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Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" Released
First time accepted submitter kazade84 writes "Over the weekend the Elementary team released the stable version of Elementary OS, codenamed "Luna" which is based on Ubuntu 12.04. The new OS features an entirely custom desktop shell called Pantheon which has been developed from scratch using Vala and Gtk+ which allows for fast apps with a small memory footprint. Elementary OS has been years in the making, and the team have documented the process in their latest blog post."
I don't understand why everyone is making such a huge fuss about this. Do so many of us really desire an OS X themed window manager?
Yet Another Linux Distro Based On Another Linux Distro.
*yawn*
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So what's in there which isn't in Ubuntu?
Judging the book by the cover, it looks like someone thought this new cool programming language of the week was the most awesome ever, wrote a few wrappers to some applications, and released it as a new distro.
c++;
Can't you guys just let us have a menu where we can select a program from a list of all the ones already installed and let us put our crap on the desktop?
Every GUI OS designer wants to present stuff stylishly and enforce some good file housekeeping paradigm, must of us users just want to be able to select (not find) our installed programs and store files were we expect them.
Screen organization and the other stuff of elementary is nice, if you are going to be inspired by Apple, include letting us put stuff on the desktop and give us a thing like "applications folder" were we can quickly browse installed programs.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Why not release pantheon as a package for any old ubuntu user who wants his computer to look like a Mac? Do they plan to contribute such a package upstream?
All I see is another attempt to set up yet another "app store" with a bunch of bullshit jargon about being "faster and more lightweight". It's still just ubuntu and x-windows, but with worse support and a fairly useless and uninformative website (obviously not reaching out to technical users).
If they want to clone MacOS, they should start with Darwin, and go from there. ReactOS is more interesting to me than this.
927
That is all....
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You copied OSX.
How is this different from other distributions? What is the point to it? What sort of use-case is it designed for? I'm all for making new and different things, but I can't find anything that tells me what the point is. Not in TFS, not on the SF page, and not on their website (which has plenty of buzzwords and is very pretty but lacks a statement of purpose). I don't have a problem with making new Linux distributions for any reason under the sun, but unless there's a clear statement of purpose, some reason why I should bother with it, I won't.
How do I dual boot with Ubuntu ..
AccountKiller
Time for my occasional rant on grids.
Grids are terrible for displaying sorted lists of item collections. Almost all of the time, we sort a collection along a single dimension; a grid positions items across two dimensions, but that second dimension holds no information about the sort being performed. If you have more than a few items, your brain has to bounce back and forth and conform to the line breaks that the computer has chosen in order to find items in the collection. Displaying a collection in a table with each collection item taking up one row and attributes of that item can be displayed in table fields (a.k.a. columns) allows for easier, more intuitive searching of the list based on those field values. It also leaves plenty of room for textual display, which fits quite well in a long, horizontal space.
Grids of icons have been a blight upon GUIs for decades. Why do they persist?
"The distro itself is a joke. I've been battling these guys for a couple years on another Linux blog"
I believe there are 269 patents on the Aqua interface elements. If you are right, given they sell this distro for $10, they better hope they are never successful enough to get noticed.
ElementaryOS is likely a bigger benefit to Linux and the FOSS community than those that are focusing solely on its technical shortcomings perceive it to be. Is there room for improvement? Of course. I'd love to see them base it upon a "Linux Mint Debian Edition" or "Arch/Manjaro" style rolling release, to keep everything leading, if not bleeding edge. Heck, I'd like to see a more modern Ubuntu and/or Mint release used as a base. I'd certainly like to see all the "Pantheon" content released upstream and available to be packaged into other distros. However, lets not overlook the benefits that ElementaryOS provides, which will touch the entire Linux community in time.
For years a huge contingent of users and potential users have voiced their experience that most Linux UIs are made "by gurus, for gurus", and lack aesthetically pleasing and functional elements that are the hallmark of a UI developed by a UI designer. In addition, when it comes to desktop Linux, some feel that even current full-featured DEs lack a "unified experience", where tools that are simple, easy to use, and functional are provided from the start. In short, it is the reason that many are drawn to Apple OSX - design, and experience. Well, ElementaryOS provides this, without the restrictions that plague Apple. This is a Linux distro that is not supposed to simply apply an OSX skin to a desktop environment - that can be done easily - but instead replicate the overall experience thereof within the framework of Freedom that Linux provides. They took a long time developing Luna because they wanted to tweak it to a perfect experience and develop new programs to showcase that ideal and experience. It may not be the OS for everyone, but it most certainly brings something new to the the table without impeding the ability of the user to update and customize it as they wish.
Desktop Linux adoption is on the rise thanks to making the platform more accessible, functional, and alluring to users of other operating systems. ElementaryOS is an important step in this regard. It rebukes the idea that Linux developers "just don't get design", and as such it can be a tool to leverage those who are interested in an OSX-like experience to come to Linux and see the benefits thereof. This is a bigger step forward than many are giving credit, and it is thanks to these evolutions that we have greater adoption and it shall only continue to build (ie Linux as a viable desktop platform, bring Steam for Linux, which brings more users to Linux and improvements in GPU drivers etc...) upon these successes.
Methinks someone needs to learn the difference between an OS and a Linux distribution.
If everything worked out of the box, now that would be revolutionary. I'm still struggling to get integrated webcams and broadcom wifi drivers working on some older platforms.
It's not just the docks behavior or the slightly less similar menu bar across the top. They actually went so far as to copy expose functions and the music player looks exactly like the version of iTunes before the most recent update, even the file browser is an obvious and direct clone of the Finder. For crying out loud, the default wallpaper that the video starts out with is even the default wallpaper in OS X. And all that just from the video. Since I'm going to install it, I'm willing to bet the similarities don't even come close to stopping there. I am really super surprised at what a brazen OS X clone this is, even shocked they would go this far.
