I appreciate them capitalizing on people looking to switch. I think they could have done a better job of describing how to switch instead of talking about what people love. I think it would have been better for them to talk about some main sticking points, like how to get out of the ecosystem (say iTunes or Photos). Either way, nice to see the competition stepping up and capitalizing on the situation.
While I agree, I can also understand why they would want to give people coming from macOS an impression of what they can expect from the switch in terms of apps, etc.
"Exiting the ecosystem" is a guide crying out to be written though.
LOL! I doubt many people are looking to switch, the article just said that as it is trying to market something. Funny that HN readers are buying it so gullibly.
I've downvoted you for now, since your comment doesn't tell us anything about the project and appears to be a lazy effort to piggyback off the resource that (I presume) a competitor has offered.
I wrote that comment first, but then got a login prompt and thought it didn't go through. But it did, so I deleted my second comment, which went something like
> I recently installed Solus and was pleasantly surprised
I don't have a detailed comparison or anything like that, I haven't used that many Linux desktop distros to begin with, but I did try Elementary OS and found it wanting.
I think there might be something wrong with that website. I went there and saw no screenshots nor any real information on what Solus is. There was a learn more link but it took me to something called Budgie.
Why do both of these hide the fact that they're Linux distros? Only nerds are going to be installing a new OS. That's not a small detail; it means you can run thousands of useful programs.
Because they're not trying to appeal to the "nerd market", they're trying to appeal to the general users with their design. As someone who has used elementary quite a bit, I can guarantee you that the elementary OS is way simpler to use to Average Joe than both Windows and macOS.
I've been using Solus on my laptop for almost a year now and I must say, for everyday use, it is quite good. I'm not sure about using it as a dev machine. But if you just want to browser the web, listen to music, and occasionally write a document or something, it's very stable. I don't think I've ever seen it crash. Also, it's very easy to install and is definitely one of the best looking linux distros around. That and elementary.
I tried running it this week since I have a lot of friends who use Macs. I figured I could help them out if they had questions, etc. But after a few minutes I went back to KDE as Elementary was horribly broken coming from Kububtu.
It probably assumes you'll be installing from fresh.
elementary is indeed not meant to be 'just a desktop environment like gnome / kde'. Installing it that way is not supported. It's a full operating system including default apps, etc. all sorts of things you probably didn't install.
You should indeed install it fresh. I hope you didn't give your friends a bad expression.
But as others have stated, as you have access to all the giant repos, installing any other software than the elementary-oriented stuff instantly feels disjointed, as toolkits etc. don't match.
This isn't really a problem with Elementary OS itself, more the proliferation of toolkits available, but to pretend that it is a drop-in replacement for a Mac (with its unified Cocoa UI) isn't quite right. (Yes, I know you can run FLTK and X apps on Mac so it's ugly too).
The thing I've used the most while I used elementary is the option to direct perform actions of the apps. I find it so easy to just press the keyboard shortcut and do something like "2+2" and get "4" as a result. I absolutely loved that!
I've never gotten them to work well on laptops running Linux. I have limited patience for fiddling around with drivers, releases, different laptops, so perhaps I just haven't spent enough hours trying to get them to work; in the end, I've always given up and just thrown a small mouse in my bag.
For me, the palm rejection has never worked as well as it does on Macs and the scrolling and multi-touch gestures are so pathetic under Linux on a laptop that its better to just disable the touchpad and stick with a mouse.
Even the glassy smooth feel of the Mac touchpad is superior to other laptops and the new haptic touchpad on the newer macs makes clicking on any part of the touchpad wonderful.
I do have a question for HN: with enough practice, does a keyboard with the pointing stick ever feel adequate? I've never seemed to get the hang of it in the numerous times I've had to use them (each time for only a few minutes).
The new MacBooks are so lackluster that for the first time in 11 years I'm actually considering Windows options, and I also arrived at Razer as the best option out there. They look amazing and performance and connectivity wise blow the new macs out of the water.
In the end, its macOS that's still holding me back. Haven't decided yet tough.
Windows is getting better, but it will still make you very angry. The update system makes me howl. The shell is pale shadow of the MacOS terminal (you can kind of fix this with other shells, but the app-restore behavior after a reboot? Gone, and Windows reboots a lot compared to MacOS).
I'm curious if you've tried PowerShell. MS has been pushing it as a command prompt replacement since Windows 7. It's a little annoying to have to relearn the syntax, but it seems about a capable as osx terminal.
When you say shell I assume you mean terminal. The Windows terminal is utter garbage, and I've not found a decent one (i've not looked very hard to be fair) but you can install bash (the shell) and have all the functionality you've got in OSX (also a bash shell, a really really old bash shell).
> but the app-restore behavior after a reboot? Gone, and Windows reboots a lot compared to MacOS
It's annoying enough on my gaming machine, I can't imagine using Win10 on a device I use for serious work. Reboots seemingly every 36 hours or so. Their update system is totally out of control.
>They look amazing and performance and connectivity wise blow the new macs out of the water.
So, in the two things that matter less for laptops? Because on the go you can do with less performance and you don't need as much connectivity, if that means less weight and more battery life.
Rolling into a creative 'pro' setting with a laptop from a company that tweets about sucking dicks does not telegraph a particularly professional image.
The other problem is that laptops are being built like mobile phones, with everything soldered to the board and the whole thing either sealed shut or taped down. Upgradeable & portable laptops just dont seem to exist at the price points they used to.
Get used to it. This is the way the industry is going, for very good reasons. Increased demands for more (or same) performance at lower power means you want more connections with shorter traces, and more functionality in the same chip or package. It seems likely that eventually all components except primary storage (SSD) will be in a single package.
On the flip-side, we've gotten external GPUs through Thunderbolt. So we've gotten the ability to extend laptop GPUs.
Another positive development is that SSDs are likely to continue getting faster. Maybe RAM won't be upgradeable anymore, but if Intel can push out their Octane/3D XPoint tech, you might get SSDs so fast that you can get almost the same benefit swapping to a faster SSD as upgraded RAM.
I mean, you've never been able to upgrade your CPU cache. If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD, why complain that you can't upgrade that anymore?
Maybe one day SSDs will be soldered on in laptops too though :/
>>I mean, you've never been able to upgrade your CPU cache
More L3 cache will hardly do anything for you either way.
But upgrading the CPU may mean upgrading the CPU cache, if it's a socket one instead of soldered, it ain't hard at any rate. However, even overclocking the CPU cache has beyond minuscule results.
>>If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD
This 'really' depends on your workloads and it's not always the case, even though it's often the RAM is mostly used as disk cache.
Nowadays, and most "fancy" brands.
Few weeks back I upgraded a 2010 laptop by replacing the CPU, RAM, Battery, adding SSD (instead of the DVD).
The end result was glorious.
Looking at current generation of soldered CPU and glue as building solution is off putting at best. It feels like a cheap toy produced in a sweat shop.
I think this is not going to change, basically the industry is going back to the whole package concept that was common when the PC took off.
Think about Atari, Acorn, Amiga and such. While there were a few Pro like models, the majority of the home users were using the full packaged ones, with connection ports for external extensions.
Apple was the last one with this mindset, and thanks to their survival and success, that is the trend the industry is now returning to.
Specially given that computers have reached a plateau for 90% of the users out there.
Fwiw, i sort of like that. I understand it really sucks not being able to replace chips, especially something as simple as adding RAM, but i've not really seen a super compact laptop also allow me to replace RAM easily. My Macbook Pro Retina is quite compact, and it's proven to be a really important trait.
If someone makes them as compact and replaceable i'm on board, i just haven't seen it. Not saying it's not possible of course :)
I personally value far more the possibility to easily replace hw (battery for sure, cpu, ram, and ssd at minimum, but even looking also for screen, keyboard and wlan cards). For me is a good compromise in exchange of even 1-2 cm more in thickness.
Just recently I was looking for a new laptop and ended up buying a refurbished thinkpad t430 (270e with 8gb [gonna become 16] ram, ssd and i5 3rd gen)just because I am sure I can change basically every part of it whenever I want for a low price.
System76 is a solid choice (I love my four year old Gazelle, with 16Gb or RAM from the start), although ordering a laptop there is slightly cumbersome if you are living outside of North America.
Depends on what you care about. If you want are willing to sacrifice a bit of performance for longer battery life and lower weight, then the XPS 13 wins handily. If on the other hand you're willing to sacrifice (quite a lot of) battery life and accept (a lot) heavier weight in exchange for performance, then System 76 will sell you some of the fastest laptops money can buy.
Mobility is relative. Back when I split my time between two offices and occasionally worked from home I would have loved to have a decently powerful workstation that I could easily transport in a backpack.
Mobility is relative. They may want desktop level performance that can be moved more easily than lugging around a tower/monitor/keyboard/mouse. Not everyone needs (or cares about) the ability to work away from a power source for more than a few hours.
It is actually available to buy right now. The Xps 13 developer edition is not available and the Windows edition has different hardware which is not Linux compatible (WiFi).
Those appear to be laptops preloaded with Windows with an option to ship without an OS. The benefit of ordering from System76 is that the hardware all just works with Linux.
What about Apple's hardware quality really makes that much of a difference? Is it really that important for a tool which is meant to be replaced in 3 years to be made from machined aluminum and beautifully designed (sometimes even at expense of usability)? Up until 5 years ago we were perfectly happy and productive using laptops with 3-4 hours battery life. Did our habits and requirements changed that much that anything below, what, 12 hours of battery life is scandalous and unacceptable?
That's 12 hours of battery life in optimal settings. Being connected to wifi/downloading, watching videos, playing games, or doing anything computationally expensive will significantly reduce that battery life to a couple of hours.
my mac's battery backup is of 8+ hrs and it is a 2012 model, it depends what I do on it, sometimes I get a 12+ hr backup. I don't think there is any other laptop which is as slim and has such a nice battery backup
my mac's battery backup is of 8+ hrs and it is a 2012 model, it depends what I do on it, sometimes I get a 12+ hr backup. I don't think there is any other laptop which is as slim and has such a nice battery backup
The only reason I am still using a Mac is because I need to be able to compile iPhone apps and unlike android I can only do this in OSX. All my other tools are already available in Linux or even Windows.
Yes, the Elementary team has been doing great work for years. Sad that it's all parallel to the efforts of the larger GNOME Desktop project. I don't know how much code gets shared between the two, but I cringe to think that Elementary is dragging along a suitcase full of patches! Some of their apps are forks, while others are written from scratch to fit their design (UI/UX/simplicity) goals. I think their decision to use what amounts to a random, third-party web browser (Midori) as the default is laughable (this day and age, would any security-conscious person NOT recommend Chrome?).
Nonetheless, bravo to the Elementary team for taking the time to even write up this blog post (which is apparently the first in a series).
Edit: replies pointed out that Epiphany is the default web browser. Point still stands that Chrome implements the most security mitigations out of ALL browsers on the market.
> I think their decision to use what amounts to a random, third-party web browser (Midori) as the default is laughable
They switched to the default GNOME browser "Epiphany" in the latest release of elementary OS. But I agree, the first thing i did was install a different browser. In my case Firefox.
The version of Epiphany which has to ship with Ubuntu (because Ubuntu is only shipping GTK 3.18) is pretty outdated [1]. I have been trying to move away from Chrome to Epiphany slowly but was encountering quite a few issues which I reported to GNOME and they were like "Oh yeah, we fixed this a long time ago, get the latest version".
I got the latest version via flatpak and I've completely replaced Chrome. There are still a few issues to be ironed out in flatpak (like notifications and downloads support), but it's getting there!
Midori is not the default browser, it's Epiphany, as stated in the blog post. Besides, Chromium is available in the software store, and official Chrome is installable directly from Google.
Also, how is this any different than macOS shipping with Safari only, or Windows shipping with Edge only? You're holding an open source project to a higher standard than two highly successful commercial offerings.
Firefox scored below Chrome and Safari in several areas: address space layout randomization (ASLR), heap protection, stack guards, fortified source. And I've even seen infosec people saying that Firefox has some of these, but doesn't even enable them on builds for some platforms!
Oh, definitely. Open-source software is awesome. I'm just saying it's a shame that they do such awesome work and have to keep it parallel, maintaining a ton of their own software (or suitcase full of patches) with their small team, compared to the GNOME team that has a much larger developer community.
