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Comment by josephpmay | Hacker News Reader

Talk about a terribly designed website. If someone had no idea what Elementary OS is, the website does absolutely nothing to tell them. No list of even basic features. No explanation of compatibility or how to install it. Only a single screenshot. Why is this the case?

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As someone who knows nothing about Elementary OS, you are correct. I dug into the blog a bit and all I can tell is that it's Ubuntu with some Gnome skins. Why would I pay money for a free OS? What's the purpose? What need is this designed to fill? The site failed to inform.

I agree that the website it poorly designed, but you can download Elementary OS for free. Just enter 0 in the "Custom Amount" box.

> I dug into the blog a bit and all I can tell is that it's Ubuntu with some Gnome skins.

Not really. The eOS developers wrote a whole DE(Pantheon) and the included applications from scratch. The website does a very poor job of explaining that.

They used to have a better website. I think it was the victim of "upgrades".

https://web.archive.org/web/20130302134643/http://elementary...

Release notes from a previous beta that explains more about the underlying infrastructure.

Their old developer website also explained some of the new technologies that Elementary OS exposes to applications:

- Contractor (like Android's Intents): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024115/http://elementary...

- Switchboard (unified, pluggable system settings): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024137/http://elementary...

- Granite (GTK+ widget collection): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024129/http://elementary...

Totally agree. Especially since this is far from Ubuntu with GNOME skins. In fact it doesn't use GNOME at all. It's a completely custom built desktop environment.

As I remember, elementaryOS originally was a customized GNOME, but they've since made everything their own.

Agree, its buried. http://blog.elementary.io/post/116134677986/freya-is-here in case if interested.

Even as someone familiar with Elementary OS in the past, I can't figure out what's new with this release.

Designers take themselves so seriously... sometimes they need to be reminded about usability.

Yes! I looked at it, like, "Is this elementary the linux distribution that I have at least heard of by name or is this some completely different thing?" That's a serious failure on their part.

elementary OS have a similar mentality to the Vivaldi browser -- it's just for our friends.

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.

Good pointer. I have an old laptop with Arch that basically only runs Chromium apps and terminal programs -- PapyrOS looks like the logical step up from there, when it's ready.

I've never seen making Slackware look nice as a burden. Especially since I can generally just copy over config files.

I love Slackware for the simplicity and that's why I use it. So many of these feature filled pretty systems work nice.. until they don't. Unneeded features are just more stuff to learn and more stuff to break in my opinion. Slackware is a rock solid work horse and I know right where everything is and can change it if I need to.

But to tell the truth, just give me a nice Unix terminal and a web browser and I don't really care that much what it's sitting on.

I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but if you really, honestly want a no-frills, easy to set up UNIX for your personal computer, there really is no better machine than a Macintosh.

I have to agree. As ridiculous and disgusting Apple is as a company, OSX still offers the best UNIX experience. But I applaud any attemt to change that fact.

Yeah, but that would require the distro maintainers to sell their own computers, which they support and test their distro against before releasing. Most distro maintainers don't really like the thought of that.

Or a hardware manufacturer working with them long-term. (Dell with it's "developer" XPS versions would be an obvious candidate)

I agree. I have an iMac and a Thinkpad; I classify these as my work computers. I really like OS X. It blends the Unix operating system with the best looks/UI of the OS market. If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

At home I have a collection of misfit laptops that were discarded by others or sold very cheaply. It is these laptops on which I tend to run a Linux distro (because Windows tends to be slow and no SSH; because I'm not really in the business of Hackintoshing.)

Running eOS Freya on one of them now. It's not bad. Wifi seems a bit temperamental--which is astounding given that eOS is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu had no trouble with wifi.

> If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

That's why I said personal computer :) Another OS X pitfall is that modern, vendor-supported versions are somewhat resource-intensive and not very fit for running on older or less powerful systems.

While true its not clear you can click "Custom Price" and input $0 dollars.

The donation money buttons are also confusing

Ironic really, especially give the teams focus on usability!

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