My biggest gripe against Elementary OS 6, that I think everyone thinking about using it should consider: There is currently no upgrade path from Elementary OS 5 that is officially supported.
You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall.
Considering that Elementary OS is somewhat marketed as being ideal for, say, elderly folks or people less experienced with their PC, as something that a Linux user might install for non-techie friends, this is beyond unacceptable and also shows a certain lack of technical competence for the folks running it.
Edit: Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe? I'm trying to avoid using profanity...
It’s really hard to beat chrome OS for this use case.
Options from $200-$1000+, with good options around $400 on sale.
Issues? Power wash it.
Really broken? Go buy another one.
Lost or stolen? Buy another one and log in.
Need office? Google’s products work well. Need more? O365 subscription.
Want more security? Two factor auth with a Yubikey.
I recognize that this relies on Google and Microsoft and is not FOSS and has privacy issues and everything else. But I do not have enough time to spend managing my extended family’s IT beyond giving them chromebooks that achieve 99% of what they need to do with very little input on my part. If they want to invest time in learning about Linux and get away from Google and MSFT, that’s fine, but they can do it on their own time with a test machine and keep Chrome OS as their daily driver until they are confident on their own.
Chrome OS devices have a fixed "kill" date when they will stop getting updates. Google Chrome OS devices do not have an AUE date beyond 5-6 years. I will not recommend Chrome devices to friends until they change this wasteful practice.
The chromebook i bought my mother in law announced back in September it’s getting no more updates.
Other chromebooks with comparable hardware are still getting updates. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware. It’s still snappy to use. Battery life is still north of 4 hours. Just no more updates suddenly from Google.
A few years ago, I used elementary OS for my workstation at work. As part of an upgrade, I ran their backup program to make a backup to a removable disk. It went through the full backup process. Apparently, there was a 'bug' in the software where if you click on it, and then hit select in the folder dialog, instead of double click the destination, (it might have been the other way around, it was a few years ago). the backup would essentially write an empty file. How much fun it is to rebuild all your data from other sources!
I submitted a bug report and essentially got a DM from someeone that it was still on their todo list, and had been that way for a while. That was the last time I used them.
I haven't used a Linux desktop in quite a while, but Crunchbang was pretty great. No desktop (as far as I remember), right-click menu as the one source find everything, a minimalist taskbar, and a better terminal than what shipped with any Debian distro. It was a sad day when the author abandoned it, although it's really not hard to just download Debian and replace the DE with Openbox and the other things that came with Crunchbang.
Do you remember which program that was? Afaik elementary does not have any official backup application or function so I wouldn't put the blame on them here.
I often think that Linux needs to divorce itself from the notion of distributions and instead we need to find a better way to deliver these all-inclusive experiences in some alternate way. Specifically in this case I love everything that Elementary is doing but wish you could "bring your own OS"
This is the issue with Linux Desktop - every time you want to try something new you need to effectively reinvent the wheel for yourself. Most things end up being the same though, my browser is my browser, my data is my data. I can compartmentalize some of that to make it portable between distributions but I feel like that is solving the problem from the wrong direction.
At some point I would hope this becomes a DE like Gnome or KDE. Inventing your own programming language, app marketplace etc... is admirable but seems like it is being done in vein.
Well, if you ask the folk over at Red Hat, they agree. And they're doing it within their code, which is both working and simultaneously making the old-timers very, very angry.
They've been sponsoring GNOME, which has been pushing the simplified, mobile-friendly look for almost a decade now. They've also (I believe) been behind the scenes in GNOME's push to kill theming on the behalf of developers who hate their apps getting themed, which of course distributions hate because that hurts the ability to stand out. If GNOME looks the same on every distribution, your distribution sticks out less.
Red Hat has also been behind sponsoring SystemD, which for better or worse brought every distribution kicking and screaming into a more consistent "low level" layout. Again though, this makes management across Linux systems somewhat easier, while making distribution-specific differences smaller.
