[HN Gopher] Elementary OS 6.1
___________________________________________________________________
Elementary OS 6.1
Author : bryanmikaelian
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-12-20 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.elementary.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.elementary.io)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| 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.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| 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".
| katmannthree wrote:
| 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| xd1936 wrote:
| I've been using Elementary OS since 0.3 as my main OS at work
| (Higher Education IT) and it's my favorite distro. The lack of
| Ayatana indicators is annoying, but overall, the polish and
| look/feel of their desktop environment is really nice and has
| only gotten better with each version.
| roshansingh wrote:
| I used Elementary 5.1 for over 2 years and then switched to
| Elementary 6. It was very buggy and slow on Thinkpad X1 Carbon
| Gen 9 with very good hardware. I switched to Ubuntu 21.04 and
| everything worked really well. I dont think I will hop distro
| again.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| As someone that has used Elementary on my x200s for a number of
| years, at least since the 4.x days, I was disappointed to find
| the lack of support for the 11th gen/Iris Xe combo in my new
| laptop and was pushed back to traditional Ubuntu 21.04 with
| wayland.
|
| I may give it a shot again.
|
| I especially liked the ability to customize the key combos so
| that it acted reasonably close to a tiling Wm (I had moved to it
| from awesomeWM) which was very handy on an Thinkpad x200s with
| only a track point and no touchpad, but with the added perks of a
| fully baked DE. And that was in addition to the very nice
| aesthetics, rather than in spite of.
| pxc wrote:
| I've tried Elementary a few times, but the hardware support has
| never been good enough for me to install it because the base is
| always ancient as all hell for some reason.
| forlorn wrote:
| Unfortunately Elementary's devs are too busy finding the right
| shades for the dark theme so there is no time left for your
| marginal features. These problems and bugs are not tackled for
| years.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Good _looking_ design is something people tend take for
| granted until it 's gone.
|
| If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours every
| day, those details really do matter to me. I tend to be able
| to fix everything else on my own.
| simion314 wrote:
| >If I'm going to be staring at something for many hours
| every day,
|
| Most people would stare at an IDE and browser many hours
| and not at the DE control's panel or File Manager, and IMO
| this core apps should have had the UI fixed years ago and
| not have stuff still changed at each updated.
| seph-reed wrote:
| I'm just arguing because I feel like talking to someone.
|
| But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an
| obsession with visual design? Maybe your anger should be
| at the distros that do all the things you want but are
| too ugly to use?
| renzo88 wrote:
| > But perhaps it's okay for this one distro to have an
| obsession with visual design?
|
| The linux desktop is a house on fire, and elementaryos is
| standing in the living room holding up paint to a
| smoldering wall.
| simion314 wrote:
| My DE, browser and IDE are themable and configurable so I
| set them up with whatever I think is usable
|
| >Maybe your anger should
|
| What wording in my comment can be interpreted as anger ?
| I did not intended that so I would like to understand and
| express myself better next time.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Shouldn't take took too long to find given everything is
| more/less derivative from macOS.
| bobuk wrote:
| Honestly, the whole support of Iris Xe in modern linux is
| terrible painful. You have to carefully pick right kernel
| number and always use "disable Panel Self Refresh". And after
| that you have to stick to this exact kernel because "don't
| touch it while it works" even for Ubuntu now.
| pxc wrote:
| Intel gets credit for their drivers being open-source but IME
| their drivers are also plain _bad_. WiFi drivers disconnect
| you to scan, graphics drivers seem very poorly tested so
| depending on what acceleration profile you use, you get weird
| artifacts and other stability problems... I strongly prefer
| Atheros for WiFi and AMD for graphics, wherever possible.
| Naac wrote:
| If you want a tiling WM backed by a full DE ( with sleep,
| volume buttons, media buttons, working automagically ) you
| should try Regolith[0]
|
| [0] https://regolith-linux.org/
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I just want something like this but with Arch.
| Naac wrote:
| The Regolith package is available in Arch Linux.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| oh cool! I'm sold.
| bisby wrote:
| https://github.com/regolith-linux/regolith-i3-config
|
| All distros are basically the same but with different
| default packages and package managers.
|
| Fortunately, regolith is open source and has repos for
| their default configs. Get the right packages installed on
| Arch and copy the regolith configs for those packages. and
| you have yourself an arch regolith clone.
| caslon wrote:
| Why not take the ten minutes to set it up yourself? It's
| pretty trivial to get everything Naac described working.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Yes I mean that is my current set up, I am not that fast
| though!
