My biggest gripe against Elementary OS 6, that I think everyone thinking about using it should consider: There is currently <i>no upgrade path</i> from Elementary OS 5 that is officially supported.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...
I love elementary, although I couldn't make 6.0 work on my Nvidia-based machine (something has changed about the driver installation?).<p>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.<p>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.
My problem with Elementary OS is that, it comes with a selection of apps that look beautiful but are just... really bad.<p>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.<p>The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it <i>except</i> (IIRC) it has videos from <i>The Guardian</i> newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that?<p>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.<p>Every app is like this - barely functional.
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:<p>- Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into DavMail all the time<p>- 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.<p>- The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs.<p>- A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one works fine)<p>A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love about elementary:<p>- It looks fantastic.<p>- 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.<p>- Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable.<p>- 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, [...]<p>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.<p>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 tried Elementary for a week recently but just couldn't make it stick.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.
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.<p>I may give it a shot again.<p>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.
Elementary OS is ok but I have issues with the stability of its window manager, lock screen, and other core UI replacements that often lock up (on 5.x and now on 6.x) and require a hard reset (or killing X).<p>On my laptop and even w/ proprietary drivers installed, I cannot get eOS to hardware accelerate videos with either my embedded Intel graphics card or my discrete nVidia card in Firefox or Chromium.<p>The UI is full of really weird inconsistencies and is <i>extremely</i> opinionated without any way of changing some basic things (previously adjustable via `gsettings` but it seems that has been intentionally deprecated). For example, the elementary File Manager forces single-click-to-open ("web-style") behavior for any folders, but then switches to double-click-to-open for any files within those folders, so you can select a file but not open it but you cannot do the same with a folder. If it weren't for elementary tweaks (neutered as it has become for eOS 6), elementary would be completely unusable.<p>The decision to not even have an official upgrade path besides "nuke everything and reinstall" makes me question the clarity of vision of elementary OS developers/decision makers. You want to be the macOS of the Linux world but you have a worse upgrade experience than any other Linux distro bar none? You purposely advertise to "less techy" users that are exactly the kind of users that won't be able to handle a "back up your files, wipe everything, and clean install" upgrade path?<p>They added multitouch gesture support... but the only gestures available are for interacting with the desktop window manager (show all windows, move to prev/next virtual desktop)? Fortunately my `syngestures` that I wrote for elementary OS 5 works just fine alongside eOS 6's so-called "multitouch support" but for something that was going to be their killer feature, you'd think they would integrate some of the TouchEgg configuration into their touchpad gestures control panel UI, wouldn't you?
Heh, it's funny (to me) that their new 'Quick Window Switcher' is just... A window switcher that's been used forever and works well.<p>Why did they bother trying to redesign a window switcher of all things?
I just can't get used to that search field in the title bar (you can see it in several applications e.g AppCenter first screenshot). IMHO it should be more prominent centered top in the main content area, not (almost greyed out?) in the title bar next to the maximize/restore button (why?). Just weird. What GUI guidelines are stipulating this?
I've been using Elementary OS since 0.3 as my main OS at work (Higher Education IT) and it's my favorite distro. The lack of Ayatana indicators is annoying, but overall, the polish and look/feel of their desktop environment is really nice and has only gotten better with each version.
Not a fan, its trying too hard to look like OSX. If you like OSX, just go use the real thing.<p>See also this clip by Chad, I mean Nick.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUIKdIY7Y8</a>
I used Elementary 5.1 for over 2 years and then switched to Elementary 6. It was very buggy and slow on Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 with very good hardware. I switched to Ubuntu 21.04 and everything worked really well. I dont think I will hop distro again.
Elementary OS is in a strange place for me.<p>Coming from MacOS, it does so many things right and Danielle and the other contributors have such a great mindset focusing on accessibility and platform building.<p>With their dev conference, they’re doing great work encouraging people towards native app development with an eye to performance and HIG.<p>Everything looks so good.<p>And yet, as a daily driver for development, it’s just never quite there. The edge cases stand out enough that I always want to reach for Manjaro or Zorin or the like instead.<p>But I love their approach and think it’s ultimately “the right one”, so even when I’m not using it, I can only support them and cheer them on.
I'm dying for installer support for Pinebook Pro. I can flash an image today, but as far as I know there's no way to do full-disk encryption yet.
I don’t know why this distro even exists, Fedora and vanilla GNOME does everything this does but better. I feel the same way about Ubuntu by the way. The theme and tweaks that are added on top of vanilla GNOME in both cases only makes it worse.