Elementary OS Review

"Elementary: Of, relating to, or constituting the basic, essential, or a fundamental part"

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

Probably one of the most anticipated distro releases in a long time, Elementary OS JUPITER finally came to life just a few days ago. Building on the popularity and success of some of the projects own applications, most notably Nautilus Elementary and Postler, this distro has raised high expectations, but does it live up to them? Come on in and let's find out.

ELEMENTARY, PHILOSOPHY AND IMPLEMENTATION

Elementary OS, as its own name already hints at, is all about simplicity. Good simplicity, that is, the kind that removes bloat and strips applications to the core of their functionality so nothing stands in the way of the end user. On top of that, in a sometimes controversial way (due to the obvious Apple influence), it also attempts to bring up the elegance and beauty of such simplicity, aiming at a sleek and clean Look&Feel.

That's the theory, at least.

INSTALLATION AND FIRST LOGIN

Booting from the LiveCD/USB, the Plymouth theme already showcases that "simple yet elegant" vibe, showing the Elementary OS Logo (a big 'e') surrounded by a neat glowing animation. Nothing groundbreaking, but nice.

As is the case with most Ubuntu forks, Elementary OS sticks pretty close to the original installation wizard, just tweaking certain elements to make them fit with the distro's own branding (and simplicity motto, in this case). If you have seen the Ubuntu 10.10 installation, you will find nothing surprising here.

The GDM theme is pretty standard, but it does show a little bit of the Elementary GTK theme. The default background, which is the same that is used in the desktop, is somewhat cheesy and cheap, failing to convey that sleek-looks vibe that the distro sports in other areas.


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THE DESKTOP, APPS AND ALL THAT FUN

Leaving the default wallpaper aside, another element that strikes me as odd is the default icon theme, which again does not seem to stand the comparison with other portions of the desktop. This is all entirely subjective, of course, but after seeing the project official Website and how carefully everything Look&Feel was being put together, I must admit I was expecting better. As far as the choice for default wallpaper is concerned, I think it is quite unfortunate, as there are others available which would have fit better.



Looking for some fancy GTK themes and window decorators? Look elsewhere, the elementary theme is the only one available.


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The application catalog continues with that idea of simplicity, particularly obvious in the distro's own apps: Postler, Dexter and Lingo.

Postler is an extremely simplified email client. It's got some nice features, like a very clever account creation interface, which is as easy as it gets. In addition, thanks to its simplistic interface, Postler loads very quickly and is surprisingly snappy for a mail client. On the down side of things, I think the interface is too simplistic and I found myself missing some options I often use in other mail clients. Surprisingly, Postler did not all messages from my Gmail account, but just a portion. I have messages from today all the way back to 2005, but I could barely get anything from 2009. I have not tried Postler in other circumstances, so I am not sure if this is expected behavior or a true bug/application limitation. (Can anybody comment from their experience?)


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Dexter is a neat address book that seems to offer cross-applications support. Once again it sports an extremely simple interface and snappy performance. Adding contacts is simple and automatic import is supported. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see no obvious integration with online contact address books (ie. Google Contacts) or worse yet, Postler. Both Thunderbird and Evolution offer easy integration with their address books, so one can very quickly add contacts from existing messages just by right-clicking on the contact's address. Not here.


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As for Lingo, it is another cute little application, a dictionary to be specific. I haven't played much with it, but I see nothing here I didn't get from Gnome dictionary. The GUI is simple, as one can expect from any application in this project, but again, nothing groundbreaking. From a philosophical stand point, I am not sure that a dictionary fits the definition of Elementary, as in a fundamental or critical application.


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Other apps included Gnumeric and Abiword, both of which try to cope with Office Suite duties, but falling terribly short, unfortunately. For example, it only took 10 minutes before I got a message with a PPS attachment and guess what? There is nothing available to open it with.



I personally like to keep the full OpenOffice or LibreOffice suite installed, but it could be argued that they are heavy and take quite some room. Looking at it from that perspective, I like the Peppermint approach better... Why not integrate Google Docs straight from the desktop?

Another application that made me scratch my head was Midori, the default Web browser. I was curious to test it because I had read good things about it, but boy did it disappoint. As another browser based around the WebKit rendering engine, one expects speedy browsing from Midori, but I got the complete opposite. In my experience under Elementary OS, Midori is ridiculously slow and unstable. It consistently took more than 20 seconds to partially load my Blog page, only to systematically crash time and again. After a few tries, I downloaded Firefox 4.0 and it was back to browsing fast and reliably.

Another "pleasant" surprise was the lack of Flash plugin... In an Ubuntu fork? Really? Come on!



And how about listening to music? Fancy downloading or copying your favorite MP3s over to give them a listen with the on board default audio player? Don't bother, there is none.


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As I continued to play around in the desktop, I started to get more frustrated with lots of features having been removed or heavily limited. Right-clicking on the desktop, the panel or the main menu had been disabled, as well as drag-and-drop, so lots of things could not be done, at least not in an obvious way. The same applied to Docky, which did not support effects, addition of new launchers and had no apparent settings edition available. As already mentioned, the application catalog was poor, so I started to wonder "What is so good about this simplicity to begin with?".

THE SIMPLER THE BETTER?

I cannot understand the rationale behind using GNOME but limiting its flexibility and/or options. If a distro builder is willing to deal with the extra weight, what's the point in stripping it down? It certainly doesn't make GNOME faster nor cuter. On top of that, there are other alternatives out there that better fit the simple-and-fast category, such as LXDE, Openbox or XFCE, to name a few.

The application catalog feels weak, lacking in many areas, and it seems to fall in the middle of nowhere. It does not provide enough firepower to be considered a heavy client that can do most things offline, yet not light enough to be able to compete with other simple-and-fast distros out there. Elementary OS' own software is alright, but I personally find it too simplistic, often lacking features I use on a daily basis.

Another element that seems to be part of the Elementary "identity" is a sleek Look&Feel, but I only saw that partially in Jupiter.

NOT A FAN

Long story short, Elementary OS was a bitter disappointment for me. I think the concept is there, and it could be a successful one with the right implementation, but I don't see that happening in Jupiter. Moon OS, Zorin OS, Linux Mint... The list of Ubuntu forks that do better is long and I don't see that changing as long as the Elementary project does not realize that Linux without flexibility is hardly an option.

Is Elementary OS for you? I find it hard to believe if you enjoy Linux, but by all means do give it a go. After all, looking at Unity and GNOME Shell, lack of flexibility may be the theme moving forward.