|
| But it would just be nice to have the full DE backing
| behind i3 as a distribution. Yes I know you can do
| everything here with _list of tools_ , but I just want a
| configuration that I know has been thought out, with best
| practices, and easy to modify in a reproducible way. The
| list of dotfiles and little adjustments alone you need to
| marry i3 with a power manager, menu bar, network manager,
| is a lot! I just want the work done for me (a DE).
| csdvrx wrote:
| But why i3 if you can do that with the existing window
| manager and shortcuts?
|
| It seems to me you are introducing complexity for
| complexity sake, with nothing to be gained - except maybe
| nerd credential points for using i3?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Yes, you are right... I guess just need the tiling
| shortcuts and the AUR. and I guess I want gnome-control-
| center, and that can be that.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I may not be fancy, but it will get you where you want to
| be faster, easier, and in a more maintainable way.
| folkrav wrote:
| After rotating i3, bspwm and qtile for a while - never
| managing to make it "just work" as expected on every single
| machine I own - I gave up and went with Pop OS. Their Pop
| Shell extension is basically what I wanted all along - tiling
| without giving up the DE.
| Naac wrote:
| I would recommend you give Regolith a try. I was also
| looking for a "just works" tiling window manager solution
| and Regolith gives you the best of gnome, and i3.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Or if you want a _truly_ full-featured desktop, try KDE + the
| Bismuth KWin extension. ;)
| [deleted]
| smallerfish wrote:
| Oh nice! I'd been living with krohnkite's bugs - glad
| somebody picked it up.
|
| Would be good to get it out of the PPA and into official
| ubuntu repos.
| csdvrx wrote:
| As shown in Windows 10 and now 11, tiling can be achieved
| easily by:
|
| - having windows automatically start at "empty" coordinates
| if available,
|
| - having sufficient shortcuts to position them on specific
| square coordinates.
|
| Since I have a wide screen, I have configured win-[, win-]
| and win-\ to go to the left third, middle third, right third.
|
| On a thinkpad, I complement that by having win-left to the
| left half (50%), win-right go to the right half (50%), win-
| pgup toggle half size top and win-pgdown toggle half-size
| bottom.
|
| Then I can assemble the windows very precisely with just the
| keyboard (full screen, half screen, quarter screen, one-third
| of a screen, one-sixth of a screen) both on the laptop
| display and the external wide screen, while keeping the full
| convenience of normal titlebars and mouse operations to
| reposition windows by hand if needed.
|
| Add to that some custom scripting to make win-left and win-
| right move between physical screen, and you get a tiling
| solution that do not require any specific window manager.
|
| Of course, space taken by the title bars might be a problem,
| but with Mica and the like (more generally, titlebar moving
| from "full of wasted empty spaces to "where tabs are shown",
| like Edge now does), I think tiling WM are quickly becoming a
| thing of the past.
| tlhunter wrote:
| I tried Elementary for a week recently but just couldn't make it
| stick.
|
| The Calendar app doesn't work with Google Calendar as a backend;
| or, at least not with a ton of hacks, which is what one chooses
| Elementary to avoid.
|
| Overall the Pantheon WM feels rather sluggish, even on modern
| hardware. Managing windows just feels so clunky compared to KDE
| or even Windows. To be fair, macOS is their direct competitor.
|
| I paid a bug bounty ages ago to get streaming audio to work in
| their Music app but I don't think that went anywhere.
|
| I think they might be able to get something solid in the next few
| years.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Elementary OS is ok but I have issues with the stability of its
| window manager, lock screen, and other core UI replacements that
| often lock up (on 5.x and now on 6.x) and require a hard reset
| (or killing X).
|
| On my laptop and even w/ proprietary drivers installed, I cannot
| get eOS to hardware accelerate videos with either my embedded
| Intel graphics card or my discrete nVidia card in Firefox or
| Chromium.
|
| The UI is full of really weird inconsistencies and is _extremely_
| opinionated without any way of changing some basic things
| (previously adjustable via `gsettings` but it seems that has been
| intentionally deprecated). For example, the elementary File
| Manager forces single-click-to-open ( "web-style") behavior for
| any folders, but then switches to double-click-to-open for any
| files within those folders, so you can select a file but not open
| it but you cannot do the same with a folder. If it weren't for
| elementary tweaks (neutered as it has become for eOS 6),
| elementary would be completely unusable.
