elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a special desktop environment called Pantheon. The project's latest version, elementary OS 5.0, carries the code name "Juno" and is based on Ubuntu 18.04. (I will sometimes refer to this version of the distribution alternatively as Juno or elementary in this review.) Juno includes many changes and its release announcement is a lengthy read. Some of the highlights in the Juno release include:- The software centre allows users to pay what they want for programs, with the option to try a program first and donate to the upstream developer later.
- The Scratch code editor as been renamed Code and integrates better with git repositories to show available code branches
- The terminal, and other core programs, include dark themes and the terminal offers easy font resizing.
- The Epiphany web browser supports Firefox Sync to share bookmarks and passwords across multiple devices.
- Juno includes Night Light to reduce blue light levels in the evening.
- Application windows with shared edges can be resized together.
- Picture-in-picture mode lets us see previews of windows when an application's window is covered.
- We can tap the meta key to see desktop short-cuts.
- There is a new problem reporting tool to help us file bugs with the proper upstream project.
elementary OS runs on 64-bit computers and the live media download is 1.4GB in size. Booting from the media brings up a graphical window where we are asked if we would like to try elementary's live mode or start the system installer. I opted to jump immediately into the installer. The installer appears to be an unmodified copy of Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer. It begins by asking us to select our preferred language from a list and we have the option of clicking a link to open the distribution's release notes. I tried to open the release notes and found it opened a web browser which showed a "page cannot be found" error from elementary's web server.
Undeterred, I continued through screens asking for my keyboard's layout, whether I wanted to install software updates and third-party media support during the installation, and picking my time zone. Partitioning can be handled automatically by the installer or we can manually create partitions. I like the manual options which are easy to navigate and support virtually every Linux file system. I opted to use a Btrfs volume for my root partition. The last screen asks us to create a username/password combination for ourselves. The installer copies its packages to our hard drive and then offers to restart the computer.
Early impressions
elementary boots to a graphical login screen where we can sign into our account to bring up the Pantheon desktop. The desktop features a thin panel along the top of the screen which provides us with an application menu, a clock and the system tray. A dock (called Plank) sits at the bottom of the display, providing us with a macOS style launcher and application switcher. When an application's icon is visible on the dock, we can right-click it to pin the application to the dock for quick access later.
elementary OS 5.0 -- The application menu
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The application menu defaults to showing application launchers in a large grid, however we can click a button to switch to a split menu with software categories on the left and launchers on the right. The launchers are all given names indicating their purpose. Some examples include Mail, Calendar, Files, and Videos. This should make it easy for newcomers to quickly find the software they want to use.
The desktop is mostly empty and relatively distraction-free. When the system wants us to tell us something it generally places a red mark on the notification icon in the system tray, or puts a similar red marker on the software centre icon in the dock. There are some visual effects to liven up the desktop and launched program icons jump up and down a little on the dock, but otherwise the desktop tries to avoid distracting us.
Software management
Software management, both installing new programs and upgrading existing ones, is handled by the App Centre. The software centre has two tabs, the first shows us recommended software and categories of programs we can browse. Clicking a category (or typing a search for a program name) brings up a list of available software. Program names and icons are shown on the left side of the page with a brief description. Clicking an entry brings up a full page description with a screen shot.
elementary OS 5.0 -- The software centre
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Some applications are listed with a price. Clicking the price allows us to adjust it up or down. This allows us to pay what we want (including nothing) for applications to help support the developers. Most programs are simply listed as free. Generally no-cost programs cannot accept donations directly and we cannot offer the developers money through the software centre.
The software centre's second tab lists installed items which we can remove with the click of a button. Available software updates are listed at the top of the page. Low level packages, such as command line tools and libraries, are bundled together into one entry referred to as operating system updates. Each desktop program gets its own, separate entry when updates are released. I encountered a few updates during my trial and these downloaded and installed without incident. Some software gets pulled in from elementary's own repositories, but much of the software comes from Ubuntu's repositories.
I found the software centre generally worked well and was easy to navigate. My one serious complaint was that when I had queued multiple programs for installation, there was no sense of the overall progress. A tiny "busy" indicator appeared in the upper-right corner of the window, but it didn't give any sense of how many packages were still waiting to be installed, or how long it would take.
