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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Elementary OS is that, it comes with a selection of apps that look beautiful but are just... really bad.

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.

The Videos app? Again, only your local library, and that's it except (IIRC) it has videos from The Guardian newspaper of all places as one of its four online sources? What's up with that?

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.

Every app is like this - barely functional.

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To play devil's advocate, the apps being simple to the point of pain for power users is almost the point of the distro. If you want a distro that you can wrangle into exactly what your vision is, you'll love arch. If you want the simplest possible mostly-functional option where you don't need to change anything to get it to work, elementary isn't too bad. That said I hate using it and generally dislike their entire philosophy of taking an open program, stripping out three quarters of the code, and then calling it their own and begging for money to keep doing that. Feels gross.

None of the issues you mentioned are really fixable. Online streaming is a bit of a pipe dream for linux, legal(ish?) solutions are going to be hacky and break constantly since nobody has the negotiating power to work out deals with labels. Same with videos, alphabet is not going to just allow random apps to bypass the entire point of youtube (serving ads to eyeballs and tracking said eyeballs to serve more ads). Maps does suck, and that's mostly and openstreetmap issue. You could integrate google maps but those API keys are not cheap.

Arch user here who's slapped the Pantheon desktop on top of it; I don't use it often, mostly an i3 guy, but when I do it's beautiful and I love the work Elementary OS has put into it. All I need to add are those dancing icons from Cairo-Dock and I can get back to embarrassing my apple friends with how riced my desktop is.

It has a really weird feedback loop problem. I've spoken to some developers of the most popular elementaryOS apps and the amount they get from donations is extremely small, which limits how much time they want to spend making an app specific to such a small userbase. At some point they usually consider that the monetization of the app on elementaryOS isn't worth anything and they just re-work the app to be for Gnome systems overall and push it to Flathub.

IMHO it's a lost cause trying to make money with apps, especially on Linux. Of course there are a few well known exceptions, but I'm not sure it's a worthwhile endeavor in 2022 to say "hey I'm gonna build an app and live of it".

The Music app does what it's supposed to: play your music. Their stance is that arbitrary streaming platforms should be their own app, which makes sense.

The Videos app likewise plays your videos. No idea where you're getting that bit about The Guardian, but that's just flat out false.

There is no first-party Maps app, so again, that's not something that the elementary team provides...

Constructive criticism is helpful, but only when it's informed.

I agree about multimedia apps, I always replace Music and Videos with something else. But on the other hand dev-focused apps (primarily Code and Terminal) are so stable and good that I never have to install an alternative to them. Calendar and Mail are also pretty awesome.

I feel like the more internal team relies on them, the better they are. And, well, I guess they don't use multimedia apps a lot.

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