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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

I'm betting long on ElementaryOS[1]. It's a distro that wants to be top-notch in UX, design, developer APIs and system frameworks. They even have a Human Interfaces Guideline. Still a work in progress, but I used their previous release for a while and it was just a breeze of fresh air after Gnome/Unity, and surprisingly stable.

Two things are real blockers for Linux desktop adoption: the Adobe suite (or alt) for professionals, and gaming for casual users. One of these is about to be solved :)

[1] http://elementaryos.org/

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This looks very interesting indeed. Initially it looks like a darkly themed Gnome-desktop with a new launcher, but looking around it seems like this is something different.

Unfortunately I cannot seem to find any details on the what's backing this distro. Maybe that's the point and that you shouldn't have to care, but I'm still curious.

Do you have any more details on what's actually running here?

It's an Ubuntu. As windowmanager they developed gala which is also using mutter. They're using many components of the Gnome Environment.

From the screenshot it looks like an OSX clone to the point. It seems like the UI designer switched to 2d-dock, inverted the colors, replaced the apple with an 'e' and called it a day.

Not that this is bad per se though.

Edit: They even pretty much copied the icons for browser, address book and dictionary.

Check their blog. It's more descriptive than their website.

http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready

The browser icon has changed since: http://elementaryos.org/journal/new-midori-icon-elementary

Oh so instead copying Safari's logo they now copy Firefox? http://elementaryos.org/sites/default/files/user/5/midori.pn...

Elementary might have something going on for them but originality is not it apparently.

The new icon solves the problem of being yet another thing people will point at and say they were just copying Apple. It might not be totally original, but that's okay, everyone borrows from everyone, and I don't think they will get any flak just because it somewhat resembles Firefox.

The problem arises when you can trace so many ideas back to a single source that it makes it look like you're just making a cheap copy, which sadly is what is happening with elementary.

Yes, it is clearly inspired by OSX, yet you wouldn't mistake the two. If you look at the details (shading, borders, highlights, buttons) it has a different set of standards, some things are closer to KDE's Plasma than Aqua.

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