ElementaryOS Stable: Installation + Review

Yesterday pandev92 he beat me with a Very good review about Elementary OS (henceforth eOS), so I'm going to omit a lot of the things he already said or just give my opinion based on the tests I've done.

At the end of the post I leave the assessment in numbers. The following tests have been carried out on a computer with these specifications:

[specs]

• CPU: Intel Atom 1.0GHz
• GPU: Intel N10 Family DMI Bridge
• HDD: 250 GB
• Brand: HP
• Model: MINI 110 3800
• RAM: MB 1024

[/specs]

What's new Old man?

After two years of waiting, users of eOS finally have a stable version of this distribution, although those who have been testing the versions Beta they ensure that it has always been stable.

And yes, although many think that two years is a long time, keep in mind that the development of this distribution does not have a large team behind it like Ubuntu o Fedora. In fact, having Ubuntu as Upstream is a huge relief.

eOS It comes to us with a facelift on its official website, very elegant and simple, which reminds us of what the Artwork of this entire distribution is inspired by: Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), y OS X. However, copy or not, I love how it looks.

On the subject of «the copy» it is good to know that according to Daniel Foré, eOS for him it is the ideal system mixing Windows with OS X. And what of OS X I understand it because you can see it everywhere you look, but what does this distribution have that has been taken from Windows? Anyway.

The site has new resources and links, as well as access to its online store where you can buy certain items, for example T-Shirt. The blog loses the sidebar and gains in horizontal space.

Special attention has been paid to the section for developers, where we have the links and resources to collaborate with eOS, participate or develop applications.

In short, the style and simplicity to which Daniel Foré and his team are not accustomed are maintained.

elementaryOS

Now let's move on to the distribution as such. The first thing I will show will be the simple installation steps for all those users who want to have it on their PC.

The process is very simple. The first step is to select the language of the installer and of our system. Then we click on the button Install elementary OS:

Afterwards, the installer checks the disk space we have and whether or not we are connected to the Internet. Passing this step we reach a critical point, the disk partitioning.

For this example I will use an empty disk, without any partition. This method is not recommended for the simple fact that if for some reason we have to reinstall this distribution or any other, we will not have our data separated from the root and we can lose everything.

But the objective of this article is not to show how to partition a disk, since we have already talked about this topic on other occasions.

Once we pass this step, we have to select the place where we live, so that the system configures our PREMISES.

Later it is the turn to choose the keyboard layout. I like keyboards in English, and using the layout US International with dead keys, I have the characters like the Ñ, with the combination AltGr+N (the Alt to the right of the space bar).

The next step is also very easy, we just have to put our data, the name of the PC, the user we want to use and that's it.

The installation begins, depending on our computer, it can take between 5 and 10 minutes.

Once it is finished we reboot and this beautiful screen receives us:

Appearance

The integration of the applications with the theme is very well achieved gtk, what it offers to eOS an enviable appearance. All the applications that come with the distribution, and even those that are installed afterwards, maintain a uniform finish and that is appreciated.

The only thing in this section that I don't like are the pop-ups, which continue to have the same effect as in GNOME-SHELL and they would look much prettier if they were like the Calendar (and other applications). Example:

Usability

eOS not include button Minimize windows by default. The explanation is simple, according to Daniel Foré, applications close and open so fast that there is no need to minimize them. Although of course, always Can the problem be solved.

Also, some applications like Noise (the audio player), they stay working in the background and are managed through the icon in the system tray.

Pantheon Files el File manager it doesn't convince me either. It is lightweight, has tabs, can be divided into panels and folders are managed in the style KDE, but I miss a built-in search engine.

I also noticed that Breadcrumb is not 100% fluent and sometimes locks in small intervals of thousandths of seconds, and the fact of not being able to edit the folder path detracts from usability.

Last but not least, I had trouble with tumblerd (which generates the Thumbnail preview) when trying to unmount a memory. I had to solve it by opening the terminal and putting:

$ killall tumblerd

Well, there was no way the process would end.

Midori, the web browser, only serves me to access websites quickly but it is not the workhorse to spend the whole day in the Internet war.

Maybe I am adapted to the keyboard shortcuts of Firefox as Ctrl + Enter to autocomplete addresses .com, Shit + Enter for directions .net y Ctrl + Shift + Enter for .org. It's fast, it's light, but it's a long way from being an all-time application.

Maya (the Calendar) is fine, it is simple, it is beautiful, but not very intuitive. It would be very nice to be able to add an event by clicking on the calendar day with the right mouse button, although double clicking works. And perhaps the other thing that remains a bit is the fact that we have to open it to see what events we have scheduled since there is no notification or alarm mode for them.