|
| The decision to not even have an official upgrade path besides
| "nuke everything and reinstall" makes me question the clarity of
| vision of elementary OS developers/decision makers. You want to
| be the macOS of the Linux world but you have a worse upgrade
| experience than any other Linux distro bar none? You purposely
| advertise to "less techy" users that are exactly the kind of
| users that won't be able to handle a "back up your files, wipe
| everything, and clean install" upgrade path?
|
| They added multitouch gesture support... but the only gestures
| available are for interacting with the desktop window manager
| (show all windows, move to prev/next virtual desktop)?
| Fortunately my `syngestures` that I wrote for elementary OS 5
| works just fine alongside eOS 6's so-called "multitouch support"
| but for something that was going to be their killer feature,
| you'd think they would integrate some of the TouchEgg
| configuration into their touchpad gestures control panel UI,
| wouldn't you?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| My biggest gripe against Elementary OS 6, that I think everyone
| thinking about using it should consider: There is currently _no
| upgrade path_ from Elementary OS 5 that is officially supported.
|
| You heard me right: The official explanation on how to upgrade to
| Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a full reinstall.
|
| Considering that Elementary OS is somewhat marketed as being
| ideal for, say, elderly folks or people less experienced with
| their PC, as something that a Linux user might install for non-
| techie friends, this is beyond unacceptable and also shows a
| certain lack of technical competence for the folks running it.
|
| Edit: Also, I've made the tragic mistake of installing previous
| Elementary OS versions for non-techie friends I rarely see. Not
| anymore! What am I supposed to do Elementary? Inform my friends
| I've got to basically rebuild their computer the next time I see
| them at Thanksgiving to keep them safe? I'm trying to avoid using
| profanity...
| mlac wrote:
| It's really hard to beat chrome OS for this use case.
|
| Options from $200-$1000+, with good options around $400 on
| sale.
|
| Issues? Power wash it.
|
| Really broken? Go buy another one.
|
| Lost or stolen? Buy another one and log in.
|
| Need office? Google's products work well. Need more? O365
| subscription.
|
| Want more security? Two factor auth with a Yubikey.
|
| I recognize that this relies on Google and Microsoft and is not
| FOSS and has privacy issues and everything else. But I do not
| have enough time to spend managing my extended family's IT
| beyond giving them chromebooks that achieve 99% of what they
| need to do with very little input on my part. If they want to
| invest time in learning about Linux and get away from Google
| and MSFT, that's fine, but they can do it on their own time
| with a test machine and keep Chrome OS as their daily driver
| until they are confident on their own.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| I put my mom on Ubuntu 3 or 4 years ago. It has been
| absolutely uneventful since then. This wasn't the case when
| she was on Windows.
| petepete wrote:
| Same for mine but with Fedora. I enabled auto updates and
| haven't needed to provide any tech support since.
| Khaine wrote:
| Until Google stop you from doing what you want because they
| don't like your content:
|
| https://reclaimthenet.org/google-docs-policy-is-updated-
| hate...
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| The chromebook i bought my mother in law announced back in
| September it's getting no more updates.
|
| Other chromebooks with comparable hardware are still getting
| updates. There's nothing wrong with the hardware. It's still
| snappy to use. Battery life is still north of 4 hours. Just
| no more updates suddenly from Google.
| thom wrote:
| This is a totally valid complaint given the target market, but
| for me personally there are few pleasures greater than a fresh
| OS install. It's like a blank white page, full of hope and
| opportunity... soon to be ink-stained and dog eared and with a
| broken X config, in need of replacing.
| mlinksva wrote:
| Surprising enough (expectations set by decades of
| Debian/Ubuntu) that I had to look it up, but it's true
| https://github.com/elementary/os/wiki/Release-Upgrades#perfo...
| justin66 wrote:
| > You heard me right: The official explanation on how to
| upgrade to Elementary OS 6 is to back up your stuff and do a
| full reinstall.
|
| You're acting as if this is some kind of massive and
| unprecedented inconvenience, but this is Linux, where users
| routinely recommend to one another that they try a different
| distro to solve application problems. By comparison, what you
| brought up is pretty tame.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I often think that Linux needs to divorce itself from the
| notion of distributions and instead we need to find a better
| way to deliver these all-inclusive experiences in some
| alternate way. Specifically in this case I love everything that
| Elementary is doing but wish you could "bring your own OS"
|
| This is the issue with Linux Desktop - every time you want to
| try something new you need to effectively reinvent the wheel
| for yourself. Most things end up being the same though, my
| browser is my browser, my data is my data. I can
| compartmentalize some of that to make it portable between
| distributions but I feel like that is solving the problem from
| the wrong direction.
|
| At some point I would hope this becomes a DE like Gnome or KDE.
