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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

See also Elementary OS and its Pantheon desktop environment.

ElementaryOS is very polished aesthetically and I love that they didn't jump aboard the "flat rectangles and monochrome icons" bandwagon like everybody else, but the way they went along with the various functionality-limiting GNOME conventions like replacing proper menubars with hamburger menus and hiding the minimize button is disappointing.

Still better than GNOME

So much effort goes into badly cloning another desktop these days.

I like macOS for the attention to detail, not for the rounded corners.

I like X11 for the flexibility, not for the ability to poorly imitate another system.

I will give credit to GNOME for trying to be their own thing, but it seems like they have no real vision, except trying to be "simpler" at all costs.

A long while back there were efforts to port Pantheon to FreeBSD. IMO, a coordinated effort to get the graphical and UX experience on Linux or FreeBSD would be better than yet another one.

I do wonder about eOS staff issues. It would be a shame to see that fall apart, I've been using it for years. Even so, someone picking up the torch as it were would be better than starting another.

Has ElementaryOS gotten their staff problems fixed yet?

I’m also annoyed that they don’t go for Objective C which could make a lot of seasoned Apple developers comfortable, but instead went for a custom language.

Then take a look at GnuStep or WindowMaker.

Window Maker does not use GNUstep or Objective-C at all, it is all written in plain C. In fact the UI toolkit it uses (developed for Window Maker itself) is called "WINGs" for "WINGs Is Not GNUstep".

Probably it's time to rewrite WINGs in Swift.

> custom language

Vala wasn't a custom language for elementaryOS, it already existed for years before the first version of the OS (and i think the first version didn't use any Vala code).

It most likely used instead of Objective-C because its object system was built on top of glib's gobject system and elementaryOS used Gtk and a lot of other glib/gobject-based libraries. Using Objective-C would mean they'd have to base their UI on GNUstep and GNUstep wasn't as polished as Gtk.

Remember that while they used macOS as an inspiration, it was never elementaryOS's goal to make a macOS clone.

Of course they could have used GTK from ObjectiveC, in fact it has been proposed.

Of course they could have used Gtk from Objective-C, it is a C superset after all. However it'd be the same as using Gtk from C and the point of using Vala was to use a higher level language which understands the gobject object system and works with its memory management so they wont have to care about it.

I have used Vala a bit some years ago to make a Gtk program and it was MUCH easier using it than using Gtk from C directly, so i can understand why they went with it.

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