I very much appreciate all of the hard work that goes into striving for a consistent, beautiful UX in ElementaryOS. It feels like there is a driving vision behind all of the design and usability choices.<p>The move to Inter as a UI font will be a good step forward, as Open Sans has not aged well. Especially as displays are higher and higher DPI, another good step forward would be to completely disable font hinting. It's subjective, but it would seem consistent with the rest of the distro's approach to visual design.<p>But those are details that some like me deeply appreciate, while others don't see what the fuss is about one way or the other, for better or worse. What really matters is that I can throw ElementaryOS on my wife's or mom's laptop, and they can figure it all out no problem, without all of the terrible anti-user everything that is Windows.
I'd love to use Elementary OS, but their use of Vala is just such a turn off.
That language is dead except for a tiny gnome niche.<p>If they wanted the mac devs for their sleek look and feel they could have switched to swift.
And if they wanted to gain easy popularity they could have switched to rust. But vala... there is no developer pool to draw people from, and they're not apple where ObjC might have been an obscure but in the end really productive ecosystem.
Somewhat off topic: Whenever I see these user-friendly Linux distributions I think they would be great for mass deployments in schools or similar. Is there any technology that gives Elementary (or similar distributions) a deployment workflow like Chrome OS; ie zero-config (for the user) to log into a central service and configuration of the user account while being easy to administer?
It looks like there is still no fractional scaling out of the box (always possible with hacks). The elementary team has defended the choice not to introduce it before [1], but it just makes it unusable for me and many other users.<p>KDE Plasma handles fractional scaling well. Gnome does it mostly fine on Wayland. Now you can also run Gnome on X11 with fractional scaling (at least with Pop OS [2]).<p>There's a cost of running the DE with fractional scaling of course. But I am fine with that if that makes the DE usable!<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.elementary.io/what-is-hidpi/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-improving-pop-os-with-fractional-scaling-now-live" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/system76-continue-impr...</a>
Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.
Lots of negativity, as is expected on HN. For what it’s worth, I like Elementary OS and hope version 6 is a success. I’m going to kick the tires today.
Tried elementary but the hidpi scaling is useless! Also it was unable to handle different dpi for each display.
Had any of this changed in this version?
I always run Elementary shortly after each release and then after a few months find myself coming back to pure Ubuntu after the rest of the ecosystem moves on and updates.
Hell yeah!<p>I'm hopeful to see some features by the time stable gets released. Notably the tasks app[0] and Nextcloud integration[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/elementary/tasks/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elementary/tasks/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/63</a>
I'm very excited for the multi gesture track pad support. It's such a small change but I just haven't been able to find good support for this outside of Mac OS.<p>I'm tempted to install this version the second they hit their first release candidate for that feature alone.
I ran elementaryOS for a couple years when I worked in research. I switched off when I bought a intel NUC, and the skylake processor platform wasn't supported yet (not their fault) and had to run the latest kernel and never went back.<p>I like elmentary. It's pretty, works well, etc. One thing that did irritate me was when I had to install something that wasn't "default." A gnome or QT application, and it looked to fugly. Just didn't work.<p>I with these guys the best. I think what they are doing is really cool, and I admire all the work they've done in vala and what not.
Quite looking forward to this as my Linux laptops all run it. I’ve found it to be a great DE with a clean, no-fuss experience, and have often considered moving to it (plus a Windows VM with pass-through graphics) for a desktop.
I'm not entirely sure how to feel about the Flatpak-centric application ecosystem. Reminder: <a href="https://flatkill.org" rel="nofollow">https://flatkill.org</a>