Epiphany uses Webkit, and Gnome and Elementary are clearly emulating OSX. Also, unlike Chrome, Epiphany is well integrated with GTK3 apps - for example you can drag/drop text from Epiphany to Nautilus. And Firejail+Epiphany should be similar in terms of security.
Of course, Chrome is still better feature wise, however, Elementary or any other distribution would need Google's permission to distribute Chrome.
The truth about PS and Lightroom is that many of their users wouldn't really need them.
A workflow of, for example, Rawtherapee + GIMP would be more than enough for basic to upper intermediate tasks to replace Lightroom with. ( No, I'm not talking bs, my wife is actually using this for work; just like Mixxx is usable for professional DJing. ) There is also digiKam, which is rather impressive; it is lacking a few features, yet, but not as many as you'd think.
PS & Lightroom is everywhere, that is what's tought in schools; it's the MS Office of photo & design, and it shouldn't be.
There are, of course, situations, when the all-in-one PS is needed, but it's really, really rare.
Give digiKam and GIMP a go, but give them weeks, not minutes. Most of those who run away are only literally trying them for hours at max while these are utterly different tools.
UI&UX are both object to taste.
You know, the good thing is, that with the afromentioned software, it can be easily fixed, since the accept patches and pull requests.
I honestly wonder where GIMP, digiKam and the rest would be with the money PS subscriptions generate, paying for People With Good UX Taste.
The difficulty in practice is that this isn't 100% complete. Observe the debug messages spewed out in the console when you run a Windows app under Wine.
Despite saying this, this is a fairly good option and I applaud Wine for its existence and the monumental undertaking they undertook (poor grammar, sorry).
It also makes sure that there won't be native ports of these applications.
Adobe won't make a Photoshop port, unless it is 100% obvious to them, that they are leaving more money on the table by not porting it than is the cost of porting and support.
Which may suck for you, if your business or job requires Photoshop right now. You aren't going to switch to Linux then, because you will get Photoshop and whatever OS it requires in the state it is today - which decreases the motivation for Adobe from previous paragraph.
If you actually check Wine compatibility charts and user ratings you will see that there is a lof of garbage (the worst rating) ratings for the most popular Windows/Mac software. So it is not a viable option for the biggest applications like Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, etc.
And certainly no option for a business, but rarely for your average Joe, either. It is often hit and miss.
Like I have said countless times, a lot of users are bound to using either Windows or Mac because of a few applications. There is Microsoft Office (cloud versions are not good enough). Visual Studio. Adobe products. Avid. Ableton. Apple’s own software (Logic, Final Cut).
Where there even is alternatives, they are just not good enough.
Where Linux has gotten some support, is from the VFX industry, especially from Autodesk. You can use Maya and Nuke and Linux. Actually, almost all VFX companies use Linux in their shop.
Photoshop CC 2015 has gold rating and should be stable with Crossover or a fixed Wine version - not too hard to setup with Playonlinux. Of course, a native version from Adobe is preferrable but that is unlikely to happen until market share is 5%.
I feel like, unless your situation dictates a specific product (which is unlikely), this should be rephrased "Unfortunately, no graphics editor that does x, y, z". If you continue to put up a 'Photoshop' barrier, then you will never be able to consider any alternatives — assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux, but that there may well be a graphics tool in future that is far superior as far as your needs are concerned; it may even already exist! Furthermore, the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop".
Not really, The functionality required is "Everything photoshop does" I think the problem with the Linux desktop is that everyone thinks its fine and blames users for being dumb instead of providing a better experience.
As an engineer part of your skill is trying to translate what people are saying into something meaningful
One factor you don't mention is the learning curve required for someone to develop the skills needed to be, at a professionally viable level, productive and effective with a tool like Photoshop or Lightroom.
Even if there was a collection of Linux-compatible software that was just as effective as PS and LR, professionals don't necessarily have the time available to learn those tools.
> If you continue to put up a 'Photoshop' barrier, then you will never be able to consider any alternatives
It's an industry/education barrier more than anything else. Photoshop has been the standard for years because it generally works quite well and is supported on the two major desktop operating systems.
> assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux
Probably not, no money in it for Adobe. I've always said I'd happily pay for a commercial Linux OS developed by Adobe that ran Creative Suite.
> it may even already exist
It doesn't.
> the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop"
No offence but you're kind of talking about Photoshop like it's MS Paint. It's a ubiquitous, massively bloated, complicated piece of software (10 million LOC, roughly the same as the Linux kernel?) that can take years to master.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Most apps I use on Ubuntu work well on hidpi. The main problem I face is when I connect my laptop with 4k screen with some external monitor with 2k or 1080p display.
A couple of years or so ago, I managed to "solve" this issue in Ubuntu 14.04, if I remember correctly. I somehow figured out how to drive Unity at 162% scaling for my XPS 13 and scale it down to 100% for my external display. There definitely were some artefacts, but it basically worked.
I'm sorry to say though, that I don't remember how I did it, since I've been using mainly macOS and Windows for quite some time now.
Did that solution involve using xrandr scaling parameter? unfortunately that's not right solution IMO, as I observed it takes lot of CPU. Hacky and feels laggy.
My solution is to organize myself so that I don't have to move windows around. I mostly need browser, terminal and emacs. I open chrome in one monitor with specific scaling option, and when I move emacs or terminal around I manually decrease font size with Ctrl-+/-
What issues do you face, because I currently use that exact workflow with a MacbookPro retina, and a 24" dell monitor. Apart from windows not resizing/positioning automatically (so I have to manually re-layout everything whenever I switch from monitor to laptop), I haven't really suffered any problems so am curious to know what issues I'd face if I switched to Ubuntu.
I did face problem with macOS and having external low-DPI monitor: the Finder would act up sometimes: when you rename file the caret and edited text would be someplace else that the filename shown in Finder and dragging and droping files would stop working. Firefox had similar problems with addressbar and controls in web pages too.
All these things disappeared when I changed the external monitor for a HiDPI one.
I use a tiling window manager, so positioning is not a problem. Problem is that, on a my laptop (4k) screen things look normal, but on 2k external screen things look bigger by default. Ideally the GUI toolkit should be able to pick up per screen scaling factor.
Not trying to downplay issues or shame another system, but if you compare Linux's HiDPI support to Windows, it doesn't look so bad anymore. For one, it's more likely to find apps that scale on Xorg/Wayland than on Windows, most Microsoft Windows official system apps included. Simple things like apps with list controls that have a huge number of entries where you're not able to resize the window while other more prominent MS apps waste white space like macOS and GNOME is an interesting phenomenon to observe.
The Linux world[1] has got together and is banging out a solution for a somewhat bigger problem that the multitude of X toolkits and their different (non) approach to HiDPI.
It's called Wayland, it took some time to make and next week, new Fedora is coming out that uses it by default (until now you could "only" opt-in during login).
[1] Except Ubuntu, they have their own NIH solution, of course.
Wayland, the solution where not only does every toolkit have a different and often incomplete approach to HiDPI, they now all have their own implementations of window titlebars and widgets too?
Toolkits always had their own implementation of widgets, that's not even Linux or X11 specific. The same applies to Windows and macOS: ever noticed that MS Office has different widgets than Photoshop? The only difference is, that Windows and macOS had one or more widget libraries supplied with the system and synced look&feel for them, while there was no canonical widget library or l&f for X11.
Title bars are up to compositor (it was up to window manager in X11). Even client side window decorations (i.e. mostly title bar combined with toolbar) are nothing new, if that is what you mean with custom implementation of window titlebars.
X was designed for multiple DPI from the start; it was the ‘Linux world’ who abandoned everything from the ‘Unix world’ that wasn't immediately relevant to cloning the Windows desktop.
interesting project, would like to check it out. I recently upgraded from MacOS to Yosemite and have been quite happy. That said it would be nice to see other options.
So I went to their main page to download an ISO to give it a try in a VM.
They hid the download button really well: You have to type in "0" into the "how much you'd like to pay" field for the "Purchase" button to change to "Download".
I mean I understand that open source projects need funding. But if you want people to try your niche OS at least make it obvious how to download it. Ask for money later after people had to chance to try it out.
I only typed in 0 because I know that "trick" from other websites. If I hadn't known I would have just left the website and would possibly never return.
This is a long-standing criticism of Elementary. I think they initially didn't even provide a way to get a free download, and eventually settled for the current UI. Basically the founder-owner is adamant that someone has to pay for his time, and tbh I don't begrudge him.
I run a small software company myself. We're selling our software on the internet. But our website focuses on getting people to download the free trial first. The "asking for money" is then done once the trial period ends.
It's already hard to get people to download your stuff for free. With obviously visible download buttons.
If we did what Elementary is doing we would be closing our shop rather soon.
As far as I know the GPL does not allow trial periods and asking for money later on, but feel free to correct me. That's why elementary cannot do such a thing.
If Elementary wants to alter some program to add a time bomb, the GPL cannot stop them. The GPL only ensures that the user can take the time bomb out (either by themselves or by following instructions on the internet, or by hiring somebody to do it).
GPL just requires source to be available to anyone who receives the binary. It has to be available on request. You can ask them to pay for the cost of postage to ship it to them.
Hell, you can ask them to pay anything, like RedHat does, regardless of costs. It's perfectly legal and GPL-compliant. You just have to provide sources.
No. Gpl has no such thing. But you'll have to provide the source code with your software, so I'll just modify the source to give myself infinite trial.
It'll work, it just won't get quite as many conversions as it might otherwise. The same principle applies to closed-source software, after all: you have to provide the binary, so I'll just modify the binary to give myself an infinite trial. This is entirely doable, but enough people still pay to make it a viable business in many cases.
The number of people that would bother to do that is relatively small. If it's a good product, and reasonably priced, people would much rather just pay to have it. (See music streaming.)
The GPL and payment are orthogonal. They could GPL a piece of software that stops working after 30 days if you don't pay. You decide if to compile out the code that checks for the payment (and possibly distribute your version) or pay them those money.
No, I didn't mean a trial version. I just suggested they should ask for a donation once people actually had the chance to find out if they'd consider donating worth it.
It is progressively becoming quite more than a simple skin. They do have their own window manager and a quite comprehensive set of applications with simplified interfaces and consistent UI. To me it seems like a worthy goal, however it seems to create a separation between the typical Linux user/developer and their potential targeted users.
Not really. I developed on elementary quite a lot. I find its ease of getting around quite easy. Your text editor / IDE is at the front and everything else is completely tucked away + you can control basic things about your OS like music / notifications etc. without having to focus on some other app to make a change. And it's pretty lightweight.
Comparing that to GNOME, where everything is so damn big that it wastes half of my screen and KDE where the default apps are usually bloated and confusing and can do way too many things, I call Pantheon as a win for the developers.
EDIT: Also, one neat trick that I've never seen any other terminal emulator doing other than Pantheon Terminal, is that you get a desktop notification every time you're not focused on the terminal when it finishes its job. For example, let's say I do something like "sudo apt install netbeans". Since the download is large, I'm going to focus on something else in the meantime and I'll get a desktop notification when the installation is finished.
The argument is that the potential user needs to be aware of his action when he's entering in "0". Otherwise, it's just automatic - you don't even think about it.
But I think it's counterproductive, because it looks adversarial. Apparently the best way to get the donation is to bring up the payment screen after the download has happened. This is because risk-averse buyers can first try the product and then feel less pressured to decide how much it's worth:
It's kind of difficult to do that when you are talking about the OS, isn't it?
First of all, it's a rather large download, so you're probably going to close the website as soon as you click on the download button. Second of all, to consume the product in this case, you have to install it. And yet again, after you do so, if you get greeted with the "donate" window right away, you're going to dismiss it because you still haven't tested out the product.
So, what you need is a timer, something that says like "after 30 minutes (or an hour, or two hours) of usage, display the window", but that would require the OS to make calls to external servers without the user consent, and, because we are talking about a Linux-based operating system, people would be complaining that this is a a privacy violation.
> It's kind of difficult to do that when you are talking about the OS, isn't it?