| Inventing your own programming language, app marketplace etc...
| is admirable but seems like it is being done in vein.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| Yea, even just something simple like backing up your home
| directory, and being able to store the packages you've
| installed via a package manager. I've done this sort of thing
| myself, but it's a manual process, and you need to know how
| to write some bash.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Well, if you ask the folk over at Red Hat, they agree. And
| they're doing it within their code, which is both working
| _and_ simultaneously making the old-timers very, very angry.
|
| They've been sponsoring GNOME, which has been pushing the
| simplified, mobile-friendly look for almost a decade now.
| They've also (I believe) been behind the scenes in GNOME's
| push to kill theming on the behalf of developers who hate
| their apps getting themed, which of course distributions hate
| because that hurts the ability to stand out. If GNOME looks
| the same on every distribution, your distribution sticks out
| less.
|
| Red Hat has also been behind sponsoring SystemD, which for
| better or worse brought every distribution kicking and
| screaming into a more consistent "low level" layout. Again
| though, this makes management across Linux systems somewhat
| easier, while making distribution-specific differences
| smaller.
|
| Red Hat has been behind Flatpak, which compartmentalizes
| applications and means that they can run on any distribution
| when built against a common runtime. For app developers and
| new people, this is great as a "Linux app" just runs on any
| "Linux" distribution, easy. For old-timers and technical folk
| (even on here)... again it's with kicking and screaming. And
| if you are a distribution author, every distribution now runs
| the same apps, so what's so special about your distro again?
|
| Red Hat has also been behind PulseAudio and PipeWire, which
| changed how audio worked on Linux... again with kicking and
| screaming.
|
| The point is, Red Hat keeps working on technology that, I
| would argue, makes Linux more consistent and approachable to
| newcomers, but massively changes how it works which angers
| old-timers and also happens to reduce diversity within
| distributions as to how things are done. This makes things
| easier for programmers, but erodes away the proliferation of
| distributions because the differences between them get
| smaller and smaller.
|
| Because, if Red Hat gets their way, consider: Every desktop
| that uses GNOME looks the same because there isn't as much
| theming. Every desktop runs the same apps using Flatpak.
| Every desktop has similar low-level internals with SystemD.
| If you are a distribution maker, not much left to stand out
| now, is there? Again, app developers love this, but if you
| are a distribution maker, Red Hat is trying to kill your
| edge.
| Taywee wrote:
| As a side question, who is kicking and screaming about
| PipeWire? PulseAudio had contention because of compromises
| and sacrifices in various places, but PipeWire is really
| quite great for basically every use case, professional and
| casual alike, and effectively unifies the long PA/JACK
| split. I couldn't imagine anybody who has had to fight with
| Linux audio being anything less than ecstatic for PipeWire.
| pxc wrote:
| I just finally switched over to PipeWire last week. I
| enabled PulseAudio and ALSA emulation, since that's what
| my apps expect.
|
| I never would have noticed the change except that
| detecting and setting audio profiles/codecs on my
| bluetooth devices from my sound control GUIs works much
| better than before!
|
| It seems to be damn good.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > It seems to be damn good.
|
| It is. PipeWire is good. PulseAudio was bad. End of the
| story for me.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's bad wording on my part. PipeWire has been well-
| received, but that's partly because the kicking and
| screaming over PulseAudio (which PipeWire implements)
| already happened. Though if PipeWire had been introduced
| before PulseAudio occurred, it would have no doubt gone
| through the hate phase.
| rvense wrote:
| I don't use Pulseaudio, so I only know it from "I've
| heard..." and that's all been negative, that it doesn't
| work or is annoying. For Pipewire, I've only actually
| heard good things. Maybe I'm talking to a specific set of
| people, but I still might try it.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I have continually heard the assertion that Linux desktop
| folks just hate change much at odds with the actual
| community of users who by and large willingly changed
| from what comes on 99% of computers learning not just one
| new thing but in fact many over time. Anyone who has
| stuck with the Linux desktop for any substantial portion
| of the 20+ years its been a thing has had to change
| plenty. Indeed the Linux community has adopted many
| things eagerly over time.
|
| Most of the biggest communities are around distributions
| that have releases every 6 months - 1 year and proudly
| proclaim all the things that they have improved and
| changed.
|
| It's an entirely bad faith argument.
