[frugalfirbolg]

Since I haven't found a roadmap or mission statement on their site, would it be correct to summarize Elementary OS as an attempt to simply user interfaces and application development?

I laughed when I read the "Minimal Documentation" guideline in their design philosophy. Yes, aiming to make an application intuitive is great, but I first thought of how many developers achieve the Minimal Documentation goal in another sense.

It looks like they have put a lot of work into applications that meet their design goals, instead of rolling just another distro remix with the same old repositories, although it is listed as Ubuntu based on DistroWatch.

In case anyone else wants to look at their forum, it's at http://elementaryforums.org/ For such a UX focused project I find it unfortunate that they don't have a link to it on their support page and their answer service is listed as down from the home page even though I was able to reach it through Google.

[Spittie]

They want to offer a stable, good locking, free (as in freedom) and well integrated operative system. To get this, they have written their HIGs (i guess this is what you could call "simplify user interfaces") and their own framework Granite ("simplify application development"). The closest thing you can find to a roadmap is their blueprints page on Launchpad (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos)

This forum is not the official forum, since Elementary doesn't have one. While some devs browse it, they mostly use irc and mailing lists.

They took down the answer service because it was dedicated to Elementary OS Jupiter, and they've stopped to support it some time ago (http://elementaryos.org/journal/farewell-jupiter). They're probably going to bring it up again soon, but if i recall right they wanted first to do a refresh of their whole site.

[frugalfirbolg]

Thanks for the info. I can see why devs wouldn't want to discuss everything on the same forum as the help / support topics, and I assume the mailing list is easy to subscribe to.

That blueprints link is pretty useful for taking a quick glance at what they're currently hacking on. Something longer term might be helpful for recruiting folks that don't want to lurk on the mailing list and irc just to figure out if there are interesting bits for them to contribute on.

[cassidyjames]

The forums aren't official. ;) They're fan-hosted and helpful, but not officially part of elementary.

[frugalfirbolg]

True. It looks like there isn't an official one so that one is as good as it gets :/