 I've never been a big fan of elementary OS. It's just a distribution that has not been targeted towards my likes and tastes. I don't care for the aesthetic of it. I don't care for how restrictive it is. I don't really particularly care for their model of distributing software. I have all these problems with elementary OS and I'm on record saying all of them. But I've never really thought that elementary OS was for me anyways. I'm not one of those people who enjoy the macOS aesthetic anymore I used to. I don't really care for it anymore. And I also think that the elementary OS implementation of the macOS thing is a little bit dated. They're still doing the skeuomorphic thing. Their icons are kind of terrible. And add on top of all that the restrictions that they place on top of review and TP from customizing it has always really turned me away even though it doesn't really matter because like I said I don't think elementary OS 6 was ever for me anyways. But it is a very popular distribution. And people have been waiting for a very long time for the next big release of elementary OS and it's finally here. Elementary OS 6 was released today and what I thought I would do is go through and install it and play around with it for a little while. Now this is not going to be a traditional review. I'm not going to go through and list out all the applications that has installed by default. I'm not going to go through every single little new brand new feature. If you want to see something like that the Linux experiment just posted a video that has all the new features and stuff that you should go watch his stuff. He does a way better job than I ever could. I just want to see what elementary OS 6 is all about. And I just want to see whether or not it changes my mind on if elementary OS is for me or not. So let's go ahead and jump into the installer. Now apparently this installer is completely new. So we'll just go ahead and run through this quickly. Yep. That works. And that works. And we'll do this here. So you can go through and actually try this if you want to. Or we'll just go ahead and install it. I'm assuming the custom install will allow you to change the partitions. Yep. Okay. So we'll just do this. And then we'll choose the hard disk that we want to do. Erase and install. And then I don't need to encrypt a virtual machine thing. But normally I do. So we'll just wait for this to install and see how it looks. It looks like it's going fairly fast. But we'll see if it continues on like that. And I'll cut away. Okay. That took about five minutes or so. And I'm going to go ahead and hit shut down. And normally you could just go ahead and remove your installation device and hit restart. But I'm going to hit shut down simply because I have to remove the ISO from the virtual machine. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. And then I will hit start again. And we'll see how the boot up time is. That was pretty good. Now this is what you'll see on the first load of any elementary OS because it saves all the user creation and stuff like that for after the install. Now I really wish that when you chose a language for the installer, it would remember it when you install got past installer. So it while it does select English, you shouldn't have to select it again because your your language is not going to change from the installer to the install. It should be the same. Same thing with a keyboard layout. We already selected that. Why do we have to select it again? But so I'm going to put my name in here and we'll save use that username and then we'll create a very strong password. And hit finish setup. And then we'll log in. Again, that login screen was very, very pretty, right? It's elementary OS is very much an aesthetically designed desktop environment. So be prepared for some really pretty stuff. Except for the icons, that kinds are still ugly. All right, so let's go ahead and hit next. So this is their welcome screen. So this is what I'm really looking forward to the dark mode. The light mode should not even be an option, in my opinion. You can also choose accent color. So I'm going to choose red. That looks really weird. Because it kind of shades everything. This you can actually choose kind of I wonder what this last one actually is. Automatic based on wallpaper. That's cool. All right, so let's choose green then green green look better. All right, good. Next. Nightlight. That's kind of like the thing will take blue light out of your monitor to save your eyes. Automatically delete old temporary files and trash files. Sure. Online accounts. That's probably going to be an account. What can what can we add? Caldav and IMAP. That's it. Okay. So no Google, nothing like that. I mean, not a huge deal, but you'd expect to see a little bit more than that. At least exchange probably would be at least something that we should try to implement. So next here, we'll do, we'll look at the app center later. And then we're done. So after you get past the login screen, this is what elementary 6 looks like. Now, if you're thinking that this looks an awful lot like elementary OS 5, you'd be right. And it does. The icons haven't changed all that much at all. There are a few changes, and there's one new app down here that will go over here in a second. But otherwise, it looks like elementary OS. So if you're expecting some grand change, you're going to be disappointed. And I don't think I'm disappointed elementary 6 look has always looked fine. I think that the the old chroma aesthetic is kind of dated, like I said before. But for the most part, with a new dark theme, if we open up the file application here, which isn't actually in the dock for some reason, I mean, that's a weird choice. We actually have to go up here to the thing and type in files in order to get to files. Why isn't it seems like the file manager should be docked in the dock by default, but whatever. Anyways, with the new dark theme, I think the look and feel is actually pretty good. I enjoy this dark theme. It's