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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to Ubuntu Desktop? Why would I use one over the other? I ask as somebody who used to use Ubuntu a few years ago, and wants to switch back to Linux in the next few months.

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I'm (slowly) switching from Mac to Linux, and in the process I tried a lot of options. I settled on Ubuntu as my preferred distro for several reasons (although I liked a lot about Fedora too), but I think the choice of desktop is most personal preference. Unity, GNOME, MATE and Xfce all have offical Ubuntu flavo(u)rs and work well, while Elementary uses an Ubuntu base which is nearly the same thing. (Lately I'm mostly using Xfce/Xubuntu.)

The great thing is that they all use the same core system, so try them, or even install them at the same time (except Elementary), and use them until you find your favorite.

I used Elementary for 3 months a year ago when I was very unstable.

Why would you use? I would list why I tried it and used it for 3 months - at work. I stopped using it because it became a little difficult to manage the stability issues, build problems (at that it was very unstable as I mentioned above) and then the start-up I worked for got funded and gave everyone the then latest Macbook Pro (I had been using an Air at home anyway).

I found it pretty. Simple. Not at all cluttered - very clean look. I was used to OSX and its look and feel was/is very much inspired from OSX (or a similar UX/UI design philosophy if I may say so). And it's open source.

I kept using it also because I kind of fell in love with Midori (the Elementary browser and that's one app from Elementary I still miss on OSX).

Why not Ubuntu? Honestly, everyone else in my team used Ubuntu and it worked perfectly fine for them and whenever I ran into issues I was just asked one question "why the h not Ubuntu?". It was mostly aesthetics. Elementary felt very simple and pleasing to my eyes (yes, even when compared to X/LUbuntu) and for some reason I never really liked Ubuntu after Unity and all that happened (that was back in college - can't recall all the reasons as of now). Also, it was definitely lighter then Ubuntu.

This may not be the answers you are looking for but I thought I will chip in with my own reasons. And yes, I am going back to Linux too. My Air is 5 years old now and is already showing its age. I don't think I would like to spend the latest Macbook Pro kind of money for another Apple laptop. Then most probably I will try one of these - Elementary or Solus or Apricity etc on a lightweight 13ish inch laptop.

In my very limited experience, Elementary is really minimal and tries hard to get out of the way, but it provides what is still fundamentally a desktop/mouse-oriented interface: you have a dock, a systray, and a "Start" menu.

Ubuntu veered towards the touch stuff, using nontraditional approaches; I honestly get lost these days when I have to use it.

It's a distribution based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but with customized default applications and desktop. It's more Mac-like, simpler, but because of that also has significantly less customization features.

Here's a list to all the projects maintained by elementary [1]. Quite a few. What elementary gets from Ubuntu is the kernel, userland tools and package repositories but from the desktop environment up, it's different stuff (albeit based on the same toolkit, GTK, and many shared libraries with GNOME).

[1] https://launchpad.net/elementary

I switched from Ubuntu to Elementary OS several months ago and have never looked back. It's a lot faster and smoother, the UI is less orange, the file browser looks better, and I still get the entire Ubuntu package ecosystem.

The best answer to this would be to try out both using a live USB. You really have to use elementary to see the differences. But as mentioned, it's based on Ubuntu so all apps that run on Ubuntu will also run on elementary.

I prefer it over Ubuntu because the UI makes more sense to me than Ubuntu's Unity.

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