Elementary OS Freya Released

Despite leading with donation panhandling.

Still, I'm using it now because I am tired of Slackware. I love Slack to bits but the amount of work involved in making my setup look and play nice is just silly. I'm looking for something like a one-click-pretty-usable Linux for random laptops/PCs I've accumulated.

PapyrOS might be nice if it's ever finished.

Some people could find that offensive, especially when eOS gets the vast majority of its codebase for free from Debian, Ubuntu and the rest of the FOSS world. What the eOS guys said was offensive to some people, and downright idiotic to everyone else!

On the substance rather than the wording, surely Hacker News does not agree, as a group, that open source software should never be monetized, especially on a voluntary basis. They have rewritten the Linux desktop environment from scratch, which is an enormous amount of work, and in my experience it works very well. Why not expect that you could find 10,000 users, many of whom people spending their professional life on computers, willing to pay $20 (which in the UK is about 4 cups of coffee), and actually be able to support some developers working on the project full time? That is not at all an unreasonable goal.

I know about 20 people over the age of 70 who I periodically help with computer problems, I would say about half of them still using XP on computers that cannot be upgraded to Windows 8. They principally use their computers for checking webmail and browsing the internet.

I have tried Ubuntu, but unfortunately it has all sorts of minor UI ruffles which make it difficult for many non-technical people to use. Some examples are: people really struggle to use its pop-up scroll bars, partly because the concept is apparently non obvious, and needs to be explained, and partly because they're fiddly. Then, programs often open in the background, and don't come to the front, so the only sign they're ready is an illuminated icon to the left. And, you get regular pop-up which say 'serious system error detected' which never seem to amount to anything.

And in general, I would say my experience is that it is not beautiful, polished or consistent enough to justify to non technical users the change in user interface which it asks them to make.

Linux is effectively a developer market, it is written by and for developers, to stratch and itch or for infrastructure. But there has been a consistent failure to produce an operating system that ordinary people want to use. In my opinion, Linux also needs a consumer market, which is willing to pay to bring in other professionals, principally designers, and support them in polishing the user interface, in the way that users want, to a heavy sheen. Elementary OS was a step in that direction, and it's very disappointing to see it apparently shot down for a lack of ideological purity and/or just being abrasive. Hopefully, despite the level of outrage which many people feel, they will be able to find their 10,000 users out of the general Linux community, and carry on regardless.

Maybe it's just me, maybe eOS runs perfectly on everybody else's computers, but the standard install has proven a little buggy and I've had to make adjustments from the command line to make it usable.

I think if Windows or OS X didn't work out-of-the-box, I'd want a refund and I'd consider a free alternative. eOS is great for free, but for money? Not so sure.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pantheon

Really, it's just an ubuntu clone with a pretty osx-like gui. This isn't really anything amazing or new, and it makes it seem like they're trying to tap into the elitist osx market. If that is indeed what they want, they should really check out [2]

So it's not really the software that's bad, really it's all what you can get on any other distro with a little work, it's their attitude about it.

[1] http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments [2] http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/

As for the negativity, I think people wonder about the "why" of this. As far as I can tell, it's basically "Ubuntu is ugly so we'll make it look like Mac".

What? You actually expected somebody to come up with a whole new OS that runs software written for another proprietary, closed source OS?

eOS is a replacement for those users who want to browse the web, read email, watch videos and look at photographs. These people are its target demographic, not professionals who rely on specialized software to do their job.

Because the average user totally uses those programs...

Anyhow, I've installed Ubuntu for 'average' users with old, virus riddled machines and they love it. I use Linux every day for University stuff, and have for nearly 4 years. My wife uses it for her computing needs. Linux, any Linux distro, is 'enough' for the average user. Elementary OS is enough too, just a little prettier out of the box (I don't use it, my laptop has openSUSE, but eOS does look pretty).

I'm not sure about touch screens, I think most people view them as optional extras. And although of course people are shifting towards other form factors, huge numbers still use a desktop or laptop, and have no expectation of convergence between the devices.

I agree about automatic backup. I actually wonder whether that might be a route towards monetization which would be more palatable to the general community - an edition which is provided free with donations as is, and an edition which has automatic cloud backup built in, along with integration with Android and iOS devices for things like photos.