First experiences with elementary OS

I finally decided to try installing elementary OS Luna on my main PC, an Asus laptop.

Writing the ISO to an USB key was relatively pain-free once I figured out how to use the tool included in Ubuntu for that purpose. After rebooting, and mashing F-keys randomly in search of the one throwing me into BIOS setup, I eventually found my way into elementary OS’s ‘live’ environment that allowed me to try out the desktop before installing.

The elementary OS installer is based on Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer, I gather. It occured to me how archaic “partition tables” seem in this day and age. It’s the 21st century, and we still need to compartmentalize our harddrives up into little silos for each OS to reside inside? Really? How would I be able to decide now if I need 300 GB for Windows and 100 GB for elementary OS or 300 GB for elementary OS and 100 GB for Windows in the future? I’ve tried carving up such partitions before, only to later regret that I hadn’t divided the space differently. Alright – it may be that Microsoft has made a push to make dual-booting more difficult altogether with UEFI. But it still ought to be possible at least for different Linux distributions to coexist peacefully and dynamically on the same partition.

Also, the installer generally lacks the polish of the rest of elementary OS. But I imagine that’s an item on the to-do list.

Once installed, I was happy to see that elementary OS really does feel smoother than Ubuntu, for the most part. The little transition animations in Pantheon, the desktop manager, are one of the first signs that these people must know what they are doing. Also, the horrid “Dash” thing of Ubuntu – my main motivation for seeking other pastures – has been thrown out completely, and replaced with a much sleeker popup area that shows launcher icons of a handful of useful applications beneath a search field that lets the user find anything missing from the selection.

One bizarre issue I am still struggling with, though, is that I have no right mouse button (RMB)! I’m using a trackpad, but if I click its RMB, it’s just registered as a left mouse button (LMB) click. I’ve never had this issue in Ubuntu, as far as I remember.

I am also unable to copy and paste text in pantheon-terminal. When pressing Ctrl-C or Ctrl-V, it sends the keypress to bash instead of copying or pasting, respectively.

On a more sentimental note, the lack of a way to show the desktop (or even minimize windows!), is making me claustrophobic. You know how liberating a day in the woods can feel after a long week in the city? Sometimes I just need to see that wallpaper on the desktop, man, but Luna won’t let me do it.

The worst problem I ran into, however, was when I tried installing the restricted Nvidia drivers, using the “Additional Drivers” application. After rebooting, as it said I had to, the desktop was broken. After the elementary OS logo boot splash, I just got a textual init screen and then nothing. The machine just kept showing the lines of init text, never getting to the graphical login screen. I Ctrl-Alt-F1’ed into a console, issued a ‘reboot’ command, and tried again. Same thing happened – only this time I was unable to Ctrl-Alt-F1 out into a console! I was stuck. In my view, this is terrible. Failing is one thing – all software does it, especially complex system software. But not leaving the user a way out, a way back … that’s unforgiveable.

I even tried booting into recovery mode (which shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place), but this also failed. The lines of init text was different and more verbose, but it also eventually just stopped – halted, leaving me stuck. If I had been really desperate, I could have booted into my Ubuntu partition, and attempted to clean up the elementary OS setup from there, but that would be a ridiculous amount of work for what ought to have been a simple task – installing a driver for a graphics card. So, at this point, I just had enough, and reinstalled Luna from scratch. Fortunately, I had not done many customizations of the installation yet, so nothing was lost. But I am still without proper drivers. And I am not wanting to screw up my Luna installation once more by careless experimentation.