Not necessarily. It's not like you expect the buyer to do a careful analysis of what it's worth before they pay. You can usually decide this sort of thing based on very quick impressions. Also, there's the aspect of it just seeming nicer to ask after the download has happened. Then it's clear that you already have the product, now it's up to you to decide what to pay for it, if anything at all. Here people have been tricked into thinking they had to pay and begrudge the author.
> 99% of us simply close the tab after the download starts.
Really? On most sites that I visit, I 'Save As' every link that I care to download, so that there is no separate tab to close. (But maybe you were referring only to this specific site.) Maybe the solution is just to make sure that there's more of interest on your download page than just the download button?
It's a tradeoff between getting more users and getting more money, which I'm sure he knows. He's chosen to be more towards the "money" end of the scale, which is fair enough.
I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"
It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.
edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.
I'm very curious to try it out, and came to comments in hopes of seeing some comments about what it's like. Instead there's a bunch of comments about the pricing situation. So it's definitely affected my chance of giving it a shot.
I'm using it and it's pretty good. I don't really agree with the scheme of 1. Tricking you into paying something. 2. Feeling guilty for entering $0...but the ui is not bad at all imho.
In the previous design of the website, there was a small "...or download for free" button tucked away below the payment options. IIRC that meant that the number of users who payed for the OS was something below 1%. Now, after that switch, it's still rather low, but combining with the amount of money they get from other places (like Patreon[0]) it's enough to have two (again, IIRC) full time developers and one part time developer.
From what I can remember, there was never a time where they disallowed a way of downloading the OS for free, they just made it more difficult to figure out over time.
As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why.
If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.
>As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why.
If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.
By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.
That's kinda the point. He pushes for donations, but doesn't offer support. It's not illegal for him to not offer support and it's not illegal for me to not pay him.
I would prefer to pay a reasonable subscription fee with a support contract which is also not illegal, but benefits all parties.
I do make contributions to some projects (can't support them all), but if the project is being too pushy, they can count me out. The idea that I can get support in return is just a nicer model of exchange. There's a good chance that I won't even use that support, but it's nice to know that my contributions have a direct impact on how usable the project is for my needs.
I really wish someone would start a paid OS based on Linux and OSS tools. I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build quality to Apple)_ and putting Linux on it... but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
I want a for-profit UI company working on a Linux UI. OSS just can't compete with Apple on design it seems.. and in my opinion, users shouldn't have to choose between OSS and pretty design.
It's bad enough that if/when i leave OSX, i lose a lot of my apps due to them not supporting (or not supporting competently) Linux, but losing apps and UX.. well, it's a tough pill to swallow.
I believe elementary OS is the closest thing to what you're looking for. They're an LLC with the team that focuses on building a good looking UI and a nice UX. Pantheon is the only desktop environment which I wouldn't call outdated in the Linux world and somewhat stable and easy to get (Solus project is attempting to do the same, but I think they just don't have enough man power to pull it off).
I agree, been using mint linux (Debian based, borrows some "just works" stuff from Ubuntu) plus the Cinnamon Desktop, is a dream, on high end hardware or not. I will concede though, most people coming from iOS/Mac will want something tailored and curated for them, even though *nix offers unlimited possibilities in customization and software.
I wish them the best of luck but recall Eazel (?) attempting to do this with Gnome back in the day and ended up folding as not enough people were willing to pay.
You can always pay for Ubuntu. BTW, that is probably the one closest to what you're describing, not elementary, but they have a tendency to focus in fixing not the broken things.
I'm right there with you. The only thing that keeps me on a Mac is the combination of Unix + Half decent UX. If someone built a paid Unix/Linux distro that could run Mac Apps, I'd give away my extra kidney for it.
Windows almost has me sold with their new Ubuntu subsystem.
I gave that up in 10 minutes. I really tried spinning up a basic docker project (docker compose) without luck. Sure, having a bash is a step forward and I see it getting better but it's no way near to a developer's basic needs.
It works tolerably well, but the hyper-v thing that it runs on is currently my #1 suspect when Windows takes > 30 seconds to connect to any network :-/
I've come to a conclusion that if you have high standards, you can't look to other people for happiness. Even if I had a dream system for a while, at some point they'd follow a new trend that annoyed me and I'd feel left out again. Or they'd fail to follow a trend, and I'd complain that they'd fallen behind.
I've been orphaned from several platforms. OSX surprised me. It appeared to be the dream commodity unix. But then a release broke my workspace usage.
Eventually, I completely switched to a stripped-down unix. I use a bash menu for controlling things like wireless and screen lock. Tmux/dwm are my window managers, I use whatever the latest browser is.
All this required effort to learn and set up. People who look to the big companies for fashion would sneer at this. But it's a sharp tool, and it'll never be made obsolete by shifting trends.
As a daily Linux user I feel your pain, but have you considered Windows 10 with their Ubuntu coop install? I'm seriously considering it for user-space apps.
> Is that not what Red Hat is? I thought that's what the Red Hat license provided?
I won't say anything bad about Red Hat, but calling the UX awesome isn't something I would do based on my experience. Then again, they might have changed but I haven't heard anybody mentioning it.
(This used to be Canonicals niche before they picked up the assumption that Mac-like == Good ; )
I may have skipped over the awesome UX. More of the stable and paid dev work.
I'll agree most UX on Linux isn't great. But GUI is such a pain in the ass that most people really don't want to work on it. Plus, plenty of Linux users aren't casual users and will accept or prefer function over form.
I myself am a heavy terminal user and pretty much limit my GUI use to the occasional image editor and the browser.
Fedora is ahead of RedHat server, kernel and package-wise. That's the point: pish the edge with the desktop, keep the server conservative and very stable.
RedHat makes their money on support licensing for the server. Employees are paid to work on Fedora, but it is not the RedHat product.
That's really sad to hear.. if you think the GNOME 3 UI is buggy, childish, opinionated, and hard to customize (I've yet to get a downloaded theme to work right the first time) Fedora is a non-starter.
Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Probably nothing that can't be easily dismissed as personal preference. I recall YaST had a bad habit of unnecessarily cycling network interfaces when certain changes were made, but that was a long while ago.
Awesome UI/UX is where everything falls apart. Everyone wants something different and just about everything beyond a rectangle with a few handy buttons on it actually slows productivity. Nothing's worse than waiting for an animation to complete so you can click a button you have to click 100 more times today. On top of that, people get bored really fast and then everything has to be overhauled for absolutely 0 gain.
You just described elementary (fwiw, it is a for-profit LLC).
I think you're massively underestimating the magnitude and difficulty of what you're seeking. elementary has been at this for 5 years and made an immense amount of progress, though. But it's definitely still not at the level of Apple, which has had decades and billions of dollars poured into this.
It's not a "paid OS" in that it doesn't force you to pay a particular dollar amount, though. (People tend to lose their minds when you charge them for open-source software.)
I think this is one big problem with the OSS community: there is no concept of 'value'.
People complain about iOS' race to the bottom, but in the OSS community, I frel like this has been there for a long time. "You want to _charge me for it_ ?! Pffft!"
We may complain about macOS now with Sierra but for thr most part, macOS has been stable for a long time. I haven't seen a kernel panic in probably a decade. Not saying it's perfect, but there's a point you hit when people are paid to make things happen and macOS hit that point yeats ago.
I would argue Elementary provides a lot of value and should therefore weed out the complainers and worst of the bunch by charging. I would remove the 'pay what you want' and just charge $30 or $40.
We don't live in the Star Trek universe yet, so people still need money to live. I fully believe in and support companies, individuals, and groups that provide a good value for what they charge.
I _want_ those people making great things and doing it full time. Otherwise, you just get abandonware or crappy products where people don't fix bugs because they have a day job to deal with. That's the reality in my mind.
I can throw $XX at a linux distro, pray that it goes to the right things and gets improved proper, and then wait until it becomes good, or I could throw $XX at a closed source solution, and have something that works good right now.
Its all fine to donate $XX, but buying for $XX to get something significantly worse than its competitors is a bit weird, and can only really be justified through "I support free software even if it has binary blobs", which is still a bit weird
Ironically, Elementary might have an easier time charging money for it if they positioned it less as an open source project. macOS is built largely atop open source software, and while they do make the GPL'd sources available for download they're not nearly enough to compile an OS with an experience approaching macOS.
>I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
Good luck with that. The problem is that no one will make a UI/UX that's both awesome and stable. It's not like the resources aren't there: there's a ton of DEs for Linux, and they've been working on them for 20 years now. But the problem is they can't ever agree on anything, and they can't ever just leave well enough alone: every time they get something stable, they abandon it and make up something completely new and unstable. It's easily the 2nd biggest hindrance to Linux-on-the-desktop adoption (the biggest of course being application compatibility/inertia with Windows).
>but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
That's the Linux community's fault. It's not the features that lag, either; KDE, feature-wise, has always been far ahead of the commercial UIs. For one simple example, I can't middle-click and vertically maximize a window on any other DE that I know of, but in KDE that's been a standard feature for at least 15 years. For another simple example, multiple desktops have been standard on Unix UIs for over 30 years, but never in Windows or Mac. The problem with Linux UIs isn't design, it's stability: everyone's constantly revamping stuff (Gnome3, KDE4, KDE5, etc.) and never spending any time fixing bugs. For instance, I have the Dvorak keyboard set on my LM17.3/KDE desktop, but several KDE apps don't respect that and go back to Qwerty. (To be fair, Windows is even worse: I have my work Win7 desktop set so I can switch between Qwerty and Dvorak, and the stupid thing is constantly switching back and forth randomly.)
Totally agree with this. Except, I've never liked the KDE look and feel. It's like the worst glossy cartoon ui ever. Yuk. To be fair, I haven't looked at it recently, so the gloss might have been toned down or removed.
But to your point of bug fixing, I absolutely agree. macOS is plagued by this as well, but mot to the degree Linux DE's are.
I've used multiple desktops since the 90's and loved it. macOS has had support for a while, but the animation switching from desktop to desktop was horrendous. I got a utility to fix that, but it's a joke they don't just include a checkbox to toggle the animations. This is one huge UX fail in my mind.
KDE's changed its look, but more importantly, it's not set in stone: it's entirely possible to change its settings and theme. It's the most configurable DE out there.
I really wonder sometimes why distros don't use it more, and make their own custom themes for it, instead of just leaving it at the default. It wouldn't take that much work to make themes to make it look almost like anything you want. Or you could even make a different version of Plasma which emulates some other OS/DE if you needed to, leaving all the underpinnings intact.
> I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
The problem is that many people have differing ideas of what the UI/UX would look like.
If you asked me to provide such a thing I'd just use Debian. Others might prefer RedHat, or similar. But copying an existing distribution, and keeping up to date with new versions would be a full-time job in itself, and that wouldn't leave any room for actual development.
The GNOME project, and KDE project for that matter, have spent years creating a unified environment, and even with their funds and developers the project is never-ending.
I wouldn't say a minimal & unified distribution is impossible, but it would require a lot more users to pay, up-front.
I'm a KDE user / occasional contributor. I love the new Breeze theming and all the effort that went into the icon set along with it. I've used Macs in the past, and find the UI garish and much more intuitive, and way less customizable.
It is definitely a case of "to each their own", but the only issue with KDE right now is developer churn. As the writers and more experienced developers in some applications reduce their participation due to time constraints, it is incredibly hard for anyone to step into those shoes in often millions of LOCs code bases. A lot of UI rot isn't because we don't have technologies (Kirigami, Qt Quick Controls 2, Plasmoids, etc) that enable fantastic UI and UX experiences, it is because porting forward hundreds of applications comes down to who has the time and willpower to either continue maintaining their 10 year old project or someone having the willpower to learn what can often be very ugly C++ or ancient PyQt codebases.
I also have no problem with what Gnome is doing. Their applications may not be for me, but I can recognize the beauty in what they are trying to accomplish, and still think they have a much better design language than anything MS / Apple is putting out. Whenever I sit down at OSX / Windows I feel like both are stuck in the 90s, often because half their applications (especially system management) were written then and never updated since, and because they just make random UI splits every release to look shiny and new by just changing the shell look and keeping the rest jarringly legacy.
It's all subjective but I find that KDE apps need a lot of work in terms of control flow, UI hierarchy, white space usage. To me, these are some of the things that macOS and most third party applications for it get very much right, and coming from it KDE feels... jarring. In some ways it feels modern but in others I feel like I'm using Win9x, complete with overcrowded windows and dialog tunnels, with a new coat of paint. It would greatly benefit from someone sitting down and giving it all a rethink.
