Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro | Hacker News Reader

Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro

apricityos.com

168 pointstambourine_man119 comments

[apricity-core]

SigLevel = Never

Server = http://apricityos.com/apricity-core/

This instructs the package manager (pacman) to load system packages over an unencrypted connection and disables all signature checks.

Source:

https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacm...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Package_signing#...

"This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices."

What does this quote mean? And what does it have to do with someone's package manager configuration?

It's from Atlas Shrugged, and I think it's trying to draw some kind of parallel between using Arch and struggling against oppressive forces of mental tyranny. As represented by Apricity perhaps? Arch is for heroic individualists?

Arch is great and all. I love using it, but I get pretty impatient with people who think they're smarter than everyone else because they can follow the detailed instructions in a well-written and lovingly maintained wiki. I get similarly impatient with B.S. Arch derivatives. If you want Ubuntu, just use Ubuntu. It's based on a perfectly legit distribution.

I don't think it's Atlas Shrugged, googling it brings up some kind of spiritual philosopher guru guy. It makes sense in that context, like he's justifying why most people don't understand his enlightened teachings. But I don't get why it's posted here.

Fascinating! You're right. I was misremembering the quote. Furthermore, it's from 1929, well before Atlas was written. Still, it sounds quite a lot like something John Galt would say. Who knew Ayn Rand was so eclectic?

I have no idea where you detected anything having to do with Ayn Rand or any of her ideas. It's a pretty way that saying that the rewards of experience can't be granted and must be earned; not that no one eats for free, unless people eat mountaintops. What is a mountaintop without a mountain anyway?

One of the characters is talking about John Galt in that roundabout way they have of talking about John Galt, and says that he's the man who climbed to the top of the mountain and discovered the fountain of youth, but when he tried to bring it back down, he found that it couldn't be brought back down, only climbed up to. Or something like that. That's why this quote reminded me of Atlas. Probably, they both cribbed it from Nietzsche.

I only wish that you'd posted each sentence as separate comments so that I can upvote each one individually.

Back when I had freedom of choice for my OS at my place of employment, I wanted to learn about Linux so I chose it. Then I wanted to learn more about Linux so I moved from Ubuntu to Arch. At first, the documentation is a lifesaver. However, a bit of time invested in reading it carefully will also really educate someone in so many aspects of an OS. Not only that, but so many of the things that someone would really want to use are so well documented. I learned more about PostgreSQL administration and X from the Arch Wiki than the documentation from the actual projects themselves.

Thanks to Arch Linux, my first instinct when using a new command-line tool is to add the `--help` flag, then run `man <command>`. It helped me stop googling crap all the time.

Same with Gentoo. Some people pretended like doing a stage 1 install taught you more about the system. Besides chroot I don't remember anything I learned from it. Loved Gentoo though. Especially how configurable it was.

On the other hand, I learned quite a lot through many stage 1 installs. Don't think I ever would have grown so comfortable with a command line and Linux if it hadn't been for stage 1s (and screwing them up).

My guess is it's about looking for the perfect setup through trusting some random server with the keys to the castle (by disabling signature checks) instead of learning how to configure your own system.

Eh, new defaults configurations do NOT merit a new distro. I've long believed this, and since I discovered NixOS it is now clear that there is away to avoid it.

How do you use NixOS to manage your OS and applications and configurations? I thought it was for having reliable reproducable builds?

Nix the package manager is for getting deep control and hard guarantees about your dependencies. NixOS uses Nix, but also gives you ways to 1) specify your system's configuration declaratively from the beginning* and 2) reliably get that configuration running on another machine without having to worry about, say, conflicts with existing dependencies.

Or at least that's the theory. In practice I'm mostly still trying to get my mouse to work. :-P

*As opposed to layering a declarative system over an imperative one, which I think is more or less what Chef, Docker, Ansible, et cetera are doing.

