I’m not writing a review of an OS, just sharing my experiences. Friday evening the Studio’s hard disk crashed 🙁
With a new hard disk I decided to try out a new OS — Elementary OS Freya 0.3, launched last week. Freya is pretty impressive. It is based on Ubuntu 14.04, so the awesomeness is carried over (at least I thought so during installation).
The desktop looks clean and will remain so, as you can’t add folders or shortcuts like other desktops. Right-clicking on the desktop has no context menu. There must be another way to add them — haven’t discovered it yet.
The multiple workspace manager is the most elegant I’ve ever seen — smooth and beautiful.
Hot Corners – Yet another cool feature, but I feel that with a few tweaks in the Unity Tweak Tool you get more corners in Ubuntu.
When it comes to Linux, we can’t live without a terminal. I like the way the Elementary OS team worked on the UI and usability of the terminal. The OS seems to have been developed for non-tech users as well as tech users. Ctrl+V gives you a nice warning before you execute commands that need superuser permissions.
Plenty of applications, a nice layout, and a great UI experience. A couple of built-in apps: Geary (mail client), Audience (video player), Midori (lightweight browser), and Maya Calendar with a beautiful notification system.
Well, I can’t live without my set of tools: Skype, LibreOffice, GIMP, Notepad++, Firefox, Chrome, Pidgin, and more.
While setting up the development environment, I found that EasyEngine does not support Elementary OS. Well, that’s not such a big concern.
Looking forward to an update from Rahul & his team. So I’ve had to install the LEMP stack manually.
VirtualBox is good. I set up a Nexus device using Genymotion. Overall system performance is good.
But with my bad habit of using TweetDeck in Chrome + reading in Firefox + development in Notepad++ + GIMP for some graphics and a VM, this beautiful graphical interface is too much for my Dell Studio 15.
I’m logging off from Freya. It is good and shows promising usability. You guys can give it a try.