Elementary OS | Hacker News Reader

Elementary OS

elementaryos.org

105 pointsrkwz79 comments

For everyone wondering: it's based on Ubuntu, with a clean theme and some "homemade" applications. It's minimalist and blazing fast. The music player will come with the next release. It's opinionated. I like it.

Thanks for that, I was missing the About page.

This. Thank you.. They should at least specify it on the home page..?

The next release should also include their own shell called Pantheon/Pantheon-Shell. It features their top bar, Wingpanel, their Unity/Gnome3 style dash called Slingshot, and their own fork of Docky called Plank.

https://launchpad.net/~elementaryart/+archive/elementary-dev

One of the really cool things about this is the readily available links to descriptions of the core applications. Easily the best-designed distro website I've ever seen.

The bad news: branding collisions galore:

The 'e' looks way too much like enlightenment's 'e', and enlightenment already has a project called elementary -- http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Elementary

The design of the whole bloody thing looks exactly like OS X. The topbar, the notification icons, the dock, the Midori icon (which is weird -- Midori already has a standard claw icon that looks cooler than the compass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28web_browser%29). Hell, they even have a set of "human interface guidelines"! http://www.elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines

That isn't really that strange: http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/

That people don't think about human interface guidelines because it's open source software is alarming as all hell.

To be fair, the portion of open source software which actually have that kind of guidelines instead of being just a shot from the individual developer's mind is very small.

I believe the point here is how Elementary presents itself. If you compare Elementary's discover page with Ubuntu's feature page, the difference is clear. Elementary's page screams I'm clean and simple; their page don't took you to figure out what the hell Me Menu is (and how I should care), they just put enough stuff to get you comfortable with its application and featureset, which I believe is a good thing for those who want to get their stuff done without much fiddling around.

This looks eerily similar to OS X. Everything from the desktop to the icons (safari, dictionary, contacts) and even the design of the website.

Yep, the Safari logo in particular does it for me as they've attempted to make it look ever so slightly different ("Nooo, see this one's green and the compass dial is pointing at a TOTALLY different angle"). Just reminds me of the rather awful OS X-like skins you see for Winamp or basically any skinnable application. Bleh

Yeah, but didn't Apple just copy the Netscape Navigator theme for their Safari icon?

Which part of the theme? The netscape navigator icon was just a circular logo with a big "N" and the icon for the old Communicator browser was a Lighthouse - which is only vaguely related in a nautical\navigatey sort of way

The old navigator icon had a steering wheel in it. See http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/7038.gif for the image.

Over time they simplified it.

OK so a ship's wheel is again in the nautical ballpark, but not really the same thing as a compass

This website's bizarre mix of imitation and over-explaining reminds me of some earnest but vacuous manual for a foreign knock-off product.

"Press the File menu," I expect it to say, "and a beautiful pull-down fades quickly into view, with useful functions such as New Folder and Close."

Too bad Apple patented calling an address book "Address Book," I guess they'll just have to do their best with nonsense names.

> Too bad Apple patented calling an address book "Address Book,"

Are you joking? I didn't think that was possible, it's too generic and I couldn't find anything on Google regarding the matter.

Yeah, it was a joke, though maybe too close to the realm of possibility.

In the good old days, Microsoft would have called it "Microsoft Address Book", waited a few years, then started suing people for using the term "Address Book". More recently, they'd have called it "My Address Book" and then changed it back to "Address Book" in Vista, breaking applications that expected to find "My Address Book". And the 32-bit version would be in "Program Files x86" because it's really important to segregate applications by their bitness.

The clean, simpleness is good, but it's looking over the wrong pond for inspiration.

Windows 7 has a great desktop experience, and it's whats keeping me from switching over to Linux. Gnome 3 is really close to it though, if not for the font rendering[1], games[2], and comfortable software I would switch over to Linux. I think Linux can do it if the people who develop software with a GUI only work with their GUI to develop their software. This would force them to be frustrated enough with their application to make it work, or just give up. Either case, it's better than wasting other peoples time.

