Elementary OS 8 "Circe" is here, based on Ubuntu 24.04, with Wayland support in the Pantheon desktop.

Elementary has its own desktop environment, Pantheon, which resembles a desktop version of iPadOS. The release supports Wayland, which the login screen amusingly calls a "secure session," as opposed to a "classic session" meaning X.org. Pantheon runs on top of an Ubuntu base, which in this version is 24.04 "Noble Numbat" and inherits the new features of that release.

Elementary OS is one of the more sophisticated Linux distros. It's one of the best-looking, its developers make serious efforts at improving accessibility for people with visual disabilities, and, as it's based on Ubuntu, it boasts excellent compatibility. Rather than repeat ourselves, to get an impression, we'll point you at previous coverage in The Register, including 2021's version 6, version 7 in early 2023, and the most recent, version 7.1 in October 2023.

The announcement for this version mainly refers to it as "OS 8," which immediately makes us think of MacOS 8, the first release after Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. MacOS 8 arrived 13 years after the Macintosh first appeared, and it's also 13 years since the first release of Elementary OS.

We mention this because this is a mature, well-established distro by now. Linux itself is heading for middle-age. The kernel turned 30 a few years back, as did Elementary OS's grandparent, Debian, a couple of years later.

As such, you shouldn't expect radical changes. OS 8 doesn't change the basic Elementary story that much, Pantheon is still very pretty. It's not very customizable, but it doesn't need it to look good. This is not an environment for modders, but if you appreciate good graphic design, then this is still about as good as desktop Linux ever looks. This release gains Wayland support for the first time, including support for multiple displays with different scaling factors.

The installation program is very slick. It even talks. On the opening screen, a spoken message tells you how to turn on the system's screen reader. This is one of the distros of choice for visually impaired people. The installer can optionally encrypt the machine's drive during setup, and even if you choose not to, it uses LVM by default and enables encrypted swap.

Sadly, in our testing, both in VirtualBox and on bare metal on our venerable ThinkPad W520, the Wayland session wasn't usable. In a VM, the display was totally corrupted, and on the ThinkPad, our second monitor was a flickering rectangle. It was interesting to note that OS 8 correctly detected and identified the ThinkPad's discrete Nvidia GPU, but because of Ubuntu Noble's kernel 6.8.0, it can't use it. Nvidia's legacy drivers won't work on such recent kernels.

Elementary is very Flatpak-centric. In this release, the App Center has Flathub configured by default. In the default install, along with the "elementary platform", the following apps are shipped as Flatpaks: Calculator, Camera, Captive Network Assistant, Music, Screenshot, Videos, Mesa, Web, Document Viewer, File Roller, and Fonts. Since it no longer only shows software from Elementary's own repository, the App Center now shows a Made for Elementary OS badge for native programs.

Another change to the App Center in this release is around updates. Before, this software store handled all software updates, but in version 8, it only updates applications, which never require a reboot. OS updates are managed by the System entry in the Settings program, which displays a message if the OS needs to be rebooted. It can also recommend device drivers if needed, but although we could select the driver for the VM graphics adapter, we couldn't work out how to actually install the thing.

Speaking of updates, Elementary still has a critical weakness. It doesn't support version upgrades. If you use Elementary OS 7.x, you'll need to back up your files and data and reinstall. (Unless you followed our 2022 advice, which remains the same as it was in 2010: use a separate /home partition.) Previously, user-friendly distros like Linux Mint and Zorin OS had issues with version-to-version upgrades, but this has been resolved in recent versions such as Zorin OS 16.3. Linux Lite 7.0 still doesn't support version upgrades, and it's past time that Linux Lite and Elementary caught up in this department.

UI elements such as the Dock, multitasking view, the login and lock screens, and more have all been tweaked, although we could no longer work out how to move the dock to a vertical screen edge where we prefer it. Notably, this release changes the role of the Windows key (which most Linux distros call the Super key, but which Elementary indicates with the same looped-cross symbol as the Mac's Command key): it's now less Mac-like and more like GNOME and other Linux desktops. Super on its own opens the app browser, and Super+space changes keyboard layouts. Elementary's desktop is its own thing, with elements from macOS, iPadOS, and modern GNOME, but for us, it feels more cohesive and integrated than GNOME.

Elementary OS is one of the most polished Linux distros out there, possibly because it has a source of funding: its pay-what-you-can policy. The download button on the homepage suggests giving the project $10, $20 or $30, but if you click "Custom" you can simply enter a zero and get it for free. It's clean, simple, friendly, and accessible. Opinions about appearance in the Linux world are hugely variable. This jaded old vulture thinks that GNOME looks great, but we find its usability poor; on the other talon, while switching to a flat look in KDE Plasma 5 tamed its appearance slightly, KDE remains the ugly step-sibling of Windows. For us, functionality is more important than appearance, which is why our preferred desktop on most distros is Xfce – but we often hear people saying that they prefer Cinnamon for its better looks.

We've tried using Elementary as our daily driver, and while it can certainly handle it, we had to do a lot of manual installation and config. Since its App Center only handles Flatpaks, and we favor .deb and AppImages where possible, this meant a lot of work in the terminal, installing Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Franz, Tilde, VirtualBox, Pandoc, Panwriter, and many more. For a less-demanding user who is happy to just use what they're given, Elementary is an attractive offering. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/12/04/elementary_os_8/