Are you trolling?
Geary is a GTK3 application. It's great that people from Elementary are helping out, but basically it's made for GNOME, using GNOME's toolkit, object system and programming language. Midori is part of XFCE, and also uses GTK and Vala. The GNOME project of course has their own browser, called Web (previously Epiphany).
This move to the most generic names possible for the software makes searching for i formation mearly impossible for people who don't know the old names.
Problem with "Files"? Good luck searching for a solution and getting relevant results unless you know to include the word "nautilus".
"Package kit" has four different names in the version on Fedora 20.
Package Kit is called "Packages", "Software", "Software Install" and "Package Kit". Searching for "Fedora packages" or "Fedora software install" is obviously sub-optimal.
Here's a screenshot for the package kit name thing. Package in the Gnome menu bar, Software in the program's title bar, Software Install and PackageKit in the About dialog.
I would prefer the about dialog to contain a magic-word to be used when searching for that software. So, you can call the file manager "Gnome Files", but in the about dialog let people know that "Gnome Files" is "nautilus".
[This was a huge annoyance with NextStep-derived projects like gnustep... Because they started from a proprietary system developed in relative isolation, all the apps had super generic names, and culturally they were loathe to make them any less generic. This resulted in a big mess on systems where multiple desktop environments are supposed to live in relative harmony...]
Perhaps it is just different aesthetics. Too often 'beaty' means: cut features to half, remove all icons and make huge empty dialogs.
The appearance options are so complicated and multi-layered that it's hard to replicate simple changes, and even installing a pre-built theme isn't wholesale: Separate types of themes need to be applied in a few different places.
Then you finally have the problem of GTK apps: They look bad in 99% of KDE themes, and most users are using at least some GTK apps (Firefox, Chrome ).
> GTK apps: They look bad in 99% of KDE themes
??? There is GTK engine which uses QT to render widgets. I really do not see any difference.
I use Chrome and only problem I have is new window placement, which is not really KDE problem. Chrome uses KDE dialogs and even KDE password manager.
Also, I am not sure why you say Firefox looks ugly in KDE - http://album.gnufied.org/firefox.png . I have made 0 modifications in KDE/GTK theming and firefox looks just fine under KDE.
I'd pay for that. Snow Leopard was the best iteration of OS X ever.
What Elementary does better for me: * works with standard free software (gimp etc) without looking ugly. * installs easily on standard hw, no need to use laptops with crippeled keyboards (fn/ctrl instead of ctrl/fn) * you can use home/end everywhere instead of a mix of ctrl+a, ctrl+e, fn+something, cmd+something depending ob application. (yes, Excel on Windows annoys me as well because ctrl + a doesn't work like it does in about every other app there, but on Windows this is unusual.)
Works great for me.
The devs are all current/former OpenBSD guys, including Marco Peereboom (Who forked OpenBSD recently).
As an aside, I think this is the Linux community in a nutshell - this offer of help is similar to many I've received in the past.
I don't generally comment on the whole systemd controversy but I'll make an exception. I have two points:
1) I think we probably do need something better than init.d scripts. Consistency would be a good thing and better sandboxing couldn't hurt.
2) I've had more issues with pulseaudio than any other piece of software on Linux ... asking for a new piece of software from the guy that wrote pulseaudio is like asking Ross Ulbricht to be in charge of OpSec for BofA.
(Yup ... I'm probably going to get spanked for this comment since he's a far better marketer and politician than he is software engineer)
I've now switched to having a dedicated linux desktop and just letting my mac continue to just be a mac for now. After many hours of effort there's a point where you wonder if it's worth it. I want to contribute to the linux kernel, so feel I should live in linux too, the desktop is my solution to this (if a bit extreme!)
Which offer of help? :) I am really undecided on the systemd thing. I read terrible diatribes against it, but a friend recently pointed me towards an article which contradicts many of these points - http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html. the reality is it's a lot faster for sure all other concerns aside. I'm glad arch defaults to using it as a user :)
Being 1 binary or 10001 binaries don't change that they are useless unless systemd is running as init.
In essence the issue of systemd being monolithic is about run time, not compile time.
As stated above Geary is built on top of GNOME technology (Vala, EDS), and uses GNOME infrastructure (i.e. bug tracker and git.gnome.org) -- and I'd argue it's built for GNOME.
Mirdori is also developed independently, again building on top of GNOME technology (i.e. WebkitGTK). Based on this thread[1], "Midori does not securely handle unverified TLS certificates, so it's not safe to use for HTTPS."
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-Novembe...
I have it in my smallest laptop, because it is much faster than the alternatives, but it has several shortcomings as well.
Open a video and the video player detects an incorrect aspect ratio? Good luck changing it without menus.
As it would mean Motif, http://www.opengroup.org/standards/unix
My little travel netbook is quite happy with Unity.
They are developing in Mac but targeting server software or devops tools. So pretty modern, hot and bleeding edge things are happening in there but not desktop area.
GNOME - Always doing some experiment. No application. Just changing shell. No reliable usability. Call me when they are done. One good thing about GNOME is they care about beauty and elegance.
KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything. But their applications are freaking featureful, reliable and developed by people who actually using it. I can feel they are dogfooding. I saw KF5 screenshots. They still don't care about beauty.
ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart.
Unity - I like Unity itself. Very long time user. But Canonical lied to us it's stable but actually alpha stage. One more bad thing is it smells vendor lock-in pretty much. Anyway pretty usable and has big ecosystem(community + vendor).
XMonad - At first time, it just looks like another tiling window manager. More I use it, it feels like 'custom desktop construction kit' if you don't mind learning about some haskell. As you all know, 'kit' is about fun and learning more than actual result. So I'm doing still this dumb like window manager ...