GNOME sits on the other side of the spectrum on these issues but I personally find it and in fact most GTK+ apps more aesthetically pleasing and more well organized even if all the buttons are too huge and its white space is like a football field.
I also never thought that the UX was particularly good. It looks pretty, but some fundamental stuff is hidden and when I was new to OS X I never knew when I had to switch to terminal. To me the real reason to run OS X is that I never have to fight with drivers or my xconfig. On Ubuntu plugging in a projector to give a presentation was always more exciting than it should have been. I more often than not had to borrow someone else's Windows laptop. I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one. Last time I gave Ubuntu a try a few years ago it actually managed to destroy the firmware on my external screen. I just want a Unix based system that works.
> I also can't count the times apt-get update replaced my proprietary Nvidia driver with an much worse, open source one.
I don't think it's fair to compare OS X (with runs on a very limited set of hardware) with a Linux distribution running on a random not-well-supported system. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison I'd suggest to test Ubuntu on one of the officially supported systems - see https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ for a list.
It's fair when you consider the usual value proposition of "do I buy a PC and put linux on it or do I buy a Mac".
But you are right, some people mix these different issues up. My next laptop will come with Linux pre-installed - so I expect to report that all the bits work correctly (except Linux will be running on top of Qubes rather than on the metal, so...)
OSX has plenty of weirdness, but in my experience it's still more usable by far than Windows and a million miles away from any desktop Linux distro. I use it because it's the best available, not because it's perfect in every possible way. It's not, and nothing is. But it's a generally excellent GUI around a UNIX core, which is perfect for me.
I hackintosh so I'm less well-placed to answer your second point, but I'll try: A Mac is expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting and you know it will work well (recent dongle madness notwithstanding).
Meanwhile, eOS markets itself (previously implicitly and now apparently explicitly) as a potential replacement for OSX. But it's nowhere near. It's an outdated version of Ubuntu with some basic custom apps on top (a calculator, another basic wrapper around webkit, a slightly cleaned up fork of a file browser, etc).
And then you stray to the third party apps, and as always with desktop Linux, they're awful. Everything uses a slightly different toolkit, the UI elements are ugly, UX seems to be devs' lowest priority item, and of course you can't completely interact with industry standard formats (DOCX, PSD). The Intel Mesa driver still tears and/or stutters (actually all drivers do except Nvidia's) so watching videos is an awful experience.
Most of those items above are not fatal by themselves, but together they make for a miserable experience. I used desktop Linux (mainly Ubuntu) for over a year since I needed to do some dev and couldn't run OSX at the time. I won't try again unless there's a revolution in the desktop FOSS world. (Good video drivers, standard well-designed toolkit, UX as a priority, deeper integration of things like WINE.)
I do have some family members who use ancient core2duo laptops and do absolutely everything in Chrome. I pop Ubuntu MATE on their machines so they can avoid malware. I also always keep a live USB stick handy for flexible troubleshooting. As far as I'm concerned, this is basically the limit of usefulness for desktop Linux.
I understand some people value the flexibility above everything else and thrive under desktop Linux. I'm not trying to devalue their views or say that their setup is wrong. Use whatever works for you- but if you haven't gave OSX a serious shot yet, do try it.
I don't think anybody is saying that macOS is perfect. It's more that historically for most of us, the set of trade offs that come with it are much easier to swallow than those that come with $DESKTOP_LINUX_DISTRO. In fact, that's the core of the problem: even now, after all that he missteps Apple has taken and after all the improvements desktop Linux has seen, macOS is still the more appealing option. This is frustrating because it suggests that there may never be another desktop platform with a set of pros and cons similar to those of macOS.
I tried a few times to contribute to their project, but all of their apps (at the time, at least) were hacked together with no tests and poor documentation. This is all fine, everyone has to start somewhere, but they were openly hostile to suggestions of testing or new architecture. In my opinion, they had a very "we know best" attitude for a group of (almost entirely) amateur developers. :/
I felt the same way ultimately despite my original enthusiasm. To be honest now that I have some experience with the eco-system as a whole, I mean Linux, it's really unreasonable to expect a few developers, even very good ones, to produce a desktop operating system that rivals OS X or Windows or even Fedora because they are competing against very large and well funded teams at huge corporations that by now have at least three decades of experience building desktop operating systems. In short, Elementary OS is a nice idea but it's a somewhat Quixotic endeavor.
This part wasn't that horrible as the quote from Elementary blog was (apparently they removed the old blogpost, but it's easily googlable):
"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. We didn’t exclude a $0 button to deceive you; we believe our software really is worth something."
This. They tried to shame people for downloading without paying, Foss community shamed them for that because they don't pay anything for the parts they get from Ubuntu, Debian, gnu, Linux etc.
>> we believe our software really is worth something.
That's why you let users decide after they've used the software. You don't tell someone that up front and expect a payment when you haven't been able to try and test the software for yourself and your team.
If it's worthy, then users will come back and offer a payment or contact you to find out how they can contribute if they feel its really worth it.
I think a lot of people have this misconception that everybody who uses open source software just assumes it should be free. In my own experience, it's quite the opposite. Most people who use open source are actually more willing to pay for something they feel is valuable to them without hesitation. They're also usually willing to pay a little more then perhaps is necessary in order to make sure its maintained and supported.
Don't ever rely on your own perception of what's intuitive to evaluate a user experience. Someone has given specific feedback to the contrary, which means that there will be others. If I was the site's maintainer, I'd be heading straight for the analytics to see if they support this feedback.
Because for most people, "0 dollars" is not a sensible answer to that question. Getting something for free is perceived as a separate kind of action from purchasing something, even if you can ultimately boil it down to the same "exchange $X for Y" process.
When BetterTouchTool forced the switch to a "pay-as-you" want version (they even forcefully expired existing versions of the app, it simply stopped working unless you fork over money), their minimum was 4$ or so, because apparently if it was less, then the payment processing would be too high in relation.
So apparently in the bait-and-switch mentality of the mac world, that you can pay '0 dollars' is not obvious.
They retracted that and apologized. It's unreasonable to just hold this over their heads, and in general use it to dismiss their entire project, which they have been working on for half a decade, mostly with no salary, because of one badly phrased sentence from one contributor which was then retracted.
I also think if you read the rest of what they're saying, it's probably is true that we will only get Linux GUIs which are competitive with Windows or Mac when people are willing to fund their professional development. OSS works exceptionally well for lower level components, or for components targeted at developers, because everyone involved benefits. For a professional developer a contribution acts as a good mechanism to raise your profile within the community and improve your ability to earn a decent salary elsewhere. For a company, running open source projects means they can solicit contributions and improve their profile; they contribute to other projects because it gives them a base to be able to build their products. We don't expect or find that OSS developers of high profile projects are starving in garrets, they are in fact leaders of their communities, highly prized and in-demand.
But these mechanisms do not have the same force when the consumer of the software is a general user, not a developer in the same field. i.e. when you're writing software in C++ which is then going to be used by graphic designers or artists, or by a casual user. In those case, the direct reputational benefits just aren't there, and that's why those sort of projects often struggle to take off. And on top of that those projects also involve a lot of painstaking and arguably boring work to get everything polished to a fine sheen. Krita for instance is excellent, but it has found a way to fund development through yearly crowdfunding. I think the same applies to Linux GUI's, that ultimately you need some pot of money able to support developers, which moves around according to the desires of informed consumers. In my opinion, that's what it will take for desktop Linux to become a serious mass market alternative to Mac and Windows.
My problem with their project funding argument is that I'm not an investor. An investor has lots of money, and so is more willing to accumulate risks for the payoff of creating a stable enterprise.
It's not rational for me as a consumer to fund such an unsure bet, especially when changing an operating system has lots of friction. I assume that the proposed talent of an individual investor is in the ability to sieve good from bad in a sea of maybe. But I also don't understand the market well enough to see how such an unproven bet might succeed in a very stale market dominated by arguably one entity (you can't really buy macOS) -- maybe two.
I'd also say that while software work is expensive and requires talented labor, and while operating system work takes an intense amount of effort, there's something to be said about the fact that Elementary OS could even build their OS to begin with. How did they do it? On the backs of billions of dollars of free labor. I can't imagine how it would be if the whole world hid their source code with proprietary-only software, and Elementary had to start from ground 0.
Your argument would make sense if it weren't pay what you like, with the option to pay zero, and the default option being less than the price of a sandwich.
You mention that investors have lots of money and are therefore able to take on risks. I suspect that nearly everyone who would consider downloading this operating system has a lot of money relative to the $5 suggested donation, and certainly relative to the $1 you could choose instead. And if you truly don't have that, then you can do $0 instead.
You can make the risk to yourself arbitrarily low, selecting whatever you think fits your profile of cost vs potential reward. That is their rational model.
I agree this is kinda frustrating, but judging from other comments it seems like ElementaryOS is maintained by a for-profit company. Driving conversions is probably more important to them rather than optimizing for total total number of downloads. I personally think this strategy is limited in scope as it ignores the life-time value of users that donate after using for a period of time, but always interesting to play devil's advocate.
It is a shame for Elementary OS Team, because this issue was many times discussed on GH issues / IRC about implementing just a "$0" button. As I remember in launchpad there is also a task or discussion about suggestion of the dialog which will remind about donation after certain time duration.
I don't think this is a trick - especially as it states "Pay What You Want". They need money to develop the OS and apps. And asking later will result in more hate.
They should include more videos and screenshots so people have a better idea of what they are buying.
Sad. I tried to modify elementary OS entry in italian wikipedia for this (and... it is not open software, but 'free' if it is distribuited via GPL...). I did not be able to modify the wiki, anda banned for 24h... EDIT: for 'personal attacks'... LOL, it's all written, where are my personal attacks? LOL
I'm long term Linux user and I played with Elementary sometime ago. While just after installation everything is great and beautiful, it changed shortly when I need to install apps outside the ecosystem. Experience gives you feeling I could compare to using old-java application on Windows 10.
Along with seemingly everyone else, I had a quick look at my options to migrate away from Apple over the last few days. First thing I looked for was a decent mail app, was immediately put off the whole idea, exactly as you describe.
This is probably the most painful thing on desktop at the moment, because no one gives a s* to desktop mail apps these days.
I recently switched back to evolution from Thunderbird, but where one if great, the other falls short ( in this case, GPG with Evolution is _painful_ ). Geary is... well, not mature, Claws and Sylpheed are a bit too oldschool and mutt is ... well, mutt.
I'd love to see something like Rainloop[1] as a real desktop app. Mailpile[2] is a nice idea, but is nowhere even close to the usability of Rainloop.
I recently switched to Mint Cinnamon and I'm completely satisfied. There is not one thing I miss from Mac OS X and many where GNU/Linux is much better.
Well Geary (and the elementary fork Pantheon Mail) are quite good for basic use. There are still a few bugs and their codebases are quite hell to work with (see [1] for my review of them). This document motivates my little side project, but, lately, it hasn't seen much direct attention as I've been working on some stuff upstream, in elementary and Evolution, for this project.
I'm really hoping this is just a phase. Hoping that Apple will reduce prices of new laptops and we'll be back to normal.
Right now everybody is using Macs. Walk into the Bay Area coffee shop, you see Macs everywhere. I love that.
I build desktop software for Macs (focuslist.co). My apps are prettier than any others. They are easier and faster to use. This is the reason why people pay me $5 while they can get the job done with paper and pen.
This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.
Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away. We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff. Ugh.
> Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away.
Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.
Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.
Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.
I think his point was that the Apple/Mac ethos foster high quality design and attention to detail, which is applied when developers build apps for the Mac.
To be fair, so does elementaryOS. They really try to encourage developers to adopt their HIG.[1]
So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.
I have used Gtk+, wxWidgets, Qt, KDeveloper, once upon a time between 1995 and around 2004.
Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.
Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?
You have valgrind and many other tools instead of "Instruments".
The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.
GTK has been fairly hostile to non-Gnome usage since the GTK 3 era; they keep on breaking backwards compatibility for applications that use it, don't care about whether apps can be used on non-Gnome desktop environments, etc. I don't think it's all that polished either.
Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".
well the not-fully-working desktop stack for Linux devs seems to work just fine for them. I've certainly never had a problem with it. I've never had a problem with the Apple kit either but it's nothing to write home about. The only thing I've seen Apple do that I did think was really cool is the package signing.
Sorry, but this old argument never washed with me. Certainly before Gnome 3 and Unity, the UX was considerably nicer than on my Mac, and in fact those old DEs are still much nicer to use than Yosemite, and the new ones are much worse precisely because they abandoned good design in favour of the Apple kool-aid.
I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.
Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.
> GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.
Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.
I don't know why, but MacOS feels more high-quality than the other desktops. I use Unity on all my computers and haven't run MacOS in years, but I think there's more "tearing" in Linux WMs. Things just don't feel like they stick together as much, sometimes the decorations will hang, the menus will disappear, there are blank icons in my notification bar, etc.
It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.
I know exactly what you mean. Are the technical issues because of X or because of design decisions? I have to think it's because of X because I haven't seen an OS GUI that was as stable and as predictable as Windows/OSX. Edit: Or put another way, I always run into weird graphical/display issues using Linux desktop flavors, whether they've been on a desktop PC or in a VM.
Massive +1 to this. And enabling vsync manually in any flavor of linux I've ever used makes the framerate tank.
I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.
> Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.
I'm with you but to be objective Apple hasn't done significant efforts for the pro market in last years. They have stated the future is in the iPad. Their pro line is stagnant or receding (where is Mac OS X server, Final Cut pro dumbed down, etc.).
Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.
Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].
Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].
> Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award.
Well, thats kind of a narcissistic statement. How many people develop for Windows? How many for Linux? How many for Mac? oh.
I try to make my software as beautiful as I can, and keep a simple and usable UX. There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion.
I'm not sure you've done enough macOS/iOS development to know where that feeling comes from. In every Apple developer conference, in much of the UI API, and in input from the community, the idea of creating beautiful apps is something that gets repeated over and over until it is ingrained in us. It has nothing to do with trying to be better looking than other platforms but rather trying to match the aesthetics and quality of other apps on the same platform. People tend to notice when your one utility app stands out as the ugly duckling on macOS/iOS.
> "There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion."
And that is the biggest problem in software world, that's why our computers are full of half-baked, ugly, poor documented and uncompatible programs - because someone "just wanted to get job done".
I want to dislike you for your statements of the truth, but I can't.
I'm a multi-plat guy who has a Macbook and a Windows machine. This makes me want to get a real open source initiative going on Windows to enable better UI assembly. Xaml is great but it has a ways to go.
No offence intended but I took a look at your website (which is very neat and tidy BTW), and looked at the screenshots but I do not see how your app (consisting of mainly a listview control) is "prettier than any others".
I can see how having a simple UI with few controls on it can sometimes be translated as "pretty" in certain circles, but simply having few features and few controls doesn't magically mean your app is top of the pile on the entire Earth regarding "prettiness". It is quite an assertion to make.
EDIT: Again, this is not meant offensively but was more of a response to the assertion that the app is prettier than ANY others.
Furthermore, I certainly agree with the rest of the comment where they state that more attention is paid to UI etc. on MacOS than other platforms, typically.
Personally I think this is just a phase triggered by those that actually aren't developers invested into Apple, rather people that want UNIX with a pretty GUI.
I think the emphasis including that in the article on pretty is a fundamental misunderstanding of why developers like macOS.
For me and a lot of others what I really want is a UNIX that just works.
Meaning it just works with its hardware in all ways... audio and video playing, recording, editing and everything else all work very well, without having to recompile the kernel or hunt down and install alpha drivers without source hosted on sketchy sites, which is what drove me away from other UNIXes.
Also macOS is a good platform for developing native iOS apps. Why iOS and not Android? Mostly because the version adoption curve of Android is pretty bad.
The point is it's more about functionality and getting stuff done than it is about pretty. With other UNIXes there was always too much fighting with the system.
The single thing that keeps me with macOS is a universal key that is truly universal. Apps on mac are built around the command key. The windows key and the linux super key don't have anywhere near the consistency across applications that the command key does. `cmd + shift + [` flips through tabs in every application I have. In linux, it works only if I set up the keys for that application, and only if that application has the ability to set those keys. I spend more time in xkb config files than I do programming.
I had a very similar experience. I switched for the pretty fonts, and stayed for the key bindings. You can even add your own key bindings to (almost) any menu item in (almost) any Cocoa app using System Preferences. After I discovered that, I just dug in even more.
Maybe because when I see people using UNIX systems in 2016, I can hardly see a difference with people using 21' monitors with Aix full with xterms in 1994, as if nothing has changed.
Total phase. The "only Mac update for the next 3 years" meme is just fanning the drama flames. Once you back out of HN into the real world the vast majority of people aren't going to hop into a laptop using Linux. Maybe some will go back to Windows but I think Apple's brand is strong enough that majority would feel dirty buying a Dell, etc. It's akin to someone who usually buys clothes at high end boutiques opting to switch to Walmart because they don't like this season's line. You also need to consider how long the current crop of Mac books last. If you maxed one out over the last 3 years it's hard to even defend the need for a new one.
Another distinction to make is business vs private users. Unless something has changed recently, Macs are basically unheard of in offices (aside from maybe the receptionist), so if 50% of the market is businesses where there's 0% market share, "how many people use a Mac at the coffee shop" will overstate their overall market share by 50%.
I not sure about the office bit though. In my office there are some macs although they are a minority. I'm also not sure offices account for 50% of the computers.
But yeah, many other variables to consider. Age as well, it's mostly younger people in coffee shops.
I mean, sure - the design is pretty, but OSX has been terrible for me quality wise. I know what you mean about pretty, but currently i'm feeling like i need to pick between pretty (OSX) and stable (Linux).
Worse yet, is if i pick a stable variety of Linux, it's likely to not be pretty. The pretty Linux OSs (in my experience) tend to be at least as unstable as OSX. Ugh.
(Note: I upgraded to Sierra, crash or have weird crap happen ~4times a week)
edit: Why the downvote? Note that i explicitly stated this was my experience. Furthermore, i had the same experience when my Macbook Pro Retina was new, and came with OSX Mavericks. Both Mavericks and Sierra have gave me the impression that Apple releases unstable OSs for major versions, and need time to make it stable again.
Clearly something, but no idea what. I only use a small number of apps (iterm2, neovim, chrome, spotify, etc). Spend most of my day in iterm2, and avoid using new programs because i prefer cli programs.
Not sure about the last crash reports (the os froze until i force restarted it), but other weirdness are things like the keyboard going apeshit. Spazzing out like a variety of buttons are being held down. That's happened 3 times since updating, never before. Another one is all input not working, etc. Both keyboard/pad related though, i assume there's a wonky driver in Sierra but i haven't researched it (and frankly don't want to atm).
I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.
Sidenote, that is indeed a pretty app! If i was sure i was staying on OSX (probably migrating to Linux), i'd purchase this! Shame i never found it sooner. I use a combination of Todoist and a Pomodoro timer on my phone.
But you have to realize that those applications on Macs are not for everyone. Which basically means that if Mac were to continue having their monopoly, developers like YOU would never look to provide the same kinds of services to people who prefer something else. Not everyone uses software that just because they look pretty.
The USB-C ports and the processor + RAM limitations will be fixed by time.
As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM. Counting in design and manufacturing time, that could be about a year from now.
And USB-C is clearly the future for connectors. In a year or two a lot more peripherals will be shipping with USB-C as the default cord.
This is why Apple carries a huge amount of cash around on their books: so that they can make long-term decisions even if it hurts in the short term.
> As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM.
Can you comment on why you think this is true? A cursory look at Kaby Lake does not seem to indicate any sort of intrinsic change that would allow the MBP to have more memory.
I believe that Kaby Lake brings support for LPDDR4, whereas Skylake doesn't have it. Apple only uses LPDDR on its laptops, so you can't get 32 GB as this would mean DDR4 and higher power consumption.
I think you're mostly right. The RAM problem will go away. The USB-C thing I think is a total misnomer; it's clearly the future of connectors.
My biggest problem is the obsession with "Thin and Light" crippling system specs. I get that a 11-13" laptop isn't gonna have the best GPU in the world, but I'd like a decent one in my 15" 'Pro' model please...and I'll take a little less thin and light to get it.
This is even more true on desktop. I don't really care about how bulbous you make the back of my iMac or Mac Pro, just give me SLI GTX1080s.
I get it, I'm the niche, I'm a gamer with a Mac, but I still exist.
I don't really see any issue with Electron apps -- Slack and Atom, both Electron-based, are some really good looking apps that really get the job done.
For me, even as a Mac user, I avoid Mac-only apps as much as I possibly can because I want the freedom to switch platforms in the future. I will happily have all my apps be slightly less pretty if it means they work on any OS.
I like Electron apps too, and I am running a handful of them as I type this message, but they are notorious for hogging system resources (especially memory).
> This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.
This may be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read on HN.
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Cofeeshop people will still buy Macs, as well as those looking for status symbols. So there is no danger of Macs going away from demand side.
The issue is that Apple is alienating early adopters by removing ports, charging double for obsolete hardware and introducing gimmicks instead of real innovation. And there is a decrease in OS quality from Apple.
Perhaps I am just dense, but the article references, specifically, the "Pro" market. For most pros that I know (and I am among them), our OS choice is often based on our tools, not the other way around. If I need Photoshop, Lightroom, Logic Pro, Visual Studio, etc., switching will be quite a chore. For the average user, this is probably a much more appealing argument.
That depends on what kind of creative pro you are. In general I'd completely agree with you, but the major VFX vendors all run on Linux - with Nuke, Maya, Houdini, Modo, Clarisse, Mari, etc.
From what I've seen it's been getting much better. Linux has very powerful tools for media creation/editing now: Blender, Krita, Darktable, Natron are some quality apps that I'm aware of.
I've played around with it a bit - someone packaged Krita as a snap for Ubuntu and I wanted to test installing it. Looked good, more for painting like you say but looked powerful enough for basic image editing. I've seen people produce beautiful digital art with it
I think you can forget Adobe porting all their stuff to Linux. They have a ton of different projects and teams going on at the same time, they certainly are not going to bother increasing that by 50% to support an open source platform with 1.x% market penetration.
Yes, even for a developer looking to switch from OSX to Linux, it's much more relevant to discuss how he will be working with his usual tools (git, IDE/editor, installing with apt-get, docker, etc) than whether the dock or the notification bar will behave the same as on OSX.
There are also pros who primarily do web development. They need a terminal window, a text editor, and a web browser -- making switching to a different platform not as painful.
I think over the past 15 years, lots of Linux users migrated to macOS because it was a pretty, usable Unix. Those users might not be terribly loyal to Apple and will move to back to Linux if it's better for them.
If you use macOS because you need to run Mac software, then you probably aren't going anywhere.
That's exactly my case, I went from Gentoo to Mac about 10 years ago. I loved Gentoo when I was a student but getting it to work perfectly on a laptop was a hassle and while I loved customizing fvwm, macOS had great UI right out of the box.
I think this is the sort of person that elementary are trying to capture. i.e. those who don't want the hassle of customizing the UI, who want a well thought out UI out of the box. And combine that with the underlying flexibility of Linux. They're not quite there yet, but the vision is right.
that's basically me. i went from linux to osx ~9 years ago because it was pretty, worked out of the box and it was a *nix.
now i'm back to linux because i can't stand the decisions apple took. plus, it feels like osx (now macOS) is less and less table on every iteration. i had a BSOD while trying to plug my external monitor ffs.
One nice thing though is that the "Pro" market for developers is mainly centered around Unix, not OSX. Sure, some devs might like OSX specific tools like a GUI for Git or some such.. but at its heart, most tools are Unix oriented, with plenty of crossover between OSX and Linux.
Depends on what work you're doing. My (slowly improving) programmer art workflow is based on Blender, Substance Designer, and Substance Painter, all of which are available on Linux as of a few months ago.
Since the Linux release of SD I've been dual booting elementary on my desktop and have had a pretty solid experience. For me it's games that make me keep a Windows installation around.
