Cheers to 10 Years | Hacker News Reader

Cheers to 10 Years

blog.elementary.io

152 pointsmariuz77 comments

After hearing complaints for years from my mom about how slow her laptops were (with Windows), we bought her a NUC and I put elementary on it. That was about 4 years ago. Since then: not one single complaint.

She’s not a power user. She uses a web browser for Facebook, her bank stuff, and to play silly word games and puzzles. She checks email. But even those two tasks were enough to land her into trouble on seemingly any Windows machine we put in front of her.

I assume she was clicking on questionable ads, accidentally visiting who knows what websites from weird Facebook clicks, etc. but since she’s not on Windows, she’s less of a haphazard target.

Whenever I’m a good son and visit her, I’ll make sure everything’s updated and it usually is. She knows to click the update button when it asks.

I’m sure this could have been ANY Linux that would have fixed this, but Elementary looks the most simple, and that’s what it’s a great fit for her. It’s easy to use, easy to keep updated, and won’t virus itself up when your mom clicks on weird banner ads. All in a cheap little package. (Which I get could have been even cheaper.)

Had the same experience with Ubuntu and my mother, who is similarily not a power user. Even the software she uses to create her photo books had a linux variant, the printer worked out of the box.

Before that she had quesions about the computer every week, after that she maybe asked me once every two months and was very happy.

The printer support really blew me away. Maybe I still have PTSD from trying to get any peripheral to work with anything that required a driver when I was younger, but that you can just plug and play anywhere these days (on Linux or Mac or Windows) still makes me smile.

Probably not PTSD

> Whenever I’m a good son and visit her, I’ll make sure everything’s updated and it usually is. She knows to click the update button when it asks

The advantage of a Linux machine is that SSH is both trivial to setup & use but also reasonably secure to leave exposed to the Internet (as opposed to RDP) which is great for remote maintenance & troubleshooting.

I know, but “I’ve converted my regular visits to SSH tunnels” doesn’t go over well with moms. :)

"I can fix that in a few minutes" versus "I can come visit you in two weeks" does work well, though.

The thing about her using Elementary is that these things haven’t come up in the years she’s been on it. I’m sure I just jinxed it now though.

I'm just going to put out there that to my mom, priorities are different. She'll absolutely prefer a video/phone call and visit to me just solving her problem.

Especially if you live in the same town :)

Is she still on the version from 4 years ago, then?

IIRC, my biggest complaint about eOS was that you could not upgrade it between major versions, and had to do a clean install every time.

Yeah, that part sucks. She started on Loki (not that she knows that) and I upgraded things to Juno and that was enough for me. Luckily, her life on the computer is a printer driver and a browser window, so there wasn't much that needed re-configuring.

I need to force myself a bit and setup a "study" giving people eos on old laptops and ask them to live in it for a month.

And kudos to the team, even it's highly macos inspired (someone would say stolen or lifted) it was a brilliant ~replica and felt great right away.

Anecdotally, elementary OS is the only OS I've gotten my mom to use consistently. She's 70+ and Windows absolutely confuses her.

It really is “just enough computer: the OS.”

I have been using elementary on my laptops since 2013. If you want to give Linux a try, I recommend it over Ubuntu or Fedora. (KDE is nice, but I didn't try it in years).

I really wish they had more resources. I mean look at theses mockups from years ago ! (Nothing offical). https://www.deviantart.com/bassultra/art/Spreadsheet-3631475... https://www.deviantart.com/spiceofdesign/art/Writer-Concept-...

The default apps aren't this great. For my workflow nowadays it's mostly Firefox, Tilix, Visual Studio Code. + VirtualBox for Word and Kali Linux (I work as a pentester). But the virtual desktops, the launcher and the file browser are a pleasure to use.

Also it's based on Ubuntu, so all your commands from the Internet will works.

And finally good default touchpad gestures on Linux in the next version. https://blog.elementary.io/multitouch-gestures-in-elementary...

