The first thing you notice when booting Elementary OS, called Freya, version 0.3 Beta 1, is how pretty it is. It's a beautiful piece of work, with a light gray and whitish modern interface and an eye-pleasing bitmap for the background, called "Blueprint".
You have a dock at the bottom which you can configure, but not extensively. It works very well and can be resized and made to look white, dark, or transparent. You can easily remove icons by right-clicking them and un-checking them to make them disappear. If you make a mistake and make the wrong one disappear, you can always use the menu, on the top left of the screen, to restore that icon by dragging it back on the dock. The doc also acts as a task manager, with a pointer below the icons to show which program is sunning. All-in-all, well thought out design.
As I mentioned above, this is a very nice looking interface, but there's a hitch, at least for those who love to tweak a desktop: it isn't very customizable. I'm thinking that the devs probably thought that the KISS principle was a good one where their desktop was concerned. So what if you can't tweak the desktop to within an inch of its life? Don't get me wrong, I think choice is good, but some might think there's too much of it; Freya would be for them.
Freya uses Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer, and the install went very well... up to the end when the bootloader was to be written. There was one small hitch, but an important one if you're a newbie: when it got to the part where the grub bootloader was to be installed, I got a message that the installer had crashed, that the bootloader had not been written and that I would not be able to boot Freya. BUMMER! That one might have been a show-stopper had I not been able to correct it.
This happened to me on my main box and on my Lenovo laptop. I tried again to install it on my main box, and the same thing happened again, but this time I rebooted into Manjaro (KDE), my main OS on another SSD, and fired up "grub-customizer". G-C reconfigured the bootloader for Freya; problem solved. Having said that, you can always run Freya from a USB flash drive and still get a good idea what it's about. You can also set up a persistence file on your flash drive and keep your settings on reboot. Moreover, if you're adventurous, you can repair Freya's GRUB "mistake" using the command line.
I rebooted and started running Freya. As I write this, I have the Scratch text editor and the XFCE4 terminal running with htop--more on the terminal later--Chromium web browser with four tabs open, and I'm using about 928 MB of memory; not too shabby, and certainly not as heavy as the 1.2 to 1.5 GB that would be used by Windows 7, 8 or 8.1. The desktop, by-the-way is not a Gnome 3 shell, but a more "traditional" desktop with a modern looking interface.
The system runs pretty fast and is fairly snappy. There isn't a ton of software included, but there's a good selection in the repos and getting more is no problem. I recommend installing "synaptic", which is the best GUI package installer around, in my humble opinion. Freya has the Ubuntu Software Centre, which sucks the bag; again in my humble opinion.
I used synaptic to install the XFCE4-terminal, because the terminal you get with Freya, called the "Pantheon Terminal", just doesn't cut it for me. It has a nice dark interface, which I like, but I can see no way to change the font, nor the colour or the size of the font used. That's a bummer, because some of us "older" folks have a bit of a problem reading those smaller fonts. I hope later editions of this terminal will be more configurable. I use the terminal quite a bit, so decided to download the XFCE4 terminal, although the lxterminal would have done just as well.
In Freya, cycling through programs can be done in two ways that I've discovered: a) though the standard "alt/tab" key combination, which cycles though each window, making the others temporarily disappear, and b) is to move your cursor to the upper-left side of the screen, where you can get a good look at all the open windows on your desktop, kiosk style, and click on the one you wish to switch to.
Freya comes with the Midori web browser. It's light weight, fast and pretty customizable, but I prefer Firefox or Chromium. However, that's a personal choice, not anything negative concerning Midori. Like Gnome's Web, or KDE's Reqonk, I can live without it. Freya also comes with "Scratch", a slimmed down version of Gnome's gedit, which is quite good. Freya uses the "Files" file manager, a stripped down version of Nautilus. Also very nice and fast.
There's a nice system settings program that's located on the dock, which is like Gnome 3's system settings. An odd thing happened as I was using it to test and adjust the sound: the program closed by itself (read: crashed) for no apparent reason. Otherwise, I had no problem tweaking everything I could.
The drop-down menu, which is located at the top left of the screen, on a transparent panel, offers you the choice of viewing only icons to launch programs, or you can change that to a menu with a list on the left side and icons on the right. The panel also sports a calendar located in the middle, and a system area at the far right, which includes a location/language chooser, volume and sound adjuster, a network indicator, and finally at system button for logging off, restarting or shutting down.
Configuring my printer involved getting the proper driver, which I did, and then heading to the Arch wiki, at <https://wiki.archlinux.org/>, and doing a search for DCP-7030 in the search box on the left margin. Arch has a great how-to on this. Ever since I purchased my Brother DCP_7030, I had never been able to get my printer's scanner to work properly in any Linux distro I tried, until I installed Manjaro XFCE, and found a tip on its wiki about the Arch wiki. I followed the instructions and the scanner worked flawlessly the very first time. You can imagine my elation, when I applied the same instructions to Freya and the scanner worked. Dog bless Arch Linux. ;-)
Freya needs a bit more work to fix things like the terminal--unless there really is a way to configure it, and I couldn't find it--and the system setting software, for example. The interface is beautiful, simple and very easy to work with. I predict that Elementary OS will mature into a really nice working desktop, that I would recommend to anyone, especially Linux newbies coming from the Windows or OSX world, although I would caution them to use Luna, a more stable version of Elementary OS, because of Freya's inability to install GRUB.
Freya version 0.3 Beta 1, is based on Ubuntu and Gnome, but specially customized by the Elementary team for ease-of-use. It is, in my humble opinion, a great distro, even though still in beta. If you're looking for something that's pleasing to the eye, simple, not too complicated in the tweaking department, then Freya is for you; or you can try Luna, which is their stable version.
27-Oct-2014
Peace
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