elementary 5 "Juno"

Bryan Lunduke — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 12:30:00 +0000

A review of the elementary distribution and an interview with its founders.

In the spring of 2014 (nearly five years ago), I was preparing a regular presentation I give most years—where I look at the bad side (and the good side) of the greater Linux world. As I had done in years prior, I was preparing a graph showing the market share of various Linux distributions changing over time.

But, this year, something was different.

In the span of less than two years, a tiny little Linux distro came out of nowhere to become one of the most watched and talked about systems available. In the blink of an eye, it went from nothing to passing several grand-daddies of Linux flavors that had been around for decades.

This was elementary. Needless to say, it caught my attention.

Figure 1. elementary 5 "Juno"

In the years that followed, I've interviewed elementary's founders on a few occasions—for articles, videos or podcasts—and consistently found their vision, dedication and attitudes rather intriguing.

Then in 2016, I was at a Linux conference—SCaLE (the Southern California Linux Expo). One bright, sunshiny morning, I found myself heading from my hotel room down to the conference floor. On my way, I got it in my head that I really could use some French toast. I had a hankering—a serious one. And when Lunduke gets a hankering, no force in the cosmos can stop him (he says, switching to talking about himself in the third person seemingly at random).

Somehow or another, I ended up convincing the elementary crew (four of them, also at SCaLE, with a booth to promote their system) to join me on my French toast quest.

After searching the streets of downtown Pasadena, we found ourselves in a small, but packed, diner—solving French Toast Crisis 2016—and allowing us to chat and get to know each other, in person, a bit better.

These were...kids—in their mid-20s, practically wee babies.

But, I tell you, they impressed me. Their vision for what elementary was—and what it could be—was clear. Their passion was contagious. It was hard to sit with them, in that cramped little diner, and not feel excited and optimistic for what the future held.

And, what's more, they were simply nice people. They oozed goodness and kindness. Their spirit had not yet been crushed by a string of IT managers that make soul-crushing a hobby.

They were the future of desktop Linux (or at least a rather big part of it). This was evident, even back then. And, that wasn't just the French toast talking.

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The State of Desktop Linux 2019

Bryan Lunduke — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 12:30:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

A snapshot of the current state of Desktop Linux at the start of 2019—with comparison charts and a roundtable Q&A with the leaders of three top Linux distributions.

I've never been able to stay in one place for long—at least in terms of which Linux distribution I call home. In my time as a self-identified "Linux Person", I've bounced around between a number of truly excellent ones. In my early days, I picked up boxed copies of S.u.S.E. (back before they made the U uppercase and dropped the dots entirely) and Red Hat Linux (before Fedora was a thing) from store shelves at various software outlets.

Side note: remember when we used to buy Operating Systems—and even most software—in actual boxes, with actual physical media and actual printed manuals? I still have big printed manuals for a few early Linux versions, which, back then, were necessary for getting just about everything working (from X11 to networking and sound). Heck, sometimes simply getting a successful boot required a few trips through those heavy manuals. Ah, those were the days.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE—I spent a good amount of time living in the biggest distributions around (and many others). All of them were fantastic. Truly stellar. Yet, each had their own quirks and peculiarities.

As I bounced from distro to distro, I developed a strong attachment to just about all of them, learning, as I went, to appreciate each for what it was. Just the same, when asked which distribution I recommend to others, my brain begins to melt down. Offering any single recommendation feels simply inadequate.

Choosing which one to call home, even if simply on a secondary PC, is a deeply personal choice.

Maybe you have an aging desktop computer with limited RAM and an older, but still absolutely functional, CPU. You're going to need something light on system resources that runs on 32-bit processors.

Or, perhaps you work with a wide variety of hardware architectures and need a single operating system that works well on all of them—and standardizing on a single Linux distribution would make it easier for you to administer and update all of them. But what options even are available?

To help make this process a bit easier, I've put together a handy set of charts and graphs to let you quickly glance and find the one that fits your needs (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Distribution Comparison Chart I

Figure 2. Distribution Comparison Chart II

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elementary OS

elementary 5 "Juno"

The State of Desktop Linux 2019