That means that I've been actively using it for about 8 years now! Back then it was the only Linux-based OS that was lightweight enough for my old Asus laptop not to overheat.

It's the little things that make me always go back to it:

- If I've made a selection in terminal, Ctrl+C will copy it. If there's no selection, it will kill the process as usual.

- Simple math directly from the launcher without the need to open calculator. Just press meta key, type the calculation, see the result. I wish it did more than that, but I'm using a third-party launcher for that stuff (https://ulauncher.io/, comes with elementary-inspired theme out of the box).

- Fuzzy search in the app launcher! I'm quite annoyed that I have to type "fire" in the launcher in every other OS I've tried to start Firefox (in Win10 even that does not work reliably). In elementary OS, I can do "ffox", "ffx", or anything resembling what I'm looking for, and Firefox will pop up.

Overall the system just gets out of my way and lets me launch apps quickly and navigate between them with breeze, which is precisely what I'm looking for in an OS. There's also a couple of third-party apps specifically designed for it that I absolutely love, most notably Planner (https://planner-todo.web.app/).

Congrats on the awesome decade team! I hope for many more successful ones and can't wait for the v6 to be ready for my laptop!

It’s funny, those features you mention mirror macOS features I love almost exactly (macOS used Cmd + C/V for copy/paste which I personally think works better than other meta key choices).

I mean this in the best way possible: macOS has a very a well through out UI and copying some of its patterns in an intelligent way is a good thing. I look forward to trying Elementary OS.

Agreed. But now we need touchpad hardware and/or drivers at Mac level quality and features.

There have been precisely 3 reasons why I’ve been using a MacBook for my laptop for the past 11 years while being a diehard Linux on the desktop fan:

1. Hardware quality. Metal chassis, amazing screen, an acre of touchpad surface that just works. I know I can’t pull the hard drive or upgrade the RAM. I know I can’t replace the battery, but even with those limitations it is an amazing build.

2. AppleCare. I don’t mind paying for insurance on my laptop (or phone for that matter). In all other products I use I opt for the “if it breaks I’ll either fix it or buy another one) approach but when it comes to my two main devices I don’t want to do that. Peace of mind is nice.

3. Pixelimator and Graphic. These are two amazing pieces of software and as much as I’d love for an open source alternative to come along and eat their lunch, GIMP and Inkscape can’t touch them. I have been using darktable instead of Lightroom but might switch to the latter at some point as it just has much more community support. The only other bonus thing would be iMessage/Messages because a full size keyboard is nicer for texting people than a tiny on screen one, but plenty of alternatives exist.

That’s really it. If I could have these things in an open build, my next machine might not be a MacBook.

I agree on 1. for sure. I bought a HP Envy laptop a couple of years ago and the hardware is terrible. The touchpad is awful compared to a MBP, the thermals are awful (doing anything will start the fans), and worst of all the metal is flimsy and has started to bend around the USB ports and the whole thing generally feels like it is going to fall apart, in around a year of use.

Even though the envy was a fair bit cheaper than a Macbook (Air/Pro) it doesn't really make sense if it falls to pieces after a year. I usually get 5 years out of my Apple laptops and that is with insanely heavy use.

>AppleCare. I don’t mind paying for insurance on my laptop (or phone for that matter)

There are all kinds of third-party companies that will insure your electronic goods, in which case you get the benefit of fixing it or replacing it. Not quite as convenient if you have an Apple store nearby, but just sayin'.

I agree that Apple touchpads can't be beat by anything else I've ever used. But, I eventually got to the point that using an inferior trackpad was trumped by features found in other laptops.

> If I've made a selection in terminal, Ctrl+C will copy it. If there's no selection, it will kill the process as usual

Which is already a prime example of bad user interface design.

I also love that feature. It's not inherently good or bad, just you clearly don't prefer it. I definitely prefer it to work intuitively like this.

I'd say it's a really functional compromise to handling well-established and conflicting keyboard shortcuts.

I turn this feature on in gnome terminal on all my machines (It's built into it by default).

