Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" Released 117
First time accepted submitter kazade84 writes "Over the weekend the Elementary team released the stable version of Elementary OS, codenamed "Luna" which is based on Ubuntu 12.04. The new OS features an entirely custom desktop shell called Pantheon which has been developed from scratch using Vala and Gtk+ which allows for fast apps with a small memory footprint. Elementary OS has been years in the making, and the team have documented the process in their latest blog post."
What's new? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's in there which isn't in Ubuntu?
Judging the book by the cover, it looks like someone thought this new cool programming language of the week was the most awesome ever, wrote a few wrappers to some applications, and released it as a new distro.
Sheesh (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't you guys just let us have a menu where we can select a program from a list of all the ones already installed and let us put our crap on the desktop?
Every GUI OS designer wants to present stuff stylishly and enforce some good file housekeeping paradigm, must of us users just want to be able to select (not find) our installed programs and store files were we expect them.
Screen organization and the other stuff of elementary is nice, if you are going to be inspired by Apple, include letting us put stuff on the desktop and give us a thing like "applications folder" were we can quickly browse installed programs.
Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's new? (Score:2, Insightful)
and why the need to release and advertise an entire new desktop OS when just the desktop shell is novel? people don't know how to create software packages anymore?
Re:What's new? (Score:2, Insightful)
More like someone wanted something different from what was already available, and put their desire into a project that created something new.
Good for them. Hacker spirit and all.
But basically taking a bunch of Ubuntu themes, adding some different application handling code, a new desktop manager and touting it as an "OS" is disingenuous to say the least.
More grids? Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for my occasional rant on grids.
Grids are terrible for displaying sorted lists of item collections. Almost all of the time, we sort a collection along a single dimension; a grid positions items across two dimensions, but that second dimension holds no information about the sort being performed. If you have more than a few items, your brain has to bounce back and forth and conform to the line breaks that the computer has chosen in order to find items in the collection. Displaying a collection in a table with each collection item taking up one row and attributes of that item can be displayed in table fields (a.k.a. columns) allows for easier, more intuitive searching of the list based on those field values. It also leaves plenty of room for textual display, which fits quite well in a long, horizontal space.
Grids of icons have been a blight upon GUIs for decades. Why do they persist?
A new OS? That's impressive!.... Oh... Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
Methinks someone needs to learn the difference between an OS and a Linux distribution.
Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)