[1]: While the freetype2-infinality library tries to solve this problem, it's not quite there yet. It's close though

[2]: Wine is a good effort, but it needs to look more like Windows 7, and less like Windows 2000 (lots of the great UX was introduced in 7 in my opinion).

What? I'm on GNOME2 and my fonts are gorgeous. Far superior to Windows's ClearType or my MBP's blurry rendering.

Also, not sure how the appearance of buttons plays into UX... it's not like Wine comes with Windows 2000 or Windows 7 applications. I assume you're referring to the visual style of the buttons. It's a very small issue that affects people dependent on Windows applications... and besides, you can use Windows themes in Wine... very, very easily. That feature's existed for years and years.

I was more so talking about Gnome 3. The titlebar fonts are generally okay, but the way fonts are rendered in web browsers on really any desktop environment in Linux versus how they're rendered in OS X or Windows are considerably worse.

I'm referring to the visual style in general, there's a huge difference between having something work and enjoying using it, and Wine is most of the time the former, but rarely, if ever, the latter.

I guess I don't understand what you want. Like I said, Ubuntu fonts out of the box are rendered gorgeously and I've had similar or identical rendering in GNOME 3. Maybe it's just me, but I think these all look decent:

http://i.imgur.com/4dGbR.png

http://i.imgur.com/mfyjw.png

http://i.imgur.com/BqOdg.png

In fact, I would venture to guess you couldn't differentiate between Linux and Mac OS X (the Windows one is obvious), out of those three.

Again, the "visual style" of Wine is adaptable. winecfg allows you to use the uxtheme files that are used by Windows. There is even a uxtheme file that makes applications run in Wine look just like native Ubuntu applications.

Wine is great considering what it is. And anyone who understands what it does, has reasonable expectations for what it can do. They've effectively written their own implementation of Windows APIs to the point that Team Fortress 2 and the (current_version - 1) version of Office runs with little to no problems at all.

I love Wine. It lets me use self extracting ZIP files, small executables, small tools, old programs I wrote but don't have the source code for. I don't "enjoy" using it because I'd rather use a native app... but again, I'm really just not sure what you're expecting. It's not an emulator...

Anyone trying to use Visual Studio or AutoCAD in Linux (wine that is, I use Visual Studio in VirtualBox for my day job) is asking to be laughed at. Fortunately, there are half a dozen excellent virtualization technologies for Linux... and many competent replacements for Windows tools in the Linux world.

He just doesn't like them. Get over it. People have different tastes. You don't really need to write essays about why he is "wrong".

I think the blurryfonts in the 3 imgur urls you've provided are way worse than what I see in Windows 7 and Mac OS X every day. They're somewhat misshapen and smudged-looking.

Hey dude buddy friend, maybe calm down a second. He has bad preconceptions regarding linux fonts and is nearly completely wrong about how he's considering Wine.

And by the way, those screenshots were, in order, Linux, OS X, Windows (default settings, font, browser zoom level, etc in each). But nice to see that confirmation bias is still alive and well. That's the whole reason I provided as much context as I did. I knew someone would reply with a comment like yours. Sad that I was right.

The last one is ok, but I like thinner fonts. MS fonts are legally available on Linux (just accept the license). I know that may be blasphemy to some, but here's how fonts look on my system:

http://i.imgur.com/vBi93.png

If anyone cares:

    $ sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
    $ cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
    $ sudo rm 10-hinting-slight.conf
    $ sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf .
    $ sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf .
    $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Since people seem to be missing the point, those three screenshots are (in order): Ubuntu, OS X, Windows 7. Latest versions of each, default fonts (msttcorefonts installed in Ubuntu), with the default browser zoom level.

I think mine look even prettier: http://i.imgur.com/29dRv.png http://i.imgur.com/Nf087.png

Anyway, some fonts look good at a specific size. I'm currently using the big size in the first picture and everything looks gorgeous.

The third one is Windows.

edit: I just looked at this thread again. I didn't fully scroll down and see that you already said it was Windows.

