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I am a bit of a desktop manager nomad, never quite managing to remain faithful to Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or any of the others. Unity came and went, as did Enlightenment with Bodhi Linux. For the last year, however, I have mostly kept to Lubuntu's LXDE as a good compromise between a practical user interface and one that doesn't grab at too much hardware resources. When a distribution with a new desktop manager gets my attention, I often download and install it on a virtual machine, at least long enough for a general peek around at how it works. The last of a long list was Elementary OS, released as version 0.2 “Luna” on August 11th.
This could easily have been the review of Yet Another Ubuntu Derivative Distribution — Elementary 0.2 has a core based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS — except for two redeeming factors: 1) the developers go for a simple and uncluttered desktop, and 2) they go for beautiful. For the most part, my feeling is that they have managed quite well on both counts.
The download process of the 700MB image is what you would expect, though with a perhaps unfortunate twist. Straight from the gate, you are requested to consider making a small donation to the cause ($10 is suggested). I do appreciate they may actually need the money to continue development, but it does come across as slightly pushy. An alternative entirely free download button is also provided underneath.
Once booted up, the ISO image goes into graphics mode and gives us the choice between installing directly or using it in Live-CD mode (“try without installing”), in a similar fashion to Kubuntu. In either case, the screen flickers a bit back and forth between text and graphics modes, reminding us that this is not to be considered a finished product but rather “work in progress.” This is coherent with the 0.2 version number the team gave it.
Going into Live-CD mode, the desktop comes up rather quickly. I have not actually measured the time used, but it does feel similar to Lubuntu or Xubuntu—and somewhat less than Unity. We have the dock at the bottom, a panel at the top with an application menu and a notification area, and that's that. It gives an impression of clean, refined elegance, giving us enough graphical cues to access our stuff, but without the least clutter.
Many of these elements have been created or adapted “in-house” by the Elementary team, so to speak. The window manager is called Gala, the top panel is Wingpanel, the application launcher is Slingshot, while the dock is called Plank and seems to have a lot in common with the Docky code base. As for applications, the file manager is “Pantheon Files”, the mail client is Geary, and the music reproducer is simply called Music. They use the Gtk and Clutter libraries like many other graphical interfaces.
On the other hand, several existing applications such as the Midori browser and Shotwell image manager have been chosen among existing programs, perhaps mainly as lightweight, well-tested alternatives that get the job done well enough for most users. Ubuntu's Software Center is also there if we need something more substantial.
This should not make us think the distribution itself has low memory requirements. Testing gave a memory usage in the low 800 Megabytes with little or no load on the computer besides the basic system and graphical interface. In this sense, it is comparable to most other Ubuntu Live-CD offerings, and slightly higher than lightweight Lubuntu. Processor use is not too heavy, however, and the desktop can run well enough on an Atom processor, for example.
The Elementary team has been hard at work on design and eye-candy in general, as can be seen from this stunning selection of wallpapers. Okay, so nothing is easier than downloading a wallpaper from the Internet, but I find this default array a good point to start with for normal users, i.e. those who do not wish to spend too much time on desktop decoration. Actually, I think it is rather better than Ubuntu's choice of wallpapers, but that may be a matter of personal opinion.
The system settings application seems to be an adaptation of the classical Gnome settings panel, though some options have been rearranged. The wallpaper, dock and “hot corners” panels have been grouped as tabs in the Desktop settings section, one of the simplest arrangements I have seen in quite some time.
The file manager, Pantheon Files, is quite similar to Nemo from the Gnome framework. It comes with the integrated disk usage indicator. As described in their Launchpad page, “Files is a simple, powerful, sexy file manager for the Pantheon desktop.” Note “sexy.”
There have been some small changes, however, such as the absence of menus—they are not to be found in the window or at an alternative location. This would seem to be due to remains of Unity integration: no global menu bar at the top of the screen, so no menus in sight. Using only the icon on the Network tab, I managed to set up an SFTP connection to transfer files to another computer … which it later refused to unmount. It also refused to indicate Dropbox file status, even with the pantheon-files-plugin-dropbox packet installed.
On the other hand, a color tagging functionality—clearly inspired by Mac OS-X—has appeared. This lets you color file labels, which can come in rather handy for classification purposes. Let's see, which images have I already inserted into my article, and which remain to be placed?
The general design both of the user interface and of the http://elementaryos.org web page does seem to owe a lot to Cupertino's design teams, with the Music application's screen as a dead giveaway. However, most design cues come very clearly from Gnome's GTK, with some elements from LinuxMint. It can in some ways be seen as of mixed inspirations. The end result certainly works from the user's point of view, though long-time Mac users may grumble a bit about it not being exactly what they are used to. The devil comes out in some small details such as window button positions at the top of each screen.
All in all, the end result is quite satisfactory and well worth a test for those who are inclined to simple, uncluttered graphical interfaces. Though it is worth bearing in mind that their design philosophy may be a bit too radically simplistic for some as in, for example, doing away with window and contextual menus (no right clicks on the desktop or elsewhere).
Another minor hiccup is lack of stability on some hardware. I had a continuous problem with freezing on an Acer Aspire AO722, perhaps due to graphical hardware issues—though no other Debian or Ubuntu distributions (including the very same 12.04 on which Elementary is based) have given me problems on this particular computer. On two other laptops, it gave no issues at all. So testing is definitely the name of the game.
Though the user interface is still under heavy development, it should be possible for the more adventurous to use it for some actual work. However, as usual, care should be taken to make frequent backups of your data, for example on another computer or in the cloud. Following the team's simplistic mantra, none of the usual user programs such as Libreoffice are installed, though this is a simple matter to solve with apt or the Software Center.
An alternative approach could be to start out from an existing Ubuntu 12.04 installation, and add the elementary packages from the project's Launchpad repositories:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/elementary-os/stable/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/elementary-os/stable/ubuntu precise main
First, make sure your target system is up to date. Then, after inserting these two lines at the beginning of file /etc/apt/sources.list, the following commands should get you going:
apt-get update
apt-get install elementary-desktop elementary-standard elementary-artwork
It will need to download about 47 MB of software packages, if starting out from a vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 installation. Some conflicts may appear (e.g. between elementary-scan and simple-scan), but can be ignored. You will need gnome-tweak-tool to replace your existing widget theme with Elementary's, and will perhaps also choose to remove plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text and plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo to get Elementary's “e” screen on boot/shutdown instead of Ubuntu purple.
Seeing what these people have been able to achieve since their release 0.1, it will be interesting to see what they can come up with in the next few years. It is certainly a project to keep an eye on.