this post is published few days before elementary Juno beta release!
Just to make it clear! This story is nothing but my personal feedback as someone who has used latest elementary quite a lot, but I’m not convinced that elementary OS is the Linux I wanna get and use! The reason isn’t because elementary somehow sucks, but because I see better solutions, and quite frankly, Ubuntu 18.04 is one of them, even if I already called it not good enough!
I’m not discovering America by calling Ubuntu “better” than elementary, it is an unbeatable fact that Ubuntu has much larger user-base, and please save the excuses that popularity isn’t a quality measurement! In open source it is! Specially when we are comparing two almost identical systems (Ubuntu 18.04 and elementary 5.0 Juno), with a very “techy” user group!
Before I start I want to highlight one last thing. Last April (2017), Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu will drop all Unity development, and they will use GNOME as default desktop. What Mark really meant was that Ubuntu will stop investing on desktop, and thus Canonical fired lots of their desktop engineers; they didn’t move them to GNOME development
The irony of this whole thing, is while we have a major Linux desktop less, it actually increased the competition for at least the GTK based desktops, like elementary, Mate and Cinnamon. GNOME was actually turned into a beast with massive community support, and that makes it very hard for the rest GTK desktops to keep up and compete it!
So to the issues! In random order!
0. The Desktop!
elementary desktop as desktop Shell, is the one thing that isn’t really an issue! In fact I find it quite usable, but most importantly, i find it quite enjoyable to use, and I have uploaded lots of videos with elementary Juno desktop already, because I really like it!
To me, the biggest annoyance in whole elementary desktop is their Files App, and specially the search, that it works with that drop down, and very very politely is an absolutely trash!
There are some more annoyances like the Alt+Tab or the Fullscreen apps or the missing Status Icons and others, but you know, all Linux desktops have many usability issues, and this isn’t the actual problem with elementary OS! Desktop side they do pretty alright! Problem is that their desktop is the only reason to get elementary OS really!
So time to go on the things that in my opinion (which is always right!), that elementary guys do terribly wrong! In random order!
1. Compatibility with GNOME Apps
elementary team has made it quite clear, that elementary desktop is not GNOME, and they do not care to support GNOME apps, even if elementary and GNOME HIG are virtually the same, with minor differences! Actually if we just change the CSS a bit, we hardly can tell what is elementary and what is a GNOME app!
The outcome is that many GTK apps like Fractal (one of my favorites), Builder, Eolie and many more to look like this..
Which is hilarious, because elementary essentially destroys every other GTK app, just for the shake of a theme?!
Then there are things like the window controls (max on right, close on left), that work inconsistently to anywhere else, which makes it less “attractive” to those who use mutltiple systems in parallel, and I guess is the majority of users!
To make the case more obvious, look on close button on tabs on elementary Terminal and Tilix (which is a must have Terminal Emulator) that are placed opposite!
You can argue that you don’t use lots of GTK apps in desktop! Perhaps the only GTK apps you use is Files and Terminal. I dont either use lots of them! But sometimes we may open a tool like GNOME Usage, and it is not super cool to get the broken graphics!
However elementary apps really look nice, they have good usability, but to be honest there aren’t strong apps, and it is definitely not the reason that will make someone to use/switch to elementary!
2. Ubuntu Based
elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, and most specifically elementary 5.0 Juno is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Actually elementary OS isn’t just based on Ubuntu, but they also use Ubuntu repositories in addition to theirs! This brings some issues
For example on our new elementary OS installation, we can simply do
$ sudo apt install plasma-desktopAnd get Plasma desktop! That happens because Ubuntu is not really a desktop system, and if I over-react with “plasma-desktop”, we can easily install a package that will pull 200 KDE dependencies, and when we start it, we will only realize that it won’t even work outside of Plasma!
The point I want to make, is that elementary team doesn’t actually have control over what they ship, and moreover, Ubuntu has a bad reputation on their packages
And most importantly, if elementary is more or less identical to Ubuntu, whats the reason for anyone not using Ubuntu, that offers a bigger community support?
3. Release Schedule
elementary release schedule is slow! And not just slow, but snail slow!
0.1 Jupiter →2011 (Ubuntu 10.10)
0.2 Luna → 2012 (Ubuntu 12.04)
0.3 Freya → 2015 (Ubuntu 14.04)
0.4 Loki → 2016 (Ubuntu 16.04)
5.0 Juno → 2018 (Ubuntu 18.04)
This release schedule reminds Windows XP era, and it is irrelevant to today’s home computing, but in technical level it forces users to use old graphics libraries, old drivers, old display servers and in many cases even old applications!
Imagine that in May 2018, current elementary (Loki) uses GTK 3.18! Oh and as bonus, you can’t even update on a new OS release! You need to re-install!
4. Promotion
Linux, any Linux isn’t really famous for their promotion and marketing teams! But in elementary’s case it is as simple as
Amazing reviews and good comments on the week of a new release, and nobody cares about them for the next two years, and till their next release!
It is really really good practice to try to keep your community and most importantly your potential community “on excitement” with news and new releases as often as possible!
