Elementary OS releases "Luna"

When we last looked at elementary OS in April 2011, it was in its first beta release. Based on Ubuntu 10.10, it was using GNOME 2.32 and Docky, and customization was so limited that even the wallpaper could not be changed. Now, with the recent Luna release, much of that has changed. Today, elementary OS features its own desktop and many of its own applications, as well as a focus on both development and design. The customization options have also increased, although they still fall short compared to most desktops.

Elementary OS grew from an icon set called "elementary" that governing council member Daniel Foré designed around 2007. But, as press lead Cassidy James tells the story: "it gained popularity, but he realized he could only do so much with icons. So he followed it up with an elementary GTK theme, which became pretty popular as well. But he wasn't done. While a well-designed GTK theme is nice, it doesn't fix the underlying user experience of an app. To do that, you need to patch the app or write a new one. So that's the direction elementary took."

Recruiting others from the Ubuntu and GNOME communities to patch Nautilus and work on first-party applications, Foré founded elementary OS as a combined development and design project. Its work was showcased first in the Jupiter release in early 2011, and, more recently in the new Luna release.

These origins have given elementary OS an emphasis on aesthetics as much as code. At least two of the project's council members have backgrounds in design. In fact, James goes so far as to say that "our entire team is led by designers rather than developers."

Many of the project's developers, he added, "are not only excellent at coding, but have an eye for design." This awareness of design is obvious in the unified, minimalist look of the desktop and basic utilities, as well as the attention to branding in everything from the installer to the web pages and the widgets on the desktop dialogs. Foré explained that "essentially, [elementary OS's] existence stems from a desire for great design."

The elementary experience

Elementary OS uses a modified version of the Ubuntu 13.04 installer. The most noticeable changes are a bare minimum of text and a reliance instead on icons and check boxes. These changes generally work, but at times it is at the expense of context, to the extent that inexperienced installers might be at a loss without the User Guide, since no online help is included.

The Pantheon desktop and its utilities often show their influences. Its fixed panel, for instance, is reminiscent of Unity, and so are its minimalist scroll bars. Similarly, the login manager is based on LightDM, and the Files file manager on Nautilus. The overall effect is as though GNOME 2 were using OS X widgets.

So why go to the trouble of rewriting these basic applications, instead of collecting them the way an average distribution does? Pantheon's individual applications do contain small enhancements — for instance, the music player includes the option to adjust the equalizer based on the genre of the current track, and the file manager has a button for re-opening closed tabs. However, such features are not really must-haves.

What binds the desktop and utilities is elementary OS's standardization on GTK3 and Vala. "Vala has been a great language to work with," Foré said, "seeing as it's been built specifically in conjunction with GObject while offering the same low barrier-of-entry as other modern languages like C#."

An important part of this standardization is Granite, which Foré describes as not "so much a separate framework as an expansion of GTK3. As we began to develop our apps, we realized we were using a lot of the same chunks of code over and over again. We built Granite in order to centralize this code, avoiding idiosyncrasies and ensuring that bug fixes propagate to all of our apps."

Thanks to Granite, the desktop and utilities share common features and behaviors. The (admittedly subjective) result is that Pantheon compares favorably to any desktop for speed. The project prominently lists "speedy" as one of the goals of elementary OS — something that seems to have been achieved.

Just as importantly, the desktop and utilities have a common design theme, which includes selection using a single click across the desktop, and no menu or minimization button for windows. Instead, the close button is on the far left of the title bar and the maximize button is on the far right. Windows are minimized by dragging them to a hot corner of the display; that corner is chosen by the user in the Systems Setup dialog. Similarly, instead of a taskbar or a virtual workspace switcher, keyboard commands are used to open graphical lists at the bottom of the screen.

When elementary OS borrows applications, it favors those built with similar design principles, such as the Yorba Foundation's Geary email client and Shotwell photo manager, or the Midori web browser. Other applications are borrowed from GNOME, including Empathy and Totem, more out of functional necessity apparently than design compatibility, "much like how Xfce is not a GNOME 2 desktop, but uses several GNOME 2 technologies," James explained.

In addition to utilities with a common look, feel, and performance, the Luna release also adds one or two configuration choices — despite the fact that its developers assume that users expect to have choices made for them. This assumption is less irritating than you might expect — the desktop fonts, for example, display well even at the small size at which they appear in the panel, while the icons usually work even for a text-oriented diehard like me. All the same, a desktop is highly personal for those who spend 8-12 hours a day in front of one, and the loudest complaints about elementary OS are likely to concern the lack of choices for fonts, themes, and other customizations. Choosing the wallpaper is unlikely to be enough.

Overall, Pantheon is an immense improvement over the GNOME desktop in elementary OS's first release, transforming it from a derivative into something original. However, the impression Pantheon gives is of a work in progress, of something more than a proof of concept but less than finished. The logical expectation would be for more native applications and more customization in the next release. Meanwhile, Pantheon seems promising, just slightly less than complete.

Looking to the next release

All the same, elementary OS succeeds well enough in development and design that the Luna release has attracted a moderate degree of buzz. According to Foré the new release had some 120,000 downloads in the week after its release, while lead developer Cody Garver notes that the project has some 40 contributors, of which 10-15 are regular committers. By any standards, the project has become a respectable size, and appears to be growing steadily.

Project members are careful to avoid giving details about future plans. However, Foré does reveal that "we are looking into online accounts integration and ways to provide cloud services to our users." In addition, James mentions that "we've begun exploring more responsive design, client-side window decorations, and different ways for apps to interact with the shell."

In the last few years, elementary OS has evolved from a fledgling project to one of the more interesting desktop environments. Not only has it incorporated development and design as much or more as any free desktop — and with far fewer resources than many — but it has gone far further than most Linux distributions in coordinating its pieces into a coherent form. For this reason, project members prefer to refer to elementary OS as a "software platform" rather than a distribution.

That preference may seem like nothing but attitude, but it is hard to argue with that attitude when it has delivered on such ambitious plans. With Luna, elementary OS has exceeded the uncertain promise of its first release and become a project worth watching, flaws and all.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Byfield, Bruce

---

to post comments