> If I've made a selection in terminal, Ctrl+C will copy it. If there's no selection, it will kill the process as usual.

You can set that up in a bunch of terminal emulators these days. I have it working that way in Konsole.

I can, but I don't have to, it does that out of the box! I've dabbled in other terminal emulators, but could never be bothered to set them up quite as I'd like them to behave.

Have you tried xfce? It's even more lightweight than eos, and has existed for more than 20 years.

I've been testing Xubuntu 21.04 in virtualbox and so far it's solid. Definitely recommend trying it out if people are interested in xfce.

Congrats to the elementary team: 10 years is something to celebrate. I remember they took some stick for changing the website such that one has to specifically enter 0 in order to download for nothing.

But it seems like it's enabled them to fund the distro and the people who work on it. Without resorting to ads or data mining as the article notes.

I suppose there'll still be those who criticise the design as a "dark pattern": there's no hint that says "hey, you can get this for nothing if you enter 0". That's true, but then it's all relative: I'd personally rather have that than the "HEY IT'S FREE!! (but you pay with your privacy)" so beloved of the ad tech world.

I'm also biased, though, because I really like elementary. As an inveterate distro hopper, it's the one I keep coming back to. (And have donated annually to support it).

So congrats again to the team: looking forward to v6.

I think it's interesting that so many things in elementary OS are written in Vala. They are probably the biggest user of the language.

For example:

Calculator: https://github.com/elementary/calculator

Calendar: https://github.com/elementary/calendar

E-mail client: https://github.com/elementary/mail

File manager: https://github.com/elementary/files

Image viewer: https://github.com/elementary/photos

Music Player: https://github.com/elementary/music

Terminal: https://github.com/elementary/terminal

Window manager: https://github.com/elementary/gala

They actually offered to become stewards of the language itself when it looked like it was dead, IIRC.

I think its development has picked back up, although I'm still not sure it's getting much love, as most developers are pushed just to use GNOME Builder instead.

Vala is really good language, if you target GObject/Gtk. GNOME also uses Vala extensively.

Being able to switch to Genie on a whim is great¹. I've used vala on a few projects, and depending on the devs involved or type of project the ability to choose a syntax is really useful.

Although, quickly scanning through the GitHub topic doesn't paint the rosiest of futures² :/

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(programming_language)

² https://github.com/topics/vala?o=desc&s=updated

The Elementary OS blog also links to sellers of Linux-only computers [1] [2]. I might start recommending these to friends who are tired of Windows but also wary of Apple’s ecosystem.

[1]: https://laptopwithlinux.com/ "Laptop with Linux"

[2]: https://starlabs.systems/ "Star Labs"

We used Elementary OS for our point-of-sale systems at our small chain of resale clothing stores. It's been very solid, and my staff, who are not technically inclined at all, have no trouble with it. We're super happy with this choice.

Can you share more details? Kind of cool to hear linux being deployed in non technical businesses.

We resell clothes and all our inventory comes from our customers. We have buyers on site that examine and select items from pieces that customers bring in. We price the items and give the customer 25% of that price in cash or we give them 50% store credit which lasts forever and works at all our locations (currently 3). When my wife started the business, all the credit notes were slips of paper in cardboard boxes. We'd have to chat over to the other stores to resolve credit when customers came in to use it and we were at a breaking point.

After looking at several POS systems and not finding anything that met our needs, I hired a local dev company to build a POS system using Ember-electron front-end and a Solidus/Rails API on the backend. We extended Solidus to support a buying process and customer credit. That project was then handed to me to finish and bring in to production. I failed dearly. I was in way over my head trying to get this all working. I can maintain code, but I can't craft a thing like that. By sheer luck and connections I found a fantastic developer who we hired to finish and continue developing the system. She continues to develop and extend the system and It's been working really well.