If you need Adobe stuff, the alternative is Windows (where it's more stable) not Linux. If you need Logic, you are stuck on macs. For everything else you MAY be able to get away with linux, but simple stuff like Evernote or Google Drive are not available
Yes, exactly. I've read that people are expecting photographers to move to Linux because the new MBP doesn't include an SD slot.
They're actually claiming I'm going to give up Photoshop, Pixelmator, Lightroom, CaptureOne rather than buying an external card-reader. And that's ignoring that most of us already prefer 3rd-party external card readers for speed alone ..
It wasn't the UI that got me using macs. In fact the UI was a pain in the neck since it couldn't do what my Linux window managers could do. And I kinda liked how I had my WM set up.
It was the fact that software I needed was available on Mac and I didn't want to use Windows.
Is there a place where I can directly ask experts or experienced users about alternative apps of my need. I have been making my mind about complete switch but few of the most used apps from Mac holds me back. I wish someone can suggest me a decent alternative to those apps. I must also add that I will lose several licenses of purchased apps in the process but I am willing to make that sacrifice. I wish I could find a reliable way to keep running those apps in VM.
Every few years I investigate switching back to a Linux laptop. Every time I find there are still issues. Last time it was poor GPU support (no fast switching) and buggy sleep.
What issues still exist with using Linux on laptops?
It highly depends on the laptop you're talking about specifically. Some will just work, others will steal your soul with frustration. I've had very few issues on my thinkpad x240 with Kubuntu. It's an older model, but back when it was less than a year old I still had very few issues with it. Mostly with the touchpad, but that particular model is horrible even with good drivers, so I don't use it in general. I had to fiddle with some bearded parts when I wanted my battery to only charge to 70%, rather than keep a full charge while plugged in as the lenovo bits are windows only(I vaguely remember having to set up shell scripts of some sort). Bluetooth didn't work in the beginning, but upgrading to a newer Kubuntu fixed that, and I don't use that very often either, so I didn't mind. Also generally battery life is slightly worse than windows but this also varies. And although Windows 10 is a fairly snappy, it spins my fans much more than Kubuntu does.
The last computer I had significant hardware problems with on linux had a Pentium 4, but I've been vary careful with hardware choice in the last decade. Do your research and you'll be fine.
"What issues still exist with using Linux on laptops?"
It depends on laptop model, some are worse than others. Just google "<latop_name> linux problem" and see what others encounter. Personally, I don't have any problems with my 5 years old Dell laptop running Kubuntu.
I have a HP laptop for work running Ubuntu that appears on their Certified hardware list. Wifi is buggy, using an external monitor is buggy, there are always "Internal Errors", sleep simply does not work, it crashes regularly.
So I am clueless here, how does swapping the OS rectify any issues people had with machine pricing or lack of desired new hardware features?
I don't get the angst. To me the disappointment is wholly related to the action bar/etc/whatever it is called. Its such a lame approach to adding additional functionality I would have never expected it from Apple. The Windows environment has many machines fully embracing touch screens right where the action is.
It's great timing for elementary. I'm having a lot of software problems with the Mac, and since I develop exclusively for Linux it seems like it'd be a lot easier if I could build and run everything on my target platform.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] thread"Exiting the ecosystem" is a guide crying out to be written though.
https://solus-project.com/
> I recently installed Solus and was pleasantly surprised
I don't have a detailed comparison or anything like that, I haven't used that many Linux desktop distros to begin with, but I did try Elementary OS and found it wanting.
There are some screens in this pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Ymf8oYXx-PSXU2eFlsR0NvY1E...
It probably assumes you'll be installing from fresh.
You should indeed install it fresh. I hope you didn't give your friends a bad expression.
This isn't really a problem with Elementary OS itself, more the proliferation of toolkits available, but to pretend that it is a drop-in replacement for a Mac (with its unified Cocoa UI) isn't quite right. (Yes, I know you can run FLTK and X apps on Mac so it's ugly too).
I just don't have any interest in installing it full. Instead I went with KDE Neon.
The only laptops comparable to Macbook Pro hardware quality and battery life are the Dell XPS series and the Thinkpad X1.
I feel there is a serious shortage of good laptops with linux pre-installed that the non-technical user can pickup and start using.
For me, the palm rejection has never worked as well as it does on Macs and the scrolling and multi-touch gestures are so pathetic under Linux on a laptop that its better to just disable the touchpad and stick with a mouse.
Even the glassy smooth feel of the Mac touchpad is superior to other laptops and the new haptic touchpad on the newer macs makes clicking on any part of the touchpad wonderful.
I do have a question for HN: with enough practice, does a keyboard with the pointing stick ever feel adequate? I've never seemed to get the hang of it in the numerous times I've had to use them (each time for only a few minutes).
In the end, its macOS that's still holding me back. Haven't decided yet tough.
I install http://cmder.net/ on every Windows machine. Makes my life more pleasant
It's annoying enough on my gaming machine, I can't imagine using Win10 on a device I use for serious work. Reboots seemingly every 36 hours or so. Their update system is totally out of control.
So, in the two things that matter less for laptops? Because on the go you can do with less performance and you don't need as much connectivity, if that means less weight and more battery life.
On the flip-side, we've gotten external GPUs through Thunderbolt. So we've gotten the ability to extend laptop GPUs.
Another positive development is that SSDs are likely to continue getting faster. Maybe RAM won't be upgradeable anymore, but if Intel can push out their Octane/3D XPoint tech, you might get SSDs so fast that you can get almost the same benefit swapping to a faster SSD as upgraded RAM.
I mean, you've never been able to upgrade your CPU cache. If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD, why complain that you can't upgrade that anymore?
Maybe one day SSDs will be soldered on in laptops too though :/
>>If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD This 'really' depends on your workloads and it's not always the case, even though it's often the RAM is mostly used as disk cache.
Looking at current generation of soldered CPU and glue as building solution is off putting at best. It feels like a cheap toy produced in a sweat shop.
Think about Atari, Acorn, Amiga and such. While there were a few Pro like models, the majority of the home users were using the full packaged ones, with connection ports for external extensions.
Apple was the last one with this mindset, and thanks to their survival and success, that is the trend the industry is now returning to.
Specially given that computers have reached a plateau for 90% of the users out there.
If someone makes them as compact and replaceable i'm on board, i just haven't seen it. Not saying it's not possible of course :)
Just recently I was looking for a new laptop and ended up buying a refurbished thinkpad t430 (270e with 8gb [gonna become 16] ram, ssd and i5 3rd gen)just because I am sure I can change basically every part of it whenever I want for a low price.
https://system76.com/laptops
The build quality of their offerings seems to get better with each successive generation too, and of course everything works out of the box.
I just wish they would partner with someone in the EU; that way shipping costs, VAT, and tariffs can be handled more transparently.
Then you're not really into this mobility thing?
link? I heard they had crappy broadcom chipsets but would be good to get some specific info.
TBH the sites i looked at last night seemed to say the current hardware that ships with windows is well supported...
Glad if that has changed!
I personally think XPS has a much better design for a laptop.
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/
and
https://www.mysn.de/
where the first two I found with some quick googling
Nonetheless, bravo to the Elementary team for taking the time to even write up this blog post (which is apparently the first in a series).
Edit: replies pointed out that Epiphany is the default web browser. Point still stands that Chrome implements the most security mitigations out of ALL browsers on the market.
They switched to the default GNOME browser "Epiphany" in the latest release of elementary OS. But I agree, the first thing i did was install a different browser. In my case Firefox.
I got the latest version via flatpak and I've completely replaced Chrome. There are still a few issues to be ironed out in flatpak (like notifications and downloads support), but it's getting there!
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2016/03/30/positive-progr...
Also, how is this any different than macOS shipping with Safari only, or Windows shipping with Edge only? You're holding an open source project to a higher standard than two highly successful commercial offerings.
Would any security-conscious person DO recommend a browser made by an advertising company for datamining purposes?
Firefox is a much better choice for the privacy/security-aware individual.
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-gradin...
They give one example (with a graph) of the security mitigations that are in popular web browsers:
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20...
Firefox scored below Chrome and Safari in several areas: address space layout randomization (ASLR), heap protection, stack guards, fortified source. And I've even seen infosec people saying that Firefox has some of these, but doesn't even enable them on builds for some platforms!
That is why open source is still a thing: because of available choices.
Of course, Chrome is still better feature wise, however, Elementary or any other distribution would need Google's permission to distribute Chrome.
Windows 10 with forced updates is too big if a reliability risk, especially when we're under deadline. Even if we could accept the spyware.
MBP could work, but it's very expensive, and the 16GB limit would be painful.
Mac Pro is expensive and somewhat outdated, and also is not portable.
Windows as a guest on Linux may work for us, but I'm still unclear on how that will impact color calibration / transforms.
I wish Adobe would just offer CS for Linux. Even at twice the price it would be our best option.
A workflow of, for example, Rawtherapee + GIMP would be more than enough for basic to upper intermediate tasks to replace Lightroom with. ( No, I'm not talking bs, my wife is actually using this for work; just like Mixxx is usable for professional DJing. ) There is also digiKam, which is rather impressive; it is lacking a few features, yet, but not as many as you'd think.
PS & Lightroom is everywhere, that is what's tought in schools; it's the MS Office of photo & design, and it shouldn't be.
There are, of course, situations, when the all-in-one PS is needed, but it's really, really rare.
Give digiKam and GIMP a go, but give them weeks, not minutes. Most of those who run away are only literally trying them for hours at max while these are utterly different tools.
I honestly wonder where GIMP, digiKam and the rest would be with the money PS subscriptions generate, paying for People With Good UX Taste.
Despite saying this, this is a fairly good option and I applaud Wine for its existence and the monumental undertaking they undertook (poor grammar, sorry).
Adobe won't make a Photoshop port, unless it is 100% obvious to them, that they are leaving more money on the table by not porting it than is the cost of porting and support.
Which may suck for you, if your business or job requires Photoshop right now. You aren't going to switch to Linux then, because you will get Photoshop and whatever OS it requires in the state it is today - which decreases the motivation for Adobe from previous paragraph.
And certainly no option for a business, but rarely for your average Joe, either. It is often hit and miss.
Like I have said countless times, a lot of users are bound to using either Windows or Mac because of a few applications. There is Microsoft Office (cloud versions are not good enough). Visual Studio. Adobe products. Avid. Ableton. Apple’s own software (Logic, Final Cut).
Where there even is alternatives, they are just not good enough.
Where Linux has gotten some support, is from the VFX industry, especially from Autodesk. You can use Maya and Nuke and Linux. Actually, almost all VFX companies use Linux in their shop.
As an engineer part of your skill is trying to translate what people are saying into something meaningful
Even if there was a collection of Linux-compatible software that was just as effective as PS and LR, professionals don't necessarily have the time available to learn those tools.
It's an industry/education barrier more than anything else. Photoshop has been the standard for years because it generally works quite well and is supported on the two major desktop operating systems.
> assume Photoshop will never happen on Linux
Probably not, no money in it for Adobe. I've always said I'd happily pay for a commercial Linux OS developed by Adobe that ran Creative Suite.
> it may even already exist
It doesn't.
> the developers behind OS alternatives will never know what functionality you require if all the details you give are "Photoshop"
No offence but you're kind of talking about Photoshop like it's MS Paint. It's a ubiquitous, massively bloated, complicated piece of software (10 million LOC, roughly the same as the Linux kernel?) that can take years to master.
Ubuntu veered towards the touch stuff, using nontraditional approaches; I honestly get lost these days when I have to use it.
I prefer it over Ubuntu because the UI makes more sense to me than Ubuntu's Unity.
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.
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.
[1] https://launchpad.net/elementary
I'm sorry to say though, that I don't remember how I did it, since I've been using mainly macOS and Windows for quite some time now.
My solution is to organize myself so that I don't have to move windows around. I mostly need browser, terminal and emacs. I open chrome in one monitor with specific scaling option, and when I move emacs or terminal around I manually decrease font size with Ctrl-+/-
All these things disappeared when I changed the external monitor for a HiDPI one.
It's called Wayland, it took some time to make and next week, new Fedora is coming out that uses it by default (until now you could "only" opt-in during login).
[1] Except Ubuntu, they have their own NIH solution, of course.
Title bars are up to compositor (it was up to window manager in X11). Even client side window decorations (i.e. mostly title bar combined with toolbar) are nothing new, if that is what you mean with custom implementation of window titlebars.
