
Myths about ElementaryOS - dgellow
http://elementaryos.org/journal/5-myths-about-elementary
======
munchor
As one of the people behind elementary OS, this blog posts pretty much
summarises how hard of a time I have when reading online criticism on
elementary OS. Feedback is good, we love it and realize how important it is.
However, for the most part the complaints are not about the OS itself but
instead on some of these myths (or worse even, how we're "just a blatant copy
of OS X" when we have our own ideas and identity).

We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we
hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.

~~~
gy3b
First of all great work on Elementary. One thing that doesn't help with the
"Copy of OSX" comments is the video on the front page where the desktop uses
the Mountain Lion wallpaper.

~~~
ekianjo
> desktop uses the Mountain Lion wallpaper.

It's not exactly the same as far as I know. You can use another picture of the
same Galaxy without it being the same picture. Plus it appears for 5 seconds
on the video and not all the time. They are other wallpapers shown in the
video.

~~~
eddieroger
The fact that it needs defending is kind of the point. It looks similar enough
to evoke the reaction from most people that it is similar to OS X, which is
more than like a goal and not an accident. It may not be the exact image, but
it doesn't have to be.

------
Brakenshire
It's very impressive that a relatively small team could rewrite huge swathes
of userland applications from scratch, and end up with something more polished
and lighter-weight than much of the competition.

It seems like the sort of thing which could happen as a matter of course if
the money was there from the community to support developers working full-time
over the long term on these sorts of projects.

One thing I'd like to see would be elementary experimenting with ways of
encouraging people to support development. It really should be a matter of
course to donate $20-30 in exchange for something which makes your computer
function substantively better, especially when many of the users are IT
professionals who earn good salaries. But it doesn't appear to happen, for one
reason or another.

Perhaps, open up the books, and give people real-time, kickstarter-like
information about the donations as they are ongoing, where the money will be
spent, and how much more is needed. I'm sure there must be a way of nudging
people to get out their chequebooks.

~~~
danford
> something more polished

What do you mean by this? IMO the last time I used EOS it was lacking in a lot
of areas. This was only a few months ago.

Installation was fast and everything was automated, the install window had a
"drop-down" terminal to watch processes, but nothing was there. I expected to
be asked to re-size my partitions but never was. When I rebooted I noticed
grub was a little borked, showing EOS, EOS recovery, Windows 7, and then about
30 or so entries of old kernels (I know I need to clean these up). It should
have showed two more ubuntu OSs installed. I can still boot into my other two
installations fine, I just had to do some guess work on what to pick in grub.

So I get into EOS and things are pretty cool, the thing I like best is the
speed. Everything seems instant, well except the applications menu, it was a
few milliseconds slower than anything else on the DE and that was annoying as
I would often end up clicking it a second time causing it to open twice, which
was kind of hard on the eyes. Coming from a Gnome 3 environment, I decided to
change some things on the interface around to make it more like the gnome
shell. Moved the launcher to the left, assigned the top left hot corner to
show all windows, things were looking pretty good.

I tried using midori but the font rendering was just not worth it so I
installed chromium, and of course that came with a lot of dependencies (around
300mb), so I tried to find out exactly how much space I had left on the
partition (I some how missed the partition editor in the install). I opened
the file browser and really liked it. you could see how much space was being
used by each partition with "progress bars", but not by the EOS partition.
There was no way to right click and select "properties" on the EOS partition,
so I opened up the applications menu (twice) to find the "system monitor",
because on Ubuntu, the system monitor shows how much space you have. But the
OS had no graphical system monitor. I'm sure top was installed, but it's not
the same. I was able to right click my home folder and select properties and
this showed how much space I had on my partition.

Next I opened the terminal. I forget the name of the default terminal, but it
wasn't gnome-terminal. It was a very utilitarian terminal that had tabs and no
menu bar. I couldn't figure out how to change the look of it or get the tabs
to go away.

Overall I give EOS a 5.9/10 It's fast, but it lacks a lot of functionality I
look for in an OS like this. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I feel it
will be a long time before EOS is as robust and polished as Ubuntu. I realize
that EOS is meant to be lighter than Ubuntu and use different programs, but at
this point it's just not ready to be my work horse.

------
madprops
elementary OS is one of the most promising Linux distributions. This for
several reasons, like having a good installer and an overall clean desktop
experience. But also because of the applications they are making themselves
like Noise or Files.

That being said, I don't agree with some of the design decisions, which stop
me from fully supporting the project.

For example I don't like the idea of having a top panel. It is constantly
there wasting space only to show some tray icons a clock and a link to a
launcher menu. Personally I prefer a single panel on the bottom, think Windows
7, there is enough horizontal space to show everything in a single row. Top
panels just look bad in my opinion, for a normal maximized window you have the
panel layer, then the titlebar layer, then the window. If you insist on having
the notification bar on top at least, please, use wingpanel-slim (with the
application launcher disabled and autohide).

------
arjie
The 'outdated' comment stems from the fact that we depend very much on the
repos. Being based on an old release means we don't have access to lots of
software.

I use Elementary on the desktop and laptop and like it. Can't wait for dock
improvements.

