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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

Elementary OS has truly come so far. I still remember the old days where it started as a Gtk theme and how excited I was back in early 2010s to try out the beta versions of Luna. Unfortunately haven't used it since I bought a MacBook, but I truly appreciate the effort by Elementary team to provide a well thought out aesthetically pleasing linux distribution.

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I'm honestly always confused as to what makes Elementary (or Mac for that matter), so much more pleasing than the much maligned GNOME?

I'd like to understand because these discussions which often include "I'd use Linux but awful desktop" always leave me feeling like people are tapped in to a dimension I'm not privy to.

I want a UX which is mostly unified (outliers will happen, but should be few), clean and crisp, and easy on the eyes. This is of course subjective, and I've never found an equal on Linux, and Windows has never measured up for me, including Windows 10. Font rendering has always looked oddly antialiased and mostly washed out on Linux. It's never felt as refined as MacOS' UX. But again, that's my personal take.

The turnoff for me is usually wrt UI scaling, i.e. I have a 4k monitor and I want to scale the entire UI up to maybe 175% the normal size. On Ubuntu, with GNOME, I can do this in the settings, but at the expense of performance and sharpness. I'm not sure how Cinnamon or Elementary fare. To contrast, Mac OS X handles this without any issues- there is no blurriness, no performance degradation at any UI scale.

I think it’s subjective, both gnome and elementary seem like interesting designs. But Elementary is obviously inspired by macOS so it’s going to attract people who like that over Gnome’s take, or would otherwise like the windows XP end of things.

I did a 360. I was a GNOME 2 fanboy, switched to FUDUNTU because of GNOME 2 support (before MATE / Cinnamon forks), left GNOME because of Unity, etc., had a macintosh, used Xubuntu.

10 years later I'm on vanilla GNOME and I think it's amazing. Truly perfected.

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