The physical terminals are NUCs with Elo Touch screens and Cherry industrial keyboards. NUCs run Elementary OS, and we have our custom Ember-electron POS app running on there that talks to the API running on AWS. The terminals have 2D barcode scanners, and print to various networked printers for receipts, trade slips, hangtags, and price stickers. They're also semi-integrated with our keypad terminal for card transactions. The backend is a JSON API built on Solidus core.

If you have any questions, let me know.

I once upon a time suggested installing dual boot for a family member's pc with elementary just for her to try linux out. Every so often she uses it when windows has issues (more often than not) and ever since that, when I got a new laptop I tried using it over gentoo which is my usual choice (I have other issues with gentoo over the past few years but that's an aside).

Elementary isn't perfect, it has its hang-ups like anything else but it's pretty good, stable, and it's generally a pleasant experience. I can't really decide if elementary is better than gnome or not, I think I prefer gnome's activities view to the macos inspired dock+applications shtick but the design elsewhere feels a little bit more my taste than gnome. Also, while I don't use the curated apps that much, greatly prefer firefox to epiphany and the email app has issues with protonmail the ones I use are aesthetically pleasing.

All in all, I'm still waiting on the next update! But kudos to the team for a good 10 year run and here's to the next 10.

> Elementary isn't perfect, it has its hang-ups like anything else but it's pretty good, stable, and it's generally a pleasant experience.

I think they have one of the nicest Linux UIs out there; they certainly put a lot of thought into it and I love the aesthetics. But I must admit that both times that I tried out elementary, I switched back to Ubuntu after a few months because I found it annoyingly buggy.

I don't want to be the guy who just complains about everything and provides no solution, but eOS is, at the end of the day, just Ubuntu, which is just Linux.

I recently installed eOS because I was excited about the following things: paid app stores, a simpler and more intuitive UI, and a resource-light desktop. Target machine was a Dell XPS laptop with 8GB RAM and a previous gen i5 - outdated but far from 'old'.

Sleep and hibernate did not work because the installer did not add a swap partition. It took me forever to connect my Bluetooth headphones and the sound quality was really flakey. The touchscreen didn't work well and didn't support gestures or scrolling. Battery life was horrible compared to Win 10 or even Ubuntu. The native apps like Mail looked good but would often freeze or crash (esp when searching).

Without a focus on fundamental stability, there's no way for me to appreciate the UI or the paid apps. I went back to Kubuntu.

Sleep doesn't require a swap partition (or even swap at all). The memory stays powered on during sleep. Sounds like it was broken for some other reason, which is somewhat surprising since XPS laptops are supported well by Linux in my experience.

I also remembered: fingerprint reader doesn't work any Linux. Given that list of issues I'm surprised you consider them 'well supported'.

Do you have a newer model and how is your experience? I would consider buying another XPS in the future if it had better Linux compatibility.

I have a ~2 year old XPS13 thats been pretty flawless, though it was bought as a "Developer Edition" that shipped with Linux (which was replaced with a different distro on day 1). Not sure how much those differ in hardware, but it seemed more or less identical to the Windows versions at the time.

I tried this in a VM just to test it out, and I think it looks nice, but that's about it. It tries to mimic macOS and that's the only unique selling point of it. Personally I am happy with vanilla Ubuntu with a few custom themes I installed that makes Ubuntu easier to use and aesthetically pleasing.

I put Elementary OS on my 2012 MacBook Air. I’m a very experienced Linux user, but in the past I had to fiddle a lot with things, especially on Mac hardware.

It setup Ubuntu 18.04 very well, with wifi, Bluetooth, audio, ethernet, those are not unusual. But also the brightness controls, the keyboard backlighting controls, the trackpad, the volume control keys. Everything and all hardware worked out-of-the-box. I was very pleasantly surprised. Been using it for months now and it works a charm. And yes I made a donation and was very happy to do so.

Kudos!

I've tried it but it was unable to handle different dpi for each screen and that was the end of it :( hidpi is something that bugs so many distros

Not only Linux distros. HiDPI seems to be a problem in every OS except macOS. Windows regularly draws things twice as big or half as big as intended, especially if it's an app not developed in Windows-native technologies. Ubuntu (and similar distros) handles this better than Windows in many respects but not all. On macOS though it doesn't matter what tech it is, it just works.