------
justin66
The first myth is a valid point, although it comes across as a little
defensive. The person who wrote it is an elementary OS developer, I suspect,
and I wonder if they are missing an important point: it would be _FUCKING
AWESOME_ if Elementary OS were "just a theme on top of Ubuntu."

It would presumably mean more frequent releases, less dependency on any given
version of Ubuntu, smaller workload on the developers, and so on. Reinventing
_every_ part of the OS, including the bits that people hope to use as little
as possible, might not be the best strategy at this stage. (I have no
illusions as to whether they'll change their strategy)

------
bndr
The problem I have with elementaryOS is that there is no defined release
schedule (like e.g Ubuntu or Fedora). So there's no ETAs or anything.

~~~
spain
It's kind of sad too, because the Elementary developers originally planned to
release Isis (the next release) around April to prove that they can stick to
schedules [0], but that now seems to have changed to the usual "It'll be done
when it's done." Relevant quote below:

"Also, I think in general most of us think it would be the best idea to
release Isis (see, I'm already going with it) as closely as possible to Ubuntu
14.04. We have a lot to prove about our ability to provide updates in a timely
manner and we're getting some negative feedback from developers/nerds about
our 12.04 base. So let's address that and make sure that elementary is the
best open platform for both users and developers (and I guess nerds too)."

[0] [https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-
community/msg0257...](https://lists.launchpad.net/elementary-dev-
community/msg02577.html)

~~~
Maskawanian
Which would be better though, a rush job, or something that has polish (which
seems to be the whole goal of Elementary). I suppose it is kind of like the
difference between Valve and so many other games publishers out there.

------
jjsz
eOS has too much eye candy. Someone suggested in the comment section to
install alucryd's PKGBUILDs to gain access to updated packages on Arch. If
you're already thinking of Arch because of that comment, this should be enough
eye candy: lightdm, cinnamon + CoverflowAltTab, plank + plank-themer, nautilus
or spaceFM, themes like Numix + cinnamon-chronumix [1], awesomeWM, and reEFInd
and a minimal theme [2]. Not sure why people opt in for a visual
representation of applications when they need to browse to install
applications...there's the list of applications in the wiki and /r/unixporn if
you need visuals..

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/serdotlinecho/cinnamon-
chr...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/serdotlinecho/cinnamon-
chronumix/master/screenshot.png)

[2]
[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/32729998da4401a2aef674308...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/32729998da4401a2aef67430828c62a2270b7a50/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f51323676514a782e6a7067)

------
leorocky
When it comes to problems with Linux as a personal desktop OS, the appearance
of the GUI is among my lowest concerns. What prevents me from considering
Linux as a desktop or laptop OS includes: horrible battery life times (worse
than half for a friend's thinkpad when compared to it running Windows), how
difficult it is to get Bluetooth and Wifi working, really bad multi-touch for
trackpads.

The problems with Linux as a replacement for Windows or Mac are that the
fundamentals are not there. Recent hardware support is non-existent as
volunteers have to write drivers so you're likely stuck with old hardware.
You'll get anecdotes of people who are happy with what they have, but any such
person that I've known long enough I've seen them gripe on IRC about things
that are completely trivial or just not even issues on Windows or a Mac.

Linux needs a hero with deep pockets that builds their own hardware and
drivers. I thought Dell might have been that hero once, but it never became a
priority for them.

If you could get elementary OS working on a nice slim, powerful Samsung or
Thinkpad laptop, with good battery life and driver support then I'd think
you'd really have something.

~~~
chroem
This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux
distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to
see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life
on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows
installation.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Both my Windows and OSX machines know that if I connect my bluetooth speaker
to them, to play the sound through the speaker. Likewise, they know that if I
plug in a Logitech USB dongle into the machine, that the sound and mic should
go through the dongle.

Elementary is better than most at having some sort of easy to use, functioning
bluetooth setup, but every time I use one of these devices I have to go into
sound settings and switch them to the device. It's a pain in the ass that
other companies have figured out.

~~~
eddiedunn
This can be fixed by editing your pulseaudio settings:

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Automaticall...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Automatically_switch_to_Bluetooth_or_USB_headset)

I do agree, though, that it is weird that this is not enabled by default.

------
hisham_hm
I was honestly expecting a post about the accusations of being an "OSX
clone/ripoff/etc."

------
DAddYE
Quick question, does ElementaryOS handle hiDPI better than any DE out there? I
found frustrating it on gnome 3.12.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Which OS? For some reason Arch's Gnome handles hiDPI terribly, but Gnome
Ubuntu is very good. So I stopped fighting it and just installed Gnome Ubuntu.

~~~
DAddYE
Jeez, thanks I'm exactly on Arch -.-'

------
krisgenre
I love eOS but I've been spoiled by Unity and Google Chrome, I hate having the
title bar.

------
Aissen
Most important point: does ElementaryOS support EFL-based elementary apps ?

------
Yuioup
I'm missing Myth #6: elementaryOS is a clone of OS X

~~~
st0p
And I'm missing fact #1: WTF is elementaryOS and why should I care?

~~~
sergiotapia
It's a Linux distro, read here:
[http://elementaryos.org/](http://elementaryos.org/)