not the most original dark theme in the world. This is just a dark version of Adawaita or whatever it is. However you pronounce it, I don't know. It's basically the same as that. The icons and the folder for the folders is still just I mean, these things are ugly. I mean, you got to change these. These are horrible. Yeah, those aren't good. But moving beyond that, you still can't minimize a window from the window. You actually have to go down here and click on it in order to minimize it, which is just the dumbest thing in the world. If you're going to have a floating window manager slash desktop environment to not be able to minimize something is just, I mean, at least easily is still not a great design choice. And I understand they're going for the whole Apple thing. They're trying to copy Apple and Apple does the same thing. Or at least, if I remember right, they do the same thing after after they get went to the whole whole screen thing. In Mac OS, they got rid of the minimize button. That seems like that something that actually happened. But yeah, not being able to minimize except for having to go all the way down here and click up click the icon is kind of a tortuous user experience. But I'm being negative right off the bat because I like I've always had a negative feel towards elementary OS, and that's going to color everything in this video. I'm sure it is. It's a flaw that I have that colors my association of everything with the elementary OS. So I'm going to try to be I'm going to try to find some things that I like. So I like the dark theme. I've always liked this kind of dark theme. I think it should be default, but I'm glad that they let you choose right off the bat. They don't bury it in a setting, like some distros do some distros that give you the option bury it in the settings panel. And you never know what's there unless you go digging for it. And genome doesn't let you change the theme at all. So this is definitely a great way of doing it. I like that web welcome app. So there we go. I found something positive to say. I don't want to be negative about the whole thing because if I sit here and say, well, this is stupid. These icons are ugly. You need to change this. You need to change that. I just come across as an asshole, you know, so I don't want to be that guy. But let's go ahead and look around a little bit more here. So like I said, I'm not going to go through all the new features. I'm not going to go through all the new applications or all the applications. If you want that kind of stuff, you should look at Linux experiment. He did a way better job, but I'm going to go through just some of these things just to see if I can see some of the new features, see if there's anything here that kind of catches my eye. So we'll open up the terminal first. Now my friend terminal for life. He just hopped to elementary us and he was complaining about the tabs in the terminal. And I agree. If you only have one tab, it shouldn't show up. Granted, I don't know how you they would then let you know that tabs exist. So maybe they'd have to move this plus up here to the top. I'm not sure, but I think genome terminal does it right. Good on terminal. If I remember, could be just pulling this out of my ass, but genome terminal by default has a like a little like a plus icon up here in the top bar and the tabs don't show up. So you know the tabs exist, but they don't take up space if you're not actually using them also close. So you like if you open up a new tab here and then you close it. You can like get back to that closed tab with a history. That's kind of cool. I guess I wonder is H top installed. It is each top is installed. So if I went and open up a new tab and then closed this one here and closed it and then went over here to the history thing. If I open that back up. Okay. That's cool. Okay. That's not something you see in any other terminal. I don't think being able to basically reopen an application. Now you'll notice that it's not actually running, right? It says it's killed. So it just shows it kind of in the background. So I guess that's not as impressive as I originally thought it was. If it actually reopened up the thing that was running in the background or in that tab, that would have been cool. So that didn't actually reopen H top. It just opened up another tab. So yeah, that's, I mean, I can see some situations where maybe that would be useful, but if it's not actually going to reopen up what was running, I don't know, it seems kind of useless to me. That's another thing that they kind of do here is that this thing here kind of takes up space. It could be moved up here and you could get rid of some of this chrome by getting rid of the tabs. If you only have one tab and you move this up here and then you would only have the top bar. So it'd look a little cleaner. I'm not sure what exactly you would be searching for. Like if you had a whole bunch of tabs and one of them was running H top and you were in another tab and you searched for H top, I guess. What does the search actually do? I'm very confused. I'm not aware of another terminal that actually has search. You know, like, obviously the terminal has search find, locate, those kind of things. But that's researching the file system. This documents. No, I mean, so what exactly am I supposed to be searching for? That's really weird. I don't understand what that's for. Probably something that I just can't get my head around. Settings here, you can change the color of it, you can zoom in, zoom out, natural copy and paste. So you can just use control V and control C. That's kind of cool. If you wanted that in any other terminal, you'd have to remap them. So that's kind of neat. I probably wouldn't have that on though, because I'm so used to control shift C, control shift V, but it's cool that it's an option. Okay, let's get let's close this. Okay, so that's the terminal. Let's go ahead and look at something different here. So supposedly they've gone through and they've switched all their applications