So I spent my day yesterday upgrading my elementary OS 5.1 (codenamed Hera) to elementary OS 6 (codenamed Odin). It’s a pain considering the upgrade is not seamless. I had to take a backup not only of my files but of the Firefox profile and InSync profile too and research and remember which folders to backup and their path.

I’ll come back to the Odin experience later. I got hooked on eOS when 0.2 (codenamed Luna) was launched. That seems like an age ago (launched in August 2013). The clean look and feel got me hooked and the OS certainly increased my productivity. I was a fanboy of Ubuntu until Gnome 2.2 and when Ubuntu went the Unity way, I too switched to eOS. I liked Gnome 2.2 for the fact that I could tweak my system the way I wanted it to behave and look. However, the enormous possibility of its customization, hindered my productivity as I spent more time playing with the machine than putting my time on the job at hand.

I had tasted the Linux and opensource blood. The dislike for the bloating Windows turned into hatred. I compromised with the thought process of the eOS developers. They have a philosophy and are never open to community feedback. Take it or leave it. However, with time, they are getting more closed and the OS is becoming restrictive. The fact that if I have to work on a restrictive OS, I may as well buy the original – the Mac.

Not that I was happy with Juno (v5) and Hera (v5.1). The app indicator panel didn’t allow other icons. There was a workaround, yet it was restrictive. The devs think that users don’t need the icon tray. Yet there are apps out there… Insync, Weather… for which I don’t want to open the entire app. A simple glance lets me know that things are in progress.

eOS never respected other themes. Installing third-party icons like the Numix, broke the Notification panel. There was a workaround for that too (It still breaks in Odin too). Add “elementary” as Inherits besides Numix and Gnome in the usr/share/icons/ICON_FOLDER/index.theme file. So every time Numix updates, I go back to make these changes. Same in Odin too.

Another pain point in 5 was the trackpad freezing the scroll after waking up the system after 15 minutes of inactivity. Modprobe psmouse in the Terminal was the workaround for that. Every time. I had created a shortcut command for that in the bashrc, yet it still was a pain every time.

If that was a pain, waking up the system from the deep sleep of 30 minutes was an excruciating pain. Out of 30 times, the system would wake up only once (and probably that too when the system was on direct electric supply). I would have to eventually hard reboot the system.

And these issues have been lying there as bugs for quite a long time.

There were other niggles as well. I chose to ignore them as Windows was far worse. Simple things required deep dive-in and mazes to be conquered.

Anyway, coming back to 6, I think my love affair with eOS is coming to an end. People are going gaga about it, however, Odin offers nothing new as for user experience is concerned. Rather it’s getting further locked and restrictive. Some things that I want to do, the devs feel I shouldn’t be doing, or should go to a third party to get it. I kept waiting for “Online Accounts” through the entire life cycle of 5 and 5.1 and yet it’s not been implemented in 6 as well.

The sexy ‘e’ bootsplash – the elementary OS logo – in 6 is gone and is replaced by the boring manufacturer logo. In my case, it is ‘Lenovo’ that I have to keep looking at. The bootup time has increased by about 30 seconds and I keep staring at the Lenovo logo, not sure if things have moved ahead or not from the initial switch on.

The Files Manager no more remembers the folder last opened or the file saved in, while opening a File from the browser etc. Also, ‘Save As’ opens a pane that has the File name at the top, and the extension (Save As) at the bottom, which earlier were in a single row and easy to manage.

The notification panel cannot be tweaked. Have tried all the possible solutions available on the internet. InSync and Meteo have become redundant. I no more know if Insync is working or not.

While elementary OS Odin claims and boasts of out-of-the-box support for Flatpaks, they break the User Interface and do not respect native GUI, which essentially is GTK. Installed Firefox as Flatpak and the UI looked ugly. Did not find any way to force Firefox to respect the native theme. Had o uninstall it, and had to find a deb package. In Chrome, at least there is an option to force it to respect GTK.

In a country like India, where internet data is a luxury, downloading and installing Flatpaks or for that matter even snaps and Appimages which come bundled with dependencies is a nightmare. A deb app of 500 KB could bloat up to 20 MB or even more, even though the pain could be downloading for the first time only. I understand that sandboxing is the way ahead, but it may be too early for people who have data limitations and work on older machines.

The idea also is completely paradoxical to the devs’ philosophy of a uniform look and feel and not allowing tweaking and customization for that purpose. Not sure how many Flatpaks respect that philosophy and easily adapt to the eOS’ theme.

So, time to say GoodBye to elementary OS. Right now, I am distro-hopping and have zeroed on to a few of them. Fedora 34, Zorin OS and Pop! OS are a few options. Zorin’s homepage says Zorin Pro is coming soon. Will wait for that. Will try Garuda as well. Mint is plain Jane. Ubuntu too is confused now. Manjaro could be a learning curve as it is Arch-based. Deepin??? Not sure. Let’s see where it all leads to.