Geary it's fine as it is. I wish it had account support POP3but hey, nothing is perfect in this life. The vertical arrangement of the panels is pleasant, as in Opera Mail. Trying to set up an IMAP account, the settings window was getting larger than the height of the screen, making it almost impossible for me to do so.

The global menu of eOS I quite like it, not only can the icons be arranged in various ways, but it serves as a launcher when pressing the key combination Alt + F2. Maybe it's a bit big, but it's very comfortable.

De Plank (the dock) I have no complaints. I would like to have a version of me but in Qt for me KDE.

Scratch, the text editor just has one thing that I love: When you save a document for the first time, you don't have to worry about saving it again, it does it for you.

Performance

Those of us who had already tried the version Beta we did not find any relevant change in the version Stable. For a distribution that claims to be light, in a HP Mini 110 Netbook performance is not as expected. The normal thing also if we take into account that it has running to GNOME behind.

Using graphics Intel in the same netbook, transitions sometimes get a little slow, especially when we have several applications open. RAM consumption starts at around 190MB, leaving about 725MB remaining, but just by running htop, it shoots up and goes up to 216MB.

Of course, with several applications open: Midori, Geary, PantheonTerminal, Pantheon Files, Noise, Maya, Scratch, consumption did not exceed 400MB of RAM. Already with a lot of workload, I got slightly to 512MB.

Ease

The one who says what to use eOS you have to know about commands and consoles. I tell you that this is a fallacy. In all the testing time I did not have to touch a terminal at all, or rather, not to do the most common tasks.

It can be easily installed from the Software Center, add new repositories from the Update Manager and therefore, for a user approaching GNU / Linux, eOS is 100% recommended.

Although perfectly eOS It could bring the necessary codecs installed by default, when we cannot reproduce audio or video due to lack of one, the wizard that looks for it and installs it immediately jumps out.

Longevity

Ah, but not everything is rosy, or gray tones. Unfortunately the long development time it has had eOS, the small team that maintains it, and wanting everything to work well, has also cost it to suffer from a certain delay in terms of package versions.

Hey! eOS it works and does it well, but if we want to be up-to-date with some applications we have to resort to PPAs. For who does not suffer from versionitis and just needs something simple and that works to work, no problem then.

More power and customization

If you think that eOS not quite right or something is missing, you may be right. Personalization is important and luckily we can add a tool to eOS for that.

In a terminal we put:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa: versable / elementary-update $ sudo apt-get update

Now we proceed to install Elementary Tweaks:

$ sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks

Now in System Preferences we get a section called Tweaks where we can change "almost everything" into eOS.

First of all, we can change the appearance, although I like it by default.

We can install more themes for eOS by putting in the terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install elementary-dark-theme elementary-plastico-theme elementary-whit-e-theme elementary-harvey-theme

We also have the option to change the default font, although it looks great with Droid Sans.

paragraph Animations It suited me like a glove. When deactivating them the work with eOS it became much smoother, and opening and closing applications seemed almost instantaneous.

The same with the shadows, although if we deactivate them we lose a little in the Eyecandy.

In the Miscellaneous we can find some interesting options:

For Plank we have a lot of good options. We can change the size of the icons, the theme of the dock, the options for its behavior and something very good, the position on the screen.

Pantheon File I needed something like this by default. Not everyone likes to open folders with one click.

Another option that is appreciated: Customize the terminal.

Conclusions

The fact of not bringing a tool that allows us to change the default appearance subtracts a point from eOS. EYE, I said that it does not bring it by default but if it has it as we already saw, only that we have to use a PPA.

The same as GNOME-SHELL, Boys eOS they take for granted that as it comes by default, it is good enough not to change anything, and yes, I admit that it is beautiful, but to the users of GNU / Linux we love to personalize our desktop.

If you are new to this world, or you don't want to waste time setting things up and as a plus, you like the look of OS X, you will find in eOS the ideal layout.

But keep in mind that being so simple can be a problem for some. eOS It doesn't have the most productive Desktop Environment out there, its applications lack options, but doing "normal" things is fine.

Assessment

Taking into account the above, I leave you my assessment of Elementary OS:

[5of5] Appearance [/5of5] [4of5] Usability [/4of5] [3of5] Performance [/3of5] [4of5] Beginner-friendly [/4of5] [4of5] Stability [/4of5] [4of5] Personal Appreciation [/4of5 ] [4points][/4points]

😉