to flat pack. So if you are someone who wants all of your application sandboxed, you can use elementary OS and be sure that all of your applications are going to be in the flat pack container. And it will also allow you if you install something from flat hub to to kind of enable that repository. It doesn't that doesn't happen by default. But you can install it pretty much whatever you want from flat hub. And that's a good thing because elementary OS six is based on Ubuntu LTS 20.04. Now if you're thinking, well that's pretty old, it is pretty old. And we are just a few months out from the next LTS. So they're quite a bit behind in terms of software and kernels and all that kind of stuff. So they will continue to get hardware enablement support. So elementary OS should work fine on newer hardware, even, you know, a year from now, two years from now. But the software is still going to be quite a bit behind. So the fact that they're basing this on flat pack will allow you to go through and get the newer applications and stuff like that. It's going to be a good saver for them, because they are quite a bit behind. This is kind of nice because I am in a virtual box and they actually recommend the drivers that I would need to get things up and running. They probably do the same thing for like Nvidia and other kind of drivers that you might need as well. So that's cool. Other than that, I don't need to go through that. So what I'm actually quite curious about, because it used to be in order to install something from using apt, you'd have to enable it. So sudo apt install them. And it will allow me to do that. Okay. Like I said, it used to be that you'd have to enable that in order to get that to run. So the fact that you can actually go through and install stuff from the terminal now is a good improvement. I think they fixed that in like five dot one, I might be wrong. So that might be an old change. Now supposedly when that stopped running, I was supposed to get a notification, but I didn't see the notification. So maybe it doesn't run or maybe it doesn't give you a notification when a command stops running. I don't know. It's supposed to other than that. Most of the stuff here is the same as it was before. Now, this icon here is always like, why are you trying to steal the adobe loco? It's really weird, but whatever. The tasks is the new application for this time. So this is supposedly trying to emulate Apple tasks on the Mac and on the iPhone. It looks pretty. Supposedly it doesn't have recurring tasks yet. So that would be pretty useless for me. There is an application in the store called planner or supposedly interesting. It's supposed to be there. Productivity maybe, okay, because planner is developed from the fact that it's not in the store anymore. It's really weird. Finance, education, development, games, graphics, internet, math, science, engineering, nearing media production, office system. Maybe it's maybe in office. Okay, wait a minute. Let's look at here is a, okay. So we don't get LibreOffice or anything like that either. Okay, so you search for LibreOffice. It's not there. So their application store is kind of lagging and more so than what it used to be. It feels like before LibreOffice was there, it feels like it. That might not be true, but for sure planner was there and that doesn't seem like it's there anymore. Maybe developers have to opt into the whole flat pack thing. Let's go through the accessories. There's not a lot here. Let's go back to hearing, look at the graphics. Gimp, not there. Keta, not there. Any of that kind of stuff? Not in evidence. Now you can add that stuff because like I said, this will support FlatHub if you try to install it. But the fact that it's not some of the biggest names in terms of applications just aren't available in their store is kind of shocking actually. Now I understand they're trying to cultivate an app store like feel where developers have to opt into it. That's going to severely limit the number of applications that are actually available in the store. So if you want to install any of those things, you're going to have to install it via the terminal. That's interesting, especially for a desktop environment and distro that are aimed towards new users. The fact that there's not an office suite here that is easily installed is just kind of mind blowing to me. I mean, like I said, it doesn't mean that you can install it. It just means that there's extra steps that you have to take in order to install it. And that doesn't seem very new user friendly. So there I go again, negative, but that is one of those things that I mean, I can't think of another distro out there that doesn't make it easy to install an office suite or most of them have an office suite installed by default. The fact that this doesn't is really weird. So the only way you could edit text is with their code application, which is a full fledged ID. And also, this is their application. This is an application that is developed by elementary OS and it doesn't follow the dark theme by default. Like it has a dark theme. Why isn't it following it by default? That doesn't make any sense. That's that's not good design. Again, really negative, but I keep finding things that are just dumb. Stopping. I mean, I was really hopeful the elementary OS 6 would fix some of this stuff. So let's let's go back to the file thing, because there's some things in the files app that used to just drive me bonkers. So first of all, the icon is just still terrible. These icons bad, I can come back to that. It used to be single clip. Okay, so it's still a single click in order to get into a directory. That's good. I'm one of those people who like the single click to enter a directory. So that's good. But I can understand if you want to change that. Let's see if there's a way to change it because sometimes they let you change it. Some districts let you change it in the settings application. So we'll see if no printers notifications language in regions not going to be there display keyboard mouse touchpad power printers sound webcam bluetooth network online account sharing daytime as you're not going to be here. Let's search for maybe no. So in other words, if you don't like that single click thing, you're stuck with it. That's a here's another thing. I can't think of another file manager that doesn't have a settings panel at all. This has no settings panel. As far as I can tell, there's no settings panel here at all. And that is, I mean, weird, right? It's just weird. And again, with the tabs, like I understand you want to show that you can have tabs, but you don't have to show the tabs by default when there's only one tab. Give her to that. Clean this up a little bit. Matt, you got find something positive again, Matt, find something positive again. I still like the dark theme. That's the same positive thing I said earlier. So yeah, as TFL said, there is no up directory button. So if you want to go to the directory that's, you know, like on top of this, there's no way to actually get there. Kind of. Well, no. Okay. So what I was going to say is like, if you switch to another place, it'd be great if this little history button, which they insist on having here, would actually show you your history because then it would be easy to go back to where you were. It wouldn't take you up in a directory, but it would at least take you back to where you were. Of course, you can obviously just do that with the back button. So what was I thinking? So no up directory there. So he was right about that. Yeah, it's just, let me see here. I'm curious about let me access my samba share from here, which it won't. My computer's not showing up on the network, which is interesting. It should. So that's the file manager. And the terminal I mean, I'm trying I'm going to go find through and find something positive again now. Let's go back to the terminal and see if we can see the do notify send test. Okay, so we have ourselves a notification up here, and that should show up in the amount of time that stays up on the screen is a little weird. But it does show up in the notifications center. Now supposedly the notifications are actionable now. I can't really test that without finding an app to actually show me a notification that has an actionable thing. But that's really cool. If it's true, it's an and it's a would be a big improvement. And there's a button here to dismiss to dismiss all of them, which is good. It also supposedly groups them by application. So that's good as well. It kind of keeps things organized. So there's a couple positive things. I doubt that the actionable notifications are going to be as like robust as something like KDE will give you because KDE's notifications will actually let you like send a message. If you're talking in your like a KDE connect, you can actually send a message from the notification, which is really cool. That's not something that you're probably going to see here. Another big deal supposedly is the gestures. Now I don't have a trackpad connected to this computer. So I can't really test it. But from what the Linux experiment was showing, you can go through and do two and three, three finger gestures on your trackpad that will go through and change your workspace and applications and stuff like that. And that is cool. And it's impressive because that's usually something that's limited to distros that are using Wayland. This is still Xorg. So the man, the fact that they managed to get that working in Xorg is actually really cool. I wish I could test them. I maybe when I'm done with Debbie and I can install elementary OS six back there and to give them a test on a laptop that actually has a touchpad. But for now, if you have a laptop, this is probably something that you can really look forward to and probably something that's not going to be very well developed in other distros. The final thing I want to kind of look at is the accessibility stuff. Now supposedly, there's a way to get to the accessibility stuff without going to the settings, but I don't see it. Let's see. Accessibility, you'd think would be right here somewhere. And I'm not seeing it. Is it buried somewhere? Oh, they call the universal access is what they're calling it. Okay. It used to be called accessibility. You more accessibility features can be found throughout system settings. So they're not all in one place. Okay. Yeah, here's what we were looking for. This supposedly right here is what's new. So there's a screen reader, onboard screen, keyboard, slow keys, bounce keys, sticky keys for people who can't use mice, dwell, click, and you can get back into the universal access. You can also go through and go through and you can also go through and zoom in on everything directly from this menu. I can understand why they don't have this up here by default. But the fact that it's kind of buried in the settings is also kind of weird because I mean, if you need that kind of stuff, you may not know to even go looking in the settings and you may not know it's called universal access. Maybe that's what they just call it now. Maybe that's something that's more standard across operating systems. I don't even know. But I feel like it used to be called accessibility stuff. And also the fact that it actually has to tell you that more accessibility features can be found throughout the system settings. And that's not all just here. It's a little weird anyways. So those are my initial first impressions of elementary OS six. Now, like I said, that was literally me installing it for the first time. It's not the first time I've used EOS six. I used the beta for a little while I actually did a video on it. And I had some thoughts on it then I have some thoughts on it now. Overall, if you were a fan of elementary OS six before, you'll probably still be a fan of it now. There's definitely some really good improvements here. The dark mode is great. Except for the fact that it doesn't propagate to every application. Now I can understand the dark mode not applying to third party applications, they want the developers to have control over whether or not they comply with dark mode. But the fact that it doesn't even propagate to all their own applications is really weird. I don't know if code was the only application that didn't follow it. I'm actually going to go back through and look right now. Open up some applications. So far, you probably can see that might as well go back here and show you all these so far are all dark, which is good. We know the settings in app center are, we know code was not calendar calendar is maybe it was just the one on document viewer. Nope. Still white theme or light themed. Let's see photos. Music. I already opened up videos already opened up calculator calculators. So there's two out of all their applications that don't follow it. The document viewer and code. Now code may remember that I said it dark in a minute, but by default it was this. So that's really weird, right? And it's just really weird that those two applications out of all of them didn't get dark mode by default. And it looks like document doesn't even have the option for it. And I may be wrong, but that application is their application. It should fit in with the rest of their operating system. The fact that these two don't is really weird, especially notes when there's an option for it. If you have the dark theme selected, it should be there by default. If you had, like I said, if you have dark dark things selected, so that is a little odd and they kind of stand out. And for a distro that goes through and proclaims itself to be the best at design, the fact that those two things are like that is really, really weird. So I'm trying. I've tried several times throughout the video to find things that I like. So I like the dark mode. For the most part, I think it's great that it's there. I hope that developers adopt it quickly because that's good. The new notification system seems really good. The universal access stuff is good. I wish they hadn't buried it so far down in the system. I like that they've switched to flat packs. That makes it easier to get software than if they just had their own repositories. So that's good. I also like to switch to flat packs and not snaps because I like flat packs better than snaps. Not a lot better, but at least a little bit better. So there are some positive things that I said about elementary OS. Negative things I have still a bunch to say. The icons are still ugly in my opinion. I don't like them, especially the application icons I can get behind. They're fine. They're not my cup of tea, but they at least look good. The folders are still trash. They're not well designed at all. They remind me way too much of the Adawaita or whatever it's called. Just not a good icons theme. Oh, another good thing is the gestures. I didn't get a chance to try them, but from what I saw in other videos, the gestures are actually really cool and really smooth. So that is a huge win. Now, I heard the Linux experiment talking about high DPI displays and how fractional scaling still isn't a thing here. That doesn't really surprise me because a lot of distributions are having a hard time with fractional scaling. So we already know that elementary OS and its team are way behind. So the fact that they are not focusing on newer features like that is not really all that surprising. It sucks because 4K and 1440p displays are the most popular displays out there now, and that they don't support that right now is kind of sucks, but it didn't surprise me. Overall, elementary OS 6 didn't change my mind in terms of wanting me wanting to use it. It's still not designed for me. I'm a tiling window manager guy, so of course I wasn't going to be happy with a floating window desktop environment. But even if I weren't a tiling window manager guy and I was like a KDE guy, which I really do like KDE, I don't see myself being interested in elementary OS either. Even though my KDE install right now looks like a Mac, like I have the dock at the bottom, I have the bar at the top, so it looks like elementary OS. So it's not that look and feel that bothers me. It's the restrictive nature of not being able to change things. It's the weird insistence on controlling where the settings and stuff for applications are. It's the lack of settings for certain things, like some applications have settings panels, some of them don't. The ones that do have setting panels are usually pretty much limited to color and a few other things. That's, I mean, this is Linux. Like I understand you're supposed to be a foreign new users, and you're trying to corral them into a certain way of doing things. That's fine. The fact that you don't have an office suite installed by default, you don't have one to be installed from your app store is really weird, because I mean, that's like one of the number one things people are going to look for. So you're going to have to jump through hoops to get to that. Also, that there appears to be less software in the app centers than there used to be is another thing that's weird. So I was predisposed to being negative towards this right from the beginning. I know that. And I said that a few times throughout the video that I was negative about us prior to this, and I was trying to have my mind changed. And it was really hard to keep an open mind. And I don't think I succeeded in doing that. But even if I could have, I don't think that this would change my mind. There's not enough here that's different or that opens up us a little bit more. That would make me happy. So let me know in the comments below whether or not you're going to try elementary OS six, or if you have tried it, let me know what you thought. Make sure you like and subscribe if you haven't already. If you want, you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons, Devon, Chris, East Coast Web, Gento, Sventu, Marcus, Magland, Donnie, Sven, Jackson, Knife and Tool, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, Art Center, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.