That means I'll have to rewrite all my (Arch) packages for Nix in order for that to work, right? How does it deal with install scripts (inside upstream packages that you have no control over) that install stuff imperatively?

packages are namespaced in a directory for each package/version, like this:

    /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1/

if a package is "installed" in an environment (it could be global, user local or temporary), its files are sym-linked in the "original" position (e.g. /usr/bin/firefox etc etc)

Small nitpick, they aren't symlinked to their original position, but instead to a "profile" (global for instance is in /run/current-system/sw, your local profile is $HOME/.nix-profile).

This has several consequences. It means binaries distributed with the expectation of libraries being in their original position (e.g. /usr/lib/libc.so) don't work as is. It also means scripts depending on the presence of /usr/bin/bash are broken (which happen far too often).

I love NixOS, but that is one of the biggest annoyance I have with the system.

Yes, you are right.

Yeah but we're very good at patching shebangs, rpaths, etc.

With packaged softwares, yeah it rocks and it's seamless.

The problem comes from anything that's not packaged. Things that exist outside the nixos ecosystem.

For instance, the Android SDK is a bit of pain in the neck to install via the nixpkgs : it's a mutable piece of software with pieces that auto-update themselves, made of lots of smaller packages that aren't bundled in the main package, etc...

However, the binaries google provide doesn't run properly on nixos by default because of the non-standard install (has to set LD_PRELOAD so it can find the libc).

Well the Android SDK is like the worst-packaged thing ever :). I thought that its nixpkgs package was one of the greatest efforts to salvage the situation---the XSLT to automatically convert it's xml metadata to nix expressions is super impressive.

So basically, one could make this compatible with current Arch packages by making packages install into /nix/store/<id> instead?

I don't know if a mechical/automatic process is possible, but it works for haskell and python packages from Hackage and PyPI.

nix packages are not exactly packages, as in rpm or deb files, they are expressions in a functional language (think build recipes). there is a central repository of recipes on github: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs

but you can make your own, and eventually make a pull request. They are more similar to Arch's PKGBUILDs. Packages in the central repository are constantly built by a continuos built process (http://nixos.org/hydra/), that works both as a binary cache and as a testing system. This is an expression I wrote to install SuperCollider plugins https://gist.github.com/gosub/a42e265ec38d9df203d6 using the Arch PKGBUILD as a reference https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=sc3-p...

Yeah we package a lot of stuff these days---more than our market share would lead one to guess. So yes feel free to file a PR for anything missing, but there's no need to port Arch packages en masse.

Are you running cool/good defaults for NixOS? I'd be very interested in the specifics.

You don't even need NixOS for that. Just use Ansible or Puppet to manage your Arch Linux configuration.

Ditto but with GUIXSD.

This is a project developed by a high school senior. Yes he made rookie choices as have been pointed out here. If you like the direction of the project, contribute! It will help him learn.

I'm really sorry for being overly snarky, but where should one start contributing to this giant mess? It's basically a few packages packaged up in a questionable manner (with license violations[1] in the past), none of which are actually written by the developer himself.

He is styling himself and the OS as a professional project (at least that's the vibe I get from the website[2]) and he is actually asking for money[3] while he is putting his users in serious danger (as the current top post[4] illustrates) caused by his "rookie choices". This is deceptive and prompts unsuspecting users to install a High School project on their personal computers in the mistaken belief that they deal with someone skilled. I have very little sympathy for that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm young and I put up my projects as well, but I don't style myself a professional or ask for financial support for my half-assed code while keeping silent about the real nature of my project. Thinking about it, I might take down some code on GitHub or at least put up a big disclaimer.

[1] https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/issues/11

[2] check the "about the team" section, for example

[3] http://www.patreon.com/apricity

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11420627

I suggest the disclaimer route. Everything on GitHub really ought to have an indication in the README.md about why it is there. A single line saying "I'm just hosting it here and you've got no reason to ever use this" can be very helpful.

