elementary Blog

This is a big update for a relatively small community distro. Kudos to the team.

A summary of some of the cooler features:

Performance: General performance improvements on all hardware resulting from optimizing for Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi - namely, reducing and asynchronizing inter-process communication between desktop components, removing unused code, and reducing disk I/O.

Firmware: Linux Vendor Firmware Service now built-in, enabling firmware updates from within the OS.

Flatpak: all-in on flatpak, all AppCenter apps are flatpaks, as well as some Elementary apps like Web.

Portals: apps must explicitly request permission to get access to files or interact with other apps. Can tweak these permissions in System Settings.

Mail: The Mail app now sandboxes html emails.

Multi-Touch: Extended from supporting just desktop to various apps now too.

Multi-Tasking: Better hot corners + new window and workspace controls.

CalDav: Tasks and Calendar now designed around the CalDav format, making importing and sharing of tasks and calendar items with other CalDav apps easier.

Dark Theme: system-wide, applies to GTK apps too.

Terminal: smart-paste protection extended from sudo pastes to multi-line pastes.

More OEM/Vendor friendly:

- Installer is simplified and streamlined - network connectivity, user account creation, and updates moved out of the installer and into the installed OS. Better for vendors & OEMs.

- Startup is intentionally non-Elementary-branded,…

Yeah - I mean certainly home folder with restrictions would be good. Things link dotfiles in home and ~/.ssh should certainly not be accessible or editable by a sandboxed application without knowledge.

I think the Downloads, Documents and Movies folders people tend to have etc. those major sub-folders would be enough for normal use.

Also, perhaps file type limits could be imposed that mean at that files are only accessible to apps that can open them. Of course, I'd want my text editor to be able to open files across root file system, if I open it as root - so I can see how quickly a person can want sandboxing, and then also want none - but the less apps with privileged access, the better.

Also I think some people had hopes it would be closer to IOS level sandboxing, which is heavily restricted on file access, and frankly can be annoying because of it, but does have the security benefit at least.

Also, the security update gripe is significant. The isolation of packages only matters if it works. Like at least if I run stuff myself inside container, I can choose to update the underlying OS and force certain packages etc. at the same time as sandboxing, and mount only certain folders if I actually need them.

I think it's hard to make it both simple for users and powerful enough provide the levels of granular access I'd expect for context specific sandboxing. I would want a principle of least required privilege, with some ability to escalate it (like Android asks me all the…

I don't have eOS as a daily driver (I've got the Pantheon desktop on top of Ubuntu as a chroot environment on my Chromebook and a full Elementary VM on another laptop), but I've been playing with it for some time.

One thing that really irks me about the OS is the designers' reluctance to actually let you customize anything. For instance, the lack of a minimize button really bothered me, and I ended up having to install a third-party program called elementaryTweaks just to restore that functionality. The designers have outwardly refused to incorporate any of that and have repeatedly defended the decision to not give us a minimize button:

http://blog.elementary.io/post/131034577721/will-any-of-the-options-added-by-elementary-tweaks#notes

http://blog.elementary.io/post/130282384916/i-was-wondering-if-you-guys-are-going-to-put-a#notes

To me, that reeks of Apple's walled-garden "We know better than you do what you want" attitude.

> Similarly, you can just Ctrl+V to paste in the terminal instead of having to work around with extra modifier keys.

– that's a bit dangerous; Ctrl-V is normally used to "escape"/make literal the following keypress, or do block select in vim.

The notification-on-long-running-process looks very handy though (I've been using https://gist.github.com/unhammer/01c65597b5e6509b9eea , but of course clicking it doesn't put me back in the right tmux window). And the "energy-sucking apps" indication mentioned in http://blog.elementary.io/post/152626170946/switching-from-macos-the-basics looks very handy. (I've been considering creating wrapper for Firefox that Ctrl-Z's it when it's minimized …)

Is anyone running the Elementary DE (or parts of it) on Ubuntu? Does it work OK, or do you have to run the whole OS for it to be worth it?

It's things like [1] that really irk me.
Yes, they're working 'hard', yes they deserve compensation, no, there isn't any license conflicts (that I'm aware of) that would make selling eOS illegal, it's the fact that they wrote this justification to make you feel like a thief.

Really, it's just an ubuntu clone with a pretty osx-like gui. This isn't really anything amazing or new, and it makes it seem like they're trying to tap into the elitist osx market. If that is indeed what they want, they should really check out [2]

So it's not really the software that's bad, really it's all what you can get on any other distro with a little work, it's their attitude about it.

[1] http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments
[2] http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/

Looking at the Bountysource docs, it looks like users can offer bounties. Do you know if it has a Github integration that allows developers to post some sort of price schedule, or to request a bounty on a given issue?

Edit: It looks like there are red flags around Bountysource too:

https://blog.elementary.io/goodbye-bountysource-hello-github-sponsors/

"If no Solution is accepted within two years after a Bounty is posted, then the Bounty will be withdrawn and the amount posted for the Bounty will be retained by Bountysource."

"In December, 2017, Bountysource was acquired by a cryptocurrency company called CanYa who redesigned the Bountysource site and service with a new cryptocoin focus."