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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?
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
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?
Methinks someone needs to learn the difference between an OS and a Linux distribution.
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.
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