[HN Gopher] Elementary OS 6 Odin
___________________________________________________________________
Elementary OS 6 Odin
Author : jdhawk
Score : 412 points
Date : 2021-08-10 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.elementary.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.elementary.io)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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?
| solarkraft wrote:
| 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).
| mssdvd wrote:
| Gnome 40 can do the same.
| Flex247A wrote:
| But overall, it's much smoother in Pantheon than in Gnome 40.
| amilios wrote:
| 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
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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".
|
| There's a separate blog post on hardware-specific improvements
| here: https://blog.elementary.io/hardware-improvements-coming-
| to-e...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> - 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?
|
| https://github.com/elementary/os/issues/164
| schmorptron wrote:
| "- 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.
| neilalexander wrote:
| 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.
| DenverCode wrote:
| Question, best solution for running it on an M1 Mac?
| babypuncher wrote:
| A virtual machine.
|
| Running Linux natively on Apple Silicon is not ready for daily
| driving.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| 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?
| babypuncher wrote:
| Do G-Sync/Freesync still work in a setup like this?
| _sigma wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| 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"
| OJFord wrote:
| That seems to imply that it _can_ use the same GPU as the
| host? I thought a dedicated one was required (not just a
| 'common use').
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| gclawes wrote:
| Are there still Pinebook Pro builds available?
| cassidyjames wrote:
| 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.
| gclawes wrote:
| Awesome, thanks!
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Does flatpack have solved the theming problems they had 2 years
| ago ? And the perf issues ?
| schmorptron wrote:
| Those were issues snap had though, I'm not aware of flatpak
| having those problems.
| sylens wrote:
| That feature does seem like the standout of their release notes
| to me
| imglorp wrote:
| Do any of the Flatpak advocates have a response to this
| security criticism?
|
| Eg - https://flatkill.org/2020/
| input_sh wrote:
| See: https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2021/02/11/response-
| to-fla...
|
| 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.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > See:
| https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2021/02/11/response-to-
| fla...
|
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| 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.
| charrondev wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > As someone who's released commercial software on linux
| before - having only 3 solutions to target is actually
| pretty delightful
|
| I think that speaks to a particularly huge failure of
| Linux Desktop more than anything else.
| beermonster wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| beermonster wrote:
| > 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| scns wrote:
| > the developer didn't even bother making a binary
| because they don't want to build it for 5+ different
| packaging formats
|
| No snark intended, but how much did you pay for the
| software?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| How can snark not be intended?
|
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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).
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| workerdrone451 wrote:
| Did you try flatseal for Wireshark? It abstracts the
| process of messing with permissions.
|
| That being said, unless the flatpak has some features
| your distro version doesn't, for trusted software package
| is always preferred.
|
| Flatpak is really for untrusted software/proprietary and
| projects that update with new features often.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You misunderstand, Flatpak has no mechanism whereby the
| appropriate permission can be granted. At all.
|
| https://github.com/flathub/org.wireshark.Wireshark/issues
| /4
| veeti wrote:
| What is the use case for running PuTTY on Linux? I'm
| curious.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It is what I use on Windows, so I'm familiar with it, and
| it supports serial comms.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| 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.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Sounds like a use case for tmux?
| Royi wrote:
| I don't get how an OS is released and performance isn't
| mentioned.
|
| I think each OS release must include data about the performance
| (Speed and resources at steady state).
|
| We want performant and lean OS's.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| 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.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So happy to see them continue their work of a solid, unified
| desktop Linux. Perhaps this year is the year of desktop Linux!
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I've never heard of Elementrary before. Is the goal to have the
| look and feel of macOS?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| 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
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| It's like popos but with MacOS look and feel.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| I'd say more "macOS UX" than "look and feel".
| xtracto wrote:
| 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"
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This isn't really different from macOS. Ever tried to run a Mac
| GTK app, or one that uses XQuartz? It's just that more people
| target macOS.
| least wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Right, so Elementary is trying to enforce a consistent
| language. Apps that follow the language will look
| consistent, apps that don't, won't.
|
| The only difference with macOS is the number of apps that
| make at least a minimal effort to follow the OS paradigm.
|
| (We might be saying the same thing!)
| kemiller wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| scns wrote:
| Shuttleworth was close to that, but he retired from
| Canonical.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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?)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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 expose is so poor).
|
| Sadly, I can run neither Excel nor PowerPoint under
| Gnome. So I'm stuck with windows.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Agreed. I've always wondered if it was somewhat easier to
| maintain a variant of GNOME with the same features they had in
| mind.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > 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 ?