Red Hat has been behind Flatpak, which compartmentalizes applications and means that they can run on any distribution when built against a common runtime. For app developers and new people, this is great as a "Linux app" just runs on any "Linux" distribution, easy. For old-timers and technical folk (even on here)... again it's with kicking and screaming. And if you are a distribution author, every distribution now runs the same apps, so what's so special about your distro again?
Red Hat has also been behind PulseAudio and PipeWire, which changed how audio worked on Linux... again with kicking and screaming.
The point is, Red Hat keeps working on technology that, I would argue, makes Linux more consistent and approachable to newcomers, but massively changes how it works which angers old-timers and also happens to reduce diversity within distributions as to how things are done. This makes things easier for programmers, but erodes away the proliferation of distributions because the differences between them get smaller and smaller.
Because, if Red Hat gets their way, consider: Every desktop that uses GNOME looks the same because there isn't as much theming. Every desktop runs the same apps using Flatpak. Every desktop has similar low-level internals with SystemD. If you are a distribution maker, not much left to stand out now, is there? Again, app developers love this, but if you are a distribution maker, Red Hat is trying to kill your edge.
Yea, even just something simple like backing up your home directory, and being able to store the packages you've installed via a package manager. I've done this sort of thing myself, but it's a manual process, and you need to know how to write some bash.
> Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe?
This is a totally valid complaint given the target market, but for me personally there are few pleasures greater than a fresh OS install. It’s like a blank white page, full of hope and opportunity… soon to be ink-stained and dog eared and with a broken X config, in need of replacing.
> You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall.
You're acting as if this is some kind of massive and unprecedented inconvenience, but this is Linux, where users routinely recommend to one another that they try a different distro to solve application problems. By comparison, what you brought up is pretty tame.
I recently put my Dad on Linux. Elementary was a disaster- compatibility and app issues did us in. I'm so happy we moved on because I did not realize that we would have had upgrade issues too.
Hmmm I did not know this, but I am also not very surprised really. There are so many customizations they've made in post versions though that I imagine this probably isn't the first time they did not offer an upgrade path.
They are also very slow in supporting the latest LTS builds. I think people should move on to something like Ubuntu Budgie when they want a simple and clean experience for themselves or others.
Ubuntu Budgie keeps their LTS and interim builds in sync very well with upstream Ubuntu and upstream Budgie & I have never seen fossfreedom shoot down a PR that makes sense. He's often encouraged others to contribute to the distro in very healthy and normal ways.
Maybe i'm not up to par, but I was under the impression that even ubuntu wasn't mature to upgrade between major versions. I never dabbled much but upgrade failure are not unheard of.
Ubuntu has offered distributions upgrades for years in the Software Updater. It just tells you, you click Install, it takes a while and a few reboots, and then you're updated. I've done it on servers, I've done it on desktops, works fine most of the time. However, I've only hopped one version at a time (16.04 -> 18.04, 18.04 -> 20.04), never multiple at once (16.04 -> 20.04).
Of course, sometimes failures do occur, but that happens whenever you do a major OS upgrade. I've had Windows fail on upgrade more than I've had Ubuntu fail on upgrade, but that's just my experience.
This in comparison to, well, Elementary OS saying scrap it all and reinstall. That wouldn't be so bad if they were, like, a technically-minded distribution - but for their primary market who hardly knows anything about updates, completely unacceptable.
I've upgraded Debian based systems between versions for literally over two decades, and Fedora for half a decade. I can't recall one issue, excluding a few weird things that I managed to fix in Slink to Potato Debian, and that was two decades ago.
Ubuntu/Debian tests upgrades and they support it, the issues you will see are caused because in our circles people will install extra stuff outside from the main repos.
You most definitely can. do-release-upgrade handles all of it but you can change sources and do it the old school way. It's always preferable to reinstall using automation but if it's just a hobbyist server then there's no issue.
If you know what you're doing, the upgrade process is the same for any Debian-based distribution, and I've never had it fail in an unresolvable way. I assume the same is true for Elementary, though I've never used it.
Distros like Ubuntu make upgrade failures harder to work through because they go to some lengths to wrap the dist upgrade process in some software that reverts everything if anything goes wrong.
