My dear Watson

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

So I recently was introduced to Elementary, and it looks awesome and like something that could really pull me from Windows at home.  Anyone else running Elementary and have any feedback?  

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's Debian based so it should be able to run Steam well enough too, right?  

I was surprised when I started looking through and didn't seem to notice any chatter about Elementary, it seems to be taking off as I start digging for Linux podcasts and things of that nature.

Thank in advance,

Darm

2

Elementary is pretty old tech, it comes with kernel 3.2, which is basically defunct on PC's.

The performance, especially in terms of filesystem features and performance, scheduling, power management and advanced graphics performance, suffers too much for it to be an interesting distro for desktop PC use.

If you want Debian, don't go for a bloatware spin-off like elementary, just go for the real thing, and go for Debian Testing branch, it's up-to-date enough to have good performance and features, and you still have all the options open source is so great for, whilst keeping the system as lightweight as possible for the configuration you want.

If you want close to Debian, and good medium-modern performance, go for Xubuntu, it'll be a whole lot faster than elementary, have more features, and be easy to set up and configure to your liking.

If you want the best possible performance and better XFS support and better power management and support for the latest GPU's and UEFI's, go for a bleeding edge distro. A lot of gaming users really like Manjaro, which comes preconfigured with Steam and has support for proprietary graphics drivers, it's pretty lightweight for being full-featured, it's fast and stable as it is based on Arch, and it comes with native software center support for the Arch User Respository, which means that a lot more software is readily and easily available.

I'm just not sure that there is a real market for elementary, it just seems like a wanna-be-Windows type of linux project, that is limiting instead of expanding the possibilities of open source and linux.

3

Thanks for the feedback.  I've toyed with having a replacement to my Windows desktop in the past and didn't really gain any traction due to a lack of time to really try different distros.  

Elementary does look like an OSX wanna-be, but it looks better than OSX to me and that's what got me thinking about trying it in the first place.

I've seen many people talk about Manjaro, and if that's more gaming friendly than most, I think it'll be a good place to move to next.  Hell, I may have to just start downloading distros and putting them on USB to test before I make a decision.  "Paralysis of analysis" kicks in for me from time to time.

I'll let you know when I get something up and running, do a sort of 30 day challenge or something of the sorts.

4

I like Elementary and have installed it for a few different people. Seems to boot up fast and perform well on everything I've installed it on. If you don't want to use kernel 3.2, you can open a terminal and enter sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-raring. That will download and install kernel 3.8 if I remember correct. 

I say go ahead and install it. 

5

How well do you think any version will play with being a VM?  I use Hyper-V a lot to test different ideas at work and home, but it's Windows working in a Windows-built VM environment.  I think tossing different distros on VMs and testing/playing with them that way will be the best way for me to experience them.  Thoughts?

6

if i recall correctly, Hyper-V plays "nice" with linux guests

7

For a comparison, the latest stable kernel on Arch linux is 3.14.2. That's six (6) versions ahead.

EDIT: watched the demo video on their homepage, it's funny. Anything that gets people away from MAC OS X or Windows is good.