What happened to elementary OS?
What happened to elementary OS?
What happened to elementary OS?
elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.
That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
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However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.
Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.
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A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.
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You can expect things like:
- The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
- AppCenter is now Flatpak only
- New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
- WireGuard VPN support
Dead like any other Linux distro that is mainly a desktop.
Here's the issue, elementary OS is made for regular people who want a computer that works, an attempt at replicating macOS, and that same group of people need proprietary software like MS Office that isn't available under Linux. The alternatives won't cut it for people once they've to collaborate with other who use the proprietary stuff.
elementary OS is essentially a misguided marketing exercise where the founders / company failed to study and understand their target market.
Then how do you explain the continued success of Mint?
Because Mint's philosophy is to make a friendly, simple and usable system for everyone.
That may be for people who came from Windows before, or those who like their OS to be a bit more conservative, meaning no flashy stuff, boring, and just working. Just like Windows was "in the good ol' days".
This makes it accessible and usable by everyone, including Linux sysadmins who come home after work and don't want to deal with annoying computers and fixing things.
Everything on Mint feels high quality, functional and cohesive.
ElementaryOS on the other hand feels like a cheap MacOS clone, but nothing works. Those who want Mac, buy a Mac.
Mint/ Cinnamon on the other hand is similar to Windows (XP, 7, etc.), but not a copycat. It's familiar enough to be intuitive for Windows users, but much enough it's own thing.
Mint's main focus is to get a uncomplicated, and usable system, while Elementary's focus is to just do what Apple does. ... Well, did. 15 years ago. They totally forgot how much work maintaining a distro and a desktop with a whole app suite is, and just stopped working on it.
While Gnome and KDE (and other WMs/ DEs) got magnitudes better in just one year (e.g. Plasma 6), Pantheon (and Elementary) just stagnated the last 5 years or so.
They don't even offer/ work on Wayland yet, or other new things.
Either they'll stop working on Elementary, and focus only on Pantheon, so it can live on on other distros, or it will just continue dying like it does currently.
I don't really think that's fair. I agree with your suggestion that it should be a multiplatform DE rather than just its own distro but I think having polished and design opinionated distros is important. I know a few Mac guys who have become interested in Linux when they heard about ElementaryOS.
I get that a lot of people hate on GNOME too for being annoying to customise and being highly opinionated but I think that's the key to getting the average person interested in Linux. The average person just wants their desktop to look nice out of the box and maybe offer a dark mode. Anything more than that gets too complicated.
Edit: and yeah having access to programs like the MS apps is important but it's not like that has to come before having an appealing desktop
I agree with this ideia, however GNOME lacks desktop icons and forces people into an activities view - all stuff that said average people don't want to deal with. GNOME isn't already dominating the DE space, and we still have other DEs, because of their poor decisions based on a "vision" that revolves around reinventing the wheel ever 2 years or so.
This is one of the major hurdles with Linux desktop and the Steam Deck just confirmed it. People like the ones you're talking about require software, be it Adobe, MS Office, Autodesk or some other and without it there's no way they're going to move. Alternatives may work for some isolated people but if you're collaborating with people that expect those proprietary formats it won't just work out.
Libreoffice is not my first choice for document preparation, but I use it only because I need to collaborate with people who use MS Office. I've had no problems that weren't easy to fix.
Yup. Same issue will plague all Windows-alternative distros. Unless serious work is done to fix Microsoft 365 and Adobe creative cloud, there's genuinely little benefit trying to claim Linux is an alternative for all but a minority of people.
That, or we can work on improving the alternatives to those apps. GIMP, Inkscape, and OnlyOffice are on a spectrum of laughably bad to just-about-comparable to their proprietary counterparts.
I don't think it's an insurmountable issue: I think there's more we could do to bring Apple software to Linux (using a BSD-based kernel means a lot less complexity!) and with it the few applications that currently don't play well with WINE.
Ubuntu, Mint, and to some extent PopOS are pegged as easy Windows/MacOS alternatives, just like ElementaryOS. They're still popular.
What minority is that?
So your take is that instead of trying to make Windows binaries run Linux it would be way easier to just get macOS binaries because it is all BSD. That's an interesting take indeed.
The development complexities of this would be insane. Plus modern Apple uses ARM chips.which doesn't help since most Linux users (desktop and server) are on x86.
zorin seems to be doing fine.
Yes, in addition to MS Office, MacOS is particularly used by a lot of people who work in art or music, and none of the programs they use professionally for that will run on Linux. You can't just go it alone with free software when all your colleagues expect you to use proprietary tools. And what people like about MacOS is that it is reliable for running these programs with a minimum of fuss, has a solid low-latency sound system (for musicians), and has easy access to Apple features like cloud backup. Imitating its desktop brings none of that.
Yeah that's my point.