elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.
That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
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However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.
Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.
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A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.
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You can expect things like:
- The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
- AppCenter is now Flatpak only
- New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
- WireGuard VPN support
Then how do you explain the continued success of Mint?
Because Mint’s philosophy is to make a friendly, simple and usable system for everyone.
That may be for people who came from Windows before, or those who like their OS to be a bit more conservative, meaning no flashy stuff, boring, and just working. Just like Windows was “in the good ol’ days”.
This makes it accessible and usable by everyone, including Linux sysadmins who come home after work and don’t want to deal with annoying computers and fixing things.
Everything on Mint feels high quality, functional and cohesive.
ElementaryOS on the other hand feels like a cheap MacOS clone, but nothing works. Those who want Mac, buy a Mac.
Mint/ Cinnamon on the other hand is similar to Windows (XP, 7, etc.), but not a copycat. It’s familiar enough to be intuitive for Windows users, but much enough it’s own thing.
Mint’s main focus is to get a uncomplicated, and usable system, while Elementary’s focus is to just do what Apple does. … Well, did. 15 years ago. They totally forgot how much work maintaining a distro and a desktop with a whole app suite is, and just stopped working on it.
While Gnome and KDE (and other WMs/ DEs) got magnitudes better in just one year (e.g. Plasma 6), Pantheon (and Elementary) just stagnated the last 5 years or so.
They don’t even offer/ work on Wayland yet, or other new things.
Either they’ll stop working on Elementary, and focus only on Pantheon, so it can live on on other distros, or it will just continue dying like it does currently.
TBH, they should put all their effort into making Pantheon better. NixOS’s installer has Pantheon, and it feels pretty much the same; that’s clearly 90% of what makes elementaryOS unique.
Trying to make a walled garden in Linux with their software choices was what turned me off to the project, and you’ll never attract Linux-minded people by forcing them into a box.
Totally agree.
I think they had or have commercial aspirations. That along with the strong desire to curate the experience are likely what lead to the walled garden effect.
The problem with walled gardens ( well, I hate them always ) is that they only work if you have the resources to pull off the full experience by yourself. Elementary really never had that and, before they could get there, they stumbled internally and killed their execution. It is going to be really hard to get it back.
Whatever their original aspirations, salvaging what they have into a distro agnostic DE is probably their best hope for relevance and survival. With a curated Flatpak store, they may even be able to someday pull off their walled garden in a cross-distro way. If it ever became big enough, they could take another run at being a full distro.
As it is, Elementary is on borrowed time. That would be the case even if the Wayland clock was not ticking but ticking it is.