My girlfriend had a MacBook Pro 2012 and broke the screen. While waiting for a new one I gave her my old Yoga laptop with Elementary OS.

About a month later I replaced the screen of the mac, threw in a fast SSD and reinstalled OSX, it was better that new. ..but she won't use it xD She likes the Yoga with E.OS better!

Thanks to the team behind this distro, your work is awesome :)

Can you now close the lid of your laptop and the OS will go to sleep? And can you open the lid of your laptop and the OS will wake up?

This is a feature, which does not work at all on my company-managed Win10 Lenovo laptop.

In my experience it has worked flawlessly without any manual setup (aside from changing bios sleep mode setting to linux). Worked for my ThinkPad and it has also worked for my older lenovo about two years ago.

If you don't have an external screen connected, yes. If you do, it just counts it as if you've disconnected laptop's monitor.

But of course, your mileage may wary on the hardware.

I believe it's mostly fixed nowadays. I remember fixing this on Ubuntu like 10 years ago by adding an "acpi=off" in the grub config file.

I have yet to get that reliable working on any Linux laptop of mine.

Maybe I am closing it wrong or something.

Works fine for me, XPS 15 running Ubuntu 20.04.

Was this ever a problem? I haven't used a laptop where that wasn't the default.

One of my favorite distro for the laymen, but it's also expandable with Ubuntu-based repos if you need to get out of the mold.

Here is my 5 stars review: Years ago I downloaded the Freya version after donating $20 , and it was a very pleasant experience. Later on I got a Tuxedo laptop that came with Elementary preinstalled based on Ubuntu 16.04 and I haven't ever reinstalled it again, it is very stable, the upgrade process work all the time without issues.

IMHO probably the most user friendly & unique linux distro out there! Congrats for the milestone!

I remember trying out linux desktop with this many moons ago. Don't know if it was my curiosity or my noobness at the time but this OS is the easiest one I've ever broken before.

Had something do with python dependencies but goddamn the pantheon desktop was a real pain trying to get it back up. Am definitely positive that things have changed now as the desktop matures.

I still don't get why is there a need for so many "Ubuntu" based distributions

They fullfil different niches. Elementary is laser focused on macOS converts, pop is focused on gamers + enthusiasts, etc. Ubuntu at its core is a decent operating system, the distributions just make it easier to get an out of the box config that "just works" for your use cases.

Also Flatpak is so much more pleasant than Snap, which is why I'll always go with something based off of Ubuntu.

Are you mixing up Flatpak and Snap? Ubuntu supports snap by default and it’s much more feature rich [1].

I found the ability to install JetBrains products through Snap particularly delightful (they don’t support flatpak).

[1]: https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/Similar-project...

No I'm not. Ubuntu does use Snap, but distros based on top of Ubuntu (like elementary OS or Linux Mint) come with Flatpak instead.

So I'll always take something based on Ubuntu rather than vanilla Ubuntu.

I've used a Ubuntu based os for years. I don't think I've ever had an app that uses flatpak. I have several snaps installed though.

I have to admit though, I can't stand the way the snap folder defaults to a non-hidden folder in your home directory with no easy way to change this.

Any suggestions on distros that play well with Flatpak? The org itself presents only a flat list — of many icons:

https://flatpak.org/setup/

Fedora, Mint, eOS.

Basically anything that's not Ubuntu.

Imagine telling a poet: "Yeah, but there is a poem about love already..."

Great analogy

Well, Ubuntu is a great base (like all the commands on github repos are for Ubuntu). But Ubuntu isn't such a great distribution. So everybody is trying to fix it by pulling their own distro :)

Why not? People have an itch to scratch, let them scratch it. If they want to use Ubuntu as the base, so be it.

Ugh I know, and so many programming languages based on C as well! Ridiculous.

Congrats to 10 years of writing an Ubuntu theme pack!

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