(Plus when someone posts your GitHub repo to HN for some random reason, that disclaimer can save you a lot of hassle.)

To be fair, he not only put up his code on GitHub, he also created a semi-professional looking and analogously worded website. That's not something that is posted to HN by "mistake". It sounds more like a startup than a hobby project:

> We are a Chicago based team of developers, dedicated to creating useful, intuitive software that helps people better integrate digital computing into their daily lives

The GitHub repository also proves it's not "we": https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/graphs/contributors

I was replying directly to embik (edit: which is, err, you, which I did not notice at first). I acknowledge and apologize that my parenthetical could look like I was talking about apricity, but I was not. I'm not taking the defense for apricity. Indeed I have a track record of recommending against young people doing things that will make people who trust them very, very angry when they can't follow through properly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974770 I just didn't see a point in joining the pile-on, which seems to have covered the bases fairly well.

And in turn, I have to apologize to you as well because I can see how my comment could be viewed as arguing against you. I didn't think you were defending Apricity at all, I was kinda trying to re-inforce your point by pointing out how he missed to point out important information about his project. Thank you very much for giving advice to novice developers, I very much appreciate it!

My favorite part of that:

http://storage.j0.hn/Screen%20Shot%202016-04-04%20at%209.35....

3.2 million additions, 916k deletions 20 commits.

An Arch system with defaults is not an Arch system.

The beauty of Arch is that you set it up from head to toe, so you only have the things you need most. And if something breaks, you're more likely to be able to fix it.

Accept no substitute. Vanilla Arch forever.

(I accept that some people don't care about how the sausages are made. In that case, use Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu, in order of similarity to Arch.)

I use antergos. It has everything I want from Arch (up to date packages, systemd, AUR) but I don't have to spend all the time configuring Arch.

Not sure why this downvoted? This is precisely the reason I went with Arch too: it is nothing more than a package system, systemd and a huge wiki that lets you grok how everything works. For everybody else there's a huge amount of distros that does the job fine (better?) without having the hassle of having to know how things are configured and what not...

I see those "distros" for certain kind of people. They installed Arch manually once or twice, liked the result and got comfortable with it. Now they want to get the install part out of their way and just get to the usable system. This "you're using it wrong" in Linux environment baffles me.

> without having the hassle of having to know how things are configured and what not

Really ? User doesn't need to know how to set and fix things on Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian ? Now that's a bold statement.

Indeed. Since I switched to Arch, I've had to spend far less time fixing stuff than when I used Fedora, which reliably broke every six months whenever I tried to upgrade.

I suppose that says more about Fedora than Arch :) (context: happy with Arch - haven't tried Fedora)

> (I accept that some people don't care about how the sausages are made. In that case, use Fedora or Debian or Ubuntu, in order of similarity to Arch.)

Or Apricity?

I won't be using this distro, but you've done a seriously poor job of condemning it in favor of some cherry-picked alternatives.

I like Arch. I would love to have it installed on my laptop, but then I don't want to spend the time actually installing and configuring it. I got fed up with that stuff using linux 15 years ago. I remember the days when you had to write your own device drivers. I don't long for them. In fact, I still cry a bit when I think about that day my RedHat 6 install configured eth0 for me. Imagine: Plugging a network cable in, and it just works! The future is here!

I use Arch for my SoC devices (RPi2 and Odroid XU-4), and for that it is hard to beat. I install what I need, configure it and then forget about it. But for a desktop? I didn't get a computer so that I could spend an hour getting WIFI to work the way I want.

I have built LFS more than a dozen times, I used gentoo for the better part of a decade (back in the days when linux actually was harder to use than osx/windows). I don't have to prove myself worthy any more. Give me an easy way to setup arch with stuff like X, network-manager and media hotkeys working out of the box and I'd switch any day.

So: arch is a very nice distro, but online it has somewhat become what gentoo was in the early 2000: an e-penis enlarger. The only thing it proves is that you have the time and knows how to copy and paste commands from the arch wiki.

