stems from Electron apps and apps like Firefox which implement its own context menus, for example, and don't interact with the OS with things like Applescript, which Chromium browsers and Safari do. Still, there's a lot of applications that do respect the OS paradigms for design and user experience. Interfacing with applications is fairly consistent, though this has been degrading for some time with the rise of Electron.
On linux, there is no paradigm to stray from and there's no consistent design language or UX because of the fractured nature of its ecosystem. There are incredibly well made applications for KDE, GTK, and Electron, all with their own ideas of what UX should be and what UI it should look like.
I love elementary OS and would use it on all my computers if I didn't love NixOS even more (and sometimes I use NixOS with Pantheon, elementary's window manager).
> all AppCenter apps are now packaged and distributed as Flatpaks, a modern container format that keeps apps siloed away from each other—and your sensitive data
All apps are siloed from your sensitive data? That is a little um simplified or misleading or something. They may have done a great job with security now that they have Portals, but it is surely a much more complicated story than the above quote suggests.
I have tried Linux desktop. One of the couple things I can’t get over with is remote. It seems there’s no straight and reliable way to remote to the same session of the host desktop. In addition, Windows RDP can also reliably adjust to client screen setup.
Hmm, VNC would normally be the way to handle that on Linux? If you have a session going and fire up your VNC server of choice, you should be able to connect to it from another machine (I can't say I do that much personally, though I did set up a little fanless box as dashboard kiosk that way for my team a while back).
Last I checked, VNC wasn’t really comparable to RDP in terms of performance. I work in a remote session basically all day long and it’s suitable for graphics and video among everything else.
It will create a separated session different from the local session. Basically if I used my desktop in office, and when I remote in from home, it won't show me the same windows I opened before.
Assuming I'm understanding the ask correctly, x11vnc will attach to an existing X session in place. Dunno about adjusting resolution; not sure VNC can do that.
Serious question. Do you have to use a GUI? Windows RDP is more polished because generally the only way to interact with a server is through a GUI. Even powershell didn't move the needle that much.
On Linux, interaction is overwhelmingly through SSH. Or a client/server app.
Of course, the canonical answer to that is remote Xorg. It needs a high performance connection and X running on both sides, but it works. And the most Windows-like answer is VNC.
Pretty sure I had to tweak some settings in Xrdp.ini, it wasn't the default - ordinarily it would start a whole new desktop session for each connection. We use it with the stock gnome on RHEL7 but I'm pretty sure it would work the same way with any DE.
Performance seems okay for me as long as you don't use fancy backgrounds. Not as good as native windows RDP, but definitely usable.
These are secured jumpboxes in our lab/production environments we RDP (or SSH) into via the VPN, but we used to connect to them from the office LAN back in the days when we actually worked in an office.
Ah okay. Yeah these are VM's running on an ESX cluster in a datacenter, I wouldn't want to sit in front of one. It'd be noisy and awkward since you can't use the desktop from an ESX console.
For cloud workloads, I prefer alpine on Amazon Linux 2 hosts. For desktop, I prefer Elementary. It's great to see an update on the best (imho) desktop distro.
That's precisely what got me into Linux desktop as well. After trying out dozens or so distros, my beaten up Asus laptop kept running absurdly hot (like 80 degrees celsius). elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) was lightweight enough that it was the first distro I've tried that I could actually use as a daily driver.
I've been using elementary OS since. I've tried some other distros, but those experiences usually ended up with me trying to recreate elementary feeling, failing, and then returning back to elementary OS a couple of weeks later.
That trackpad gesture support where it actually tracks with your finger movement looks really nice. Is this typical in Linux distros now, or is elementary going above and beyond the rest with that?
It’s not typical at all. Only in the recently released version 40 Gnome has shipped what feels like a prototype of this.
Before then only the obscure Wayfire had a similar gesture for desktop switching (actually good) and there were a few projects hacking it up with simulated keyboard shortcuts (obviously not the same at all).
