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Elementary OS 0.3.2 "Freya" Released
linuxscreenshot writes: Just in time for the holidays, it's a new release of elementary OS. Freya 0.3.2 is a minor release, mostly focused around solving some issues folks have had with UEFI & SecureBoot, but we've also managed to sneak in some internationalization updates and a couple new features. Screenshots are available.
elementary OS with the dark theme is probably the most aesthetically beautiful operating system I have ever seen.
This is the OS I'm going to dump Windows for. Great job elementary LLC! Keep it up.
Is this a traditional GNU/Linux distribution, or is it a systemd/Linux distribution?
Since I couldn't find it on their site (I had to head over to Wikipedia to find out) I figured I should post it here:
Elementary is a Linux distribution (Its based on Ubuntu). I was looking around for an FAQ, or their source code, or the license, what ABIs it supports (aka what runs on it) and couldn't find anything on their site other than stuff about how to make good UIs. I think they suck at their main goal.
ProTip: that icon in the top left of your pages: I had no idea it was a link. The web has standard styles for links, use them! Also, have an about page that says what the project is and why it exists. Your developer page should mention its Linux based, and some info about porting stuff to it, how you manage packages, what licences you like to use, and link to some source, it appears to do none of those things.
So far I believe Elementary is all about making UIs where I can't tell whats a link, does not fit on my 1440 pixels of vertical space without pages of scrolling, and does not give me any of the things I want. Is there anything good about it, or is it just the Windows 8 style take on linux: new UI because shiny is shiny?
I only looked into it because I'm interested in OS design. I was wondering it it was a microkernel or not, what licence its under, what security models it has etc. Instead I get a nearly useless pretty looking web site and another Ubuntu mod claiming to be the future. Not interested. It would be nice of the summery made it clear what this linux distro claiming to an OS was, especially since the site is trying to hide it.
Sorry, I don't particularly think elementaryOS is beautiful. It basically is just a knock-off of OS X's aesthetics. Midori is not a bad browser, but it doesn't have the same power as Chromium or Firefox; the creators only included it as the default because its UI is the same as Safari's. Same for its music player, control panel, and file manager. Plus there's a lot of annoyances abound in this distro, such as no preinstalled office suite (from what I can tell).
Basically, it might be a good OS for the specific niche goal of needing Linux to wear the flesh of OS X, but beyond that, it's nothing special.
Well, I played around with it a bit and it's, in a word "nice". It's really nice. It's Oh-my-God-this-thing-is-nice nice. It's probably the distro now I'd demo to someone who was curious about Linux.
Linux enthusiasts are all about power. To us power equals simplicity; it really is so much easier to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install blech" than it is to slash our way through some kind of stupid app-store GUI. So we tolerate a lot of crap in GUIs; ugly, bad layout, lousy typography, idiotically convoluted design, because we implicitly expect GUIs to be badly designed crap. Nice isn't even on our punch list, but don't knock it until you've tried it.
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