Comment by embik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by embik | Hacker News Reader

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As an elementary OS contributor _and_ Fedora user, I guess this is my time to shine, hu?

It really depends on your use case. I've heard quite a bit positive feedback about elementary OS for "computer illiterate" (parents, old people, etc). It seems to "just work" for them after installation (bear with me I really can't judge about "ease of use" after years with Linux) and it's running on Ubuntu LTS versions. You're running apt-get to install security fixes, the current version of Firefox/Chrome and fixes provided by the elementary OS team, and that's basically it.

Fedora on the other hand is "the latest hot thing". It has by far the best GNOME3 integration and it previews technical features worked on by Red Hat and GNOME. It also features recent kernel versions which might be important for new-ish hardware. All that is quite awesome for technical-minded people like me. I'd like to say "it's unstable", but in my experience, it's not. I did not do the 22 -> 23 transition yet though. You have to do some additional work for the frequent new versions (backup everything in case it breaks, try the transition, etc). You also have to fiddle around with GNOME addons, font rendering and media codecs (RPMFusion as third-party provider) to make it usable as "personal computer" IMHO.

In the end it's up to you. I do believe your mom will be able to work with both (you'll need to tweak GNOME a bit IMHO, but that's up to discussion I guess), but you'll have to deal with different administrative workloads.

In my opinion the Ubuntu LTS basis of eOS can be annoying for someone needing the latest packages, but is quite a boon for someone who just wants the computer to function and be predictable.

With Fedora, a new version comes out every 6 months and you receive updates for around a year. Elementary seems to release a new version roughly every two years and at least the Ubuntu LTS basis receives updates for much longer (~4-5 years, depending on the release time of eOS).

So I think that unless you want to upgrade the installation regularly (which is something that an inexperienced user probably should not do on his/her own, since a lot of things can potentially go wrong), choosing something with a longer support window is a good idea.

I don't have eOS as a daily driver (I've got the Pantheon desktop on top of Ubuntu as a chroot environment on my Chromebook and a full Elementary VM on another laptop), but I've been playing with it for some time.

One thing that really irks me about the OS is the designers' reluctance to actually let you customize anything. For instance, the lack of a minimize button really bothered me, and I ended up having to install a third-party program called elementaryTweaks just to restore that functionality. The designers have outwardly refused to incorporate any of that and have repeatedly defended the decision to not give us a minimize button:

http://blog.elementary.io/post/131034577721/will-any-of-the-...

http://blog.elementary.io/post/130282384916/i-was-wondering-...

To me, that reeks of Apple's walled-garden "We know better than you do what you want" attitude.

Well to be honest, you're not completely wrong. elementary OS _is_ trying to make as much decisions as possible for the user - To make it "just work". I agree that this is annoying to people accustomed to tweaking their system or desktop. No doubt. elementary OS is - at least partially - targetted at people with minimal technical knowledge. And there _are_ some design decisions I might not really agree with. The minize button, well, uhh ... I didn't get it back via elementary-tweaks on my machines, but I understand people missing and re-activating it.

Now here's the thing though: There's a different between Apple's walled-garden and elementary OS. You are very much able to tweak your elementary OS setup in any way you want. It's Linux after all. It's your system. We try to discourage tweaking a newcomer's system via commands learned on a blog post because they're old, outdated or plain wrong / bad. elementary-tweaks was not maintained at all for a long time as well. And there are quite a bit customizability options out there hidden in dconf. That's what elementary-tweaks is a frontend to after all, basically.

I understand it's a bit frustrating to not see the customizability in a Linux distribution you're used to from others. You're not exactly the target audience for elementary OS and I'm sorry for that.

And to be honest, there's another spin to it: More customizability means more features maintained in the source code. And quite frankly, sometimes we're really short of developers (I'm not contributing anything at all currently as I'm kind of busy with my apprenticeship). If nobody is going to maintain a new feature, it's not going to be in the code because it will break one fine day and it's adding work to the "to-fix" list.

So who is the target audience, if you don't mind my asking? Because from my perspective, I am someone who likes the idea of Linux and is not afraid to get his hands dirty, but at the same time is generally disappointed with most Linux distros insofar as their GUIs usually feel like an afterthought. So something with a nice frontend but the ability to nonetheless tinker and throw up a terminal when I need to sounds ideal. That is the attractive element of ElementaryOS, to me: an attractive frontend and a Linux backend. I could always go for Cinnamon Mint, I guess, but eOS certainly did seem to buck the trend as far as distros go.

The idea of the easy-to-use "just works" setup for the non-tinkerers, on the other hand, starts to resemble Apple; unfortunately, I don't think you can out-Apple Apple. That's their thing. The "stunning," almost condescendingly simple GUI that people "not good with computers" flock to. It's almost as though your target audience is my mother, or the people on whose behalf I will install this OS onto their aging desktop/laptop because they found re-learning Windows 8.1/10 too confusing.

To me eOS looks like glossy crap. But then i sit here writing this using a minimal XFCE on Gobolinux, so what do i know? ;)

I've started vastly prefereing eOS for my family members not because of technology, but because the bundled eOS applications have greatly stripped down functionality and UI - I've noticed that the dock with essential apps coupled with simple interface of "Files" makes people more comfortable.

To be fair, GNOME is heading the same direction. And I love it! A lot of Linux users are unhappy with this trend because it takes away features they use. But it's great to click through very intuitive and easy-use applications to do common tasks and everyday use. I don't need any manuals for GUI applications because their UX is so great! If I need to do something more complex, I'm just switching to Terminal. It's a symbiosis I really enjoy, even as an "power user".

I am very disappointed with the way the GNOME UI has had features removed.

gedit was always very intuitive and easy to use, but then they decided that such ease of use and intuitiveness was too confusing/distracting, so reduced the GUI even further to be completely useless: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-fac...

I am all for reducing complexity where necessary, but removing GUI elements to force additional clicks to get to any commonly used tools (where is the toolbar? where's the save button?) is foolish, particularly under the guise of "reducing distractions".

The speedometer in a car is not a distraction - it's a feature. As is the rev counter, the accelerator pedal and brake.

But if we apply the GNOME feature-cull approach to a car's cockpit, all we'd have is the glass in front of us, and possibly a steering wheel (debatable).

Nobody needed a manual for the toolbar in gedit - they knew what the save button did. It did not need reducing in complexity, as it wasn't complex in the first place.

Having said this, I will give this new F23 release a go, but you guys lost me as a GNOME3 user after the forced simplification and feature-removal since GNOME2. I hung on with GNOME2 for as long as I could. Of course, nobody cares what I carry on using so it's only a problem for me :-)

Now, this isn't meant nastily only a disappointment at the reduction in features/useful UI elements for no apparent reason.

Thanks for your opinion, I see that both have their advantages.

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