Elementary OS 6.0 “Odin”
64-bit
Well that was a surprise. Here we were thinking there’d be no room for Elementary OS on the DVD, but it turns out it just fitted. With all of 4MB to spare. So excited were we to achieve this that we forgot we can’t ISO-boot Elementary without making a new initramfs. And said filesystem would occupy significantly more than 4MB. So you’ll have to write it to a USB stick (or DVD if you really must) yourself. As always, our DVD support pages have all the answers.
Before you do that though, we’d like to take a minute to remind you that Elementary OS should be considered a paid product. The price is ‘what you can’, which includes $0, but please don’t think our giving it away on the cover means you shouldn’t pay something. The Elementary OS team relies primarily on payments from the download screen (and the app store) to keep their efforts funded, so if you’d like it do get yourself to https://elementary.io and send ’em some dollars.
We won’t be including Elementary OS on the digital download this issue, since that would make it too easy for people to download for free. Digital subscribers can download this directly (as they can any distro), and indeed pay for it. We hope you understand the rationale here – please do write in with your feelings. But not if you don’t understand ‘free as in beer’ vs ‘free as in speech’. It’s really not that hard.
We’ve been waiting a long time for this release, since not long after Ubuntu 20.04 came out in fact. Let’s just say it’s well worth the wait.
Elementary OS has always been stunning; people say it looks like macOS but we say it looks much better. Apart from the new dark theme, you can add your own accent colours now, or even have one automatically chosen based on the current wallpaper.
Applications in Elementary OS’s bespoke AppCenter are all packaged as Flatpaks, with strict security settings enforced. In fact, noncurated apps, which are loaded through the Sideload helper, are subject to these restrictions too. Go to Settings > Applications > Permissions to see what apps can do, and if it concerns you, to revoke some of those permissions. Besides security, efficiency is an important focus this release. Thanks to touchpad gestures everyday tasks become a little less awkward. Carefullydirected three finger swipes can summon the Multitasking View or switch workspaces.