|
| Audio prior to pulseaudio on the Linux desktop was hot
| garbage primarily for lack of hardware support for
| various built into the motherboard sound chips. The only
| viable solution was to buy supported sound cards which of
| course was only easy on desktops. With the launch of
| pulse even those machines experienced curious problems
| with a crashy, confusing, poorly engineered face to the
| already bad audio situation on desktop Linux. It ended up
| with both the credit for its own bad engineering and for
| the underlying shoddiness of the substrate it operated on
| by being the thing that visibly failed to produce sound
| when a user clicked on a video. The cases wherein audio
| was magically fixed by disabling it using alsa alone
| created loud and persistent critics whose criticism
| persisted even when both pulse and the underlying audio
| problems decreased.
|
| This is indeed how things work. If I put syrup and lots
| of salt in a glass and float a radish in it and proudly
| plaster my brand across the cup I shall never sell you
| another cup no matter how much I improve the formula for
| my "soda".
|
| Labeling people who came by their criticism honestly
| thoughtless Luddites doesn't help. You might notice that
| most products don't go through a "hate phase" and new
| software often does. It's not just because people don't
| like change its because as a species we are remarkably
| bad at making software and new software is often garbage
| unfit for purpose. If much software were a toaster you
| should have girded your foot with a steel toed boot and
| kicked a field goal out your back door with the
| disgraceful junk you were tricked into buying.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Precisely, thank you for saying this.
|
| I don't hate change; in the case of PipeWire, I
| absolutely welcomed it. The alternative was obviously
| broken and couldn't be iterated on in any meaningful way,
| so replacing it with a higher-level interface made all
| the sense in the world. I loved a lot of the iterations
| GTK3 made over GTK2 so the interfaces would be equally at
| home on a tablet as they are on a desktop. I appreciated
| the work that went into writing GUI package managers even
| though I'd never really use them, and while I don't agree
| with them, I'm happy that people are experimenting with
| containerized packaging.
|
| Linux users don't hate change, we just hate regression. A
| lot of people's workflows rely on exploiting
| extensibility and niche features, much as others do on
| Windows and MacOS. When people pull the plug on old
| systems, or limit the interoperability of their
| application, they shouldn't wonder why their reception is
| negative; people want to take your project to the next
| level, all you have to do is _let them_. PipeWire was
| beloved because it _did_ let people extend pre-existing
| features. It was a powerful tool for managing audio cart-
| blanche, and it released in a fairly feature-complete
| state. It 's an example of _the perfect_ Linux software
| overhaul in my opinion.
|
| There's a lot of generalizations in the grandparent
| comment about how distributions 'hate' the lack of
| theming and whatnot, and all I can say is that those
| kinds of opinions are almost entirely founded on a
| premise of not understanding the majority of Linux users.
| Extensibility is king, and it makes a lot more sense for
| them to build a flexible toolkit that allows for both
| theming and accessibility options instead of locking it
| into a one-track design philosophy that just-so-happens
| to benefit a small handful of users. _That 's_ what
| people are mad about.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Though if PipeWire had been introduced before
| PulseAudio occurred, it would have no doubt gone through
| the hate phase.
|
| PulseAudio's hate phase was caused by it breaking
| everything. If PipeWire had been introduced and _worked_
| , out of the box, _correctly_ , then I doubt that it
| would have been poorly received.
| padraic7a wrote:
| That's an intersting take. My only argument is with your
| assertion that "app developers love this".
|
| The 'stop theming my app' crowd is pretty small. The number
| of apps on Flatpak is pretty small compared to say Snap and
| tiny compared to 'traditional' package managers on
| distributions.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it just app theming. App developers in
| general love how there's now a "right way of doing
| things" now, but in particular, the future.
|
| You don't have to worry how each distro handles booting
| or services - it's SystemD.
|
| You won't have to worry how each distro handles audio
| with Jack, PulseAudio, or ALSA - it's PipeWire.
|
| You don't have to worry about the libraries the distro
| provides for your app - just use Flatpak.
|
| You don't have to worry where to host your app for every
| distro - just use Flathub.
|
| You don't have to worry what toolkit to use - just use
| GTK. You can use Qt if you really care, but GTK is
| clearly the "one true road" (if that analogy makes
| sense).
|
| And so on.
| jdright wrote:
| All that is true, except the last point about GTK. Most
| developers that want their apps running _everywhere_
| picks Qt. GTK is just dead in this game and any developer
| picking GTK is restraining theirselves to GNU /Linux.
| _Don 't use GTK_
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| The way I see it, using GTK reminds me of "native" Mac
| apps (like the ones written in Swift), but on Linux. GTK
| sure looks a hell of a lot better than Qt on a GNOME
| desktop: more modern, polished, and clean. So that's why
| I'd imagine some people choose GTK.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Ironically GTK apps look better on a QT based desktop
| than vice versa because KDE/QT devs unlike GTK devs
| actually make an effort on that front.
