So I distro jump again in hyperdrive, warp speed 9.
This time for nostalgic sake I downloaded elementarys OS 7.1.
What is amazing is how fast eOS installation is. It's faaaaaast. Under 5 min. on my rig. The installation software is sleek and polished, even a bridge troll can install eOS. What I envy eOS for is also it login greeter, very nice.
eOS software center is quiet fast and easy to figure to some extend. Example I need to look in the update tab to find my nvidia drivers ... and hear stops most nice things about eOS. I had to install the driver manually despite the software center downloaded them ... it didn't bother installing them for some kind of reason.
The default browser didn't work so I stood there without a browser and there was no alternative browser in the software center ... what to do? Luckly I'm skilled terminal user and a quick search found epiphany browser and via epiphany I could install google chrome. But I couldn't I need to install an app called Eddy from the software center before I could install .deb packages on eOS.
Now to installing Steam. Steam is gone from the ubuntu repositories so I had to head to steam homepage to grab the .deb but before I could do that I needed to enable i386 libs repositories on elementary, sigh.
Now to the more crucial - theming. Per se, eOS doesn't support 3rd party theming. You have to install eOS tweak from a PPA. The problem is PPA is disabled in eOS so you have to install PPA libs to get it running.
So I get to the point where I'm ready to theme eOS and here comes it to my surprise is that the icons have been hardcoded in to the applications menu
See for yourself:
The Elementary OS developers are firm believers that the user should have no control over the desktop or system. They got very angry when an independent developer distributed a Tweak Tool for eOS and they tried to retaliate against him.
That is why I also prefer KDE (Plasma). I have in the past messed around with the Pantheon ppa that someone created but you end up with a half-baked system. It is like the situation that someone asked about Miller Columns recently like Mac does in File explorer. The end result is that you end up with two 'Files' icons but you could technically blame Gnome Devs for this by renaming the Jules Verne submarine file explorer to 'Files'. (Have you noticed Captain Nemo also makes an appearance in File explorers?)
I had read that Elementary is fully committed to the libawaita toolkit regarding theming. Gnome has pretty much depreciated GTK. Before Elementary was an operating system it was a fork of Nautilus as a response to gnome removing features. I remember using the ppa.
I filled out a bug report regarding the applications-menu not changing icons. And is marked as such - so it was not their intention to not make it un-themeable.
That looks quite all right, actually. I remember trying ElementaryOS but very briefly as they have some strange keyboard shortcut defaults. But I had no idea they were so controlling about their work. Even Nick (from The Linux Experiment YT channel) gave them a negative review after being very fond of it for years.
Damnit. One of the admins on eOS users facebook page is a sad little man. When I pointed out the problem I got, he got aggressive and rude. Time to leave eOS land and say hello to Fedora and Zorin again
That sucks... be sure to record the conversation in case you need to deter other newcomers from moving into to the ElementaryOS as their first point of contact for Linux.
I also really wanted eOS to work, and pantheon too, because I love having a lot of options. After checking out the state of development and how the devs interact with people, I was pretty disappointed. I'm glad we'll be getting Cosmic soon though, that's an exciting new option
I had to use the browser. I could ofcause install another viewer, but wouldn't it defeat the purpose of using their own apps.
I might give eOS 8 a spin when it comes out, but I haven't high hopes that they will fix those annoying things I have encountered. For instans their file-browser doesn't refresh an image file when saved. Pretty annoying when I work with 1000s of .svg files.
yeah that seems pretty bare-bones, and if just the svg issue has been known for over 7 years, I can't imagine eOS 8 will be much of an improvement. Who knows? we might be surprised. I wish they would focus more on the DE side of things and just put all their time into Pantheon. I just imagine in the future a polished Pantheon with a feature-complete Asahi Linux kernel running on an M2 Mac and it sounds pretty cool.
All I can say on this topic is it is a real shame that PearOS came to a demise. The author David Tavares claims he sold it to a 3rd Party. Personally, I think Apple forced his hand - but I guess we will never know.