Out of curiosity: What do you have installed on your laptop instead?

A bit of everything during the last couple of years. After Gentoo, which was my distro of choice for a long time, I used frugalware, which is slackware-ish but with pacman and an "easy" installer. Then I got a laptop and a 3g USB modem which would only work properly with NetworkManager, so I went around between distros that packaged it (Fedora, Ubuntu).

Now I run emacs on CentOS 7. I only do security updates and have been using guix to handle userspace (Userspace = mostly emacs).

For work I have an Ubuntu laptop. We code pascal, so I almost never leave the GUI. After configuring Unity I actually like it a lot. I might switch to ubuntu on their next LTS release (which, after all the kinks are worked out, will be 16.04 + ~4 months)

There's Antergos for this.

I can't say I've had to fiddle that much. If we're talking things like deciding which packages to install, I have a script that clones my explicitly installed packages and logs them to a file, and then is able to read it and install them all on a new box.

Setting up wifi was as simple as just installing whichever manager you want and getting going, though. Contrary to a lot of peoples' experiences I seem to have a really easy time with Arch. Most of it just works after install.

For me the issue with Just Works distributions is that I actually spend more time reconfiguring all the parts than if I do it by myself from the ground up. In my opinion, Arch has the perfect balance between things just working and allowing you to decide whatever you want ro use.

I just recently bought a new laptop that I had set up within a day. A lot of that time was spent playing around with various hidpi settings, though.

And it certainly helps that I have most of my configurations in my dotfiles repo (including media key bindings).

I agree with your idea of configuring stuff to an extent I'm a recent switcher to Arch and love it so far, but on my other laptop I use a Debian minimal install with i3wm and all my manually installed programs, and I find it is that fine line between easy to use (installing, drivers, etc) and manual configuration.

I love Arch, but Debian min install will always have a place in my heart for getting set up easily while still being extremely fast and custom.

Setting up Arch is a simple as partitioning your hard drive, mounting it, pacstrapping it, and setting up the bootloader.

That's it, really. There's a bunch of stuff you probably want for a functional system, like user accounts and graphics drivers and stuff. And yes, Arch is still a pain with laptops. But with practice you can get it up "from scratch" in 20 minutes tops.

Hopefully you'll note that I didn't actually say anything about proving yourself. I even gave a list of other distros. But my point was that you don't need an Arch-based distro when there are plenty of distros that are better at giving you an easy way to set them up.

If one's ego is so seriously fragile that they depend on an operating system to feel adequate... well, it's kind of sad. It wasn't my intent to imply anything about people using distros I like less, if that's what you got. But this distro in particular is probably not as useful, because there are many more "user-friendly" distributions.

This week I purchased a new Dell XPS 13 9350 and installed Arch. The process of installing and getting a working OS with WiFi, screen brightness adjustment, media keys, Gnome 3, touch screen, and trackpad gestures took around 3 hours. It was as simple as repartitioning, pacstrapping, installing Xorg/Gnome and following the steps on the wiki.

This sure looks nice. My problem with nice looking Linux is that I becomes too limited and I get forced into habits that I don't like. Now all I use is bspwm, no status bars or anything, a lot of times I miss having something good looking though. But I became happier when I just let it go, it's easy to go down that road of constant tweaking.

I'm not a bspwm user myself, but it can look really nice as well (a different sort of nice I suppose). You could check /r/unixporn[1] for inspiration / examples / shameless copy-cat. It's really incredible what some people are pulling off[2][3][4].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3r85qh/bspwm_ligh...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3og32q/bspwm_wip_...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/3xen3g/bspwm_func...

Thanks, but I already know it ofc :)

Most of the stuff there is nice but it's nothing more than this really:

- A nice background.

- GTK themes and icons which I have, easy enough.

- A nice looking bar, but the one most commonly used with bspwm is made up by a messy shell script.

