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Without a doubt, Elementary OS is one of the slickest, shiniest Linux distributions out there. Its Pantheon desktop is often compared to macos, and more often than not that’s meant as a compliment. Elementary OS aims for beauty through simplicity, a nod to the oft-shoehorned Antoine de Saint-exupéry morsel, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. So instead of layers of unnecessary configuration and options, Elementary OS goes for sane defaults that people wouldn’t want to change.
Elementary has its own applications (you can of course add anything from the Ubuntu repos) that synergise with its delightful desktop. Apart from a cohesive style, these are pretty unique in that they save their state automatically. In theory that means you should never have to save your work, but that’s a dangerous habit to get into. Elementary has it’s own Appcenter (it’s what Pop!_os’s app store is based on) where you can find any number of applications to augment your desktop. It has a pay-what-youwant model, which might irk the ‘free as in beer’ crowd, but developers need to eat too.
Back in October, Elementary OS’S versioning scheme grew up, as it jumped from 0.4 to 5.0. This point release, codenamed Hera, snuck out a couple of months later. And we figured it was well worth including on the disc. There’s a new Onboarding greeter app to help new users set up common tasks and show them where the documentation’s at. Accessibility features have been tweaked and settings applets can now be found straight from the Applications Menu search box. The Calendar, Photos and Music applications have all been revamped.
This release incorporates Ubuntu’s 18.04.3 HWE stack. There’s now support for Flatpak applications in Appcenter, and if the Flatpak you want hasn’t made it to the app store, then there’s a tool called Sideload you can use to, well, sideload it. Elementary committed to Flatpak back in April, citing its sandboxing and decentralisation features as important in a world where traditional packaging no longer cuts it.
There’s no shortage of perfectly good Ubuntu-based distros around, but Elementary OS is one of only a handful we’d say are doing something genuinely unique, innovative and quite pretty.