|
| You can with minimal effort theme both similarly by
| installing a theme and icon theme that has versions for
| both gtk qt but your gnome desktop wont provide a built
| in gui to configure such, again their choice, their
| limitation not a limitation of QT. A given app QT app
| isn't going to pull in a particular theme because that
| would be the tail wagging the dog.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| You don't have to worry about systems getting old,
| because you are forced to update continuosly because of
| all the bloat. I'm looking at PipeWire especially, and
| the not so flat things also. Won't open the other can of
| worms, not at all.
|
| kthx baiiiii
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| As a long time Linux user, theming was always a sore
| point. It never was point and click, some programs would
| theme partially, or none at all. I'd welcome theme
| abolishing in Gnome, to offer a boring but predictable
| experience to casual users.
|
| I currently used KDE btw, because I like customization,
| but I would install a boring but predictable Gnome for
| casual users that want to try Linux.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I agree, but that's still not an excuse for GNOME
| developers to make their apps un-themable. If they want
| to target a specific stylesheet or design language,
| they're more than welcome to do so; but their efforts to
| kneecap _everyone else_ who wants native-looking apps is
| frankly immature.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You might as well replace app developers with gnome
| developers except then it wouldn't be a revelation
| because the project has always felt that way.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > The number of apps on Flatpak is pretty small compared
| to say Snap and tiny compared to 'traditional' package
| managers on distributions.
|
| While the raw number of apps on Flatpak may be less, it's
| more often the apps people care about.
|
| I say this as someone who prefers native packages, except
| for in some specific exceptions.
| rbreaves wrote:
| Hmmm I did not know this, but I am also not very surprised
| really. There are so many customizations they've made in post
| versions though that I imagine this probably isn't the first
| time they did not offer an upgrade path.
|
| They are also very slow in supporting the latest LTS builds. I
| think people should move on to something like Ubuntu Budgie
| when they want a simple and clean experience for themselves or
| others.
|
| Ubuntu Budgie keeps their LTS and interim builds in sync very
| well with upstream Ubuntu and upstream Budgie & I have never
| seen fossfreedom shoot down a PR that makes sense. He's often
| encouraged others to contribute to the distro in very healthy
| and normal ways.
| briffle wrote:
| A few years ago, I used elementary OS for my workstation at
| work. As part of an upgrade, I ran their backup program to make
| a backup to a removable disk. It went through the full backup
| process. Apparently, there was a 'bug' in the software where if
| you click on it, and then hit select in the folder dialog,
| instead of double click the destination, (it might have been
| the other way around, it was a few years ago). the backup would
| essentially write an empty file. How much fun it is to rebuild
| all your data from other sources!
|
| I submitted a bug report and essentially got a DM from someeone
| that it was still on their todo list, and had been that way for
| a while. That was the last time I used them.
|
| For easy to use, I really miss CrunchBang Linux.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I haven't used a Linux desktop in quite a while, but
| Crunchbang was pretty great. No desktop (as far as I
| remember), right-click menu as the one source find
| everything, a minimalist taskbar, and a better terminal than
| what shipped with any Debian distro. It was a sad day when
| the author abandoned it, although it's really not hard to
| just download Debian and replace the DE with Openbox and the
| other things that came with Crunchbang.
| [deleted]
| mariusmg wrote:
| > I really miss CrunchBang Linux.
|
| There's a name i haven't heard in a while :) Look up
| Archcraft, the OpenBox variant might scratch the same itch as
| CBL.
| [deleted]
| bitigchi wrote:
| Elementary OS is anything but suitable for elderly or non-
| techie folks.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I agree now, fully, but that's not what their marketing would
| say. It's literally called "Elementary OS"!
| bitigchi wrote:
| It's DoA for this reason. :)
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe i'm not up to par, but I was under the impression that
| even ubuntu wasn't mature to upgrade between major versions. I
| never dabbled much but upgrade failure are not unheard of.
| genera1 wrote:
| I did 16.04 to 20.04 through 18.04 and it was a nightmare, it
| would've been faster to do fresh install.
| sgc wrote:
| Did you stabilize 18.04 over a couple days to make sure you
| had caught all the reconfig required? It should be no
| different than 18.04 > 20.04 with that step I would think.
| I am currently at this phase ;).
| genera1 wrote:
| Well, update process taking couple of days is it's own
| kind of nightmare.
