elementary OS 0.2: Two Days In

The UI design is good… at least better than GNOME Shell and those absurdly chunky default buttons and title bars.

The UI borrows heavily from Apple… sure, plenty of things are different, but the Apple influence is blatant. Which is exactly why the UI looks better than the rest.

Fonts are a problem. There’s no way to set them, you have to edit configs under /etc. The Latin fonts look great; the Chinese fonts are absolute dogshit, and they’re blurry just like on Fedora.

For input methods, IBus shows a tray icon out of the box; fcitx doesn’t, and I have no idea how to make it. Same story with stuff like shutter — no tray icon, no clue if there’s a proper fix. Hopefully the official release comes with some documentation for this.

Repos are interchangeable with Ubuntu… the WM and main widgets all live in PPAs anyway, and updates won’t break things.

Effects and features run smooth as butter on Intel graphics. Perfect.

All in all: this thing has a solid start. I hope they keep squashing bugs and fleshing out features. Push a bit harder and this could be a distro that actually takes off. Though after looking at the dev roster, I’m constantly worried this project is going to die in a ditch.

Not recommended for daily driving — unless you only use your computer to chat, type, and listen to music… stick with Ubuntu 12.10 for now.