elementary OS Juno November Update - A few numbers and new stuff
350Juno has been out for about a month and a half now, but its development has not stagnated since then ! Here are a few changes that appeared since the official release, that you might already have seen on your own copy of elementary OS.
https://medium.com/elementaryos/updates-for-november-8c5d44ca723
Music:
Music has been given some attention, and a new accent color: it now sports an ubuntu-esque orange look which matches the icon's color, and is pretty discrete, being only visible on selected tracks, and highlights around buttons in the settings panel. Buttons which have a keyboard shortcut associated with them will now reflect that shortcut in their tooltip as well. Sorting in list, album, and column view also has been improved thanks to a new contributor.
Music still is a great audio library management for those who have not decided to move to a streaming service.
Code:
Pursuing their focus on Code, formerly Scratch, which has received a lot of attention in Juno's initial release, the developers have added new tooltips for buttons which have an associated keyboard shortcut. The "line wrap" setting has been brought back in the preferences, and a few crashes and bug fixes have also been applied to the editor.
It's nice to see that the elementary devs are still focusing on bringing a great tool to develop elementary apps, and this should have a nice impact on the whole elementary ecosystem.
A few numbers
Speaking of the ecosystem, how does elementary OS fare ? Since its release, elementary Juno has been downloaded 160 000 times. THis might seem low at first glance, but let's remember that elementary OS is still quite a niche Linux distro, and does not have the same mainstream notoriety as Ubuntu or Fedora, foe example.
70% of these downloads have originated from non-Linux OS: that means that more than two thirds of people who downloaded and tried elementary are probably Linux newcomers. This is great and shows that elementar'ys user friendly approach is bearing fruit.
Only 1% of people have selected to pay for elementary OS, though, so about 1600 people. The most common amount of donation is 10$, with 1$ close behind: this means that elementary probably made from 5 to 10 thousand $ in a month and a half, which is not bad, but could largely be improved. I would expect this amount to largely go down as the hype around Juno's release settles down, so these donations still don't seem like a sufficient way to make a company sustainable.
This is not the only revenue source, though: paid apps in the AppCenter are also contributing a little to elementary's bottomline, and 87 curated apps have been released for Juno. In total, AppCenter have 117 specific elementary OS apps, so some devs still have a bit of work to do to bring their apps to Juno, but the progress seems good.
A few highlights of these apps include Timetable, a very nice and simple app to track tasks for each day of a given week, Fondo, a wallpaper finder using Unsplash to display wallpaper ideas, or sequeler, a very nicely built SQL client to preview databases and execute commands quickly.
Curated elementary apps are, for the most part, simple, one-task applications, but some of them are starting to get more complex, such as Sequeler, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this ecosystem can achieve.
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Also Watch my Experience with Manjaro Budgie on a Full AMD Linux Build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZdj4Q08fBg
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