Honestly I think this is the most exciting thing, and I'm very glad to see support for it from the DE itself. Currently I think as someone else mentioned it's only GNOME that does it, otherwise you have to use hacky third party programs like touchegg which essentially just emulate certain keyboard shortcuts. So don't even think about finger movement tracking
I always wondered how an open-source project develops from scratch so many different apps (e.g. Web, Mail, Calendar, etc). Why not focusing more on the OS rather than wasting resources on apps that there are mature open-source alternatives (e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox, etc)?
I love the look and feel of elementary, but I'm always skeptical of trying new Linux DEs. I want them to work well, and they often do, but 4K and scaling support is very hit or miss with the ones I've used. I'm currently using Gnome and not impressed at all, just settling on it. Does anyone have experience with other DEs recently with this? Either KDE or Pantheon, or something else? I just want good 4K support and scaling that doesn't causes awful tearing or window bugs.
Do you need a DE? Linux is my daily driver for work and home. I've tried DEs and found them bloated and slow. I have been using i3-wm for years and loving it. You can always use picom compositor on top to mitigate visual glitches.
I really like elementary and the ecosystem-like, but open approach they're taking to desktop linux.
One aspect of it I feel often goes underappreciated is how lightweight it is. Provided you have a reasonable amount of RAM for the tasks you're trying to do, e.g. 4GB+ for normal desktop usage and an SSD, you can run it on fairly old CPUs and it will be blazing fast still.
Can't wait to give this version a whirl!
As I've said before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26661615), we use Elementary OS as our point-of-sale terminals in a small chain of resale stores, and it's been super solid. It's been a good choice for us.
That sounds fantastic to see that sort of thing being used out in the open. Aside from using the Ember-electron POS app can customers access other parts of the UI or elementary OS applications? What made you choose elementary OS in particular? I'd imagine the advantage of using it over ubuntu gnome would be fairly minimised if the user would be locked to just a single application.
Customers don't interact with the POS but our staff do. I tried several distributions a couple years ago and found that Elementary had the least amount of clutter in the UI. Our staff are young and most are not technically savvy. For many, an iPhone is their most familiar computing device. This was the environment that seemed most comfortable. The dock bar at the bottom also made it easy to present the limited number of apps they would need.
Been using Elementary for a couple months and it's pretty comfortable.
Every new version, however, I look to see if they've added support to increase mouse scroll wheel speed with no success. Sadly, it's still in the limbo circle of blame between GNOME,libinput,x,wayland,etc.
This is a great looking release and I really don’t think enough attention is being drawn to just how lovely the elementaryOS desktop looks and feels on a hi-DPI display, which is not something I can say for most Linux desktops. Also the font hinting/text rendering looks excellent too.
Never had any problem with them however there were some serious usability issues like the AltTab behavior, absence of mouse focus options etc etc. I also remember the animations were laggy. Switched to KDE and it feels like the full package
The biggest hurdle Linux has to overcome is somehow convincing major players to release Linux version of their apps. Making a beautiful skin is not going to solve the main Linux catch-22: not enough market share to have main apps, not enough main apps to increase market share. Excel, Power point (essential for business and school) creativity apps like Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Their are essential to most people work-flows and the biggest hurdle to adoption.
VM's partly solves the problem, but You need to have a decent computer and small technical chops.
I have a rather weird question: can Elementary be tiled and keyboard driven (at least for windows)? I like the general app visuals and their GUI philosophy but floating windows are so passé.
While I agree with you, this project originslly began (IIRC) to showcase a new theme for Ubuntu/Gnome. The main developers are designers first, and the target is to make Linux desktop more user friendly.
You and I survived the trials amd now wamt performance. I personally will lilely never use elementary, but you and I are not the target audience.
My main issue is still app notifications in the panel. IF I'm running a syning app like Insync. I want to have the app notifier in the system tray so I can see the status without having to check the service manually to see if its running.
