everett

Tex Shinobi. It's trackpoint or nothin'!

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."

My comment wasn't about PCs specifically, but consumer devices as a whole. Soldered RAM is an easy one, but soldered SSD, USB-C-only laptops, lack of 3.5mm, internal batteries, use of glue in manufacturing, etc. In many of these cases you can probably find another manufacturer who did it first on a specific model, but what Dell or HTC or whoever did simply doesn't influence the market the way Apple's decisions do.

All-time? Not sure. But recently I was pretty damn blown away by The Make-Up, 1998.

Unfortunately, Apple's worst habits trickle down to other manufacturers who see what they manage to get away with and start taking notes.

Elementary OS. People who have apparently only seen MacOS in screenshots went to a lot of trouble to copy it poorly.

edit: I was expecting to get more than a couple of downvotes, or maybe at least one person asking me what I don't like about Elementary OS. So I preemptively downloaded the latest stable version, installed it in a VM and used it for 30 minutes or so before posting this comment. It had been a few years since I looked at it, and continues to be exactly what I have come to expect.

This represents maybe half of the issues I came across doing really basic stuff for 30 minutes.

When people complain about duplication of effort within the free software world, I usually don't agree. I think it's usually fine if people want to spend their time writing a whole new thing for a specific or niche use-case! But if this is where things are after (checks Wikipedia) 12 years...

The opening frames still make me think I'm about to see the Interplay logo.

But was the person okay?

Thunder wonders: is that all you've got?

Officer: "Jonathan, I clocked you going faster miles an hour."

Jonathan: turns the radio off

Even literal poo disapproves.

Sounds like "gold standard," best libertarian-ghost pun I could come up with, without too much effort.