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Perfectly allowed? ISIS is being bombed by the US military!

(sorry for the obscurity)

If I wanted OS X I'd run OS X. I'm not sure why Slashdot is bothering to cover a distro whose claim to fame is ripping off somebody elses design. Or at least cover it and act like they're doing something unique.

It draws comparison because of design principals - most notably productivity. So, some things seem similar but it is a different (in a good way) experience from Gnome, KDE, Windows 7, and OSX.

This journal entry by the elementary team may shed some light: http://elementaryos.org/journa...

If their website's design is anything like their OS design, count me out. I'm not sure how that's supposed to be usable and elegant.

To see a sample screenshot of the desktop, I click on a tiny thumbnail of a seashell? Or a pink feathery-looking thing? Why are those icons the only way to see screenshots of the thing? And the majority of the text on the page is nothing more than flowery text explaining that it's open-source. Where's any actual description of what makes it different from other distributions?

Not that there's anything horribly wrong about all that, but for an OS that's supposed to be all about design, usability and elegance, their website looks like a fluff PR piece. It sure doesn't inspire me to want to try it.

(Although, to be honest, I'm happy that the main page of their project actually tells what the project is, instead a list of bullets about news items, which seems to be the case with most open-source projects)

"I assert that elementary OS is not a Linux distribution.

"Or at least that we don't aim to be. No, we'd rather be a software platform. A unified computer operating system. That means having a commitment to a particular toolkit (GTK+) and supporting a preferred programming language (Vala). It means deciding how our apps will behave. It means taking control and shaping the out-of-the-box experience as much as we possibly can by creating our own apps..."

http://elementaryos.org/journal/distros-platforms-and-where-we-fit

Over time it will have to diverge from Ubuntu and the others out of necessity, given the design goals and above philosophy. In the more distant future there may remain enough residual compatibility to satisfy a Linux tinkerer, but a typical PC user would not jump through the required hoops or tolerate the lack of integration that would surely result.

Anyhow, if you want to see what Wired is calling the Apple of Linux OSes, take a gander at Elementary OS. I can appreciate them striving for the 'Just Works' mantra, but it needs to 'Just Work' with the tried and true ways of doing things that Unix and friends have enjoyed for decades now.

Actually it doesn't need to do that at all. If you read eOS' website, you'll see a declaration (be still my beating heart!) that its intentionally not working in the 'Linux distro' mold, and doesn't want "Linux" to be any part of its identity to regular users. They don't even particularly want compatibility with the existing base of Linux desktop apps, opting to convert some of them to the new paradigm instead. They consider the Linux desktop a failure, as in 'so bad, you can't even give this stuff away'.

I gather they will take what they need from the open codebase, and then not give a damn about honoring old uncle greybeard living "upstream" when it comes to making radical modifications. If upstream doesn't like the changes, they can leave them out of their own branch. elementaryOS is set to fork a lot of code, I think...

Knowing this, you should never have mounted your home dir wholesale under eOS. Their philosophy doesn't engender that level of compatibility, and in a few more releases doing this may be about as advisable as mounting home under OS X.

I hadn't heard about Elementary OS until this Wired write up yesterday. Out of curiosity, I tried it out in VirtualBox just to have a look at it. And yup, it's pretty, and simple, and it's not Unity. I considering giving it a try for real on my workstation, but it kind of barfed on my nfs shared home directory, so I think I'll pass for now. That has been my most current pet peeve; distributions that do not respect the 'Unix Way' of doing things, like having a network mounted home directory, so all my files and preferences go with me to which ever machine I log into on the network. I had just wrestled with Shotwell refusing to import some photos in my nfs home, and since the article talked up EOS's tight integration with all things Yorba, the authors of Shotwell, I didn't really want to go down that road. I did try out Yorba's email client, and liked it enough to install it on my Ubuntu machine. And it seems to work just fine so far with my networked home.

Anyhow, if you want to see what Wired is calling the Apple of Linux OSes, take a gander at Elementary OS. I can appreciate them striving for the 'Just Works' mantra, but it needs to 'Just Work' with the tried and true ways of doing things that Unix and friends have enjoyed for decades now.

And I'm not saying that it completely fails at an nfs mounted home directory, but it was competing with Ubuntu's settings (where that home directory mounts on my real machine) for simple things like the desktop wallpaper. I imagine it can be made to play nice, but I wasn't looking to spend time tweaking yet another distro to get things to work the way I want them to.