- Custom terminal colours, looks good in ncmpcpp but I need a usable terminal.

Every time I see a new tiling window manager I get a little thrill of excitement. Then I discover it's identical to every other one, including the one I already use. This isn't a complaint. I'm really happy with how pointless they make constant tweaking and customising

I'm back to ratpoison after using xmonad, and it's tempting to play with something new, but I only ever use one maximized window on each screen, so it's kind of pointless.

Strange that they include Pushbullet, and advertise it so prominently, which is not a free service anymore and was the subject of a huge controversy when they cut features.

It's also misleading IMO, as it's actually the Chrome extension (so you don't actually get most of the features in the Windows version).

It's indeed strange and definitely against the spirit.

There's an excellent open source project which does this and much more: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.kdecon...

Upvote for mentioning KDE Connect!

My favorite things about KDE Connect:

1) shared clipboard between mobile and PC

2) "send file to phone" - context menu in Dolphin / "send file to PC" in Android to quickly exchange single files

3) browse the whole Android file system (and copy/delete/edit files) directly from your file manager in Linux

KDEConnect pulls the whole KDE dependencies with it which I do not want while using Unity. That is the only thing that is stopping me from using it. Pushbullet works well for now.

KDE has split up most of the libraries over the last few releases, so the situation's much improved now.

KDEConnect still pulls in a few dependencies, but it's not 300MB anymore.

Sure, but, meh. A few dozen RAW picture files take more space.

Storage is cheap nowadays and KDE applications generally are of such high quality that it's definitely worth it.

Other examples are Digikam (hands-down the best picture organizer) and Krita (which rivals Photoshop for digital artists).

I've had a lot of fun playing around with Arch, and it's taught me a lot about Linux, but it seems to me like the "rolling release, mostly unmodified sources from many third parties" update model is a no-go for anyone other than a very seasoned Linux user or someone with a lot of time on their hands.

Things just break or otherwise don't work far too often.

So, kudos to the guy who put this distro together but without addressing this issue I don't think we're going to see an "easy to use" Arch-based distro any time soon.

I'm definitely speaking just as an onlooker and a novice here as I'm not involved in any open source development, but it feels like the whole Linux community would benefit from more rigorous API versioning and better documentation of interfaces between components. Even with distros that presumably do a lot of QA on their core packages like Fedora or Ubuntu, it feels like stuff breaks a LOT in Linux because of dependencies on the wrong versions of components. It must be a really tough problem.

Interestingly I've had far, far less issues in Arch over a year or so of using it, than I did trying to use Debian stable ~10 years ago.

It could be that I'm just more of a unix beast now and so do it automatically without thinking. I remember having to edit Xorg configuration files, having tons of unsupported hardware, etc.

Arch has basically just worked for me on all my machines with the exception of some esoteric features (e.g. zfs requires a bit of fiddling).

What problems have you had in particular?

Or maybe hardware is now much better supported whatever the distribution you use ?

That is certainly true. All distributions work much better because the kernel and userspace are just more solid now.

I can't speak to problems with Arch either -- I've installed it on a number of machines and never had a serious issue. Every now and then something minor will break. For 15 minutes once I couldn't use VTE-based terminal emulators because of a configuration bug. This was easily fixed with googling. And that's literally the worst thing that's ever happened to any of my Arch installs.

I think the key difference is "10 years ago"; Debian Stable today is a much more pleasant experience than Debian Stable a decade ago. I haven't used Arch so I can't comment there, but there's been a lot of improvement in hardware compatibility over the years.

Being any sort of early-adopter on the hardware front will, as always, get you punished with configuration file editing, though.

the biggest issue i have ever had with it was back when they made the official change from `python` from 2.7->3. much breakage occurred at that time and it required a bit of fiddling with symlinks. it was resolved in about 30 minutes, 25 of which was isolating the problem.

Can you please whitelist Tor in the Cloudflare settings for this site?

