Elementary (Juno) watson

Discussion
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OK - I’ve tried elementary on and off over the last 3-4 years… Even donated a few $$$ to the “project”…
But I’ve usually ended up back at Ubuntu…

Thought I’d give elementary “Juno” another go Friday evening - on my work laptop (it’s mine personally, but I use it at work Monday to Friday nine to five)… really regretting it now… there’s just so many little niggly things that are wrong that are easy to get around in Ubuntu Gnome, Unity or XFCE.

I’m not a young man (57 in a few months) and have poor eyesight - there are NO “out of the box” settings in elementary that let you increase the size of the cursor - and things that fixed this in Loki or Freya no longer work! There’s no OPTION under “accessibility” to increase the size of the cursor (you can do it with dconf-editor - but that requires logout, and ONLY sort of works in some application windows - and NOT in elementary “native” appls) - I find I’m constantly losing the mouse pointer on the screen - it’s inconsistent. My favourite music player (thanks Abishek!) Sayonara has really REALLY screwy menues if it’s not running on the main display (e.g. an external monitor)… So many things that are wrong!

Dropbox status icon in the “wingpanel” doesn’t show anything! Synergy KVM doesn’t show up in the wingpanel when it’s running (there’s a fix - which kinda works)…

So - taking it home again tonight and going to try out Xubuntu - as I’m kinda fed up with Gnome… I’ve got Xubuntu running on a Gigabyte Brix at home - started as a 16.04.4 Xubuntu - upgraded to 18.04.1 “in place” and it just putts along (mostly just runs transmission-daemon) happily in the background.

It’s a shame, because I really REALLY want to like elementary, but just too many things wrong…

There’s no place to even adjust the transparency of the terminal app - and installing gnome-terminal doesn’t give you a replacement or a *.desktop file to launch it!

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The only occasion I tested Elementary was a few years back.

First impression was, eye-candy, using a custom Gnome desktop. But couldn’t get on with the file system, navigate or move files where and how I wanted them. Finally their choice of apps, left me disappointed. :roll_eyes:

I have tried worse, but nowadays find only a handful of the top 100 distros on DistroWatch work outta the box vice free.

:sunglasses:

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Elementary is very restrictive when it comes to customization. The devs have a set idea about the UI and they want everyone to follow it.

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Well, they seem to mimic their role model pretty well, don’t they.

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Wiped elementary last night and re-formatted with Xubuntu (18.04.1)

So far so good… few little niggles and gripes, but generally know where to find things to work around these few annoynances (e.g. reverse scrolling on touchpad doesn’t work “out of the box”)… it helps that XFCE is pretty stable… Been using it at work all day with no major issues… Only took about 2 hours last night to re-sync all ~150 GB of my “cloud” data (Dropbox and Resilio Sync - both products do “LAN” sync thankfully!) - i.e. all my music and documents and shell scripts.

elementary seem to change stuff on the spur of the moment - so what worked in Freya or Loki no longer works in Juno… I reckon they’ve dropped the ball…

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If anyone is using Elementary, I have a question about its dedicated store of packages.

The reviews claim that their package store is one of Elementary’s strong suits When comparing a program in Elementary with commonly available variants, how do they compare?

I have tested only three, and all were quite below par.

  1. Camera does not recognize my camera, while guvcview found it immediately
  2. Epiphany cannot find my headset or camera for video calls
  3. Vocal, a podcast client, is not really usable, and a far cry from GPodder.

So, along with the others here, I am ready to say, nice idea but not ready for prime time. And Juno is version 5.0???

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Been using / trying elementary on and off since around 2014/15…

It’s one of those distros I really REALLY want to try and like, it looks great, it’s pretty snappy (I think it’s probably a tad quicker than gnome 3 on Ubuntu, but that’s a purely anecdotal observation) - but - once you look past all the glitz and eye candy - it’s far too locked down for my taste - and I’ve run into all sorts of issues…

  • bluetooth is a PITA (even though it’s Ubuntu “based” - found better BT support in “stock” Ubuntu)
  • there’s NEVER any upgrade path between release versions
  • too many things too locked down e.g. increasing the font size in the terminal, turning on or tweaking transparency in the terminal
  • it’s pretty unusable without the elementary tweaks applet

I actually used it for about 6 months on an Asus “ROG” gaming laptop - it was okay, getting Nvidia Prime to switch between Intel GPU and NVidia worked fine… and I really miss the simplified settings applet (which also gets a tweak icon when you install elementary tweaks) - 'cause I really REALLY HATE the “Settings Applet” in gnome 3 - it’s hideous with stuff buried and obfuscated all over the place, a nightmare for people who need some features of Universal Access (like me - I usually have to kick up the size of the fonts and cursor size)

I even kicked in some cash to the elementary project team in 2015…

For a while I also had Debian Jessie on a Dell Laptop, but using the Pantheon Desktop from elementary… it was okay… but for my “money” - the latest Ubuntu is usually what I go for - despite my unbridled hatred for the Settings applet…

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