The (Short) History and Downfall of Elementary OS
Cassidy James announced his resignation from the entire project in a blog post on 1st of April, 2022, after internal disputes with Danielle Foré. Internal conflicts did not spare the distribution from significant regressions with the release of elementary OS 6 “Odin”.
A Brief Recap
The project started out as a series of applications and themes for Ubuntu, with the latter perhaps being elementary's biggest selling point. The desktop environment “Pantheon” is widely regarded as being similar to Mac OS X, despite repeated denials from both James and Foré. Initially basing it on Ubuntu's Long Term Support 10.10, the first release called “Jupiter” was released in March, 2011. The project's third stable release (elementary OS 0.3 “Freya”), which became available in 2015, became the first to enforce elementary's “pay-what-you-want” scheme, with the download page of the ISO now requiring people to enter a monetary amount before being presented a direct HTTP download. This, in return, caused the first controversy of the project.
At this point, it should be noted that the first warning sign of a potential larger conflict in the future came directly with the announcement of this feature:
elementary is under no obligation to release our compiled operating system for free download. We’ve invested money into its development, hosting our website, and supporting users. However, we understand the culture that currently surrounds open source: users tend to feel entitled to the full, compiled releases of software at zero cost. While we could rightfully disallow free downloads, someone else could take our open source code, compile it, and give it away for free. So there’s no point in completely disallowing it.
But we should discourage it.
“Discouraging certain behaviors” is also known as “nudging”, a concept popularized in 2008. The practice itself has been criticized on the basis that it often does not produce long-term results in favor of those engaging in it and thus is largely ineffective. Indeed, elementary's announcement caused a wave of responses from FOSS users, accusing – some merely implying – the team behind elementary of coming off as entitled. Given the fact that, at that time of “Freya's” release, elementary had yet to see its first major release that also reflects on its version number, consisted of nothing but a Desktop Environment and few rewrites of already-common tools that mostly are meant to fit into the project's design philosophy, one can see where the critics came from. The jump from 0.1 to 0.3 alone took elementary four years and would be succeeded by 0.4 “Loki” a year later, which introduced the “App Center” and replaced the standard web browser Midori with GNOME's Epiphany.
5.0 “Juno”, released in 2018, established a new versioning system, which introduced a Night Light feature similar to Apple's Night Shift, implemented “pay-what-you-want” in the App Center, and began to allow adjustable window tiling. According to Foré, only 1% of the 160.000 people downloading “Loki” chose to pay, as of November 2018. An update – a “major update”, according to the announcement – released in late 2019, dubbed “Hera”, introduced built-in support for Flatpak.
elementary OS 6 “Odin” was released in August, 2021, and would became the first version of the distribution to receive the most negative feedback. Jeff Siegel from DistroWatch expressed his disappointment with the most recent version of his “daily driver”. As the App Center was changed to only show Flatpak packages by default, many users complained about the lack of available programs shown by the GUI frontend, with Siegel advising to use the command line to download the still-supported DEB packages of their desired applications.
But the distro's developers would prefer you use their stuff – so much so that there's a warning if you try to install any other software: “Install untrusted/non-curated app? 'LibreOffice' is not curated by elementary and has not been reviewed for security, privacy, or system integration.” Why this warning for major open-source software, which is certainly not anything like some phishing expedition on Android?
The major release is considered a failure by Enno Park from the German tech magazine t3n, calling it “more of a beta, if at all”. And testing it myself turned into a huge disaster for my already-damaged external HDD. It should be mentioned, however, that Odin's beta – and despite the pleas from the team to not publish any reviews of it (no one listened and I can't read™) – performed better within a virtual environment and on bare metal than its final release. This makes one wonder what started to happen behind the scenes between Odin's beta and its final release. A first clue likely could have been provided by the announcement of elementary OS 6.1 “Jólnir”:
AppCenter continues to fill out with apps from developers—and since the move to Flatpak, all apps that have been released for OS 6 will continue to be available on OS 6.1 and beyond! You can currently find over 90 curated apps in AppCenter, and developers have continued to push out rapid and frequent updates to their apps with new features and bug fixes, as they’re in control of their own update schedule. Our shift from Debian packages to Flatpak for both curated and non-curated apps also means we’re able to lean more on Flatpak features, and we’ve been using this as an opportunity to make AppCenter much more engaging and informative right from the start—directly addressing feedback about the discoverability of the wide variety of apps in AppCenter.
The team behind the distribution aspires to become independent from both Ubuntu and its parent distribution, though said aspirations appear to be limited to end-user GUI applications; core packages, such as the kernel (5.11.0), continue to be based on releases provided by Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal). The average visitor rating of elementary OS on DistroWatch, meanwhile, dropped to 6.79 based on 334 reviews for all versions, and elementary was, yet again, involved in some controversies that would contribute to the relatively popular perception of the team behind elementary OS to be “arrogant”, and also imply some issues regarding the personalities of both James and Foré.
The non-technical issues of elementary OS
In late August, 2021, James opened a now deleted GitHub issue, in which he demanded krisives, the maintainer of the tool “Elementary OS Extras”, to stop using the name “Elementary” for their unofficial program:
We already have enough issues with people thinking the old “elementary Tweaks” was something official or made by elementary—which is why it was rebranded by its developer to “Pantheon Tweaks.” Creating a new project under the elementary name that is not made by elementary is inviting similar issues and could contribute to dilution of the elementary brand and trademarks.