They hid the download button really well: You have to type in "0" into the "how much you'd like to pay" field for the "Purchase" button to change to "Download".
I mean I understand that open source projects need funding. But if you want people to try your niche OS at least make it obvious how to download it. Ask for money later after people had to chance to try it out.
I only typed in 0 because I know that "trick" from other websites. If I hadn't known I would have just left the website and would possibly never return.
I run a small software company myself. We're selling our software on the internet. But our website focuses on getting people to download the free trial first. The "asking for money" is then done once the trial period ends.
It's already hard to get people to download your stuff for free. With obviously visible download buttons.
If we did what Elementary is doing we would be closing our shop rather soon.
Yet some projects still squeak out some money: Synergy, DOSBox Turbo, etc.
_that's why it won't work_
Freedom 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."
Does this line make a program un-GPL?
No thank you, I'd rather use Mint or Ubuntu if I want an easy distro.
[1] https://launchpad.net/elementary
Comparing that to GNOME, where everything is so damn big that it wastes half of my screen and KDE where the default apps are usually bloated and confusing and can do way too many things, I call Pantheon as a win for the developers.
EDIT: Also, one neat trick that I've never seen any other terminal emulator doing other than Pantheon Terminal, is that you get a desktop notification every time you're not focused on the terminal when it finishes its job. For example, let's say I do something like "sudo apt install netbeans". Since the download is large, I'm going to focus on something else in the meantime and I'll get a desktop notification when the installation is finished.
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53376/
First of all, it's a rather large download, so you're probably going to close the website as soon as you click on the download button. Second of all, to consume the product in this case, you have to install it. And yet again, after you do so, if you get greeted with the "donate" window right away, you're going to dismiss it because you still haven't tested out the product.
So, what you need is a timer, something that says like "after 30 minutes (or an hour, or two hours) of usage, display the window", but that would require the OS to make calls to external servers without the user consent, and, because we are talking about a Linux-based operating system, people would be complaining that this is a a privacy violation.
Not necessarily. It's not like you expect the buyer to do a careful analysis of what it's worth before they pay. You can usually decide this sort of thing based on very quick impressions. Also, there's the aspect of it just seeming nicer to ask after the download has happened. Then it's clear that you already have the product, now it's up to you to decide what to pay for it, if anything at all. Here people have been tricked into thinking they had to pay and begrudge the author.
Really? On most sites that I visit, I 'Save As' every link that I care to download, so that there is no separate tab to close. (But maybe you were referring only to this specific site.) Maybe the solution is just to make sure that there's more of interest on your download page than just the download button?
If I pay nothing, I don't pay.
I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"
It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.
edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.
They do serve a purpose though.
Stare into the abyss etc.
From what I can remember, there was never a time where they disallowed a way of downloading the OS for free, they just made it more difficult to figure out over time.
[0] https://www.patreon.com/elementary
If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.
edit: typo
By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.
I would prefer to pay a reasonable subscription fee with a support contract which is also not illegal, but benefits all parties.
But this time I regret every cent. Coming from Mac OS, or even Fedora, Elementary seems unpolished and unstable.
As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build quality to Apple)_ and putting Linux on it... but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
I want a for-profit UI company working on a Linux UI. OSS just can't compete with Apple on design it seems.. and in my opinion, users shouldn't have to choose between OSS and pretty design.
It's bad enough that if/when i leave OSX, i lose a lot of my apps due to them not supporting (or not supporting competently) Linux, but losing apps and UX.. well, it's a tough pill to swallow.
Windows almost has me sold with their new Ubuntu subsystem.
[1] https://www.darlinghq.org/project-status/
Anything in particular you are missing?
I use Docker for Windows.
It works tolerably well, but the hyper-v thing that it runs on is currently my #1 suspect when Windows takes > 30 seconds to connect to any network :-/
I've been orphaned from several platforms. OSX surprised me. It appeared to be the dream commodity unix. But then a release broke my workspace usage.
Eventually, I completely switched to a stripped-down unix. I use a bash menu for controlling things like wireless and screen lock. Tmux/dwm are my window managers, I use whatever the latest browser is.
All this required effort to learn and set up. People who look to the big companies for fashion would sneer at this. But it's a sharp tool, and it'll never be made obsolete by shifting trends.
> Is that not what Red Hat is? I thought that's what the Red Hat license provided?
I won't say anything bad about Red Hat, but calling the UX awesome isn't something I would do based on my experience. Then again, they might have changed but I haven't heard anybody mentioning it.
(This used to be Canonicals niche before they picked up the assumption that Mac-like == Good ; )
I'll agree most UX on Linux isn't great. But GUI is such a pain in the ass that most people really don't want to work on it. Plus, plenty of Linux users aren't casual users and will accept or prefer function over form.
I myself am a heavy terminal user and pretty much limit my GUI use to the occasional image editor and the browser.
RedHat makes their money on support licensing for the server. Employees are paid to work on Fedora, but it is not the RedHat product.
Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Edit: this -
> Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Anything specific I should be aware of wrt OpenSUSE?
I think you're massively underestimating the magnitude and difficulty of what you're seeking. elementary has been at this for 5 years and made an immense amount of progress, though. But it's definitely still not at the level of Apple, which has had decades and billions of dollars poured into this.
It's not a "paid OS" in that it doesn't force you to pay a particular dollar amount, though. (People tend to lose their minds when you charge them for open-source software.)
https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines
f/d: I was on the elementary core team
People complain about iOS' race to the bottom, but in the OSS community, I frel like this has been there for a long time. "You want to _charge me for it_ ?! Pffft!"
We may complain about macOS now with Sierra but for thr most part, macOS has been stable for a long time. I haven't seen a kernel panic in probably a decade. Not saying it's perfect, but there's a point you hit when people are paid to make things happen and macOS hit that point yeats ago.
I would argue Elementary provides a lot of value and should therefore weed out the complainers and worst of the bunch by charging. I would remove the 'pay what you want' and just charge $30 or $40.
We don't live in the Star Trek universe yet, so people still need money to live. I fully believe in and support companies, individuals, and groups that provide a good value for what they charge.
I _want_ those people making great things and doing it full time. Otherwise, you just get abandonware or crappy products where people don't fix bugs because they have a day job to deal with. That's the reality in my mind.
Allows students, poor etc, still manages to weed out the most entitled ones it seems ;-)
I can throw $XX at a linux distro, pray that it goes to the right things and gets improved proper, and then wait until it becomes good, or I could throw $XX at a closed source solution, and have something that works good right now.
Its all fine to donate $XX, but buying for $XX to get something significantly worse than its competitors is a bit weird, and can only really be justified through "I support free software even if it has binary blobs", which is still a bit weird
Good luck with that. The problem is that no one will make a UI/UX that's both awesome and stable. It's not like the resources aren't there: there's a ton of DEs for Linux, and they've been working on them for 20 years now. But the problem is they can't ever agree on anything, and they can't ever just leave well enough alone: every time they get something stable, they abandon it and make up something completely new and unstable. It's easily the 2nd biggest hindrance to Linux-on-the-desktop adoption (the biggest of course being application compatibility/inertia with Windows).
>but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
That's the Linux community's fault. It's not the features that lag, either; KDE, feature-wise, has always been far ahead of the commercial UIs. For one simple example, I can't middle-click and vertically maximize a window on any other DE that I know of, but in KDE that's been a standard feature for at least 15 years. For another simple example, multiple desktops have been standard on Unix UIs for over 30 years, but never in Windows or Mac. The problem with Linux UIs isn't design, it's stability: everyone's constantly revamping stuff (Gnome3, KDE4, KDE5, etc.) and never spending any time fixing bugs. For instance, I have the Dvorak keyboard set on my LM17.3/KDE desktop, but several KDE apps don't respect that and go back to Qwerty. (To be fair, Windows is even worse: I have my work Win7 desktop set so I can switch between Qwerty and Dvorak, and the stupid thing is constantly switching back and forth randomly.)
But to your point of bug fixing, I absolutely agree. macOS is plagued by this as well, but mot to the degree Linux DE's are.
I've used multiple desktops since the 90's and loved it. macOS has had support for a while, but the animation switching from desktop to desktop was horrendous. I got a utility to fix that, but it's a joke they don't just include a checkbox to toggle the animations. This is one huge UX fail in my mind.
I really wonder sometimes why distros don't use it more, and make their own custom themes for it, instead of just leaving it at the default. It wouldn't take that much work to make themes to make it look almost like anything you want. Or you could even make a different version of Plasma which emulates some other OS/DE if you needed to, leaving all the underpinnings intact.
or, you can get the Dell XPS Developer Edition with Ubuntu pre-installed.
The problem is that many people have differing ideas of what the UI/UX would look like.
If you asked me to provide such a thing I'd just use Debian. Others might prefer RedHat, or similar. But copying an existing distribution, and keeping up to date with new versions would be a full-time job in itself, and that wouldn't leave any room for actual development.
The GNOME project, and KDE project for that matter, have spent years creating a unified environment, and even with their funds and developers the project is never-ending.
I wouldn't say a minimal & unified distribution is impossible, but it would require a lot more users to pay, up-front.
It is definitely a case of "to each their own", but the only issue with KDE right now is developer churn. As the writers and more experienced developers in some applications reduce their participation due to time constraints, it is incredibly hard for anyone to step into those shoes in often millions of LOCs code bases. A lot of UI rot isn't because we don't have technologies (Kirigami, Qt Quick Controls 2, Plasmoids, etc) that enable fantastic UI and UX experiences, it is because porting forward hundreds of applications comes down to who has the time and willpower to either continue maintaining their 10 year old project or someone having the willpower to learn what can often be very ugly C++ or ancient PyQt codebases.
I also have no problem with what Gnome is doing. Their applications may not be for me, but I can recognize the beauty in what they are trying to accomplish, and still think they have a much better design language than anything MS / Apple is putting out. Whenever I sit down at OSX / Windows I feel like both are stuck in the 90s, often because half their applications (especially system management) were written then and never updated since, and because they just make random UI splits every release to look shiny and new by just changing the shell look and keeping the rest jarringly legacy.
GNOME sits on the other side of the spectrum on these issues but I personally find it and in fact most GTK+ apps more aesthetically pleasing and more well organized even if all the buttons are too huge and its white space is like a football field.
Talk more than others about usability - happily gloss over all kinds of weirdness[0] in your expensive setups.[1]
Happily pays quite a lot for your Macs - "regret every cent" after donating peanuts for the development of a Linux distro.
Just saying.
Edit: downvotes welcome! I cannot buy anything for my Internet points here in Western Europe.
A textual description of my wrongdoings would be even more awesome!
Edit2: you don't need to upvote me! Instead just tell me what I did wrong!
[0]: Yes, there is. If you cannot spot it I won't recommend you for any lead UX role.
[1]: Not saying it is bad or not worth the price though. Just expensive (given that you have to have a Mac to run it legally) and far from perfect.
I don't think it's fair to compare OS X (with runs on a very limited set of hardware) with a Linux distribution running on a random not-well-supported system. If you want an apples-to-apples comparison I'd suggest to test Ubuntu on one of the officially supported systems - see https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ for a list.
But you are right, some people mix these different issues up. My next laptop will come with Linux pre-installed - so I expect to report that all the bits work correctly (except Linux will be running on top of Qubes rather than on the metal, so...)
I hackintosh so I'm less well-placed to answer your second point, but I'll try: A Mac is expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting and you know it will work well (recent dongle madness notwithstanding).
Meanwhile, eOS markets itself (previously implicitly and now apparently explicitly) as a potential replacement for OSX. But it's nowhere near. It's an outdated version of Ubuntu with some basic custom apps on top (a calculator, another basic wrapper around webkit, a slightly cleaned up fork of a file browser, etc).
And then you stray to the third party apps, and as always with desktop Linux, they're awful. Everything uses a slightly different toolkit, the UI elements are ugly, UX seems to be devs' lowest priority item, and of course you can't completely interact with industry standard formats (DOCX, PSD). The Intel Mesa driver still tears and/or stutters (actually all drivers do except Nvidia's) so watching videos is an awful experience.
