Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamestomasino | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com