elementary OS 6 Odin review - Was it worth the wait?

Today marks 1 thousand and 28 days since the release of elementary OS 5 Juno. Oh, incidentally, elementary OS 6 is also out right now, almost 3 years after the last release. That took a lot of time, but it's also one of the biggest releases that I ever reviewed, all distros included. Let's see what we can make of this new desktop!

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Installer

You might have already seen it in PopOS, as the guys at System76 have been using it even before elementary moved to it themselves. It's much streamlined, much more simple, and beautiful, and it's really, really fast compared to the Ubuntu installer.

Look and feel

The new dark mode: all the default apps, and the system components will adopt it, including the dock, the panel, and its indicators. The dark mode can be further configured in the preferences, to start and end at specific times of day, or even following sunset and sunrise, which is pretty cool. On top of that, you can now change accent colors.
This is nicely complimented by the new theme, which isn't a huge departure from the elementary OS 5, but still looks a lot nicer.The default font has also been changed to Inter.

Desktop
The most prominent feature is the addition of multi touch gestures on laptops and touchpads. These are 1:1 gestures, where the content moves as you move your fingers, and they're extremely smooth and well integrated.
These gestures are also present in other system components: in the date and time indicator, in the notification center to dismiss notifications, or even in the settings and the app center to go back and forward. You can even swipe between users on the login screen.

elementary OS 6 has a completely redesigned notification system.
These can display buttons so you can immediately act on them. They also follow the dark theme, and can be dismissed with a two finger touchpad swipe.

The sound indicator now displays available inputs and outputs, and you can select them directly these to quickly switch between them.
The power indicator will now show more devices and their battery status, and clicking a device will open a popover with more detailed information about its battery and its total capacity.

Sadly, elementary OS 6 still doesn't support fractional scaling.In its place, you have a setting that lets you change the text size, and that will also increase the size of buttons and various elements.

Apps
First things first, elementary OS 6 is moving to Flatpak.

Tasks
It's a simple todo list app, reminiscent of Apple's Reminders on macOS. It can sync with caldav tasks, like on Nextcloud or Google tasks, you can create multiple lists, change their font color, and create tasks with date based or location based reminders.

Files
The file manager changes a bit in terms of behavior: it used to be single click only to navigate, and open files, now it uses a double click to open files, to avoid misclicks and errors.

Web
It's provided through Flatpak, for faster updates, and it now supports intelligent tracking protection. It has a new reader mode, to get a simpler page reading experience, you can navigate backwards and forwards using two finger swipe gestures, and it follows your dark theme if the website supports that.

Mail and Calendar
The mail app integrates with the all new online accounts, which is to say, setting an IMAP email account.
The calendar app is pretty much the same, except it now integrates with with the caldav part of the online accounts to show events and tasks, which is handy. It can also import ICS files, finally, and works better offline.

Terminal and Code
The elementary OS terminal has expanded its copy protection notification to multi line pastes, and pastes that include sudo.
The zoom levels are now per-tab, tabs can be reloaded from the right click menu, and you can move tabs around and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts if you want.

Code, the elementary OS text editor / IDE, has also been improved: you can quickly switch between git projects, closing a project now closes all of its files as well.
You can create branches and switch to and from branches, and you can do a full text search withing folders. Code also has a VIM mode, with more vim commands, and it now saves its state better.

[markio]

Nick: Points out it's been over 1000 days since the last major elementary OS update
TF2 fans: First time?

[joaovictorcesa]

I like how straight forward it is, just like this channel

[JamesWoodard]

3 years, huh?
Ahem, Slackware hasn't had a release in 6 years. The long release cycle, which began with 13.37, was the reason I shifted to Ar...a rolling release.

[RobinJusteEmery]

The wait sure was worth it! This is the biggest update in three years and a lot of work went into polishing this. New installer, great UEFI support, new light and dark theme switcher, NVidia support, snappy, multi-touch gestures, slick and smooth.

[dumb]

Elementary OS really did further my love for Linux coming from even a hardcore Windows user. So happy to see eOS 6 come out, been waiting for it for ages!!

[nischayj]

I was waiting quite a while for this, considering that it didn't have a release date. Thanks for the video, I'm definitely going to upgrade.

[Alexander-isjo]

Bro I was focused on the purple bar instead of listening because I was waiting for something to happen until I realized it's just to show the ad progress lmao XD

elementaryOS 6 Odin is a much expected release with a tons of new features. The swipe gestures within the apps are something that I really want on Gnome. I still remember my first days on Linux, eOS was the only system that worked without any problems and was easy to understand due to the cohesive team.

Congratulations to the team!

[JonathanSteadman]

It would be cool if they let us upgrade from 5 to 6. But still pretty cool.

[Alkaris]

I agree, all sites SHOULD have Dark Mode, but some sites whenever I've asked them about Dark Mode, their response was _"We don't see a need in it, and why don't you just invert your monitor colors?"_ NO!! That's not a solution.

[jabba]

I feel like elementary moving to flatpacks for everything is a good move, but they should really just add flathub by default, if that is allowed. I feel like eOS specifically could benefit from going to a rolling base (whether that is arch, debian or something else) now that flatpacks are a thing.

[NormanF]

The one drawback is the locked down desktop. Swapping out Pantheon Files for Nemo allows you to put icons, files and folders on the desktop. Instead of fighting the os, you can get it to behave like a normal, sane desktop.

[FengLengshun]

>right clicking app to take screenshot
...why isn't this standard? Actually, is there any KDE thing or GNOME extension that does this?
Regardless, I feel like it's soooo close to be perfect for me. I guess I'll have to wait 3 more years for it to be perfect for me, hopefully.

[abrarahmed]

Elementary OS looks great but I still think fedora 34 has the best trackpad gestures of all distros, specifically pinch to zoom in multiple apps.

[joaogabrielv.m]

Wow... I've been an devoted openSUSE, Solus and Pop!_OS user for a long time, yes I have distro hopping problem, but Elementary 6 really catch my eye! Great video, Nick :)

[reed]

I'm so excited to see linux/gnu distros getting some real polish.

This may replace Linux Mint as my recommendation for newbies. Idk

[rejoyy]

As a fan of elementary OS and Dark Mode, got real excited when your video came up. Was a bit worried whether eOS would lose its relevance due to the long wait. Need not have worried. Now am off to install this sexy little thing.

[rootbeer]

I think the right time for fractional scaling is when they transition to Wayland. And the right time to transition to Wayland is ASAP.

[dastat]

Thank you for your videos in English.
I'm a french speaker and I love Linux and I love English so you're what I need !

[The-Fishkeeper]

I definitely want to give this a go. A lot of features and tweaks here that appeal to me, especially the gestures. As a Mac user primarily, who wants to move to Linux fully eventually, I have been waiting for the best part of a decade now for a Linux distribution to have good gesture controls built in but default. It's also one of the nicest looking distributions out of the box, though I must say the dock and icons look very outdated and out of place compared to the rest of the UI.

[nilnailscrew]

Kinda sad that they haven't switched to Wayland yet

I get that Wayland isn't completely ready yet but if everyone would switch we would improve support a lot faster
-a sway user who switched because of multi-monitor VRR support on wayland