But if you just move all your apt sources forward to the next distro and read any specific error messages you get, you can generally work through them.
Distros other than Debian itself don't typically recommend that you do things this way, and instead have some extra software for going through the process. But the Debian way still works on them.
This is not the case for Ubuntu -- it's always supported upgrading from one release to the next, and that is the normal and expected thing to do.
The same is true for Debian, Fedora, and... well, every Linux distro I've ever known people using on their desktops/laptops. For good reason, because it is a pretty essential feature in that context.
I love elementary, although I couldn't make 6.0 work on my Nvidia-based machine (something has changed about the driver installation?).
What annoys me is that AppCenter takes up so much space in their blog posts and sponsoring campaigns, because I feel it's the worst of their apps. The navigation model never made sense to me (why is search disabled when I'm on "Installed"?). It also doesn't look good, because there are way more tiny utility apps than there are good icon designers, and often the icons are just shown on a giant, colored rectangle because apps have no banner images.
I wish they'd do it more "magazine-like" as Apple does, just with more unsplash images instead of Apple's terrible Corporate Memphis illustrations.
I love elementary a lot, so it hurts for me to admit that I agree.
I'm stuck on an older kernel because the nvidia drivers are borked, but worst of all the AppCenter is truly horrid.
For a distro that does such a good job at making sure that there is a GUI alternative in addition to all the normal things you'd do in a CLI, the AppCenter is really crummy.
Ubuntu actually does a better job of making sure you can sort out your drivers through the GUI.
I haven’t experienced issues with Nvidia drivers, but I did face this with AMD drivers which can be oddly specific in terms of Linux distro support [1]. I was forced to abandon Elementary and instead tried Ubuntu Budgie [2].
Same with the System Settings: Here search is disabled as well when you are not on the index page. So quickly going from display to drivers or similar is not possible.
My problem with Elementary OS is that, it comes with a selection of apps that look beautiful but are just... really bad.
For example, the Music app. Comes built-in, looks great, only works with your local music library if you copy it over and reorganize it the way the Music app wants. No online music streaming of any kind.
The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it except (IIRC) it has videos from The Guardian newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that?
The Maps app? Looks beautiful, again, but the last time I tried it, it could hardly handle directions. Maybe Directions work well now, but it's just... not good.
To play devil's advocate, the apps being simple to the point of pain for power users is almost the point of the distro. If you want a distro that you can wrangle into exactly what your vision is, you'll love arch. If you want the simplest possible mostly-functional option where you don't need to change anything to get it to work, elementary isn't too bad. That said I hate using it and generally dislike their entire philosophy of taking an open program, stripping out three quarters of the code, and then calling it their own and begging for money to keep doing that. Feels gross.
None of the issues you mentioned are really fixable. Online streaming is a bit of a pipe dream for linux, legal(ish?) solutions are going to be hacky and break constantly since nobody has the negotiating power to work out deals with labels. Same with videos, alphabet is not going to just allow random apps to bypass the entire point of youtube (serving ads to eyeballs and tracking said eyeballs to serve more ads). Maps does suck, and that's mostly and openstreetmap issue. You could integrate google maps but those API keys are not cheap.
Arch user here who's slapped the Pantheon desktop on top of it; I don't use it often, mostly an i3 guy, but when I do it's beautiful and I love the work Elementary OS has put into it. All I need to add are those dancing icons from Cairo-Dock and I can get back to embarrassing my apple friends with how riced my desktop is.
It has a really weird feedback loop problem. I've spoken to some developers of the most popular elementaryOS apps and the amount they get from donations is extremely small, which limits how much time they want to spend making an app specific to such a small userbase. At some point they usually consider that the monetization of the app on elementaryOS isn't worth anything and they just re-work the app to be for Gnome systems overall and push it to Flathub.
IMHO it's a lost cause trying to make money with apps, especially on Linux. Of course there are a few well known exceptions, but I'm not sure it's a worthwhile endeavor in 2022 to say "hey I'm gonna build an app and live of it".
The Music app does what it's supposed to: play your music. Their stance is that arbitrary streaming platforms should be their own app, which makes sense.