5. Secrecy
elementary is an open source project, and in fact they accept lots of community contributions on their projects. However if you try to get a development image for their next release, you simply won’t find it, until they release their public beta
I assume that they dont want to give people or bloggers unfinished software, with bugs etc, that may give bad impressions to users. It is certainly a theory with some good points
In practice however it just backfires! People cannot try the next development release, bloggers and YouTubers cannot talk about, and everything leads again to bad promotion and lose of interest. And of course bugs are remaining bugs, because of the poor testing cycle
One positive though, is the jokes that elementary is acting like NSA? :p
6. Bad Reputation
GNOME is a project that gets bad reputation from their user-base, mainly because of the poor communication between users and developers. I wouldn’t say that elementary has such a problem, I believe they do fine in that part, but there is a different issue
Before I describe it, I want to refer two points
- When Mark announced Unity’s drop, he also mentioned the negative reaction Unity had from the Linux developers community
- endless OS is a Linux that has actually forked GNOME Shell, but they don’t get any negativity from developers community
So, the problem here with elementary is that they’re getting very bad comments from the rest GNOME dev community, and I’m quite sure that they are complete aware
The main reason very simplistic explained, is that GNOME community is like
hey, you can help us to create a strong GTK/GNOME ecosystem, use our HIG, use our apps, and contribute upstream instead!
while elementary is like
nop, we dont like what you do, we will create our own HIG, we will create our own apps!
I won’t take position who’s wrong who’s right, but the point is that in Linux open source you need good collaboration relationships, and when the situation is like that, it is very likely a GNOME maintainer to don’t show very great enthusiasm to merge upstream a patch that elementary needs
But don’t read that either as elementary don’t contribute in GNOME at all! For example they recently PR some patches on Atom for better notifications, that it will also benefit GNOME!
And the collaboration between the two projects isn’t really a complete disaster! For example Rico Tzschichholz that is one of elementary contributors, he is also Vala maintainer, and upstream GNOME contributor in general!
But things could have been much much better, and Linux desktop needs all the best it can get, and strong teams!
7. elementary SDK
The biggest elementary achievement is their SDK and the documentation of it, that attracted lots of developers, and apart GNOME itself, I think elementary is the only GTK desktop, that community develops apps for it! At least in such degree!
elementary SDK is pretty much Vala + GTK + Meson, and the distribution works typically with a build server, getting and compiling the code from a Git repo, uploading it to an elementary .deb repository, and make it available to users through AppCenter
elementary’s AppCenter has two nice features
- It specially promotes elementary apps, so it is impossible to miss them!
- It has a built-in payment system, so you can easily support application developers! Although it doesn’t keep a wallet, which is bad, if you donate regularly!
And yet, I’m placing this as the most terrible thing elementary does! The reason is kinda easy to guess!
Flatpak and GNOME communities have created some awesome tooling for easily building and distributing applications, with first class support for GTK and Meson! It is out of the scope of this post to describe the benefits of Flatpak over .debs, but in short:
Flatpaks can be easily distributed in every Linux, increasing the userbase, thus the value of the apps, in contributions, bug reports and donations; plus they are system dependencies unaware! For example you can write and ship, an elementary GTK 4.0 app already!
It is very likely that elementary eventually will move to a Flatpak (or Snap) format and they may create an elementary Flatpak (or Snap) SDK, but it never matters what you do, it only matters WHEN you do it, and elementary is already too late!
With GNOME being in Ubuntu, a developer is so much likely to write an app for elementary only (and not for GNOME), as someone would develop an app for Ubuntu Phones and not for Android! It can happen, but I promise you, none will spend a serious time on development just to keep their app available only to elementary!
And I really doubt if users outside elementary, know a single elementary app, but elementary users know just fine lots of GNOME ones! If that says something!
Bellow I have uploaded a video that demos some elementary apps being already on Flathub. Some of them are maintained by Flathub contributors, but some of them are maintained from their original developers
These elementary applications on Flathub are build and run on GNOME Platform, because there is not an elementary one, and of course in a typical installation in Ubuntu, or Fedora, or Arch or OpenSUSE, or Debian, or Manjaro (you get the point!) these apps will use the default GNOME themes and icons
So the obvious risk (at least I see), is that developers may drop interest to elementary desktop, and move where the bigger user-base is, without virtually changing anything, because GNOME or elementary development, is more or less just GTK development!
A better elementary!
Hey! Don’t take that as I’m advising elementary developers! This is just my personal feedback!
I believe that elementary desktop is a seriously good desktop, the elementary guys do an awesome work for attracting people in Linux application development, but I also believe it will pay them off better, if they keep investing on their desktop, but to move to standard GNOME apps, and spend their efforts where really matters! To the actual OS!
Because in 2018, there is still not a single real Linux system for desktop! Fedora and Ubuntu are just generic systems, Solus is a nice try, but they missed the point of desktop (OS + desktop one thing), and the only real Linux desktop is Endless OS, which is kinda not suitable for standard Linux desktop use, because of the issues of OS-Tree
Said this, I wish elementary good luck on their Juno release, that it shouldn’t be long from now, and it is going to be by far far, their very best release!
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oh! Again by the time I’m posting this, I dont have hands on elementary Juno image, so I maybe wrote something wrong, or I missed things, and in any case I didn’t give correct information! But guess who’s fault that is :p
