Elementary OS Freya Released

Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by jamestomasino on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:11PM (#9361582)

As someone who knows nothing about Elementary OS, you are correct. I dug into the blog a bit and all I can tell is that it's Ubuntu with some Gnome skins. Why would I pay money for a free OS? What's the purpose? What need is this designed to fill? The site failed to inform.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by wz1000 on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:37PM (#9361652)

I agree that the website it poorly designed, but you can download Elementary OS for free. Just enter 0 in the "Custom Amount" box.

> I dug into the blog a bit and all I can tell is that it's Ubuntu with some Gnome skins.

Not really. The eOS developers wrote a whole DE(Pantheon) and the included applications from scratch. The website does a very poor job of explaining that.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by mintplant on Saturday April 11, 2015 @10:23PM (#9361837)

Their old developer website also explained some of the new technologies that Elementary OS exposes to applications:

- Contractor (like Android's Intents): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024115/http://elementary...

- Switchboard (unified, pluggable system settings): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024137/http://elementary...

- Granite (GTK+ widget collection): https://web.archive.org/web/20130314024129/http://elementary...

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by wlesieutre on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:41PM (#9361669)

They used to have a better website. I think it was the victim of "upgrades".

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by amk_ on Saturday April 11, 2015 @10:01PM (#9361747)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130302134643/http://elementary...

Release notes from a previous beta that explains more about the underlying infrastructure.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by djschnei on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:44PM (#9361685)

Totally agree. Especially since this is far from Ubuntu with GNOME skins. In fact it doesn't use GNOME at all. It's a completely custom built desktop environment.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by mdadm on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:52PM (#9361717)

As I remember, elementaryOS originally was a customized GNOME, but they've since made everything their own.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by reactor on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:44PM (#9361688)

Agree, its buried. http://blog.elementary.io/post/116134677986/freya-is-here in case if interested.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by dag11 on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:34PM (#9361642)

Even as someone familiar with Elementary OS in the past, I can't figure out what's new with this release.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by sudioStudio64 on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:46PM (#9361696)

Designers take themselves so seriously... sometimes they need to be reminded about usability.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by forscha on Saturday April 11, 2015 @11:06PM (#9361949)

Yes! I looked at it, like, "Is this elementary the linux distribution that I have at least heard of by name or is this some completely different thing?" That's a serious failure on their part.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by wanda on Saturday April 11, 2015 @10:07PM (#9361772)

elementary OS have a similar mentality to the Vivaldi browser -- it's just for our friends.

Despite leading with donation panhandling.

Still, I'm using it now because I am tired of Slackware. I love Slack to bits but the amount of work involved in making my setup look and play nice is just silly. I'm looking for something like a one-click-pretty-usable Linux for random laptops/PCs I've accumulated.

PapyrOS might be nice if it's ever finished.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by morbius on Sunday April 12, 2015 @04:57AM (#9362688)

I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but if you really, honestly want a no-frills, easy to set up UNIX for your personal computer, there really is no better machine than a Macintosh.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by wanda on Sunday April 12, 2015 @07:57AM (#9363044)

I agree. I have an iMac and a Thinkpad; I classify these as my work computers. I really like OS X. It blends the Unix operating system with the best looks/UI of the OS market. If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

At home I have a collection of misfit laptops that were discarded by others or sold very cheaply. It is these laptops on which I tend to run a Linux distro (because Windows tends to be slow and no SSH; because I'm not really in the business of Hackintoshing.)

Running eOS Freya on one of them now. It's not bad. Wifi seems a bit temperamental--which is astounding given that eOS is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu had no trouble with wifi.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by morbius on Sunday April 12, 2015 @03:21PM (#9364436)

> If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

That's why I said personal computer :) Another OS X pitfall is that modern, vendor-supported versions are somewhat resource-intensive and not very fit for running on older or less powerful systems.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by erokar on Sunday April 12, 2015 @06:18AM (#9362840)

I have to agree. As ridiculous and disgusting Apple is as a company, OSX still offers the best UNIX experience. But I applaud any attemt to change that fact.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by tormeh on Sunday April 12, 2015 @06:50AM (#9362899)

Yeah, but that would require the distro maintainers to sell their own computers, which they support and test their distro against before releasing. Most distro maintainers don't really like the thought of that.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by detaro on Sunday April 12, 2015 @10:49AM (#9363506)

Or a hardware manufacturer working with them long-term. (Dell with it's "developer" XPS versions would be an obvious candidate)

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by jqm on Saturday April 11, 2015 @11:22PM (#9361983)

I've never seen making Slackware look nice as a burden. Especially since I can generally just copy over config files.

I love Slackware for the simplicity and that's why I use it. So many of these feature filled pretty systems work nice.. until they don't. Unneeded features are just more stuff to learn and more stuff to break in my opinion. Slackware is a rock solid work horse and I know right where everything is and can change it if I need to.

But to tell the truth, just give me a nice Unix terminal and a web browser and I don't really care that much what it's sitting on.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by amk_ on Saturday April 11, 2015 @10:36PM (#9361882)

Good pointer. I have an old laptop with Arch that basically only runs Chromium apps and terminal programs -- PapyrOS looks like the logical step up from there, when it's ready.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by dakoon2003 on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:23PM (#9361609)

While true its not clear you can click "Custom Price" and input $0 dollars.

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by sshb on Saturday April 11, 2015 @09:02PM (#9361556)

The donation money buttons are also confusing

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Re:Elementary OS Freya Released by sbuk on Sunday April 12, 2015 @04:58AM (#9362693)

Ironic really, especially give the teams focus on usability!

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