Jose Yamut, Jr

Fond of +rw but seldom has time 4 both. 😎😋🤖

linux Ubuntu

Elementary OS Freya

Needed something new and fresh. Despite the fact that I despise anything that even remotely resembles a Mac OS X look, I do not have too much options (?) on Linux desktop-land. I have Ubuntu 14.04 running smoothly on my 4 year old laptop. KDE is what I have for my work PC. That leaves me to a handful of distros. As a start I am not going back to SuSE and Mandriva, or any RPM-based distro. Fedora can kiss my behind. LinuxMint is definitely out of the question because I think it is retarded. Well that left me to nothing but Elementary OS (eOS).

So finally I succumbed to installing Elementary OS (eOS). A lot of people were saying good things about it too, so hey why not join the proverbial bandwagon? And now I have been using it for close to 3 weeks.

elementary-freya

Currently I am using Freya, which is still in beta. It is based off of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Boot time is not too slow and not too fast. Perhaps a bit faster than my Ubuntu 14.04 laptop. Desktop loading time is definitely faster over the course of a few updates. Initially the desktop loading time was a teeny bit long for a distro that claims to be lightweight. It appears to have been fixed. There were a few other glitches and bugs that I noticed. One was when I logged out of a session and go back in, I would be greeted by a black screen. Ctrl + Alt + Fn did not work so I had to do a force Ctrl + Alt + PrtSc + REISUB for a reboot. Locking the session also had the same buggy effect. All of these have been fixed now. Screen brightness control did not work too. Maybe it is not really this OS’s fault but a quick Google fixed that.

Freya is clean and simple. It is fast. It is stable. There are a few quirks but slowly I am getting the hang of it. Say for example the (1) Application Menu. I am not too fond of it but I guess I can’t really hate this distro for that alone.  (2) There is no minimize button on app windows. You have to click the app from the dock to minimize it. But years of using Ubuntu Unity desktop, which does the opposite, has made me prepared. (3) The file explorer default behavior is single-click to open/run folders/files which I really hate. But a quick dconf edit eliminated that. Finally, and this is just a wish, it would be neat if they followed the Ubuntu Lightdm way of changing the background of the logon screen depending on the selected user.

Perhaps the best thing about this distro for me, and I say this with utmost importance, is that I do not see any console text gibbberish on logout/restart/shutdown. The transition from desktop to plymouth/splash is not the smoothest but I jumped for joy when I finally did not see that abomination which has, and still is, plaguing desktop Linux for years. At least I can say the developers of Elementary OS really have an eye for detail.

Would I recommend it for Linux users who are coming from Windows? My answer would be a definite YES. In fact, I think they should be installing eOS instead of Linux Mint. But that’s only after Ubuntu, of course. 😉

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Needed something new and fresh. Despite the fact that I despise anything that even remotely resembles a Mac OS X look, I do not have too much options (?) on Linux desktop-land. I have Ubuntu 14.04 running smoothly on my 4 year old laptop. KDE is what I have for my work PC. That leaves…

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