The Videos app likewise plays your videos. No idea where you're getting that bit about The Guardian, but that's just flat out false.
There is no first-party Maps app, so again, that's not something that the elementary team provides...
Constructive criticism is helpful, but only when it's informed.
I agree about multimedia apps, I always replace Music and Videos with something else. But on the other hand dev-focused apps (primarily Code and Terminal) are so stable and good that I never have to install an alternative to them. Calendar and Mail are also pretty awesome.
I feel like the more internal team relies on them, the better they are. And, well, I guess they don't use multimedia apps a lot.
I run elementary on my desktop and I really like it. This looks like a welcomed minor release, but here are some things that are currently on my wish list:
- Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into DavMail all the time
- A Mail app that lets me view emails in plain text first, or some kind of option to avoid downloading images and trackers in HTML mode.
- The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs.
- A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one works fine)
A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love about elementary:
- It looks fantastic.
- The terminal, code, and files apps are where I live and they are great. Code isn't a replacement for VS Code, but it's quick and light and fantastic when I don't need e.g.: a linter.
- Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable.
- The OS truly feels unified; not some hodgepodge of poorly conceived UI elements and metaphors.
> You can currently find over 90 curated apps in AppCenter, [...]
I don't think this is as impressive as they think it is. On the contrary, this seems to be a very very small number that I wonder why it's mentioned in the first place. I don't use these GUI frontends, but if we ever want any Linux distro to be more user-friendly. Almost everything should be available.
Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high. We have been complaining about Apple and Google, yet "we"(?) cannot seem to be doing better ourselves. It's a bit disappointing.
I just tried elementaryOS and the selection of apps is terrible. There is almost nothing there that you actually need and of the apps that were there I found either unusable or so lacking in functionality compared to other apps it wasn't worth trying to compromise.
> Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high
It does seem really high considering they are just taking from one Stripe account to another.
I tried Elementary for a week recently but just couldn't make it stick.
The Calendar app doesn't work with Google Calendar as a backend; or, at least not with a ton of hacks, which is what one chooses Elementary to avoid.
Overall the Pantheon WM feels rather sluggish, even on modern hardware. Managing windows just feels so clunky compared to KDE or even Windows. To be fair, macOS is their direct competitor.
I paid a bug bounty ages ago to get streaming audio to work in their Music app but I don't think that went anywhere.
I think they might be able to get something solid in the next few years.
I used Elementary on my desktop for a little bit, and while it's definitely better than modern GNOME in many respects, the developers are similarly stuck in a pearls-before-swine mindset. The more you ask from it, the quicker you start to find it's edges; if you're just browsing the web and listening to Spotify, you're not likely to find any issues. Turning it into a proper development machine has more rough edges than it has any right to though, and while I generally like their approach to customization and tweaking better than GNOME, it's still a pretty barren little desktop. You'll end up replacing most of the out-of-the-box software within a few hours.
So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.
"AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers—and since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond!"
As someone that has used Elementary on my x200s for a number of years, at least since the 4.x days, I was disappointed to find the lack of support for the 11th gen/Iris Xe combo in my new laptop and was pushed back to traditional Ubuntu 21.04 with wayland.
I may give it a shot again.
I especially liked the ability to customize the key combos so that it acted reasonably close to a tiling Wm (I had moved to it from awesomeWM) which was very handy on an Thinkpad x200s with only a track point and no touchpad, but with the added perks of a fully baked DE. And that was in addition to the very nice aesthetics, rather than in spite of.
Unfortunately Elementary's devs are too busy finding the right shades for the dark theme so there is no time left for your marginal features. These problems and bugs are not tackled for years.
Good looking design is something people tend take for granted until it's gone.
If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, those details really do matter to me. I tend to be able to fix everything else on my own.
After rotating i3, bspwm and qtile for a while - never managing to make it "just work" as expected on every single machine I own - I gave up and went with Pop OS. Their Pop Shell extension is basically what I wanted all along - tiling without giving up the DE.
