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Add to SafariWhen comparing Elementary OS vs Chakra, the Slant community recommends Elementary OS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” Elementary OS is ranked 28th while Chakra is ranked 77th. 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
Question 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 Focuses on KDE/Qt Apps
comes with none GTK apps per default
Pro Independent from Arch
its not just another Arch Spin-off
Pro Keeps Gnome apps tidier even than Gnome distros
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 Weak base
Sometimes updates will not execute hooks(full update always misses to run mkinitcpio) so you get an unbootable system.
Con Small development team
The team is very small
Con No real installer
Has no installer just a big bloated LiveCD that gets unpacked to your disk.
Con Pacman
Compared to deb or rpm it takes ages to update the system, it's also very dumb in dependency tracking.
Con Unreliable Servers
The CCR or the community forums are often down or unreachable.
Con Overwrites your default EFI config
It overwrites your default EFI config wich can make you PC unbootable if something goes wrong.
Con Uses systemd
Which is very hard to debug and not a *nix standard.
Con Only available for x86-based CPUs
Con Wont let you install the system to USB drives
Chakras weak installer Calamares does not allow you to install it to a USB drive.
Con Weak update process to a recent release
For example, you can install the Goedel Release and update it to the current release which then fails to boot due to some systemd-errors.
