I appreciate your thoughtful and insightful reply, and you’re definitely better-versed in Elementary OS than I’ve ever been! To be clear, my comments weren’t coming from a place of dislike but frustration, because there had been a time when I found myself drawn to the project and hoped it could be something I could actually use.
Even as my ideas about functionality and minimalism completely flipped (these days I really prefer the KDE approach) I held onto the hope that Elementary could still become the best that the Linux world had to offer newcomers arriving with no preconceived ideas about what software should be able to do. (If such people actually exist, but that’s another discussion.)
But my various pokings around the surface of Elementary OS over the years always reveal bugs, iffy UX, etc. To use your terms, it always seemed coherent to me, but far from polished. I don’t see the upside to having such a limited feature set when it doesn’t lead to basic stability, good documentation and so on. (By the way, I learned via Wikipedia yesterday that one of Elementary OS’s core principles is “minimal documentation”.)
P.S. I’m glad you brought up Miller columns. I didn’t know the term, but they’re actually a perfect example of what I’ll call the “Mac but sucky” quality of Elementary OS. Try this exercise: if you’re browsing an empty folder, switch to columns view. You get three empty panes, possibly leaving a typical user unsure of what this unfamiliar mode even meant to be. (I think this was the experience I alluded to yesterday, where I thought to press F1 for help and took me to a StackOverflow tag.) For an example of what the file manager should do when switching to columns in an empty folder… I mean, all the devs needed to do is try the same thing on a Mac. And just copy that. It’s clear they’re familiar with the looks, but not the “works.”
I appreciate your thoughtful and insightful reply, and you’re definitely better-versed in Elementary OS than I’ve ever been! To be clear, my comments weren’t coming from a place of dislike but frustration, because there had been a time when I found myself drawn to the project and hoped it could be something I could actually use.
Even as my ideas about functionality and minimalism completely flipped (these days I really prefer the KDE approach) I held onto the hope that Elementary could still become the best that the Linux world had to offer newcomers arriving with no preconceived ideas about what software should be able to do. (If such people actually exist, but that’s another discussion.)
But my various pokings around the surface of Elementary OS over the years always reveal bugs, iffy UX, etc. To use your terms, it always seemed coherent to me, but far from polished. I don’t see the upside to having such a limited feature set when it doesn’t lead to basic stability, good documentation and so on. (By the way, I learned via Wikipedia yesterday that one of Elementary OS’s core principles is “minimal documentation”.)
P.S. I’m glad you brought up Miller columns. I didn’t know the term, but they’re actually a perfect example of what I’ll call the “Mac but sucky” quality of Elementary OS. Try this exercise: if you’re browsing an empty folder, switch to columns view. You get three empty panes, possibly leaving a typical user unsure of what this unfamiliar mode even meant to be. (I think this was the experience I alluded to yesterday, where I thought to press F1 for help and took me to a StackOverflow tag.) For an example of what the file manager should do when switching to columns in an empty folder… I mean, all the devs needed to do is try the same thing on a Mac. And just copy that. It’s clear they’re familiar with the looks, but not the “works.”