As Operating Systems turn me ON, I spend my idle time distro-hopping from one OS to other or tweaking them. On such a trip of mine I came across Elementary OS and on booting it for first time, I was immediately in love with it. I was taken aback by it’s simplicity and beauty. I don’t have to spend time tweaking it’s desktop to suit me, It’s just perfect the way it is. As said I am a distro-hopper, I was looking for my the Linux distro and then I came across this and I knew this is the one.
First, have a look at the default desktop:
The Desktop Environment:
Elementary OS uses the Pantheon DE. The desktop itself is so minimalist and yet so beautiful. Elementary OS has a great collection of wall papers. Juno consists all the wallpapers of previous versions as well as a new set of its own. The photographers who shot the pictures and the developers who worked on the DE deserve a great appreciation for their work. The main reason for me to choose Elementary OS over Ubuntu or any other linux distro is the desktop environment and the fact that it’s based on Ubuntu 18.04. I am not much fan of Gnome DE and when Ubuntu 18.04 was released with Gnome as default DE, I was a bit disappointed. I kept using Ubuntu 16.04 as I like Unity. I was waiting for Elementary OS 5.0 Juno. I am not disappointed, the wait has paid off.Some one might say I could have installed Pantheon DE along side Unity or Gnome but let me warn you that it causes some conflicts between Gnome/Unity and Pantheon DE.
App Center:
There has been a lot of improvement in the App Centre from Loki (yeah that’s what Elementary OS 0.4 is called). It’s less buggy, more efficient and implements pay what you want and has more apps.
Code:
The default text editor, Code is a developed version of scratch which was used in Loki(Elementary OS 0.4). it has seen a lot of improvements like three themes to choose from, git support, dark mode, the tabs color now matches to that of rest of the window. Auto indentation, auto fill and a feature similar to sublime lint is also added.
File Manager:
The file manager has seen major improvements in the UI side. It’s kinda more elementary. It has different icons for folders already open in different tabs or windows. It has become more user friendly.
Browser:
The default browser is Epihany. It’s perfect for the OS. It’s minimalist, uses gnome technology and is faster than firefox. It also has a option to sync using firefox account.
Other Features:
Night light, a option to enable or disable location services, are some of the new features of Juno. The elementary OS sticks to what it says, It’s simple, fast and a complete replacement for Windows and Mac OS.
The nomenclature of Elementary OS versions:
They are all based on Greek gods and goddess. Okay that’s good, so what? Well interesting thing is the Version numbers. Elementary OS started by naming the build as 0.1, 0.2 and so on until 0.4 Loki. But after that for the latest release they used 5.0. The reason being a lot of improvements from Loki and the amount of work that went into building this version. And also 0.something gave a feel that Elementary is still in beta and not stable. Fun fact: Juno was under development for one whole year instead of regular 6 months.
My Set up:
Just changing the theme and adding a minimize button to the window buttons. Elementary OS becomes more homely for me. When I said my friend that Elementary OS is the one, he laughed saying I had said the same thing when I installed Lubuntu. But who said Love cannot happen twice 😉 The featured image of this post is what my set up looks like. I use Paper Icon and cursor theme and Vespar theme for Plank (Yeah, the dock, it’s called Plank.) You can see the images at the end of this post.
Packages:
As Elementary OS Juno is built on Ubuntu 18.04. We get all the latest packages in App Center. Libreoffice is not included by default. There are some apps shipped by default like Music and video players, Camera app, Code, Thunderbird Mail, etc. All in all, It has everything you need.
System Requirements:
As the Desktop environment is Pantheon, it’s more or less uses same amount of resources as Unity or Gnome. The docs don’t have strict set of requirements in them. The recommended specifications are i3 or a dual core 64 bit processor, 4 gb ram, 15 gb space on HD. I was able to run Juno Beta 2 decently with 3 gb ram in virtualbox, so that will be minimum I guess.
Links:
Web Site: Elementary OS
Images:
That was Elementary OS. Though it is based on Ubuntu, It gives a good challenge to Ubuntu. And is also definitely better than Windows or Mac OS. Given a choice, I would chose elementary, always.
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