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| 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.
| fsiefken wrote:
| 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.
|
| Or perhaps better, use a windows theme for a linux desktop
| - and stick to gtk apps.
| https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
| jcelerier wrote:
| No, the immense majority of windows users couldn't care
| less.
| kemiller wrote:
| And this is exactly why some people prefer MacOS, which eOS
| is trying to emulate.
| smoldesu wrote:
| MacOS still has anachronistic design elements. My least
| favorite was the Dashboard, which long outstayed it's
| welcome...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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.)
| kemiller wrote:
| Nothing is perfect, but the Dashboard can be completely
| ignored and doesn't get in your way.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Fun fact: Apple made up the <canvas> tag for Dashboard
| and it was later adopted as a web standard
| handrous wrote:
| 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_?)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| OP is clearly criticizing the entire Linux ecosystem and not
| just Elementary.
| appleiigs wrote:
| >Their own forks of popular apps?
|
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| How would you solve the issue where the existing apps do
| not fit their UX (which is one of their main "selling
| points")?
| stonogo wrote:
| 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?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The complaints seem like hard things to fix. Which of them
| have been improved?
| jjice wrote:
| 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.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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!)
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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.
|
| For anyone curious, I keep track of cross-platform workflows
| here:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...
| jlpom wrote:
| I prefer WebKit to other engines
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> 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.
| rewgs wrote:
| 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.
| creata wrote:
| It looks[0][1] like they _do_ want to be an OS comes with
| your computer, which is pretty exciting.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28133146
|
| [1]: https://au.starlabs.systems/pages/laptops
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Using the elementary OS Terminal is what pushed me to really
| learn tmux. Not sure what else I'd really want in my terminal
| now.
| caslon wrote:
| Web is just GNOME Web.
| OJFord wrote:
| ..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.)
| luke2m wrote:
| Why? Gnome web is actually simpler and easier to use than
| Firefox for elderly people. It performs surprisingly well,
| too.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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!
| doubled112 wrote:
| It used to go by Epiphany, but that's probably an even
| worse name.
| skyfaller wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| > 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Are they planning on converting to Wayland?
| dancemethis wrote:
| How dare them call us old geezers?
|
| It's the Isis drama they invented all over again.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I would migrate an office of dozens computers to this if only it
| used classic packages and dndn't depend on Flatpaks.
|
| I already tried to migrate to Pop_OS! but it failed to install.
|
| So I had to keep with Ubuntu.
| tayistay wrote:
| - 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.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| tayistay wrote:
| 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)
| RichEO wrote:
| I see a lot of criticism for eOS "copying" the Mac, and yet
| never see any criticism of Cinnamon for copying Windows.
|
| If anything, the Linux community seems to cite it as a
| strength.
| tayistay wrote:
| Never heard of Cinnamon, but if it copies Windows, then
| that's a shame too.
| onkoe wrote:
| It's insane to me that they're charging anything for their
| store; that split is actually insane
| tayistay wrote:
| Yep. Combine that with must-be-open-source, and their
| platform is practically hostile to the average developer who
| needs to earn a living.
| schmorptron wrote:
| 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.
| tayistay wrote:
| 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"
|
| It's a bit insulting, really.
| emersion wrote:
| Not being able to publish closed-source apps is a feature.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Movies don't tend to be able to spy on you, for one. Nor
| are they generally expected to be maintained over time.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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.
| andrekandre wrote:
| open source and free (as in beer) software are
| orthoginal/unrelated concepts
|
| you can have for-pay open source apps, no problem
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| ??? 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.. they sure as heck aren't
| orthogonal concepts in practice.
| tayistay wrote:
| 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.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > but if it's a consumer product...then it isn't going
| anywhere as a business
|
| why?
| tayistay wrote:
| Right, a feature which will be very limiting for their store
| as a business.
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| But very good for the user, no?
| tayistay wrote:
| If a mostly empty store is good for the user, then yes.
| Definitely a store free of many advanced apps with
| valuable IP.
| jwagenet wrote:
| 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.
| edsimpson wrote:
| I haven't been following development closely, are there any
| comparisons of Elementary and Ubuntu Budgie?
| schmorptron wrote:
| 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.
|
| Congrats to the team!
| skrtskrt wrote:
| I am sorry but those tray icons are horrific. I don't think they
| would have looked modern or clean or nice at any time. Just bad
| design for any era.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| 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
| HerbMcM wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Can it do major version upgrades yet?
| iamcreasy wrote:
| I don't think you can yet.
| netcyrax wrote:
| Big fan of eOS. Congrats on the launch!
|
| 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)?
| Flex247A wrote:
| Elementary is really great. I have to admit that no other OS
| (other than alpine/void/arch) can run smoothly on my Intel Atom
| N450 netbook.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| andrekandre wrote:
| 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...
|
| looks nice!
| temp8964 wrote:
| 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.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| 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).
| n8cpdx wrote:
| 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.
|
| Has that changed recently?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| No, it's not nearly as performant, that's for sure. I
| haven't used it personally, but there is Xrdp[1] which
| might be better for more serious usage.
|
| 1: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-xrdp-on-
| ubuntu-20-0...
| temp8964 wrote:
| 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.
| temp8964 wrote:
| My experience is that VNC won't remote to the same session.
| And it can't adjust to client resolution, so not very useful
| to me.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
| markofzen wrote:
| I had the same issue and used chrome remote desktop as a
| temporary measure that has worked well.
| temp8964 wrote:
| But chrome doesn't adjust screen setup.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Xrdp can be configured to do this, we have it setup this way
| for our jump boxes.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I did google around but couldn't get it work reliably. It
| seems have something with which desktop environment I use.
| And the performance isn't great.
|
| Also, I am not sure what you mean "jumpbox", but it sounds
| like you don't use the remote machine locally.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| 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.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I found it particularly difficult to remote into the same
| session as the one I log in locally (seating in front of
| the machine).
| nineteen999 wrote:
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Whoa. Congrats! Very nice OS.
| [deleted]
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| 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 Capitan 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.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > 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?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| > Why, in 2021, does every single Linux desktop require me
| to open a file first to see what's inside it?
|
| KDE's file manager has a previewpane that you can enable if
| you wish.
| bitwize wrote:
| Why should I have to enable it? There shouldn't _be_ any
| goddamn high places!!!