|
| And it wasn't my personal machine so it would've been
| unreasonable for me to do so.
| sgc wrote:
| Not always possible, of course. It's also understandable
| that you can't just jump through 4 years of updates in
| one go without some sort of work to catch up to current
| configs involved. I had to change 2 lines of config from
| 16.04 to 18.04 (due to my own tweaks to defaults), so
| it's been pretty pain free so far. And the few days as a
| precaution are on me, not Ubuntu. I should have updated
| years ago.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Ubuntu has offered distributions upgrades for years in the
| Software Updater. It just tells you, you click Install, it
| takes a while and a few reboots, and then you're updated.
| I've done it on servers, I've done it on desktops, works fine
| most of the time. _However_ , I've only hopped one version at
| a time (16.04 -> 18.04, 18.04 -> 20.04), never multiple at
| once (16.04 -> 20.04).
|
| Of course, sometimes failures do occur, but that happens
| whenever you do a major OS upgrade. I've had Windows fail on
| upgrade more than I've had Ubuntu fail on upgrade, but that's
| just my experience.
|
| This in comparison to, well, Elementary OS saying scrap it
| all and reinstall. That wouldn't be so bad if they were,
| like, a technically-minded distribution - but for their
| primary market who hardly knows anything about updates,
| completely unacceptable.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think the logic goes backward. Normal people are probably
| more at ease with backup + from scratch reinstall than
| update process + failure mitigation.
|
| ps: I agree with your point about EOS trying to make things
| invisible for the user and not addressing this well though.
| bityard wrote:
| I've been upgrading Ubuntu as long as doing so has been
| supported. Could be 15 years?
| _joel wrote:
| You most definitely can. do-release-upgrade handles all of it
| but you can change sources and do it the old school way. It's
| always preferable to reinstall using automation but if it's
| just a hobbyist server then there's no issue.
|
| https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-upgrade-from-
| ubuntu-18-04-lts...
| simion314 wrote:
| Ubuntu/Debian tests upgrades and they support it, the issues
| you will see are caused because in our circles people will
| install extra stuff outside from the main repos.
| lordgroff wrote:
| I've upgraded Debian based systems between versions for
| literally over two decades, and Fedora for half a decade. I
| can't recall one issue, excluding a few weird things that I
| managed to fix in Slink to Potato Debian, and that was two
| decades ago.
| pxc wrote:
| If you know what you're doing, the upgrade process is the
| same for any Debian-based distribution, and I've never had it
| fail in an unresolvable way. I assume the same is true for
| Elementary, though I've never used it.
|
| Distros like Ubuntu make upgrade failures harder to work
| through because they go to some lengths to wrap the dist
| upgrade process in some software that reverts everything if
| anything goes wrong.
|
| But if you just move all your apt sources forward to the next
| distro and read any specific error messages you get, you can
| generally work through them.
|
| Distros other than Debian itself don't typically recommend
| that you do things this way, and instead have some extra
| software for going through the process. But the Debian way
| still works on them.
| gclawes wrote:
| I'm dying for installer support for Pinebook Pro. I can flash an
| image today, but as far as I know there's no way to do full-disk
| encryption yet.
| symlinkk wrote:
| I don't know why this distro even exists, Fedora and vanilla
| GNOME does everything this does but better. I feel the same way
| about Ubuntu by the way. The theme and tweaks that are added on
| top of vanilla GNOME in both cases only makes it worse.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| I love elementary, although I couldn't make 6.0 work on my
| Nvidia-based machine (something has changed about the driver
| installation?).
|
| What annoys me is that AppCenter takes up so much space in their
| blog posts and sponsoring campaigns, because I feel it's the
| worst of their apps. The navigation model never made sense to me
| (why is search disabled when I'm on "Installed"?). It also
| doesn't look good, because there are way more tiny utility apps
| than there are good icon designers, and often the icons are just
| shown on a giant, colored rectangle because apps have no banner
| images.
|
| I wish they'd do it more "magazine-like" as Apple does, just with
| more unsplash images instead of Apple's terrible Corporate
| Memphis illustrations.
| kodah wrote:
| Pop OS's store also disables search when you're on "Installed".
| It's never made sense to me either.
| opencl wrote:
| The Pop OS shop is a fork of Elementary's Appcenter.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I love elementary a lot, so it hurts for me to admit that I
| agree.
|
| I'm stuck on an older kernel because the nvidia drivers are
| borked, but worst of all the AppCenter is truly horrid.
