elementary OS Afterthoughts

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elementary OS is an elegant Linux distro marketed for minimalists (who don't tweak as much) and new users that want to try Linux. I used it for roughly a week and I'm still liking it. I wanted to share some of my afterthoughts, so to speak, about how I feel about the OS. I watched a few more YouTube videos and some of my thoughts are voiced by many others, mainly the lack of the minimize button and the good and bad things about the AppCenter.

The Good

Designed by UX Designers: A Russian YouTuber by the name of Aleksey Samoilov posted a video (in Russian) where he said that elementary OS is elegant because it's designed by UX designers rather than programmers. I think he's the only one that said this but I do agree with what he said. To me, there are two kinds of Linux users. The hard-core, tweaker and the (maybe) new, more on the boat on how UX is designed on Android or iPhone. I'm the latter due the organic growth from the former (although I wasn't a hard-core user).

Pay What You Want: I like the idea of paying what you want (or what you can) as a way to fund the OS and/or the apps. It's better than all or nothing.

Customizing Plank: Plank is the dock of elementary OS and the YouTuber Nick of The Linux Experiment had a video that showed how to do it. It's so simple but you need to know the keyboard shortcut to get into the settings. Ctrl + right click on Plank is that said shortcut. Plank comes with some nice settings including themes, where one the screen edges it sits, and other things. The only thing that I changed is the theme to transparent. To me, transparency just follows better with the main theme of any OS, including mobile OS's, and it's modern.

Minimize Button: Do you really need it? Think about it. You don't need it!

There is a video that talks about why you don't need to minimize button. There is other ways to minimize windows such as clicking on the icon on Plank, moving windows to different workspaces, Alt + Tab (Alt +Shift + Tab to cycle backwards) to cycle between windows, or scrolling between windows from the icon on Plank if you have multiple windows of the same app. That video converted me into using all three methods, even though I already rely on Alt + Tab to cycle between windows.

Picture-In-Picture: I tend to not have any reason to use workspaces as I have other ways to manage windows. The main on is the always on top option but that has changed with elementary OS, at least with watching videos. On this OS, there is a mode called Picture-In-Picture. This mode allows you to select a window or a part of one and it will stick on top of any window, including the desktop. You can even resize it. It makes watching YouTube and Twich easier without the black outline or other parts of the pages.

The Bad

There is only one thing that is a downside outside the two that I talked about in my first post.

AppCenter: This is one of the issues that many voiced which is there is no way to know what you have purchased. On Ubuntu and it's favors, you can use your Ubuntu One account to log in and it would be nice to have it on elementary OS. I think I understand why it's not a feature because it's a privacy concern. That I can understand. If it's something else, anyone is welcome to correct me.

Other Notes