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| ... And in GNOME's Nautilus, Sushi
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/sushi does popup previews
| on spacebar more or less like the GP describes.
|
| (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.)
| michaelpb wrote:
| > 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.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| >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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| michaelpb wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://penpot.app/
| okramcivokram wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'm on GNOME 3.38.4 on Debian sid.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Apparently Gnome Sushi does this similar to Quicklook,
| wasn't installed by default though (on 3.38.4 on Ubuntu).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| 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
| harel wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what in iTerm is missing in any of the
| Linux terminals? (I usually use Tilix).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| 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.
| harel wrote:
| Try this for mark/jump : https://gist.github.com/harel/25
| 569bda00f7260923fdbc38e256f5...
|
| It's not "mine" but I adopted it years ago and cannot
| live without it.
|
| I don't know about detecting soft-splits, but tilix has a
| really nice split pane setup.
| Siira wrote:
| 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.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I would pay for iTerm to be ported to Linux, but I know
| it's very MacOS coupled.
| kall wrote:
| 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.
| Normille wrote:
| The trouble with Lucida Grande was that it didn't have an
| _Italic_ variant. Which was a bit of a glaring oversight
| for a default font
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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.
| kall wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I have too many paid-for Mac apps like Alfred, Keyboard
| Maestro, Hazel, Photo Mechanic
|
| See uLauncher, AutoHotKey and Darkroom, respectively. They're
| not 1:1 in terms of feature parity, but you can get pretty
| close for free.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| 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
| cxr wrote:
| > 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".
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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?
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 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.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| 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.
| unicornporn wrote:
| As long as you only use GTK apps that is... Half (?) Of the
| apps I need are Qt and they will look out of place.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Qt look out of place no matter what OS you use them on
| though. So I don't feel that is a fault of Elementary OS.
| unicornporn wrote:
| I've been running KDE Neon and they don't look out of
| place.
| babypuncher wrote:
| KDE does a better job of naturalizing GTK apps than the
| other way around.
| BearOso wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nice to see some Vala love.
| yosito wrote:
| Is it possible to install Elementary's DE on Ubuntu?
| spindle wrote:
| 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.
| trts wrote:
| 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.
| leppr wrote:
| _> Ubuntu [...] never does anything I don 't expect. Especially
| when it comes to finder/explorer/nautilus._
|
| You expect typing letters while having the file explorer window
| focused to launch a full recursive file search?
| turbocon wrote:
| For what it's worth, I discovered this feature on accident
| because I naturally expected it to do that.
| yboris wrote:
| How can one live without the minimize button? What does the OS
| recommend instead?
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think it's a Gnome thing.
|
| I've never understood Gnome.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| asoneth wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Windows+h (h == hide, I guess). Also, as others have
| mentioned, virtual desktops.
| kilburn wrote:
| 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.
| Flex247A wrote:
| You get used to the dock real quick.
|
| Or just install Elementary Tweaks.
| onli wrote:
| > _You get used to the dock real quick._
|
| What's the connection between the dock and minimizing
| windows? I use a WM with a dock and that supports minimized
| windows just fine.
| input_sh wrote:
| If the app is in focus and you click on it on the dock,
| it minimizes itself. You can also do Super+H.
|
| Personally I put it back to "Windows" layout
| (min/max/close on the right), even though I mostly use
| Super+H.
| onli wrote:
| 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
| :)
| input_sh wrote:
| FYI it's re-branded as Pantheon Tweaks for this release.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| > 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).
| greyivy wrote:
| 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.
| stonogo wrote:
| The Mail app now sandboxes html emails ... but it still loads
| remote resources by default. Seems like a strange combination of
| defaults.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| FYI - there is no minimize button in elementary OS, and judging
| by the screenshots, this hasn't been fixed yet.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| moojacob wrote:
| You can click an app's icon in the dock to toggle minimize.
| Flex247A wrote:
| 2 years in the making. Been waiting for this since last year!
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| 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.
| b2ccb2 wrote:
| FYI, it doesn't use Gnome. It uses it's own DE based on
| Vala/GTK+/libmutter.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Aka, "Pantheon":
|
| https://www.fosslinux.com/4652/pantheon-everything-you-
| need-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS#Pantheon_desktop.
| ..
| Shadonototro wrote:
| very nice, this is what gnome should have been, they took the
| best of macOS
|
| however, i'm still gonna stick to XFCE4
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