As shown in Windows 10 and now 11, tiling can be achieved easily by:
- having windows automatically start at "empty" coordinates if available,
- having sufficient shortcuts to position them on specific square coordinates.
Since I have a wide screen, I have configured win-[, win-] and win-\ to go to the left third, middle third, right third.
On a thinkpad, I complement that by having win-left to the left half (50%), win-right go to the right half (50%), win-pgup toggle half size top and win-pgdown toggle half-size bottom.
Then I can assemble the windows very precisely with just the keyboard (full screen, half screen, quarter screen, one-third of a screen, one-sixth of a screen) both on the laptop display and the external wide screen, while keeping the full convenience of normal titlebars and mouse operations to reposition windows by hand if needed.
Add to that some custom scripting to make win-left and win-right move between physical screen, and you get a tiling solution that do not require any specific window manager.
Of course, space taken by the title bars might be a problem, but with Mica and the like (more generally, titlebar moving from "full of wasted empty spaces to "where tabs are shown", like Edge now does), I think tiling WM are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Honestly, the whole support of Iris Xe in modern linux is terrible painful. You have to carefully pick right kernel number and always use "disable Panel Self Refresh". And after that you have to stick to this exact kernel because "don't touch it while it works" even for Ubuntu now.
Intel gets credit for their drivers being open-source but IME their drivers are also plain bad. WiFi drivers disconnect you to scan, graphics drivers seem very poorly tested so depending on what acceleration profile you use, you get weird artifacts and other stability problems... I strongly prefer Atheros for WiFi and AMD for graphics, wherever possible.
I've tried Elementary a few times, but the hardware support has never been good enough for me to install it because the base is always ancient as all hell for some reason.
Readit News
You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall.
Considering that Elementary OS is somewhat marketed as being ideal for, say, elderly folks or people less experienced with their PC, as something that a Linux user might install for non-techie friends, this is beyond unacceptable and also shows a certain lack of technical competence for the folks running it.
Edit: Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe? I'm trying to avoid using profanity...
Options from $200-$1000+, with good options around $400 on sale.
Issues? Power wash it.
Really broken? Go buy another one.
Lost or stolen? Buy another one and log in.
Need office? Google’s products work well. Need more? O365 subscription.
Want more security? Two factor auth with a Yubikey.
I recognize that this relies on Google and Microsoft and is not FOSS and has privacy issues and everything else. But I do not have enough time to spend managing my extended family’s IT beyond giving them chromebooks that achieve 99% of what they need to do with very little input on my part. If they want to invest time in learning about Linux and get away from Google and MSFT, that’s fine, but they can do it on their own time with a test machine and keep Chrome OS as their daily driver until they are confident on their own.
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9367166?hl=en
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?#zippy=%2...
Other chromebooks with comparable hardware are still getting updates. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware. It’s still snappy to use. Battery life is still north of 4 hours. Just no more updates suddenly from Google.
https://reclaimthenet.org/google-docs-policy-is-updated-hate...
I submitted a bug report and essentially got a DM from someeone that it was still on their todo list, and had been that way for a while. That was the last time I used them.
For easy to use, I really miss CrunchBang Linux.
There's a name i haven't heard in a while :) Look up Archcraft, the OpenBox variant might scratch the same itch as CBL.
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This is the issue with Linux Desktop - every time you want to try something new you need to effectively reinvent the wheel for yourself. Most things end up being the same though, my browser is my browser, my data is my data. I can compartmentalize some of that to make it portable between distributions but I feel like that is solving the problem from the wrong direction.
At some point I would hope this becomes a DE like Gnome or KDE. Inventing your own programming language, app marketplace etc... is admirable but seems like it is being done in vein.
They've been sponsoring GNOME, which has been pushing the simplified, mobile-friendly look for almost a decade now. They've also (I believe) been behind the scenes in GNOME's push to kill theming on the behalf of developers who hate their apps getting themed, which of course distributions hate because that hurts the ability to stand out. If GNOME looks the same on every distribution, your distribution sticks out less.
