When comparing Pantheon vs Elementary OS, the Slant community recommends Pantheon for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments with high DPI support for retina displays?” Pantheon is ranked 10th while Elementary OS is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Pantheon is:
Nonintrusive and easy to overview workspace.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple, clean aesthetic
Nonintrusive and easy to overview workspace.
Pro Lightweight
Pantheon is light on system resources, giving it the advantage of being able run well on a multitude of setups.
Pro Looks amazing
Looks absolutely amazing. Very nice to use. Amazing UX.
Pro Smooth, subtle animations
Nearly everything is animated, but it's not over the top.
Pro Splitting and animations
Switching between workspaces is fluid, pulling up the workspace preview bumps up the rest of the desktop, open windows show up on the switcher along with larger icons, and everything is subtly animated. You have two windows taking each half the screen by dragging to corners.
Pro Highly modular
While built to be integrated, Pantheon is also highly modular. Shell components like the Panel, Dock, and app launcher can be swapped out with limited repercussions.
Pro Great for minimalists
Although you cannot put icons on desktop, it comes with very low number of pre-installed softwares.
Pro Perfect for chromebook
It's light and easy.
Pro Slick, smooth desktop environment
Easy to use and easy to configure, there is almost nothing that the developers did not think of to creat a top-notch user experience.
Pro UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Pro Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
Pro Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
Pro If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
Pro Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
Pro Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
Pro Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
Pro Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Pro A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
Pro With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
Cons
Con Poor reputation among Linux users
The whole Elementary OS project has a poor reputation among Linux users.
Con No icons on desktop
Con Too simple
Good for people who want a plug and play simple Desktop Environment. But for a multitasking / entertainment / cutting edge or Gaming Rig this is not the answer.
Con Requires tweaks to be usable
To enable things like the minimize button, status bar indicators, and what some might call "normal" desktop features, you need to tweak the system to make it usable.
Con Uses GTK
Nowadays, GTK is designed with GNOME, and only GNOME, in mind. Non-GNOME applications which attempt to utilize it suffer as a result. Pantheon is no exception.
Con Few configuration options
It is pretty bare-bones on a stock install, but further configuration options can be added through various official tweak tools.
Con Buggy
Con Not ideal for enterprise environments
As it has no set release date, and no set support and/or EOL dates, that makes it a not so good choice for enterprises managing a number of machines where such dates are important to know before hand.
Con Slow maintenance
Any significant updates come with new release, which usually takes 2-3 years. Hence gets obsolete with current software.
Con Not available for major Linux distributions
Con Limited to eOS-only
It means Pantheon won't work properly if installed on other distros. Manjaro has given up on trying since it works better on a LTS system and takes an eternity to realease a new version or add security updates. On Arch, Pantheon also doesn't work properly. People are trying it on Fedora, not sure how it works now. If you want to use Pantheon, better get to eOS.
Con Looks and feels like a Mac
Which may turn quite a few people off with the aesthetics, of course for some people, this is a pro.
Con UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
Con Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
Con Outdated or bad default applications
Con Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
Con Quite buggy
Con Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
Con Not very configurable
Con The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
Con Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
Con Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
Con Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
Con Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
Con Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
Con Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
Con No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
Con Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
Con Boring UI
It can be very boring.