Sneak Peek at Elementary OS 'Luna'

If you haven't heard of it, Elementary OS is a fairly recent distro based on Ubuntu. Elementary say they're all about "performance, ease of use and simplicity", and having given their first release a go, I certainly agree. 'Jupiter' was released just over a year ago now, based on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), and at first glance looked very much like Maverick itself, but with DanRabbit's beautiful Elementary GTK theme and icon theme, and Docky along the bottom, featuring some unfamiliar icons for the new Elementary apps.

Now though, the second iteration of Elementary looks as if it's becoming closer to release (or at least testing), and things are looking a bit different - 'Luna' is based on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and features a whole new desktop environment called Pantheon.

Pantheon in Ubuntu 12.04

Here are some of the things to look forward to:

Plank

Plank is a lightweight dock. It's loosly based on Docky, but rewritten in Vala, which means there's no need for Mono libraries, but it's also a lot simpler than Docky, perhaps a bit too simple for some. There's currently no drag-and-drop support, so you have to lock launchers to Plank in the order you intend to keep them, if you want to customise it there's not much you can change (and if you want to, you have to edit /home.config/plank/dock1/settings - be careful!), and there's no fancy zoom effect either, but remember that any of this could change as Luna isn't even beta testing yet. Other than these issues, Plank loads fast, and seems quite stable - it works.

Plank

Wingpanel

Wingpanel seems very similar to the Unity panel, with the same applets on the right-hand side, each bringing up the same menus. The only real difference is the date (in the centre, like GNOME Shell) and the 'Applications' button, which opens the Slingshot launcher.

Wingpanel

Slingshot

Slingshot is Luna's take on the Unity dash, or the GNOME Activities overlay, and can be used to search for apps or run commands. At first I didn't think it fitted in too well with the Elementary theme, but Slingshot is growing on me. I do, however, think that scrolling might have been a bit more intuitive than the iOS-style 'pages' system. I've also found that Slingshot loses focus as soon as it's opened, so you have to click on it to start typing, although I imagine this is a bug that will be fixed in good time.

Slingshot search

Marlin

Marlin is the file manager in Elementary, and has risen from the ashes of 'Nautilus Elementary'. It combines a sleek appearance with some rather unique functionality - to open a file or folder in Marlin you only click once, and to select it you just press the plus icon which appears when you hover over it. The behaviour of the address bar is similar to that of Nautilus, however in Marlin you have the ability to type locations into the address bar and edit the current path in a very smooth fashion.

Marlin

Midori

Midori is Elementary's web browser. You can search using a range of engines from the address bar, including Duck Duck Go, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia, and there's even an 'In Private Browsing' mode.

Midori

Beatbox

Beatbox is the Elementary music player, and clearly takes a lot of inspiration from iTunes, at least as far as the interface is concerned. Beatbox has support for smart playlists, last.fm scrobbling and internet radio.

Beatbox

Postler, Maya, Dexter

Postler is the mail client, Maya is the calendar and Dexter is the contact manager, and the three work together very nicely. Postler was very simple to set up with my Gmail account, and Dexter was able to find contacts from my online accounts (Google and Windows Live), but unfortunately I couldn't get Maya set up with my Google calendar.

 The Dexter screenshot is from the Elementary website (so as to avoid publicly listing the personal details of my friends and family)! Remember, if any of the default apps don't fit your taste, Elementary is a Ubuntu variant, so you can install any of your favourite apps in exactly the same way as you would in Ubuntu.

When will Luna be released?

The Elementary developers insist that Luna will only be released when it's ready - they don't want to put pressure on themselves to rush their work by announcing a release date now. We can guess that since Luna is based on Precise, it won't be released until after Precise is officially released at the end of April (see my post on Precise and its new features), so perhaps after Precise's release we'll see a beta/some sort of test? We can only guess, but Luna looks to be shaping up as a brilliant OS, and I for one am looking forward to giving the final release a go.

How to try it

Luna hasn't been officially released for beta testing so it could still contain critical bugs, but if you really want to give the Pantheon desktop a go you can install it in Ubuntu (Oneiric or Precise) by adding the Elementary OS daily builds PPA: 'sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/daily' and Marlin's separate daily build PPA: 'sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marlin-devs/marlin-daily', and then running 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install elementary-desktop marlin'.