log.z428.eu / elementary OS “Luna”: Linux UI, revisited?

After making it through the usual social media channels for quite a while now, elementary OS 0.2 “Luna” has been released a couple of days ago. There is an in-depth article on that on the elementary OS blog which is really worth reading. Personally I stumbled across elementary a while ago on Google+, partially because of Shotwell, my favorite GNU/Linux photo management application that comes bundled with elementary OS, and I have been watching what they do for quite a while now, having elementary OS installed in at least a virtual machine, keeping it dist-upgraded then and now to see how things move along.

Unsorted desktop impressions

elementary is crafted by designers and developers who believe that computers can be easy, fun, and gorgeous. By putting design first, we ensure we’re not compromising on quality or usability.

This is one of the elementary OS goals mentioned on their web site, and it actually is a goal leaving one playing with elementary with quite some expectations. Given the team has spent quite a while working on this release, it is interesting to see how, after all that time, the result lives up to these expectations. So in the end my test drive explicitely was all about not trying to “think”, read or search the web all too much but to “just” use the desktop and use the user interface, tools and interaction options it offers to (a) see whether all I need can be easily done and, maybe a bit more difficult, (b) the desktop can be bent and configured to fit my personal usage habits easily. Things I found out all along the way:

Odds and ends

Overally, given the project is somewhat new (at least compared to the other current GNU/Linux desktops), the desktop and overall experience so far is very good, and so are most of the pre-packed applications (Geary possibly being the exception). Most of the things work well, most of my nuissances regarding configurability were resolved doing a bit of web search and in the end installing elementary-tweaks. Of course, working with the system one once in a while stumbles across things that could be improved and in some way done better, but this is not too different to working with any other environment or piece of software. I mainly like what the elementary crowd does here, and I also like the way they focus on creating an aesthetically pleasant user experience in the first place. Maybe here and there they should find a bit more a “face of their own” rather than, starting with the web site, too closely following Apple and their visual approach, but that’s a different thing. I am curious to see how the project will be a few years from now, and whether the community and the manpower behind elementary is strong enough to push this project forth and eventually getting it to the users it addresses best. Challenges I see in store for the project, generally: At one side, they’ll eventually be required to not just keep “their” stuff up-to-date but also operate on an up-to-date infrastructure. By now, core elementary OS is built on top of Ubuntu LTS 12.04. While from the LTS point of view being a good choice, this might hurt users who know their hardware runs well with recent GNU/Linux distributions yet not with an Ubuntu dating back to 2012. Worse, eventually, while building on top of Ubuntu possibly could be, sooner or later, having to deal with the upcoming graphics subsystem changes (Mir, XMir) and finding a way through that.

And, of course, there’s one thing I dearly hope elementary folks are able to avoid: Giving up on features introduced to an applications user interface in favour of keeping the UI clean and lean always poses the danger of people not being able to reach functionality they need to have easily (or at all). I remember painfully well some rather strong earlier disputes around the usability of GNOME which, at the very end, also boiled down to capabilities and functionality being removed in order not to make things too confusing or too difficult to an end user.

There’s an immanent danger in this in the difference between “unusable” and “useless”: Being minimized to a very core of functionality wrapped in a lean user interface, Geary in example is pretty well “usable” (as in ‘being able to access all its features in an easy way’). Yet, it’s still “useless” as it misses some features that are absolutely crucial if you use mail more than just occassionally and do want your mail client to be the tool to control this – starting with the ability to add signatures to outbound mails, or to configure client-side filtering to “automatically sort some mails in dedicated IMAP folders” (old understanding of things) / “apply certain labels to certain message” (new Google Mail understanding of things). I hope elementary team will manage the balance to keep applications both “usable” (in terms of offering simple, lean, straightforward user interfaces) and useful (in terms of providing enough features to use the applications it provides on a daily basis without having to search for replacement). But, given at where they got by now, I guess they do have a good chance of getting that done, sooner or later. Personally I am wishing them all the best on that.

See things…

Given there’s plenty of this online already, I didn’t bother taking and uploading screenshots. Some pointers: