First week with Elementary Luna. Review of the best Ubuntu based distribution

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Date: 2013-08-26 01:13:35 00:00


Introduction

I have installed a week ago with Elementary Luna, if you like GNU/Linux operating Linux, then you should have heard about Elementary Luna but if not, I will tell you that Elementary Luna is a new GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 12.04, the last Long term Ubuntu released.

Elementary is directly based on Ubuntu repositories, it has added some PPAs to support the look it has, so actually Elementary is Ubuntu 12.04 with another look and feel. But the look of it is what is great about it. Take a look at this screenshots.

Elementary Luna GNU/Linux

Applications

Email

Elementary uses Geary as its email application. It is almost pre-configured to work with Gmail, which is the most used email service these days. It works as a native Gmail application, something most of stand alone email applications does not do, and you have to manually modify the default settings to work the way Gmail works.

With Elementary, you have labels support out of the box, archive instead of delete when you delete any email. Well, that is something I do not like, I do not like to archive emails I do not want to keep. I like to delete emails, why to keep spam emails in your mail box?

Because I use Exchange server for my emails, I had to install Thunderbird and ExQuilla (a plugin that adds support for Exchange to Thunderbird)

Music

The music app that comes with Elementary Luna is simple, clean, easy to use and does exactly what it should. I use iTunes a lot to play my tunes, but after the last upgrade it got too complacated, I love minimalistic things so I love how Music looks like. It comes with equalizer, support for album covers, similar songs automatic list and iPod sync.

Text editor

Scratch also looks great, minimalistic look, syntax support and everything you may need from a simple text editor.

Web browser

Midori is the web browser that comes installed, it uses WebKit rendering engine, the same rendering engine that powers Google Chrome and Apple's Safari. It works well, but I had to install Firefox, because it is my favorite one.

Messenger

Elementary Luna comes with Empathy, that is an app for IRC, Facebook, Jabber/XMPP and some more, so you are pretty well covered on that field.

What it lacks, is an Office Application, I really do not know why it comes with none installed, so I had to install LibreOffice to work with documents.

Conclusion

Elementary Luna is of course a stable GNU/Linux distribution as it is based on Ubuntu LTS 12.04, but it gives it a complete new look, a modern minimalistic look, something I like a lot. Actually I love my Mac, and Elementary looks a lot like it, maybe even better.