|
| For a distro that does such a good job at making sure that
| there is a GUI alternative in addition to all the normal things
| you'd do in a CLI, the AppCenter is really crummy.
|
| Ubuntu actually does a better job of making sure you can sort
| out your drivers through the GUI.
| divbzero wrote:
| I haven't experienced issues with Nvidia drivers, but I did
| face this with AMD drivers which can be oddly specific in terms
| of Linux distro support [1]. I was forced to abandon Elementary
| and instead tried Ubuntu Budgie [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.amd.com/en/support/professional-
| graphics/radeon-...
|
| [2]: https://ubuntubudgie.org/
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| Elementary OS is in a strange place for me.
|
| Coming from MacOS, it does so many things right and Danielle and
| the other contributors have such a great mindset focusing on
| accessibility and platform building.
|
| With their dev conference, they're doing great work encouraging
| people towards native app development with an eye to performance
| and HIG.
|
| Everything looks so good.
|
| And yet, as a daily driver for development, it's just never quite
| there. The edge cases stand out enough that I always want to
| reach for Manjaro or Zorin or the like instead.
|
| But I love their approach and think it's ultimately "the right
| one", so even when I'm not using it, I can only support them and
| cheer them on.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It for sure has a "death by a thousand papercuts" vibe to it.
| One of those papercuts is that they have modified the GTK theme
| so heavily that when you run Eclipse IDE on it the text and
| background are the same color.
| Improvotter wrote:
| > You can currently find over 90 curated apps in AppCenter, [...]
|
| I don't think this is as impressive as they think it is. On the
| contrary, this seems to be a very very small number that I wonder
| why it's mentioned in the first place. I don't use these GUI
| frontends, but if we ever want any Linux distro to be more user-
| friendly. Almost everything should be available.
|
| Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a 50c
| minimum) which I find obnoxiously high. We have been complaining
| about Apple and Google, yet "we"(?) cannot seem to be doing
| better ourselves. It's a bit disappointing.
| _zooted wrote:
| I just tried elementaryOS and the selection of apps is
| terrible. There is almost nothing there that you actually need
| and of the apps that were there I found either unusable or so
| lacking in functionality compared to other apps it wasn't worth
| trying to compromise.
|
| > Also I noticed that Elementary is taking a 30% cut (with a
| 50c minimum) which I find obnoxiously high
|
| It does seem really high considering they are just taking from
| one Stripe account to another.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I used Elementary on my desktop for a little bit, and while it's
| definitely better than modern GNOME in many respects, the
| developers are similarly stuck in a pearls-before-swine mindset.
| The more you ask from it, the quicker you start to find it's
| edges; if you're just browsing the web and listening to Spotify,
| you're not likely to find any issues. Turning it into a proper
| development machine has more rough edges than it has any right to
| though, and while I generally like their approach to
| customization and tweaking better than GNOME, it's still a pretty
| barren little desktop. You'll end up replacing most of the out-
| of-the-box software within a few hours.
|
| So, good luck Elementary folks. I really hope you don't succumb
| to the ever-progressing "flatpak the world" mentality.
| greggh wrote:
| From the link:
|
| "AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers--and
| since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for
| OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond!"
| jszymborski wrote:
| I run elementary on my desktop and I really like it. This looks
| like a welcomed minor release, but here are some things that are
| currently on my wish list:
|
| - Calendar support for Exchange so I don't need to log into
| DavMail all the time
|
| - A Mail app that lets me view emails in plain text first, or
| some kind of option to avoid downloading images and trackers in
| HTML mode.
|
| - The Music app has a hard time with my library which is on a
| network drive. It keeps trying to reload all the songs.
|
| - A better UI for choosing my graphics drivers (the Ubuntu one
| works fine)
|
| A list of qualms should probably be followed by the things I love
| about elementary:
|
| - It looks fantastic.
|
| - The terminal, code, and files apps are where I live and they
| are great. Code isn't a replacement for VS Code, but it's quick
| and light and fantastic when I don't need e.g.: a linter.
|
| - Back in the earlier versions, I had a lot of small graphical
| glitches, but things are extremely solid and reliable.
|
| - The OS truly feels unified; not some hodgepodge of poorly
| conceived UI elements and metaphors.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I love the unified feel too, and i wonder if linux can
| reconcile it's bazaar nature with the ergonomic/mental need for
| simple systemic parts
| Accacin wrote:
| Heh, it's funny (to me) that their new 'Quick Window Switcher' is
| just... A window switcher that's been used forever and works
| well.
|
| Why did they bother trying to redesign a window switcher of all
| things?
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