Applications
Juno ships with the Epiphany web browser, Pantheon Mail, a calendar and what appear to be custom-made music and video players. The distribution's photo manager also appears to be unique to elementary. We can find a code editor, web cam utility and calculator in the default applications. I was pleased to find the audio player and photo manager both automatically detected and imported files from my Music and Pictures directories, respectively. elementary ships with a full range of codecs for playing music and video files.
elementary OS 5.0 -- Automatically importing pictures into the photo manager
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In the background Juno uses Ubuntu 18.04 to supply the core files, command line tools and manual pages. The distribution uses systemd for its init implementation and runs on Linux 4.15.0.
While playing around with the available software, I made some observations I would like to share in no particular order. The first was that Epiphany used a lot of CPU resources when I ran Juno in a virtual machine. With an empty tab open Epiphany used about 90% of my CPU. When loading a simple page CPU dropped to around 20-30%. These numbers are lower when running Juno on physical hardware, but the trade-off was the X11 process always used about 10% of my workstation's CPU, which somewhat balanced things out. To compare Epiphany to other browsers, I installed Falkon (formerly QupZilla) and Firefox. Falkon used about the same amount of RAM as Epiphany, but about a third as much CPU. Firefox used around the same amount of CPU as Falkon (notably less than Epiphany), but used twice as much memory when visiting the same websites. In short, I found Epiphany was the lightest browser by memory usage, but the heaviest on CPU usage.
Something I found odd about using Juno is there is no plain text editor, a common component of almost all modern operating systems. The Code programming editor can double as a text editor, but its start-up screen, features and default behaviour of numbering lines may put off people who just want to quickly jot notes or make a grocery list. On a related topic, there is no default productivity suite, but multiple ones are available through the software centre. I found that when I installed the LibreOffice package it installed just the LibreOffice greeter. Usually, on other distributions, LibreOffice is a meta package that installs the whole suite, but with Juno we need to install each component of the suite (Writer, Calc, etc) separately. This may cut down on bloat, but it meant I ended up making multiple trips to the software centre for more pieces of the suite.
elementary OS 5.0 -- Setting up a printer
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I had hoped to use Timeshift to take snapshots of my operating system, which was one of the reasons I installed elementary on a Btrfs volume. Unfortunately, Timeshift is not in elementary's repositories. As a result I was unable snapshot the system the same way I could with Linux Lite or Linux Mint, two other Ubuntu-based distributions.
Sometimes I would see a red dot over the notification icon in the system tray and click it, only to find no notifications were waiting. I'm not sure if this meant I had already dealt with the issue or if the notifications automatically clear after a certain amount of time.
Hardware
Earlier I mentioned running Juno in both a virtual machine (VirtualBox) and on a workstation. When running in the virtual environment, Juno performed fairly well. The desktop was sometimes a little sluggish, but never terribly so. The only time I saw Pantheon really slow down was when there was a lot of disk activity going on, such as when I was installing new applications. When running on the workstation, Juno was pleasantly responsive. The desktop does a good job of being both responsive and visually engaging. The icons and effects are pretty without being overly distracting, in my opinion.
A fresh install of elementary used about 4.7GB of hard drive space and consumed 490MB of RAM when signed into the desktop. This puts elementary comfortable in the mid-range of memory usage when compared against most mainstream Linux distributions.
Fun features
At the beginning of this review I mentioned the Juno release announcement mentions several enticing features. One is that the default applications generally remember where we were working and bring us back to that point. The virtual terminal and file manager both remember our last working directory and open to that location.
One useful trick the desktop can perform is zooming in and out. Pressing the meta key and the + or - keys zooms our view of the desktop in or out. This can be handy in cases when we would usually want to use a magnification tool, but don't want to open another program.
Application windows that have been moved to the sides of the desktop snap into place. When two windows are placed side-by-side, they share an edge. This edge can be clicked on and moved left or right, changing the dimensions of both windows at the same time.
elementary OS 5.0 -- A video window preview
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One neat feature is the picture-in-picture preview. Pressing the meta key and F lets us click on a window we always want to be able to see all the time. Then, whenever the selected window is covered or minimized, a small preview of the window is visible on the desktop. The preview window can be moved and resized. This keeps it out of the way and makes it possible to monitor progress taking places in other windows.