With all that said, and myself as someone who is a long time dedicated Mac user, I think it looks really freaking cool! I have been waiting for something like this and will be giving it a spin today. As someone who is also a long time Linux user, I'm about as excited as a six-year old on christmas morning to play with this new distro. Now if only I can drop that interface onto Slackware.
Also, as I scroll down their page, even that flows and looks exactly like an apple website product page, even the navigation bar at the top comes close to a clone of apple.com - interesting. They should steer this in the direction of making it a platform that integrates with Edge, much like iPhone (disclaimer: I use an Android) is integrated into Apple's platform. Anyway, going to download and install now, hope it lives up to what they are advertising.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
you guys have absolutely no respect for the work done by the community. it is fine to come out from under the rock with an OSX shell clone and rebrand an entire Linux distribution (ubuntu) as something else. however it is NOT fine to spam the community with your rebranded distro. guess what? if you guys really had something that people wanted, word would go around at the speed of light and people would use your distro at their own will.
[i am a developer in two big opensource projects and one Linux distribution, i am posting as anonymous because i don't want these guys to bother me]
once I read gtk, I didn't need to read any further - this is a doomed project and a waste of time
I thought it looked like Gnome 3, with maybe a custom dock they've written.
A top status bar, zooming windows, GTK3 and otherwise featureless design, that must be Gnome 3 right? At least it looks pleasing.
I'm not too familiar with the Apple OS so I don't get why everyone jumps on it and say this copies Apple. I don't give a shit thanks. A bar on top, well, it was copied in the 1980s by the Atari ST and Dosshell already and the dock, a bunch of icons, available before OSX.. who gives a shit?
I'm waiting for LXDE-Qt, now using a boring-looking Xfce 4.8, I'm not into the GTK3 stuff much but it doesn't hurt me too much some people are playing with it.
Totally thought this was pony related until I read it.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Another Linux distro is launched. What news!
Although the presentation layer is obviously different, I look at distros like this and Ultimate Edition (http://http://ultimateedition.info/) and have the same thought. "Why are they releasing new forks on 12.04 and not 13.04? This seems overcautious.
I see two common trends to the comments here:
1) Only negative comments, not a single positive comment about this distro.
2) Not a single person appears to have actually used it.
I'd be very interested in an old-school, actually informed comment from someone who has actually installed and used it.
-astro
I've been using it since I made the original post and it really is a big accomplishment. If I ever went back to using Linux full time, this would be my choice. There are a lot of naysayers here who haven't even taken the time to try it. Download it, fire up VirtualBox, run the ISO as a virtual live DVD, and be impressed. Interestingly enough, it even has drivers for every last little bit of hardware on my MacBook (yes, even wifi). I'm going to be installing a dedicated install on my Win 7 laptop and use it for the next week (except when I need to use my OS X only software), and see where things go. Maybe I'll write a review. Anyway, go for it, it's not like anyone here doesn't know how to get it up and running in a VM in five-minutes. Also, it's been amazing to watch people here (of all places) trash something just because it's a Linux project. Whatever happened?
Finally, to those who are upset that they are calling it it's own OS, do we not also refer to Android as it's own OS? So far, this appears far enough outside the norm of common distros to give the developers some room on this.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Download it, fire up VirtualBox, run the ISO as a virtual live DVD, and be impressed.
Easy enough. Downloaded and installed in VirtualBox. After the desktop comes up, I right click, and nothing happens. I open something via the application menu, right click on it, and nothing happens. This is all too fucking familiar. I've used MacOS before. It's great if your favorite thing to do is to hunt for basic functionality that simply isn't there because someone thinks that too many options are confusing to users. (...or maybe they leave it out so that they can claim it "just works" because, of the few features they bothered to implement, they at least fully debugged them.)
If I wanted an OS that barely does anything, I'd've stuck with the MacOS that came with my MacBook, which I bought after everyone on Slashdot was all like "MacOS is so great!" and "people only hate it because they haven't tried it." I really need to learn to stop listening to people when they say things like that. I wasted $1200 on that piece of shit because, before I obtained a USB mouse in order to learn that it wasn't just the trackpad but that MacOS's entire mouse acceleration curve is a trainwreck (and the entire MacOS community is in denial about it -- it isn't that it doesn't affect them, they're just in denial about it), the two-week return period had expired, and so I was stuck with a computer with an OS that made me want to punch something every time I moved the mouse. So, to keep my sanity, I installed Windows on it, and after it sat unused for a year, I installed Linux on it. So many better things I could have spent that money on...
I downloaded the stuff, and installed it in a virtual machine in my macintosh Pro.
Linux with a MacOSX look. OK, why not? It is better than linux with Windows look that was the fad some time ago. I started playing with it. Setup the "dock" as "auto-hide" and disappears completely, no way to get it back.
OK.
Downloaded the debugger "nemiver" and its source code. Tried to compile it but then it said to me that the xmllint program was missing. It is part of the libxml2 package, says wikipedia. But apt-get refuses to install it since "libxml2 is already the latest version".
????
Tried different options, no way to get the "xmllint" program. So, I tried to uninstall libxml2 and reinstall it later to see if the xmllint program would appear.
The machine started to uninstall libxml2, but then half of the packages of the distribution were uninstalled also!!! Control-C did NOT work of course, and now the
"elementary" distro doesn't boot any more.
Well, that was it! Linux folks are still there and nothing has changed since I stopped using linux some ages ago and bought my Mac. I was glad to have a Unix that looked great AND had all the power of Unix! I wanted Linux to do that since a long time (that is why I downloaded that distro) but linux is still linux, I think they can't do better.