Elementary 5.0 Juno
the Elementary OS team has been carving itself a fine legacy as building one of the most polished distros ever created for Linux. For its latest release it cemented that by jumping from v0.4 to v5.0, to herald Elementary OS moving from a work-inprogress to an OS ready for daily use.
Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu (find out more about the latest version of that on the right), and stands apart from the crowd by providing a finer crafted, easier to use and more consistent desktop experience. A key part is the custom desktop called Pantheon, that’s been developed over the years using the latest open source technology.
The evolution for 5.0 includes a bunch of exciting enhancements. Night Light introduces display temperature control either manually or based on local sunset/sunrise times. Window tiling automatically snaps windows to variable sized areas for easier workflow. Picture-inpicture apes the Android and web-based trick with any playing video snapping to the corner while you do other tasks. System panels can detect the brightness of the background wallpaper and adjust themselves to be more easily seen. And well over 1,000 icons have been tweaked to make them more consistent.
There’s more tweaks in there, too. Can’t remember that keyboard shortcut? Press the Super Key (some people call it the Windows key) to list common keyboard shortcuts. There’s an enhanced screengrabber built in and Emoji support is offered through the classic Noto Color Emoji set. This release of Elementary OS also took on the auditory world as well retuning the notification sounds.
An area that Elementary OS has spent time perfecting is its selection of bespoke software. Either installed by default or through its pay-what-you-want AppCenter, this enables you to support Elementary OS development while improving your computing experience. You can get a feel for the programs available with the default selection, which include Code (a purpose-built IDE), Files (the file manager), Music (for managing your tunes) and
Photos that enables you to tweak your photo library.