A tour of elementary OS, perhaps the Linux world’s best hope for the mainstream

Enlarge / The default look of ElementaryOS Juno. (credit: Scott Gilbertson)
Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. The operating system is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, and so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world that is simultaneously so utterly unknown outside the tech community.
From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the Web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't all realize it. Yet even with that ubiquity, there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Despite passionate communities of users (as seen in place like Ars comment threads), Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term. Though if it ever does, it will likely be because of projects like elementary OS—an operating system that seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux.
elementary OS began life over a decade ago as a set of icons. (Yes, seriously.) If ever there was a group of developers who started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top, it's Daniel Foré and the rest of today's elementary OS team. From a set of icons designed to improve the look of Ubuntu's then GNOME 2 desktop, the elementary project expanded to include some custom apps, including a fork of the default GNOME files app, Nautilus, called nautilus-elementary. As with most open source projects, the borrowing went both ways: Ubuntu's Humanity theme was a fork of elementary OS's icon set.
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