That's fine if you want to say that, but you have to understand what that actually means.
As for differences beyond the "visual", we wrote our entire desktop environment and a number of our apps from scratch. We did't just skin things and make opinionated decisions about design. We actually write code (apps, libraries, our DE), as this article expresses.
Full disclosure: I am an elementary team member and I helped edit the linked article.
I finally stopped caring and accepted that "OS" has evolved for most end users to mean a user experience, an ecosystem of applications, a hardware support list, and a technical support strategy. For many developers, it's now the set of tools, services, and paradigms available for development along with an understanding of the number and types of users that can be reached by supporting it. These definitions span the classical distinctions between Operating System, distribution, and even sometimes application. In my line of work, I can communicate clearly with the majority of my customers by referring to things like Android and eOS as "OSes". It's what they expect and I'm okay with that.
Congrats on the launch of Luna.
1. "Ubuntu is the world’s favourite free operating system" - ubuntu.com
2. "Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run." - debian.org
Then you have CentOS and their ilk. But that whole argument is irrelevant: take a step back and look at what you're arguing about. It is such a petty argument. I feel like I'm living in a crazy house where trivial things are important.
Exactly, it isn't. Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, they are all distros. The real OSes are Unix, VMS, Plan 9, BeOS, Minix, Windows, GNU/Linux, BSD, OSX and Android.
Making some user space applications or libraries don't make you OS authors. And I don't understand why you guys are hurt when I say that. And why you are not open about what you're actually doing.
Maintaining a distro is not a small thing though, so I'd like to see how serious you are in that aspects. What are your upstreams? What are your release policies and schedules? Update schedules? Verifications? Quality assurance? How many people do you have in charge of all that?
I see you've had one release which you call yourself "Ubuntu 10.10 remaster," and now you prepare for second based on... what? I see you make your own patches of Nautilus. Once you accept you're a distribution you can be realistically compared to others.
"Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer." http://www.debian.com/
Note the name is Ubuntu, not "Ubuntu OS." Debian and not "Debian OS."
I wouldn't have problem if the product is just named "Elementary" and described as a Linux based OS distribution, once they have a release policy (before it's just a Linux based release). Having OS in the name means a new OS, and it simply and plainly isn't.
This sort of "elementary is not an OS but a desktop environment based on the Ubuntu distribution based on the GNU/Linux kernel..." nonsense that is so prevalent in the Linux community is probably part of the reason why elementary exists in the first place.
I could be said that "Windows", "OSX", "GNU/Linux" are not really "Operating Systems", intended as software products that you can install on a machine.
Windows XP, OSX Mountain Lion, Ubuntu 13.04 and yes, Elementary, are.
You don't download a specific "GNU/Linux" OS, you download an OS (intended as a software product made up of kernel+file system+desktop environment) that is based on that technology. The word "distribution" is something that was created for Linux given its specific nature.
Yes, if we stick to the classic CS definition of OS maybe you are right, but I believe that Ubuntu, Debian and Elementary can rightfully call themselves "OS"s without issue.
Elementary isn't, too. It is not even a distro until it has clear release and update policies.
Otherwise you'd consider any skinned ISO of any existing OS a new OS, and that's just wrong. "Hello all, I'm making one new OS in my basement every week!"
> a distribution is most simply described as a particular assortment of applications installed on top of a set of libraries married with a version of the kernel, such that its "out-of-the-box" capabilities meet most of the needs of its particular end-user base.
It seems you're just making up random criteria that elementary OS doesn't meet so you can dismiss it for what it is: an operating system.
This is the wrong thread to kick up a fuss about this. If these guys are using "OS" the same way that Ubuntu and Debian do, that's just fine for a new project. It also means that your complaint has nothing to do with this new project in particular and is thus off topic. This matters because threads about new projects are the heart of HN and deserve special care.
Elementary "OS" guys use it like OSX and iOS which both conform to the real view: Note "OSX Lion" or just Lion and definitely not "Lion OS."
Clarity is important.
How dare they try to advertise themselves as operating systems.
And will we find a note on the Web site one day saying 'Luna is closed now, we are working on Selene (or whatever)'?
Jupiter worked well on my Netbook. Luna works OKish (bit heavy). The UI is refreshing, and I appreciate the work going into this. But as acqq says, a roadmap might be important for wider adoption.
All of these things have changed since over the past year or so, and there's been a lot of internal discussion about moving to Debian. In fact, it's almost sure to happen for Isis+1 (Isis is the name of our next release).
Basically, setting up our own repo took really good packagers (we have them now, and you can also get pretty much all of our software from Gentoo and Arch), running our own repo required a solid and cost-effective server (we have this now), and forking let us inherit a LOT of stuff we didn't have the resources to customize back then.
As we grow, it seems only natural that we base less on Ubuntu. But a lot of us used to be Ubuntu developers/enthusiasts, and a bunch of us have good ties to the Ubuntu ecosystem (a number of us met up at UDS-O), etc.
So, tl;dr, it will happen soon enough :)
This matters to me because I was recently checking out an interesting installation method that allowed me to do away with Linux partitions by solely using BTRFS subvolumes. (If you look at the IRC chat logs of #btrfs, #archlinux-newbie, and #elementary, I was btrfs-newbie trying it a few days back.)
As of now, I am nearly done with my laptop set up, and I am happily running Arch Linux and elementaryOS with a shared /home subvolume all under the same BTRFS partition. This is a really neat feature that I could take advantage of in the Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity, was it?). I did not have this issue on Arch because Arch's installation method was practically a chroot and create the filesystem and package structure in the proper places.
Please keep this in mind when moving forward. It would be interesting if you can maintain that aspect in your next release, Isis. Thanks so much for your time, and keep up the amazing work!
An interesting improvement of that would be a PPA system that uses Debian's awesome Update Alternatives tool to install PPA's to, say, /opt, soft link them into the system folders, and then manage side-by-versions, rollbacks, etc. with update-alternatives.
By way of example, the Rbenv in Ubuntu repositories was rewritten to use Update Alternatives to manage Ruby version shims. It would be really interesting to have an entire PPA system similarly based on that.
Who are you, to define what a operating system is?
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just a derivative BSD/Mach distro?"
Reading what you wrote, however, I don't believe you did something like that, or even that you'd be able to. I see there's no point arguing in such case.
Who knows how eOS will look in ten years, and the state of OS X now is certainly no basis for criticism of brand new OS.
What is really original there apart from the visual design elements and the UI customizations to allow them calling their contribution an "OS"? Just that they actually write some code? Where are their own kernel and their own drivers? Aren't they just one more derivative GNU/Linux distro?