In the settings panel there is an About module. Opening this module presents the option to report bugs. Choosing to report a bug brings up a window that helps us locate the application which was causing the problem. Selecting a program then opens our web browser to the program's issue tracker where we can file a bug report. This might not be quite as fancy as automated bug reporting, but it makes it easy to file bugs against core components without searching GitHub.
elementary OS 5.0 -- Reporting an issue
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Settings
Speaking of the settings panel, most of the settings modules are fairly standard and should seem familiar to anyone who has used a member of the GNOME family of desktops. Some features did stand out though. For example, we can fine-tune notifications on a per application basis. This means we can have one application play a sound while another can leave a notice in the system tray. We can silence other applications entirely.
elementary OS 5.0 -- Adjusting notifications
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There is a parental controls module. It offers to limit login times, which websites a user can visit and what applications a user can run. All limitations are set on a per user basis and, we are warned, the limits only work on standard (non-admin) accounts. I tried these features, blocking some domains and restricting access to the software manager on a standard user account. I then signed in as the hapless user and found none of the restrictions worked. I could still visit forbidden websites and run the application store, and even install or remove packages through the software centre. In short, the parental controls did not work at all for me.
elementary OS 5.0 -- Trying to block websites
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The user account module worked for me, but one curiosity is that it lists a guest account as being available and enabled by default. I had not noticed a guest account up to that point, and logged out to check. I could find no way to sign in as a guest, so the guest account options also appears to be broken.
At first I did not notice a firewall configuration tool, but I did find one under the Security & Privacy module. The Security & Privacy module handles the firewall (off by default), location services (on by default), and recording file/application history (on). These are the opposite of the defaults I would prefer, but they are easy enough to change.
Donation controversy
While not a technical feature of elementary, I think it is worth noting that the elementary developers are making a solid effort to make their project (and the projects listed in their software centre) financially self supporting. Personally, I see the appeal, especially for application developers. Being an open source developer often means putting a lot of effort into software people want to use for free while receiving timely support, bug fixes and new features. Making it possible for people who want to financially support developers to contribute money, while still giving away the operating system and applications for free, is a goal which would seem to benefit everyone and hurt no one, in my opinion. It has the side benefit of allowing some developers to put more time into their creations, working on open source projects instead of other, possibly proprietary, ventures.
While a lot of Linux distributions accept donations, and many upstream applications do too, elementary seems to receive an unusual amount of criticism for their approach. People often take issue with the donation page elementary displays prior to starting downloads, and some readers insist DistroWatch should remove elementary from our database for being too commercial. (No one seems to take issue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise also being listed, despite both being commercial products). Personally, I think elementary has found a good balance between making it possible for users to donate without making it a requirement. All we need to do to opt out of paying money, to elementary or upstream developers, is to set the donation field to $0, and that seems like a small hurdle indeed for gaining access to polished, professional software.
Conclusions
I found a lot to like about Juno. The release announcement is detailed and shows lots of examples and screen shots. The operating system is easy to install, thanks to Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer and there is a nice collection of default software that will likely appeal to inexperienced users.
The Pantheon desktop and icons are beautiful. I sometimes ran into sluggish moments with the desktop, but usually only when the disk was under load or I had a video playing. I was really impressed by how Pantheon was put together and I like a lot of the little convenience features. The picture-in-picture preview and the shared edge window resizing are great. I also love that tapping the meta key will show a list of desktop short-cuts. It is little details like these which give the distribution a polished, friendly feel.
I already mentioned the icons look good and it bears repeating. Minimal icon design drives me mildly mad. I don't like functions represented by vague dots or arrows, I want a detailed icon and (preferably) text to let me know what a button does. elementary does a good job of making icons distinct, clear in purpose and typically accompanied by a text label or tooltip.
There were a few problems. Some of them were fairly minor, like Epiphany using high CPU load, especially in the virtual machine, or X11 gobbling CPU cycles on my workstation. There were other little touches like the release notes link in the installer not working, that are perhaps only worth mentioning because the rest of the experience was generally so polished and showed a lot of attention to detail.
My few serious complaints were with user accounts. Specifically, there appears to be a guest account enabled, but I could not find any way to sign into it. It is not a big deal to set up another account for guests, but it makes me wonder if the enabled (and hidden) account could be exploited. I also found it disappointing the parental controls did not work to block application access or forbidden websites.
On the other hand, I think Pantheon includes some great features and I like that it is fairly flexible in its look and behaviour. The flexible notification area and the quick switching between application menu styles were welcome features.
Generally speaking, I think elementary OS looks and feels professional. I hope it gets picked up by more hardware sellers, like System76, as I think Juno feels polished and looks good. I think it will especially appeal to less experienced users, but many of the features and the Code tool will likely be useful to more advanced users and developers too.
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Hardware used in this reviewMy physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied ratingelementary OS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.5/10 from 163 review(s).
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Source: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181022#elementary