Arch is becoming more and more a foundation distro.

Yes and this is great. I have felt Ubuntu to be way too bloated ( last time I checked it had many python scripts running by default on startup ) and Debian is hard to use on the desktop ( "stable" is too slow, "testing" is too unstable ).

Arch will make a better foundation distro IMO.

There's always Fedora which has gotten better and better the last couple releases.

But I like Arch too. I just switched away from it because I got tired of things breaking if I wasn't religiously upgrading.

That doesn't make sense to me. Wouldn't more things break if you only updated them every six months and had to retest the whole system rather than the parts that changed as you went along.

I found that upgrading Ubuntu/Debian to the next release always screwed everything up as basically all the packages changed. Heck fedora couldn't even update to the next release until fed up came out.

I wonder how people feel about nix. Broken updates are by design a minor issue since it's transactional/rollbackable.

How is NixOS as a workstation/desktop/laptop OS? Does it have any major issues with hardware I'd run into?

2015 release used kernel 3.18, some drivers were lagging[1] so I went back to arch. But the latest 2016.03 release is now on 4.4, I'm about to try. I saw many people saying they were happy using nixos on twitter. It's a paradigm shift that require a good deal of RTFM. Felt like the first time I used linux somehow.

[1] my wifi chip took minutes to initialize due to proprietary blob issues.

Awesome, thanks for the info!

Fedora is the only real alternative if you want more stability.

I've found debian and ubuntu to be the best QA'd distros available. Followed by Fedora.

After trying Arch and running into too many irritating bugs that I didn't have the patience to fix I gave up on it.

Plus this didn't give me a good impression of the community's professionalism either: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Manjaro-Devs-Fix-Embarrassing...

They did blow it bad on this one, but apparently they manned-up since.

The Manjaro community is separate from the Arch one. Typically, Arch has looked down on spin offs, and in particular on Manjaro because of the way they manage updates.

That said, I don't feel the idea of the Arch community revolves around professionalism; it is really an amateur thing, in the positive sense.

Things like these are why #archlinux on Freenode hates Antergos; they're not responsible for how badly other communities handle their OS. The amount of troubleshooting that comes down to "Oh, that means Antergos/whoever are completely fucking up" is surprisingly high.

And people love Antergos when compared to Manjaro.

Ugh, can we please stop using "beautiful" to describe user interfaces?

lyk dis if u cringe evrytiem

Seriously though, it's such a cop out and it cheapens whatever you're trying to sell.

It's also subjective to the point of being a useless descriptor. One person's "beautiful" is another person's "terrible waste of precious screen real estate". It's fine if "beautiful" is a shorthand design goal among a group of people on a project team, where everyone shares the same design philosophy and assumptions, but it's not a great way to describe a project to the public.

It's up there with "nice" and "interesting" in terms of non-value words, IMO.

Much more useful would be to describe some of the goals that you, if you're the developer, consider beautiful. What, specifically, are you going for? If I'm looking at a project that's what I want to know. Most people don't set out to make ugly projects (well, mostly [1]) so that's the key differentiator: what subjective definition of "beautiful" is operative in the project's design, and what tradeoffs are being made to pursue it?

[1]: Maybe not if you're really into "New Jersey Style" / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Quick note, the layout seems to break when the piwik.js script is blocked:

https://imgur.com/JdB5UK3

I'm not blocking that script and it's still looks like that for me.

Firefox 45.0.1 64bit Fedora 23

Are users reliant on Apricity for OS updates, or could it be connected to whatever update mechanism Arch uses in the event Apricity becomes obsolete?

https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/build/pacm...

They use the default archlinux mirrors and add one for the extra packages

So grab gnome, pusbullet, a dock, paper theme, powerline and maybe play on linux, profit?

There are lots of other things. The most important thing is that they should have learnt a tonne of things!