Red Hat has also been behind sponsoring SystemD, which for better or worse brought every distribution kicking and screaming into a more consistent "low level" layout. Again though, this makes management across Linux systems somewhat easier, while making distribution-specific differences smaller.
Red Hat has been behind Flatpak, which compartmentalizes applications and means that they can run on any distribution when built against a common runtime. For app developers and new people, this is great as a "Linux app" just runs on any "Linux" distribution, easy. For old-timers and technical folk (even on here)... again it's with kicking and screaming. And if you are a distribution author, every distribution now runs the same apps, so what's so special about your distro again?
Red Hat has also been behind PulseAudio and PipeWire, which changed how audio worked on Linux... again with kicking and screaming.
The point is, Red Hat keeps working on technology that, I would argue, makes Linux more consistent and approachable to newcomers, but massively changes how it works which angers old-timers and also happens to reduce diversity within distributions as to how things are done. This makes things easier for programmers, but erodes away the proliferation of distributions because the differences between them get smaller and smaller.
Because, if Red Hat gets their way, consider: Every desktop that uses GNOME looks the same because there isn't as much theming. Every desktop runs the same apps using Flatpak. Every desktop has similar low-level internals with SystemD. If you are a distribution maker, not much left to stand out now, is there? Again, app developers love this, but if you are a distribution maker, Red Hat is trying to kill your edge.
you can install Pantheon, the desktop from Elementary OS, on some other distros
You're not supposed to do anything at all!
https://blog.elementary.io/updates-for-june-2020/
> elementary OS 5 will continue to receive security and stability updates to its underlying libraries until April of 2028.
You're acting as if this is some kind of massive and unprecedented inconvenience, but this is Linux, where users routinely recommend to one another that they try a different distro to solve application problems. By comparison, what you brought up is pretty tame.
They are also very slow in supporting the latest LTS builds. I think people should move on to something like Ubuntu Budgie when they want a simple and clean experience for themselves or others.
Ubuntu Budgie keeps their LTS and interim builds in sync very well with upstream Ubuntu and upstream Budgie & I have never seen fossfreedom shoot down a PR that makes sense. He's often encouraged others to contribute to the distro in very healthy and normal ways.
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Of course, sometimes failures do occur, but that happens whenever you do a major OS upgrade. I've had Windows fail on upgrade more than I've had Ubuntu fail on upgrade, but that's just my experience.
This in comparison to, well, Elementary OS saying scrap it all and reinstall. That wouldn't be so bad if they were, like, a technically-minded distribution - but for their primary market who hardly knows anything about updates, completely unacceptable.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-upgrade-from-ubuntu-18-04-lts...
Distros like Ubuntu make upgrade failures harder to work through because they go to some lengths to wrap the dist upgrade process in some software that reverts everything if anything goes wrong.
But if you just move all your apt sources forward to the next distro and read any specific error messages you get, you can generally work through them.
Distros other than Debian itself don't typically recommend that you do things this way, and instead have some extra software for going through the process. But the Debian way still works on them.
1. One that looks nice and comes with bells and whistles and is closer in UX and functionality to Mac than Windows
The same is true for Debian, Fedora, and... well, every Linux distro I've ever known people using on their desktops/laptops. For good reason, because it is a pretty essential feature in that context.
What annoys me is that AppCenter takes up so much space in their blog posts and sponsoring campaigns, because I feel it's the worst of their apps. The navigation model never made sense to me (why is search disabled when I'm on "Installed"?). It also doesn't look good, because there are way more tiny utility apps than there are good icon designers, and often the icons are just shown on a giant, colored rectangle because apps have no banner images.
I wish they'd do it more "magazine-like" as Apple does, just with more unsplash images instead of Apple's terrible Corporate Memphis illustrations.
I'm stuck on an older kernel because the nvidia drivers are borked, but worst of all the AppCenter is truly horrid.
For a distro that does such a good job at making sure that there is a GUI alternative in addition to all the normal things you'd do in a CLI, the AppCenter is really crummy.
Ubuntu actually does a better job of making sure you can sort out your drivers through the GUI.
[1]: https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-graphics/radeon-...