Ubuntu/Mac OS X both have distinctively different ways of font rendering. Windows' font rendering looks more readable (in my opinion), and OS X/Ubuntu's were designed for print.

I hastily put this together to better illustrate what I mean.

http://i.imgur.com/Ag5DK.png

Reviewed in LWN back in April: https://lwn.net/Articles/438184/

Personally i like elementary OS quite a lot, i've been a long time Ubuntu user but i am not really a fan of the new Unity UI and wanted something nice and light for my dev box. It feels snappier than the default Ubuntu install but has the Ubuntu app store so i can just install any apps that i need that aren't present in the default install. The layout is very similar to how i usually set up ubuntu anyway so it seemed like a good option. Also being Ubuntu based setting up a LAMP dev environment takes about 15 minutes including the package downloads.

There are only 2 things i dislike:

1. It looks too much like OSX, i personally prefer dark themes, so I changed it from elementary theme to elegant gnome

2. Midori, it feels super alphaish, it has potential but there is no way i would have included it as the default browser considering it seems to only be about 80% finished.

'OS' is a bit of a stretch, it is essentially a gnome skin and a handful of apps.

Well, given your description it's an OS as much as Ubuntu is.

That's exactly what an OS is.

Is this linked to Enlightenment? The "e" sure looks familiar.

Nope.

Not trying to be negative, as I haven't used elementary for any real amount of time yet, but: whenever I glance at the 'e' icon it reminds me of a negative action sign. Like a 'No right turn' road sign, or something similar. Not a problem once you're used to it, I suppose.

Takes about 4 seconds to change it to whatever icon you want..

I'm talking more about the branding, you shouldn't really have to debrand your OS to make it user friendly.

It seems to be focused on creating a few applications on its own, which are different somehow. The GNOME project seems to have the goal of usability (easiness etc.) but also has pretty clear criteria (etc. the dictionary doesn't have bookmarks as in Elementary OS) I really like Gnome 3 on Fedora 15 which as always stays close to the upstream. But still more choice of applications running on Linux to choose from is always a good thing :-).

Links for the uninitiated

Jupiter (stable build based on Ubuntu Maverick)

http://elementaryos.org/

Luna (unstable build based on Ubuntu Oneiric)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eosbuilds/files/

If you get an error with nvidia graphics card with the nouveau driver like I did, just append "nomodeset" to the boot up options. ie. click e in grub and replace "quiet splash" with "nomodeset"

Love the UI on this. I did a light dig through the docs but does it offer networking support? Would love to use this on my currently Windows box to host files.

As it's a linux distro, it supports most everything except Windows- or Mac OS-specific programs. And even those have a chance with various compatibility projects.

I'm posting from Elementary OS using the live CD. As others have said, its Ubuntu with a simpler GUI. So you get networking, hardware detection, restricted drivers (i.e. it installs the nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card on this old Pundit desktop) same as Ubuntu. But it isn't 'light' on memory!

I have not tested the OS so i will not comment about how snappier it is, but it just looks to me like one trying too hard to get OSx on Ubuntu. I applaud their efforts to build apps for it but still it would have been much better if they could have put their efforts in building something new, beyond already existing native desktop, may be an enhanced and better tiling wm to add to their os or something out of the box.

For many years I was looking for something like this, something that would be as simple and elegant as OS X, while having a solid Unix foundation. I tried everything, from all types of distros to my favorite distro with a hand-made theme (Acqua-like).

Then about six years ago it suddenly hit me. I bought a Mac, and (who'd have thought) it was exactly what I was looking for. Never went back.

I would like to know what Ubuntu this is based on because of driver issues I have experienced with 11.04 and 10.10. Also, do the software repositories work and is the shell Gnome2 or 3?

10.04 LTS

Hmm, it looks beautiful and I really don't want to be a detractor, but with the iPad, I don't really see anyone needing a minimalist desktop OS anymore.

