It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around.
I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue.
Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.
There were commits in 2024:
https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories
Just one tiny project. The rest of the Etoile codebase hasn't been touched for at least a decade. Ofc it's not the maintainers fault - it's a FOSS project so imo it's bad form to bemoan release cycles if not contributing as projects are hard even if fully funded.
What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished
Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons.
Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.
Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
> Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users
Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure.
It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such.
With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.
The churn is real. For this reason, I’ve thought for a while now that a DE that intentionally locks its overall design and feature set once it hits 1.0, with 95% of engineering effort being put towards optimization and bug fixes afterwards would do well. A DE that doesn’t unexpectedly change even over the course of many years is massively attractive to many.
Probably the closest to this that exists now are XFCE and Cinnamon, but it’s for the wrong reason (those projects’ lack of resources).
Elementary was/is perfectly positioned to adopt Objective C and now that Swift is open source, it too.
Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.
Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.
I used it in an old EEE PC laptop because of its lower resource usage compared with Ubuntu.
Elementary is (or was at the time of testing) wasteful of screen real state, there are huge spacers on the toolbars and in a low resolution screen it's just ridiculous.
It could look good and also have sensible design. It only looked good and had IMHO bad design.