Please rename this project to something that does not include the elementary name to avoid similar issues.
This demand resulted in a heated discussion regarding elementary's trademark status and it is highly recommended to read the whole issue, which ended in James accusing krisives of “doxxing his personal information” (James used his private address to register the company “Elementary, LLC” and thus, unfortunately, doxxed himself) and banning him from elementary's subreddit and Slack.
The dispute, on the other hand, is part of larger issue regarding Foré's and James' long-term vision of their project. The introduction of the “pay-what-you-want” scheme, which relies heavily on (largely ineffective) nudging techniques, made it clear to end users that elementary is destined to become a a new type of a commercialized distribution. Financial matters have been a major topic since the release of “Freya” and would become a dominant factor of the course of the project during the COVID-19 pandemic. A dispute between Foré and James about the shares of their company eventually resulted in James leaving the project behind in its entirety:
Over the last decade, I’ve worked to help build elementary into what it is today: a world-class operating system lead by a team who is involved in and oftentimes driving the direction of the greater open source desktop space. In 2011 I founded elementary, LLC. so we could have a legal entity under which to do business, sign agreements, etc. I owned and ran the company for seven years, bearing the entirety of the legal responsibility and handling much of the administration and logistics. At the time of its founding, Dani and I both had jobs elsewhere and worked on building elementary as much as we could.
[...]
Each release since I joined elementary full time performed even better sales-wise than the last, until OS 6 and 6.1 which performed far worse than expected, likely in part due to the ongoing global pandemic—people were seemingly less likely to pay an optional amount to download an operating system when they could just get it for free. It became clear we needed to re-prioritize our company finances while staying firm in our open source, privacy-centric, and ethical funding beliefs.
Keeping the already-mentioned naming dispute in mind, it does read like both James and Foré are not only unable to admit that “Odin” is widely perceived as a poor successor to “Hera” due to many significant shortcomings and bugs, it also reveals that monetary issues are more important to them than a stable operating system attracting more satisfied users and contributors without the main developers having to rely almost exclusively on marketing jargon at all times. The project, as demonstrated above, continuously relies on boasting its relevance, whereas – and feel free to check this yourself – their main channels on social media hardly seeing any significant traction that would justify the “world-class operating system” label, in fact their forums are as active as any typical “small Linux distribution most Linux users will never care about” (and speaking from experience, even the Discord channel of the hobbyist distribution “Archcraft” often times is more active than all of elementary's forums combined).
One commentator on Hacker News mentioned another issue regarding elementary:
An interesting observation: until now Elementary OS == Cassidy James. I'd never even heard of this other person. Every commit I looked at, every app I downloaded, every blog post I read, every Tweet, etc all had Cassidy's name on it. Even now I'm not even sure what this other person does. I haven't used Elementary OS in some years but I've always kept an eye on it.So to me at least, elementary OS is functionally dead, even if it's not technically dead. I don't care about the drama or who said what or who owed what person what money – the person who did all the work left, and I expect to stop seeing news about elementary OS soon. That simple.
Co-founder Foré, as stated by James, disapproved of James' idea to take a new full-time job at another project to secure the funding of elementary OS and, in return, reject being payed for continuing maintenance of elementary. Foré has yet to state the reason for this dismissal, yet I believe it would only cause more confusion. As noted, she shares the smallest part in the development and maintenance of this OS, exclusively managing finances, and James repeated his view that the current course of elementary is “the right one”, it is fair to assume that the operating system will disappear into complete irrelevance in the near future, as few rumors claim that Foré is (even more) difficult to work with.
Conclusion
Of course, there are more incidents that could have been covered and would further emphasize the key points discussed above. Nevertheless, it should be obvious enough that both co-founders appear to be overburdened with their own visions. The relatively large amount of controversies surrounding the politics of this, compared to Ubuntu and even Zorin, small project, plus the obvious lack of practical implementation of those portray elementary OS in a negative light, even though one can consider the project's initial plans to be interesting and “deserving a shot”. Both co-founders – and this is a personal opinion – do not appear to be very sympathetic and spend most of their time attempting to somewhat commercialize elementary and convincing users that their design philosophy is superior to other Desktop Environments.
On a technical scale, this OS attempts to “reinvent the wheel” by making common applications, often simply via forking, dependent on the design philosophy of the main developers, more often than not introducing bugs not occurring in the original tools. Despite claiming to “empower users”, it is restrictive by design and actively tricks those entirely unfamiliar with the Linux ecosystem into believing that this distribution is suited for “newbies”. Overall, elementary OS is just a more restrictive and more buggy Ubuntu with a Desktop Environment resembling, yet not entirely identical to, Mac OS X, which simply is not convincing enough to make people pay for it voluntarily.
Combining both, elementary is one of the few Linux distributions that started out as a remix of a popular distribution, which itself is based on another popular distribution, that turned out to be more of an experiment to figure out innovative commercialization methods. So far, the project failed almost spectacularly at the latter, and hope only remains for the well-received Pantheon DE. James and Foré would have been better advised to continue working on themes for Ubuntu or turn Pantheon into an independent DE that could compete against GNOME and KDE, rather than to tie their most-promising project to an operating system they can never maintain without Ubuntu and other projects providing the bases in the first place. And both engaging in petty disputes over company shares and trademarks suggests that they are not ready to manage even a small Linux distribution effectively.
At this point, I do not see a future for elementary OS and certainly would not miss it, after it wrecked my main machine during the only two tests I ever conducted.