When comparing Elementary OS vs Phoenix OS, the Slant community recommends Elementary OS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for an old machine?” Elementary OS is ranked 33rd while Phoenix OS is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Elementary OS is:
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Comes with Nougat
Unlike Remix OS, Phoenix OS is recently released and comes with Android 7.0. Remix OS support is discontinued and no further updates can be expected. But Phoenix OS updates can be expected. UI is same for both OS.
Pro Accelerated gaming
With Phoenix OS you guys can play any android games on pc with 30+ fps but minimum requirements must be met (pentium 4 cores with 8 gig ram) [must] and even Intel gfx would also work to run heavy games like mc5 (fps) and kritika (role playing) or pubg(tps) usually puzzle games never lags on this OS
Pro Regularly updated
Phoenix OS updated at least every month, bringing in new features and bug fixes with every release.
Pro For gaming
Cons
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.
Con Lots of ads
So many sucky ads for no apparent reason, making it not free at all.
cant even open a FileManager withouth clicking closed ad
Con 32-bit version is no longer supported or updated
The developers of Phoenix OS have dropped support for the 32-bit version of Phoenix OS. It is still on Andriod 5.1 Lollipop and was last updated on 19 October 2017
Con Google Play service is not updating
Don't expect Google services-based apps.
Con It's snappy, in a way
Snappy but not smooth. Snappy when it comes to games. Setting the resolution to 1080 but that doesnt take effect on games which still run on low resolution.