The Truth Behind Elementary OS: Why They Chose to Create Problems Instead of Solutions

Get Linux Mastery Express:
https://linuxtex.thinkific.com/

At some point in time, I know you have used Elementary OS and you were really amazed by it. You thought it was a stunning Linux distro and everything about it was super polished. I also know it’s not your current operating system. Why is that?

Support Me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/linuxtex

Connect with Me on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/aquilroshan/

Elementary OS 7, Horus, which came out early this year, was based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and came out with many iterative improvements.
With this big release, Elementary OS brought the same great old experience that its users fell in love with. It also brought the same old inconveniences.
Right out the box, the desktop looks super premium. No arguments here. But pressing the windows button doesn’t bring out the application menu. Instead we get the shortcuts. No issue, it can be changed from the settings. I would have liked it if, this was default and shortcuts message on holding down the super key.

Let me open up an application. And if i want to minimize it, there is no minimize button. Okay, this is an issue as I have multiple apps open at the same time and i need to minimize apps to focus properly. Maybe I can change this from the settings, apparently not.

And the available window controls are placed on the opposite sides here. Not the most intuitive thing here. While I can get used to this, I don’t understand the developers vision here. Anyway, can I change it from the settings. You guessed it, no.

But there must be a way I can fix these things. Let me go online and check for a solution. Where’s firefox, oh, we get epiphany web browser or gnome web here. Just fantastic.

While Epiphany is not a bad browser, it’s not a good browser either. Only recently has it become capable of playing youtube videos properly. Yeah.
Epiphany is slow, janky and overall is not an enjoyable experience. With the latest version, there have been many improvemnts and we can even use extensions now, but there are way better alternatives. But Elementary chose Epiphany.
Elementary OS chose to go with Flatpaks only. Personally, I was not a big fan of this decision. I understand the scope of unified pacakge managers like flatpak and snap and I’ve had great experiences because of these. I use few. But at the end of the day, I prefer to use full native packages like .debs or rpms. They are faster, they take up way less storage space and they integrate nicely with the system.

So I was a bit down about the decision to ship only flatpaks. Whataver, flathub has a great library of apps and whatever you want, you can find there, yeah this is not that kind of video bruh. This is not a love story. this is a horror story.

Elementary OS uses Flatpaks, but not the ones from flathub. Elementary OS provides it’s own curated library of apps. You can’t find any apps that anybody realistically uses here. There’s no browser, there are no popular apps.

One thing about the apps that are available here though. These apps are curated and specially made for Elementary OS. They are made by individual developers and look and integrate amazingly with Elementary OS. As an aspiring indie developer myself, I have massive respect for these developers and what Elementary OS tried to do here. Really, take a bow.

But as a user, I need the vlc media player, I need firefox, kdenlive, gimp, some games and many more software. Realistically, alternatives for all these apps cannot be created only for Elementary OS.

The software choice path that Elementary OS takes, this can be off putting for many and a big hurdle for Linux newcomers.
All these things combined with few more issues like over complicated NVIDIA driver installation, made what could have been a great experience plain inconvenience. I recently did poll and these were the results.