| I am very sorry. I did not want to come across as being nothing but negative. I will have to try Elementary's new email client – it replaced Geary with its own home-grown one in recent releases. I did not give it more than a cursory look. I have used Mail.app in several OS X releases, but these days, I use Thunderbird instead. I am know the GNUstep Mail client a little bit. For me, the menu tree is a big part of an app's UI. I favour older versions of MS Office that still have menus rather than the horrible Ribbon UI of Office since the 2007 release. Since Elementary and its apps have no menu bar and no menus, I don't really feel that their UI can be like macOS apps' since a core element of the UI is missing. Regarding the difference between a taskbar and a dock – well, ISTM a lot of Linux distros don't, frankly. I think there's a big difference. But saying that, the Windows taskbar (that is, the original of the species) has been getting increasingly Dock-like in recent releases. Windows 8 even dropped the Start button and Start menu. 8.1 put it back starting a full-screen app launcher not unlike Launchpad in recent macOS releases; Win10 and 11 have made it more and more Mac-like, so that in Win11 it's centred by default and can no longer even be arranged vertically at the side of the screen. (Personally, I hate the new version.) So I'd say that the company that invented the taskbar is trying very hard to make it more like a dock. And of course imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I had a quick play with an older version of Elementary 3-4 releases ago. I didn't like it much. Last week I spent a few days getting to know it better. It's a very "opinionated" distro. I like macOS a lot – I'm typing on it now – and if Elementary was more Mac-like, I would like it more. As it was, I was impressed with the clean, integrated design, but actually using it, no, I don't find it Mac-like at all. Not really in any way. You can, if you wish, read my thoughts on it here:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/elementary_os_61/ It is clean, it works well, its programmers have *views* on how to do stuff and they've found a model that pays and they're working on it. Good for them. I do not think I will be using it myself. |