Well, then I can't use my computer anymore... Do you REALLY think desktop OSes are dead? Well, think again :)

I'm not saying the Desktop OS is dead. I'm saying the only reason why you'd use a desktop OS is for complicated tasks like designing / programming / gaming / spreadsheets where this kind of power is needed.

This OS looks very minimalistic. The only functions I can see are web browsing, e-mail and pictures. It's even called Elementary OS. I just feel an iPad can replace all the features that this particular OS offers easily.

Just because I'm a programmer doesn't mean I want my computer to be needlessly complex. Elementary is based on Ubuntu, so you can do anything with it. It just has a core set of apps that are designed for usability.

"The only functions I can see are web browsing, e-mail and pictures."

wow, way off there, it's Ubuntu based so you can run anything that you can run in Ubuntu, just install it via the app store. The "lightweight" refers to the default set of application you get and the theme, if you want more functionality just go into the app store and install it.

My thought is that it makes a good jumping-off point to build a personal programming-focused system, as long as it doesn't include Open Office or any of the other junk that comes on a standard Ubuntu desktop install.

Have a look at AntiX base - essentially command line Debian 6 with the MEPIS kernel and non-free drivers.

There are quite a few light linuxes around: AntiX, SliTaz, Crunchbang. Good for older hardware (like what you can get for £50 or $50 down the local charity shop) and cheap no name ARM based laptops (ARM Ubuntu is in development).

The address book and dictionary icons have a different perspective yet sit in the same dock. Ack!

check out #elementary @ freenode

What is the target market for this OS? I can't figure out from their website.

Can't figure out the internals of the project either (how is it powered ? web based ? etc.) Plus it keeps on giving HTTP 500 errors :(

About the browser:

"But unlike many of its peers, Midori is also fully native to elementary, using the same GTK toolkit that ensures the perfect desktop compatibility and integration found in our other apps."

So apparently it's GTK-based.

Wow GTK. People are still using that ?

looks like plain gnome + docky with a clean theme, that's about it.. Another linux distro which tries to have a simple and clean interface.

I will install the mail program postler on ubuntu and give it a try, though.

Sourceforge repo: http://sourceforge.net/projects/elementaryos/

it's just Ubuntu with a new theme and some new default apps.

A reasonable observation. I suspect (but can't confirm because as you note they don't actually say it) that they are going after the 'ChromeOS' / WebStart market.

It look like yet-another-linux-reskinning, it has a bit of JoliCloud feel to it. And the downloads don't have ARM builds so I'm guessing its not a tablet OS.

it's just a over ambitious project that spawned off the elementary-gtk-theme

It's not a simple reskin. The Elementary folk have patched Nautilus quite a bit to make it more usable, and some of the changes have made it back to Ubuntu. They've also written several of the default apps from scratch.

It took some digging, but I found an introduction page: http://www.elementaryos.org/journal/elementary-101

I think the target market is people disillusioned with Ubuntu. I was a long time user of the Elementary GTK theme which probably facilitated this transition. Basically, I don't agree with Ubuntu's new default personality and how it basically forces it down your throat. I feel like with ElementaryOS, you install the packages you need as opposed to having to remove the ones you don't. It's really Ubuntu with a different philosophy

i dont understand why every new distro has to be praised by the owners as the ultimate [lightweight|powerfull|blaaa] distro every user should use. and why every publisher needs to praise a new philosophie in its work. Especially those who just copy ideas from others or invent a new wheel or just make another linux distro.

and its really the wrong direction if every developer who starts with some more or less usefull linux applications seems to have to create a new distro instead of making just a project to add to an existing distro.

Looks like Ubuntu, with Apple's marketing scheme.

the download page seems to be down at the moment.

After years of Lindows and so on, finally a LinOSX.

So... OS X?

I don't really see the point of this. OSX is already a perfectly suitable OSX, what does this add?

To expand a bit: this is obviously heavily inspired by Mac OS X (that's being generous). Imitation is fine, but it's much better when it expands upon the ideas that it's borrowed. This doesn't do that. So outside of giving linux a nicer aesthetic, what does this offer?

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