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Linux is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, so absolutely necessary to functioning of the modern world, and yet so utterly unknown. Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux everyday even if we don't know it.
Despite its ubiquity, for most people there remain only two kinds of "computers": Windows and macOS.
Linux is, at best, that "other". That's a same because there's a wealth of Linux desktops out there
If that describes you, I have a solution for you: elementaryOS.
ElementaryOS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. Yes, seriously. If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top its Daniel Fore and the rest of today's elementaryOS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source, the borrowing went both ways, Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementaryOS's icon set.
As the project grew to encompass ever more apps and ever more customizations for the desktop it became more cumbersome for users to install everything. Eventually there was enough momentum behind the project that Fore decided the logical thing to to was to create their own distribution. The project took Ubuntu as a base and began layering in their custom apps, highly refined look and feel and elementaryOS was born.
ElementaryOS launched with considerable fanfare thanks to it's revolutionary idea of asking users to pay for it. Unfortunately for elementaryOS, no one on the original team that launched 1.0 had much experience in PR, and blog post about the pay what you want model rubbed a lot of people in the community the wrong way. Most of the kerfuffle was not about the money, it the fact that an elementaryOS blog post essentially called people who did not pay for the software they used thieves.
When I spoke with Fore he was quick to point out how little experience the team had had with PR at the time and clearly regretted the post. It was poorly worded, but as with all things in Linux, it was something of a tempest in a teapot even at the time and it is well behind the project at this point. I bring it up not to revisit the controversy, but because the funding model ElementaryOS established early on has succeeded.
Today elementaryOS is a bootstrapped business with quite a few full time employees. It's not Canonical by any means, but it is self-sustaining and it has a model for how to continue sustaining itself, which is more than a lot of open source projects can say. If I were an open source project heavily dependant on contributions from Red Hat employees, I might, right about now, have a closer look at how elementaryOS's funding model works. Of course the elementaryOS model doesn't necessarily work at the scale of Red Hat, but it doesn't have to to sustain elementaryOS.
And its funding model does work, so well in fact that the project has extended it to developer's in its app store. There are quite a few apps out there targeting specifically the elementaryOS desktop and if you head to elementaryOS's app store you can choose to support the developers of those apps using the same pay-what-you-want system that elementaryOS uses at the distro level. Every app developer can set a price that they feel is fair, but users can ultimately decide what they want to pay, including nothing.
## ElementaryOS 5 Juno
The latest release of ElementaryOS is nicknamed Juno, and should be version .5, following the previous release, .4 or Loki. However since .5 implies incomplete and elementaryOS is more or less complete (in terms of stability certainly) the project is calling this release elementaryOS 5.
Whatever the version number may be, one thing is for sure there's ton of new stuff in Juno. Enough features in fact that the release notes, written by elementaryOS's Cassidy James Blaede, are an impressive John Sircusa-style essay of some 8,000 words. If you want to know everything that's new, Blaede's notes are worth a read, if you want to know what it's like to actually use all that stuff, read on.
One thing to note before we get started: Linux users wanting to try elementaryOS be forewarned, it doesn't work very well in a virtual machine. According to Fore, it's an upstream problem. One of the big lessons Canonical has learned from its recent data collection tk is that Ubuntu users need better virtual machine support, which is now in the works. That will help downstream distros like elementaryOS and Mint Cinnamon edition, which also doesn't run very well in a virtual machine. In the mean time though, testing elementaryOS means installing it.
The elementaryOS installer is brand new in this release and very well done. Previously elementary relied on Ubuntu's Ubiquity Installer, which, while it works, failed to do one important thing that the new installer does well -- set elementaryOS's unique tone, look and feel of elementary right from the start. The new installer is a collaboration between elementaryOS and System76 (creators of PopOS) and will be, I assume, what you'll see installing PopOS as well.
The installer will walk you through the process of installing elementaryOS alongside your existing Linux distro (or, presumably, Windows and macOS, though I didn't test this). I went ahead and installed it on a separate partition to keep my existing Arch Linux installation isolated. ElementaryOS was plenty snappy on my Lenovo x240 (i5 with 8GB of RAM), but I also installed it on a brand new Dell XPS 13 where it really shined. ElementaryOS's theme, typography and icons all look really nice on the XPS's HiDPI screen.
Once you've got elementaryOS installed you'll be greeted by the Pantheon desktop, which, while GNOME-based, is very much its own thing. Like GNOME is has a top bar, but that's about where the similarities end. The top toolbar shows the date and time, status notifications, a power menu, settings for audio, power, and wireless, as well as an application launcher. ElementaryOS also sports a dock-style app launcher along the bottom of the screen.
In fact, elementaryOS has taken some flack over the years for being heavily macOS-inspired. But in Juno I'd say that's less true than previous versions. ElementaryOS clearly sweats the small stuff, paying careful attention to typography, icon design, color use, shading, and so on, which is I think why it gets the macOS comparisons.
Another possible reason some users find it to be macOS like is its lack of customization options. There's really no way to change the look and feel of elementaryOS and little way to customize the apps. It's a take it or leave it operating system -- you either like it or you don't, and if you don't you're better off using something else than trying to tweak it.
That said, you can make certain customizations without too much trouble. For example, elementaryOS puts the windows close button on the left, which messes with my 25 years of muscle memory. There's no setting to change this in elementaryOS, but since GNOME is under the hood you can use `gsettings` to change the button layout. In other words, little tweaks are possible, but I'd suggest staying away from the tweak apps.
Juno doesn't make any sweeping changes to the basic look and feel that elementaryOS has been working with for some time. It's made some refinements and given third-party developers some much-improved guidelines and a new color palette, but most of the work in Juno has come into the compliment of tightly integrated applications that ship with elementaryOS.
Unlike most GNOME-based distros, elementaryOS does not ship with the usual slew of GNOME applications. Instead you'll get elementaryOS's own versions of the same. In this release that means Files, a terminal app, Photos, Code (previously known as Scratch), and then a few outside apps like the epiphany web browser, tk and tk.
One thing that surprised me about Juno was the attention to keyboard shortcuts. My desktop of choice is i3 because it's very lightweight and I can do everything with the keyboard, while elementaryOS is not lightweight (compared to i3), it does offer a wealth of keyboard customization options. I was able to duplicate all the keys I use in i3 in elementaryOS.
## The AppCenter
## Rough Edges
AppCenter shortcomings, no Gimp
no customizations
ElementaryOS also ships with a lot of Apple hardware drivers, which makes it a pretty good option to install on Apple hardware. As long as the Apple hardware doesn't have that new T2 chip which (as of November 11, 2018), which currently blocks Linux bootloaders.
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