The main things keeping me from using Linux as a daily driver are:
1) My personal desktop has Windows for games
2) My laptops (personal and work) are Macs because Apple simply makes the best laptops
When I've dual-booted in the past it's been a huge pain, and I didn't end up bothering to switch to Linux very often in practice anyway. Linux laptops exist, but they tend to be spotty in terms of build-quality and power. Gaming on Linux can technically be done, but I don't want my expensive machine to be unable to play some things because of the OS.
There are lots of little things, most of which could be overcome with effort, but these days I'd rather use my devices than tinker with them most of the time.
I guess I just wish I had an excuse to use something like Elementary or PopOS. I would if I had an a) desktop that b) was mainly for projects. But alas, I don't.
On the desktop front, I've been hearing about virtualizing windows on Linux with a framebuffer that maps directly to the GPU. Then you get to keep something like 95% performance. I forget what it's called, but I remember seeing a subreddit for it. FBIO?
I wasn't talking about performance, I was talking about compatibility with games. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I've edited.
Valve has been doing amazing things in this space, but for now my understanding is that it's more of a "most games will work pretty well" scenario, which is not really what I want for my primary games machine.
Well thats the perk, you get games compatibility. Windows runs in a window with direct access to the GPU. I primary Windows because of games and music software, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
As another comment points out, its called VFIO. From that subreddit: "VFIO stands for Virtual Function I/O. VFIO is a device driver that is used to assign devices to virtual machines. One of the most common uses of vfio is setting up a virtual machine with full access to a dedicated GPU. This enables near-bare-metal gaming performance in a Windows VM, offering a great alternative to dual-booting"
AFAIK, for the setup they're talking about, you do need a dedicated GPU. You blacklist it on the host, and pass it through to the windows VM.
I haven't worked in windows space in awhile though, and state changes rapidly, so there may be other options now that utilize a single GPU across host and vm without losing performance.
Congrats Elementary team! The focus on accessibility and inclusivity (gender neutral iconography too!) is awesome! Not a fan of Debian-based distros, but still tempted to take it for a spin.
Yes, elementary OS is preparing for an eventual switch to Wayland.
> The primary motivation for this change is the eventual move to Wayland (a protocol that will make your device faster and safer), but this also gives us more creative control over these features.
Interesting design choice. I use OSX (work laptop) and Linux Mint (home PC) and your comment got me thinking about their "minimize" button: I hate OSX behaviour of the minimize button: It hides the window and adds an additional icon in the task bar... before getting used to it for me it seemed as if OSX was "hiding" windows from me. Linux Mint has the expected (i.e. Windows 95) behaviour. Nevertheless I don't think I use a minimize button as long as I did before.
wow, the icons, window borders, shading, everything is crisp and just pops
maybe just me but i felt a lower cognitive load compared to big sur, and especially monterey where everything is super low contrast, large margins between items, and all the icons are hard to differentiate same-color outlines...
As a heavy macOS user, it doesn't seem that macy to me.
There's far fewer flat icon in its design, the shortcut hints are styled in a completely different manner, there's no global menu bar (not that they have a choice with GTK+), and the top bar widget actions are more complex than the ones you see in macOS
Does it allow you to drag a file into a terminal and get a path to that file in the prompt? That's a VERY neat user experience I like about OSX that I miss in my Linux Mint PC.
Those sort of things would make it a "UX alike" instead of only "look and feel"
Hmm, my impression of Pop!_OS is that it's a more opinionated Gnome desktop on a pretty standard Ubuntu base (I like their tiling options). elementary seems like a more ambitious project, but since they don't make and sell hardware too, (unlike System76 and Pop!) it seems like they have more of an uphill battle.
Yes, still experimental. We recently merged in the ability to cross-compile Flatpak apps across x86 and ARM, so hopefully that leads to a more official status soon.
Can't help but notice that the Sound indicator's dropdown doesn't line up with the icon above it. But the fact that a single UI glitch is a notable item now says a lot about the overall quality. Very tidy, still customizable, and a suite of built-in software that ought to cover most users. Good stuff.