The elementary OS 6 beta version has released
The elementary OS 6 beta version has released
Elementary OS 6 beta version has released with its codename Odin for developers to try and do testing and experiments. The elementary team has been performing on these updates for one year currently, giving us a peek of all the new updates and features coming to the new release in their blog now that the beta releases out. I’m really excited to check out all those new features in a live system now.
The elementary OS 6 relies on Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) it uses Xorg as its default display server rather than Walen that several alternative distros are using in 2021. elementary is conversant in its pantheon desktop environment.
Installation of Beta Version
I don’t recommend anyone use these bleeding-edge Early Access builds on their day-to-day laptop as there may be possibilities of breaking problems due to the nature of early development. Beta releases are snapshots of Early Access builds once the developer platform has stable. At this time, I like to recommend solely developers begin building and testing their apps on this elementary OS.
I still caution against using beta releases on your daily driver. (better to use on USB Flash)
For previous versions of elementary OS, the installation was handled by ubuntu’s installer however now elementary has teamed up with the System-76 team to form a fresh installer that shares the identically simplified yet elegant design aesthetic of elementary OS. This new installer of the elementary OS has the text on the left aspect with corresponding choices on the right side within which the first possibility is to pick the system language.
- Select your language, Mine it’s English thus I will choose English to go to the subsequent step.
- Choose your language, in line with my native English I select the United States within the Language category and then press next.
- Select your keyboard layout thus you’ll select whichever is suitable here then we’ll head to the next step.
- As it is the beta version I choose to attempt the demo mode so you can get into a live environment (You can do a clean install, To go to clean install press clean install, and then choose the drive which you are going to use the SSD. It will do an erase and install. or you can also choose custom installation where you can select custom drive partition to be erased if you are using multi-boot configurations)
- Once it’s finished and that is it the installation has complete and revive.
- In the last part, we’re going to create our user accounts so we’re going to log in and start our new Elementary OS 6.
Next, we have welcome to elementary OS choose your look so here we have the light and the dark themes as well as the accent colors you can choose any of your choices, next location services where you can enable or disable it. Next, night light as well so you can change the color temperature of your screen. Then we get the housekeeping option so we can automatically delete unwanted or trashed files after 30 days to save space.
New features of forthcoming Elementary OS 6 (Beta)
On the primary run, you may get a caution that you are using an early access build which should not be used in a production environment. By moving further to the desktop view you may not notice any difference from the previous version of Elementary OS, because the icon package remains identical. however, there are several refined changes to the desktop, initial is that the system font that is ‘Inter’ font now, that has been changed from the previous ‘Open Sans’ font whereas both fonts are looks similar at first glance and therefore you may not notice this change but there’s a change in the text rendering settings from RGB to grayscale so the text has more contrast and is little easier to read.
In the Pantheon desktop environment at the top, we have our top panel which is completely transparent by default but we can go into the system settings and set it to a solid color. in the center of our panel, we have a little clock with date and time, if we press that we can then expose the full calendar and events on this day and we can jump straight into the date and time settings from here. At the top right, we have a power button for things like our reboot, shutdown, user account settings, lock screen, and all such things. The notification center has been fully modified with a replacement of the notification server; it currently shows separate bubbles for every notification beneath the notification menu.
On the desktop we have a simple right-click option where we can change the wallpaper, can go into the display settings and the system settings. At the bottom of the screen, we have a dock which is fulfilled by plank and if we go control right click and go straight into the preferences it’s pretty much a standard plank installation apart from you don’t have the option to do the icon zoom or zoom on hover on elementary OS theming.
Another new setting that enables you to more personalize the desktop is that the new accent color possibility under the appearance tab. With these settings, you can change the color of highlighted text toggle switches and various elements of the desktop there are 10 different accent colors available to choose from.
Another amendment we will notice within the corner of windows for applications currently we’ve got rounded corners rather than straight edges.
Apart from that, the other major change is that the new dark mode. Currently, dark mode is something accessible in every major Linux distros nowadays. it was there in elementary’s previous release as well but the implementation was a little different in elementary 5.1 there was a toggle switch on each and every application to set it to dark mode currently in elementary OS 6 the toggle for the individual app is gone and now you have an option for a system-wide dark mode which is in the appearance tab under desktop settings this makes the entire desktop the menus background of application dock everything to a darker background the dark theme is implemented pretty well and gives the distro a total new trendy look.
The next change is that the multi-touch gestures if you have a laptop then you may notice this feature pretty helpful support for multi-finger gestures started with the release of Gnome 40 and currently all major distros are using this features in their 2021 releases, elementary OS isn’t a bleeding-edge distro and therefore the latest technology isn’t accessible immediately however we are lucky that elementary os 6 has been enclosed this feature. One difference between the implementation of multi-finger gestures on an alternative Linux distro compared with the elementary OS is that with gnome desktop there is not any choice to customize these gestures. However, in elementary 6 you’ll customize these gestures from the gesture settings under the mouse and touchpad.
We can notice a few major software packages, flat pack for app center, the flat pack is a new packaging format for Linux app built to simplify app installation in Linux distro the aim is to have one standard package format that works in all Linux distro now with the flat pack for app center all elementary packages are moving from dev format to flat-pack packaging format and support for the flat-pack, is available by default but these apps are hosted on elementary’s own flat-pack repository and not on the flat-hub which is the app store for flat-pack packages there are multiple benefits of using flat-pack packages.
Now files app has a replacement navigation mode currently this dual-action for a click rather than double click single click on a folder can open the folder except for opening files or running app you have to use double click, the hybrid action on the mouse will improve your navigation in files app making it faster the overall design of the files app is also more flat now.
In the settings app section where there are many changes some classes are fully redesigned as an example the about category is replaced by a system that provides you information on system hardware and computer firmware with links to update the system. The HIDPS scaling under display setting currently provides us an extra 3x scaling possibility for a better resolution screen and of course, the desktop category has a lot of changes in appearance, and the dock all are redesigned to add new features and the hot corners are replaced by a multitasking tab.
Conclusion:
elementary OS 6 beta version has released solely for developers and not for users. The final stable release of elementary OS is yet to come, this is often the beta release for developers and still contains few bugs and there are several broken things so I’m not providing any review on the performance facet. Major changes you can expect during this release are Dark Theme, Flat Pack for App center, Fonts and Typography, Stylesheets, Multi-Touch Gesture, and few package changes besides some swish appearance and feel. As I said I will check out each feature in detail and let you know when the stable release will come.
By-TechsoNihal