Yea but honestly, every time I try to configure Gnome the way I need it, I get frustrated and give up (ha). I just don't have the time, and this distro looks good right out of the box. I'd be someone who tries this in a VM and honestly, I'd consider switching off Ubuntu and maybe donating to them. I don't know the size of this group of people but it could also include Windows/OSX users in the same boat.

I'm not even sure if the PushBullet license lets them do that.

https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS - binaries in source control, sigh.

Edit: Looks like it could be profitable - I wonder how much of this makes it back to Arch: https://github.com/agajews/ApricityOS/blob/master/PATRONS

I guess it's oriented at people who isn't used to Linux and want a pretty OS to play with, or people too lazy to do it themselves :p

Those people are not going to be happy with Arch.

Yes they will. I installed vanilla arch many times but now I find it too time consuming and useless to do that by hand. Now when I want arch I install some arch based distro that at least have proper installer.

Idle mem 500Mb for a gnome based desktop. That's impressive. Trying out tonight!

That didn't sound impressive to me at all, then I checked my memory use on Debian with Gnome Desktop, and was a bit shocked. It's hard to gauge memory use, but considering I used to play with OSs that would load to 64MB of RAM it's hard to see what I'm really getting here in terms of perks. Network manager and some mounting help is about all that's useful from Gnome Shell for me.

Let's say they built it for an average user. And it's kinda impressive. So how much was your Debian taking up?

Debian 8, about 560MB of 4GB with no apps (but for system monitor), and about 760MB of 4GB with Chromium open, with one tab (new tab).

What's impressive about it?

Transparent shell might look nice, but is useless for work.

On the laptop I find transparency useful to read what's behind the terminal window without constantly flipping back and forth or micromanaging my windows. But I also use a solid-color desktop, so most of the time it's not even apparent that anything is transparent.

That level of transparency, yes. However, my terminal emulator is set to 35% opacity, and I like it and can use it just fine; I use it frequently, too, multiple times per day.

Why would I use this over Antergos? Which is my current goto for preconfigured Arch.

Why would I use this over arch? I mean, If you like pretty pictures, but most Arch users don't: If they did, they'd be using Ubuntu, or Fedora. Arch is all about form over function, It's the beauty of a well crafted piece of engineering, or a wooden table you built yourself, not the beauty of a very elegant interface that somebody else made. So, for now, I'm sticking to i3+urxvt.

I use this and have found it excellent. Even got me back into gnome shell after recoiling in disgust initially with all the changes from gnome 2.

Does it support full disk encryption on the installation stage via GUI (GPT HDD, LUKS on LVM scenario, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_...)?

Honestly, just another gnome desktop environment. One that doesn't follow Linux standards at that. Sure, high school senior blah, blah, blah. I made a 3d model of a car when I was a senior. Doesn't mean it was any good.

Pretty cool to see Nylas N1 featured! (Check the console text)

Do they have actual terms of service by now? When I tried it, I was signed up to their newsletter by simply entering a mail address into the account setup dialog, without any indication that I was opting in to have my personal data harvested and abused.

There was a (really bad) bug in one of our releases that did this. You must have connected then-- sorry. We're a small team moving fast and occasionally we screw up like this.

FWIW, it now correctly asks you in the setup flow and you can add/remove yourself in the preferences: https://i7.createsend1.com/ei/d/A1/835/432/153754/csfinal/pr...

Oh, now that I complain publicly about it I finally get an apology, instead of passive-aggressive "it's all your own fault really, stop caring about PII and just unsubscribe" mails from your staff.

You might want to think over how you communicate with your customers. Customer privacy isn't something you can just shrug away.

Again, sorry about that. Feel free to ping directly if you have other questions. We've had such a huge response after releasing N1 that we definitely haven't figured out the ideal way to communicate with users.

Relatedly, if anyone reading is interested in a full time developer relations/evangelist role at a small startup, please send me a note! :)

Aka, Just another gnome desktop environment

It's.. so.. beautiful!

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