Crash at Elementary OS: The founding team of the popular Linux distro breaks up
The Linux distribution Elementary OS, which is very concerned about design and its own apps, will only have one employee in the future. Co-founder Cassidy James Bleade and accountant Liz Kecso have (been) gone.
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| Crash at Elementary OS: The founding team of the popular Linux distro breaks up |
Danielle Foré takes over the Linux distribution Elementary OS alone and at the same time remains its sole employee. Instead of a strong economic basis, she now wants to focus on "enjoying development".
Elementary OS is weakening, the founder is looking for a new job
For business economists, the tones coming from Elementary OS do not sound particularly confidence-inspiring. Due to extremely sluggish sales, the company behind the distro had already fired the accountant and had to announce further salary cuts.
That had prompted co-founder Cassidy James Bleade to look for other revenue opportunities. As he describes in a blog post, he had succeeded. Starting out as a developer at an open source company, he wanted to run Elementary OS as a side project.
However, co-founder Danielle Foré is said to have disagreed with this. If he wanted to go, then right, it must have been something like that. So Bleade transferred his shares completely to Foré and withdrew completely from the Elementary OS development. The open source community wants Bleade to be preserved. He intends to bring his skills to Gnome, Flatpak, and other projects in the future.
Last remaining employee announces changes
In a live chat on YouTube, Danielle Foré commented on the future of Elementary OS and answered questions from the community. In doing so, she confirmed that she is now the sole employee and owner of Elementary Inc. In addition, there were never any other employees besides Kecso, Bleade and herself.
For the future of distribution, she wants to focus more on the fun factor than on hard economic aspects. In the past, the focus was too much on the profitability of the company and its growth, which meant that the needs of the community were neglected. She also made mistakes herself.
Update schedule to version 7 is out of the question
In the future, Elementary OS will be more open. It will soon be possible to install apps from other app stores or via sideloading. So far, Elementary OS had only supported programs from the in-house, curated app center and warned users against other installation methods.
Foré wants to keep the upcoming update to version 7, but it will be "more modest" than usual. Some features would have to be postponed due to the changed situation. GTK4 is said to already partially support Elementary OS 7.
This is Elementary OS
The Linux distribution Elementary OS is one of the most successful distros of all and has ranked 11th on Distrowatch for years. Elementary is based on Ubuntu, but goes its own way apart from the core.
The main distinguishing feature to other distributions is the specially developed Pantheon desktop, which is partly reminiscent of Gnome, but is actually a complete in-house development of the Elementary project.
In general, Elementary OS consistently relies on its own solutions, or those that, like the system itself, are based on the free GTK program library, including Abiword or Gnumeric for text and table processing. Cross-platform apps like Firefox don't ship Elementary.
Elementary OS brings its own applications for web browsing, e-mail, files, photos, video and music as well as calendar, camera and programming. The OS's Files app also supports cloud storage services.
Overall, the Elementary desktop is clearly reminiscent of macOS, which is amplified by the use of the alternative Plank dock. This allows the dock at the bottom edge of the screen, which is characteristic of macOS, to be recreated almost identically.
To make it easier to switch or get started, Elementary comes with various wizards that help make basic configurations the first time you start it after installation. This makes user onboarding easier. A welcome screen provides a more personalized login experience.
For app distribution, Elementary relies on its own app center, which offers a secure and privacy-friendly method of app delivery with the support of the open source technology Flatpak.