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Ubuntu's Unity interface is gone, which means there's one less desktop to choose from in Linux land. Luckily for Linux fans, Unity is but one of dozens. Still, Unity was one of the most polished, arguably the most polished out there and there are many that will miss its attention to detail and design.
If you're looking for a Unity replacement and want something that's equally well polished the not-quite-as-new-kid on the block, Elementary OS is worth a look.
ElementaryOS actually began like as a theme for Ubuntu. It has evolved well beyond that now with its own homegrown desktop environment dubbed Pantheon, 13 custom apps and a distinct and very nice set of custom icons and themes. Under the hood it's still very much Ubuntu/Debian, so all the commands and basic apps you're used to will be there, even if you have to install them yourself. The Ubuntu/Debian underpinning also means you get the security and stability of those projects.
I've tested ElementaryOS quite a bit over the last few years and I can say that, if you were put off by the bugginess of early releases, it's worth another look. The latest release, called Loki, has been very stable in my testing and features some really nice homegrown apps. The ElementaryOS team is very good at getting the core of an app right and then polishing up the details over time. Their Calendar app is awesome, though GNOME Calendar has improved lately and the settings app, Switchboard does a nice job of integrating Elementary-specific control panes with the few GNOME panes the project uses. And the file browser app offers something I still miss from way back in my OS X days -- a column view.
That reminder of OS X is a common complaint about ElementaryOS, though aside from the Files app, which very obviously apes OS X's Finder (one of the better file browsers out there in my view), most of ElementaryOS does not strike me as OS X inspired. I find it more of a cross between Xfce and GNOME 2.x. Indeed the developers originally started working on it back when GNOME 3.x was announced. In that sense it really has more in common with MATE and Xfce than OS X.
Still, for a couple of reasons, ElementaryOS seems to attract more than its fair share of haters. Some of it is because it's been dubbed an OS X ripoff, which, again, it isn't. There is, however, another thing that rubs many people, including me, the wrong way: the project's "pay what you want" approach to downloads.
When you go to ElementaryOS downloads page the UI is designed such that it seems like you have to pay for the distro. If you want it for free you need to enter a zero and then hit download. I've called this a deceptive UI in the past and I stand by that. It is deliberately designed -- by developers who every clearly understand design -- to mislead you into paying.
There's nothing wrong with charging for a product of course, software under the GPL is free as in freedom, it doesn't have to be free as in beer. The problem is how ElementaryOS tries to get that money. I bring this up mainly because the latest release of ElementaryOS, which arrived early this year, adds the project's "pay what you want" approach to ElementaryOS to applications in the distro's App Center.
The same UI shows up in the App Center as well. There's a suggested price (usually less than $3) and then a drop down menu if you want to give more to support the project. To get the app for free you need to type in a zero, at which point the button changes to "free". Sigh.
Maybe it's just me, but I find this UI irrationally irritating. I find it irritating because it implies that given a button that says "free" I would never choose to pay. To me that's depressing in its assumption of the worst in humanity -- that given a chance to get something for free we users would never pay for it.
It's a shame because I think the idea of getting some money back into open source development is a cause well worth supporting. Especially for small application developers that make wonderful pieces of software that are just not big enough or widely used enough to ever get corporate sponsorship or other popular open source means of funding. In fact I think that solving this problem -- how to compensate small developers for their efforts -- is one of the biggest challenges facing the open source world.
In that sense I'm very happy to see the ElementaryOS developers doing something to help out. I happen to dislike the UI and experience, but I'm happy it's out there because there are probably plenty of people who will think it's just fine and be very happy to pay the developers behind that software. And that's great news for developers and might even help draw more of them to ElementaryOS. More developers would mean more apps for users, which is part of why it's in your own best interest to put some money toward the software you use.
That said, developers who want to get paid for their efforts need to sign up via ElementaryOS's <a href="https://developer.elementary.io/">Developer Center</a>. It is not, in other words, going to help them get paid outside ElementaryOS.
It'll be interesting to see what happens to ElementaryOS apps, and how much the distro appeals to developers, as Snap packages and Flatpaks begin to become more common -- will developers want to put effort into something that's only for one distro when there's a packaging mechanism that reaches them all? Will ElementaryOS's efforts to get some money to developers make it upstream to GNOME?
What would be the best of both worlds would be an application store for Flatpak/Snaps that featured a pay what you want button next to a free button and worked on every distro.
Until that brave new world arrives ElementaryOS makes a very capable Linux distro with a very well polished desktop and set of applications. ElementaryOS gets even more impressive when you do a little digging and realize just how few developers are working on it. It outdoes some much larger distros in quite a few places, of course it does have that Ubuntu base to build on whereas Ubuntu has to worry about design and, well, Ubuntu.
Still if Ubuntu's transition to GNOME isn't for you the latest ElementaryOS release is well worth a look, it makes a very different, but similarly well thought out, replacement for Unity.
screenshots:
elementary-desktop.jpg "The stock ElementaryOS desktop, reminiscent of GNOME 2.x"
elementary-columnview.jpg "ElementaryOS Files app with column browser"
elementary-app-store.jpg "ElementaryOS AppCenter"
elementary-pay-what-you-want.jpg "The pay-what-you-want option for participating applications in AppCenter"
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