Most of those items above are not fatal by themselves, but together they make for a miserable experience. I used desktop Linux (mainly Ubuntu) for over a year since I needed to do some dev and couldn't run OSX at the time. I won't try again unless there's a revolution in the desktop FOSS world. (Good video drivers, standard well-designed toolkit, UX as a priority, deeper integration of things like WINE.)
I do have some family members who use ancient core2duo laptops and do absolutely everything in Chrome. I pop Ubuntu MATE on their machines so they can avoid malware. I also always keep a live USB stick handy for flexible troubleshooting. As far as I'm concerned, this is basically the limit of usefulness for desktop Linux.
I understand some people value the flexibility above everything else and thrive under desktop Linux. I'm not trying to devalue their views or say that their setup is wrong. Use whatever works for you- but if you haven't gave OSX a serious shot yet, do try it.
> Not now, take me to the download ›
Link.
"How much do you want to pay?"
"0 Dollars."
"Great!"
Why is that so horrible?
"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. We didn’t exclude a $0 button to deceive you; we believe our software really is worth something."
That's why you let users decide after they've used the software. You don't tell someone that up front and expect a payment when you haven't been able to try and test the software for yourself and your team.
If it's worthy, then users will come back and offer a payment or contact you to find out how they can contribute if they feel its really worth it.
I think a lot of people have this misconception that everybody who uses open source software just assumes it should be free. In my own experience, it's quite the opposite. Most people who use open source are actually more willing to pay for something they feel is valuable to them without hesitation. They're also usually willing to pay a little more then perhaps is necessary in order to make sure its maintained and supported.
Really great line, i liked that a lot.
So apparently in the bait-and-switch mentality of the mac world, that you can pay '0 dollars' is not obvious.
http://m.slashdot.org/story/213469
I also think if you read the rest of what they're saying, it's probably is true that we will only get Linux GUIs which are competitive with Windows or Mac when people are willing to fund their professional development. OSS works exceptionally well for lower level components, or for components targeted at developers, because everyone involved benefits. For a professional developer a contribution acts as a good mechanism to raise your profile within the community and improve your ability to earn a decent salary elsewhere. For a company, running open source projects means they can solicit contributions and improve their profile; they contribute to other projects because it gives them a base to be able to build their products. We don't expect or find that OSS developers of high profile projects are starving in garrets, they are in fact leaders of their communities, highly prized and in-demand.
But these mechanisms do not have the same force when the consumer of the software is a general user, not a developer in the same field. i.e. when you're writing software in C++ which is then going to be used by graphic designers or artists, or by a casual user. In those case, the direct reputational benefits just aren't there, and that's why those sort of projects often struggle to take off. And on top of that those projects also involve a lot of painstaking and arguably boring work to get everything polished to a fine sheen. Krita for instance is excellent, but it has found a way to fund development through yearly crowdfunding. I think the same applies to Linux GUI's, that ultimately you need some pot of money able to support developers, which moves around according to the desires of informed consumers. In my opinion, that's what it will take for desktop Linux to become a serious mass market alternative to Mac and Windows.
It's not rational for me as a consumer to fund such an unsure bet, especially when changing an operating system has lots of friction. I assume that the proposed talent of an individual investor is in the ability to sieve good from bad in a sea of maybe. But I also don't understand the market well enough to see how such an unproven bet might succeed in a very stale market dominated by arguably one entity (you can't really buy macOS) -- maybe two.
I'd also say that while software work is expensive and requires talented labor, and while operating system work takes an intense amount of effort, there's something to be said about the fact that Elementary OS could even build their OS to begin with. How did they do it? On the backs of billions of dollars of free labor. I can't imagine how it would be if the whole world hid their source code with proprietary-only software, and Elementary had to start from ground 0.
What rational model governs this situation?
You mention that investors have lots of money and are therefore able to take on risks. I suspect that nearly everyone who would consider downloading this operating system has a lot of money relative to the $5 suggested donation, and certainly relative to the $1 you could choose instead. And if you truly don't have that, then you can do $0 instead.
You can make the risk to yourself arbitrarily low, selecting whatever you think fits your profile of cost vs potential reward. That is their rational model.
http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments
[1]: http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments
[2]: https://github.com/elementary/website/pull/655
It is a shame for Elementary OS Team, because this issue was many times discussed on GH issues / IRC about implementing just a "$0" button. As I remember in launchpad there is also a task or discussion about suggestion of the dialog which will remind about donation after certain time duration.
Edit:
Found https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/donation...
An "I would like to try it first" button.
They should include more videos and screenshots so people have a better idea of what they are buying.
This is probably the most painful thing on desktop at the moment, because no one gives a s* to desktop mail apps these days.
I recently switched back to evolution from Thunderbird, but where one if great, the other falls short ( in this case, GPG with Evolution is _painful_ ). Geary is... well, not mature, Claws and Sylpheed are a bit too oldschool and mutt is ... well, mutt.
I'd love to see something like Rainloop[1] as a real desktop app. Mailpile[2] is a nice idea, but is nowhere even close to the usability of Rainloop.
[1]: http://www.rainloop.net/ [2]: https://www.mailpile.is/
As for mail, Thunderbird is not so bad.
I'm still on the very same install, just switched to xfwm4 and tint2, and I'm quite happy.
[1] https://github.com/matzipan/envoyer/blob/master/README.md#re...
Right now everybody is using Macs. Walk into the Bay Area coffee shop, you see Macs everywhere. I love that.
I build desktop software for Macs (focuslist.co). My apps are prettier than any others. They are easier and faster to use. This is the reason why people pay me $5 while they can get the job done with paper and pen.
This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.
Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away. We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff. Ugh.
Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.
Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.
Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.
So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.
[1] - https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines
[2] - https://quassy.github.io/elementary-apps/apps/
GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.
Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.
Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
Not to mention the related GUI tooling.
Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.
The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.
[1] https://developer.gnome.org/references
Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757985
Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.
Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No
Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".
I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.
I know that is what drove me away.
Most just want a window manager for xterms.
Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.
Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.
Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors
Well I can't argue there.
GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.
I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.
Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.
Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.
And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.
It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.
I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.
Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.
well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.
Times are changing
Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.
Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].
Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].
[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-growth-is-slowing-... [1]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tablet-decline-q2-2016/ [2]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...
ETA: Btw, macOS Server is over here: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/
Well, thats kind of a narcissistic statement. How many people develop for Windows? How many for Linux? How many for Mac? oh.
I try to make my software as beautiful as I can, and keep a simple and usable UX. There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion.
"Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away."
As if all the world's high quality apps are only developed on and for the Mac.
And that is the biggest problem in software world, that's why our computers are full of half-baked, ugly, poor documented and uncompatible programs - because someone "just wanted to get job done".
I'm a multi-plat guy who has a Macbook and a Windows machine. This makes me want to get a real open source initiative going on Windows to enable better UI assembly. Xaml is great but it has a ways to go.
I can see how having a simple UI with few controls on it can sometimes be translated as "pretty" in certain circles, but simply having few features and few controls doesn't magically mean your app is top of the pile on the entire Earth regarding "prettiness". It is quite an assertion to make.
EDIT: Again, this is not meant offensively but was more of a response to the assertion that the app is prettier than ANY others.
Furthermore, I certainly agree with the rest of the comment where they state that more attention is paid to UI etc. on MacOS than other platforms, typically.
Really this is just what users have been telling me last 6 months. "I bought it because it looks good."
Guess they're just used to worse.
Out of interest, how did you market it / raise awareness of it?
For me and a lot of others what I really want is a UNIX that just works.
Meaning it just works with its hardware in all ways... audio and video playing, recording, editing and everything else all work very well, without having to recompile the kernel or hunt down and install alpha drivers without source hosted on sketchy sites, which is what drove me away from other UNIXes.
Also macOS is a good platform for developing native iOS apps. Why iOS and not Android? Mostly because the version adoption curve of Android is pretty bad.
The point is it's more about functionality and getting stuff done than it is about pretty. With other UNIXes there was always too much fighting with the system.
Unfortunately that doesn't exist apart from macOS right now.
Because there's some price spike? If anything things are as cheap or expensive as ever.
But yeah, not everyone's using Macs. It's the biggest vendor, but there are more non-Macs than Macs.
But yeah, many other variables to consider. Age as well, it's mostly younger people in coffee shops.
Questions to ask when deciding what platforms to support:
Of Android and iOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than $0.99?
Of Windows, Linux, and macOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than a few dollars?
Worse yet, is if i pick a stable variety of Linux, it's likely to not be pretty. The pretty Linux OSs (in my experience) tend to be at least as unstable as OSX. Ugh.
(Note: I upgraded to Sierra, crash or have weird crap happen ~4times a week)
edit: Why the downvote? Note that i explicitly stated this was my experience. Furthermore, i had the same experience when my Macbook Pro Retina was new, and came with OSX Mavericks. Both Mavericks and Sierra have gave me the impression that Apple releases unstable OSs for major versions, and need time to make it stable again.
I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.
As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM. Counting in design and manufacturing time, that could be about a year from now.
And USB-C is clearly the future for connectors. In a year or two a lot more peripherals will be shipping with USB-C as the default cord.
This is why Apple carries a huge amount of cash around on their books: so that they can make long-term decisions even if it hurts in the short term.
Can you comment on why you think this is true? A cursory look at Kaby Lake does not seem to indicate any sort of intrinsic change that would allow the MBP to have more memory.
My biggest problem is the obsession with "Thin and Light" crippling system specs. I get that a 11-13" laptop isn't gonna have the best GPU in the world, but I'd like a decent one in my 15" 'Pro' model please...and I'll take a little less thin and light to get it.
This is even more true on desktop. I don't really care about how bulbous you make the back of my iMac or Mac Pro, just give me SLI GTX1080s.
I get it, I'm the niche, I'm a gamer with a Mac, but I still exist.
For me, even as a Mac user, I avoid Mac-only apps as much as I possibly can because I want the freedom to switch platforms in the future. I will happily have all my apps be slightly less pretty if it means they work on any OS.
This may be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read on HN.
You're scripting a fucking to-do app on the level of a first semester student.
> My apps are prettier than any others
No they certainly aren't.
> This is the reason why people pay me $5
Congratulations.
> They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award.
Your chances to win any design award are equal to Bashar al-Assad's chances of winning the nobel peace prize.
So much jerking from somebody making a fucking to do app which needs absolutely 0.0 skills. I hope you were joking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The issue is that Apple is alienating early adopters by removing ports, charging double for obsolete hardware and introducing gimmicks instead of real innovation. And there is a decrease in OS quality from Apple.
I'm just going to link conversation from a couple of days before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830761
Inkscape and Gimp are the stalwarts, but for someone coming from Sketch or Photoshop they feel quite ancient and somewhat messy.
https://www.figma.com is cross-platform (web based), and a pretty good Sketch competitor
For a Lightroom replacement, Darktable is actually quite good (though I really miss the high quality shadows/highlights algorithm from ACR)
If you use macOS because you need to run Mac software, then you probably aren't going anywhere.
now i'm back to linux because i can't stand the decisions apple took. plus, it feels like osx (now macOS) is less and less table on every iteration. i had a BSOD while trying to plug my external monitor ffs.
Since the Linux release of SD I've been dual booting elementary on my desktop and have had a pretty solid experience. For me it's games that make me keep a Windows installation around.
They're actually claiming I'm going to give up Photoshop, Pixelmator, Lightroom, CaptureOne rather than buying an external card-reader. And that's ignoring that most of us already prefer 3rd-party external card readers for speed alone ..
It was the fact that software I needed was available on Mac and I didn't want to use Windows.
What issues still exist with using Linux on laptops?
The last computer I had significant hardware problems with on linux had a Pentium 4, but I've been vary careful with hardware choice in the last decade. Do your research and you'll be fine.
It depends on laptop model, some are worse than others. Just google "<latop_name> linux problem" and see what others encounter. Personally, I don't have any problems with my 5 years old Dell laptop running Kubuntu.
I have a HP laptop for work running Ubuntu that appears on their Certified hardware list. Wifi is buggy, using an external monitor is buggy, there are always "Internal Errors", sleep simply does not work, it crashes regularly.
I don't get the angst. To me the disappointment is wholly related to the action bar/etc/whatever it is called. Its such a lame approach to adding additional functionality I would have never expected it from Apple. The Windows environment has many machines fully embracing touch screens right where the action is.