[2]: https://ubuntubudgie.org/
For example, the Music app. Comes built-in, looks great, only works with your local music library if you copy it over and reorganize it the way the Music app wants. No online music streaming of any kind.
The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it except (IIRC) it has videos from The Guardian newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that?
The Maps app? Looks beautiful, again, but the last time I tried it, it could hardly handle directions. Maybe Directions work well now, but it's just... not good.
Every app is like this - barely functional.
None of the issues you mentioned are really fixable. Online streaming is a bit of a pipe dream for linux, legal(ish?) solutions are going to be hacky and break constantly since nobody has the negotiating power to work out deals with labels. Same with videos, alphabet is not going to just allow random apps to bypass the entire point of youtube (serving ads to eyeballs and tracking said eyeballs to serve more ads). Maps does suck, and that's mostly and openstreetmap issue. You could integrate google maps but those API keys are not cheap.
The Videos app likewise plays your videos. No idea where you're getting that bit about The Guardian, but that's just flat out false.
There is no first-party Maps app, so again, that's not something that the elementary team provides...
Constructive criticism is helpful, but only when it's informed.
I feel like the more internal team relies on them, the better they are. And, well, I guess they don't use multimedia apps a lot.
- Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into DavMail all the time
- A Mail app that lets me view emails in plain text first, or some kind of option to avoid downloading images and trackers in HTML mode.
- The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs.
- A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one works fine)
A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love about elementary:
- It looks fantastic.
- The terminal, code, and files apps are where I live and they are great. Code isn't a replacement for VS Code, but it's quick and light and fantastic when I don't need e.g.: a linter.
- Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable.
- The OS truly feels unified; not some hodgepodge of poorly conceived UI elements and metaphors.
I don't think this is as impressive as they think it is. On the contrary, this seems to be a very very small number that I wonder why it's mentioned in the first place. I don't use these GUI frontends, but if we ever want any Linux distro to be more user-friendly. Almost everything should be available.
Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high. We have been complaining about Apple and Google, yet "we"(?) cannot seem to be doing better ourselves. It's a bit disappointing.
> Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high
It does seem really high considering they are just taking from one Stripe account to another.
The Calendar app doesn't work with Google Calendar as a backend; or, at least not with a ton of hacks, which is what one chooses Elementary to avoid.
Overall the Pantheon WM feels rather sluggish, even on modern hardware. Managing windows just feels so clunky compared to KDE or even Windows. To be fair, macOS is their direct competitor.
I paid a bug bounty ages ago to get streaming audio to work in their Music app but I don't think that went anywhere.
I think they might be able to get something solid in the next few years.
So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.
"AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers—and since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond!"
I may give it a shot again.
I especially liked the ability to customize the key combos so that it acted reasonably close to a tiling Wm (I had moved to it from awesomeWM) which was very handy on an Thinkpad x200s with only a track point and no touchpad, but with the added perks of a fully baked DE. And that was in addition to the very nice aesthetics, rather than in spite of.
If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every day, those details really do matter to me. I tend to be able to fix everything else on my own.
[0] https://regolith-linux.org/
- having windows automatically start at "empty" coordinates if available,
- having sufficient shortcuts to position them on specific square coordinates.
Since I have a wide screen, I have configured win-[, win-] and win-\ to go to the left third, middle third, right third.
On a thinkpad, I complement that by having win-left to the left half (50%), win-right go to the right half (50%), win-pgup toggle half size top and win-pgdown toggle half-size bottom.
Then I can assemble the windows very precisely with just the keyboard (full screen, half screen, quarter screen, one-third of a screen, one-sixth of a screen) both on the laptop display and the external wide screen, while keeping the full convenience of normal titlebars and mouse operations to reposition windows by hand if needed.
Add to that some custom scripting to make win-left and win-right move between physical screen, and you get a tiling solution that do not require any specific window manager.
Of course, space taken by the title bars might be a problem, but with Mica and the like (more generally, titlebar moving from "full of wasted empty spaces to "where tabs are shown", like Edge now does), I think tiling WM are quickly becoming a thing of the past.