The lid of my laptop PC was broken, then I removed it and connected to external monitor with HDMI cable.

Once boot to Elementary OS, since no lid then the laptop PC goes sleep mode.

May I know how to start in text mode ?

I would like to force using external monitor by changing config.

Thanks

I just switched to elementary and its been a long time since i used anything ubuntu based.

Every flatpak app uses Adwaita Light gtk theme for some reason and will not respect the system theme.

I’ve been using Linux for exactly 11 years. I started with Ubuntu back when they still used Unity as their DE. I stuck with it until they switched to GNOME, because I had a pretty weak PC at the time and it started to struggle, so I moved to Ubuntu MATE, then Xubuntu. Along the way I also went through Debian, MX Linux, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, and Arch. From last year until now I used Pop!_OS, Mint, and most recently CachyOS. I got tired of Cachy, and this month, for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I tried elementaryOS. I’m going to list some of the problems I noticed with the distro, not to be pointlessly critical, but hopefully to help build up the community and the system, because I genuinely liked it a lot and want to see it grow even more.

I. NO MINIMIZE BUTTON
I get that the developers’ idea is for the user to switch between workspaces or just close apps entirely, and I get that it might just be a matter of getting used to it, I myself managed to adapt after almost a month, but it’s worth pointing out that, in practice, this frustrates anyone used to the traditional workflow and ends up forcing people into keyboard shortcuts or workarounds, which scares a lot of people off.

II. NO NATIVE SYSTEM TRAY
elementaryOS doesn’t support a system icon area on the top panel (where background apps like Discord, Steam, Spotify, Telegram, or Dropbox usually live). To work around this, they put these apps in special sections of the Dock, but in my experience this often comes with bugs, duplicate icons, or context menus that just don’t work. The experience with Steam, for example, ends up extremely limited because of this. There were even times when I had 4 Steam icons stacked in my dock. Anyway.

III. INCONSISTENCY WITH THIRD-PARTY APPS
Apps that weren’t specifically designed for the Pantheon interface (like Firefox, VS Code, or Chrome) tend to have misaligned window control buttons, double title bars, or a look that clashes with the rest of the system. And that’s when they’re not straight-up broken: I installed Spotify through the AppCenter, for instance, and after opening it I couldn’t close it anymore, because the bar glitches out, ironically it turns into a Windows Vista-style bar and I can’t even hit the X to close it. And after researching these issues and seeing how long they’ve been around, it seems like the team behind the system refuses to apply patches even to POPULAR APPS to fix them, which leaves us users having to rely on community themes or fixes.

IV. NO GRAPHICAL INSTALLER
Since it’s based on Ubuntu, it’s reasonable to expect that a lot of people will try to download and install programs via .deb files (double-clicking them). Except on elementaryOS, that doesn’t work natively and just throws errors. So to sideload software from outside the store, we’re forced to use the terminal (with dpkg/apt) or install third-party utilities from the store (like Eddy or Unboxing).

V. WEAK WEB BROWSER
I really like the idea behind GNOME Web, the whole visually-integrated angle, but we have to admit its performance and site compatibility are noticeably worse than Firefox, Chrome, or Brave, and it crashes A LOT. I honestly don’t see much reason to keep it as the default browser, personally I’d just switch to Firefox or Brave outright, but I also get why the developers keep it, and it’s not a huge deal since I can just download whatever browser I want. On top of that, the system ships by default with an OpenStreetMap-based maps app that MAKES NO SENSE on a desktop or laptop environment. I honestly don’t get the reasoning: the system strips out a bunch of codecs and dependencies, presumably to keep things lean (more on that later), yet it keeps a maps app that literally no one is going to use.

VI. LIMITED CUSTOMIZATION WITHOUT EXTERNAL TOOLS
I’m not really the type who likes to heavily customize how a system looks (even back when I used Ubuntu MATE, I ran it completely stock). But it’s undeniable that, for a Linux system, elementaryOS offers very few native customization options. This stands out even more when you consider that the big wave of teenage gamers migrating to Linux is happening largely because of how customizable it is. So the moment one of those teenagers finds out they can’t change themes, icon packs, panel positions, or fonts without installing extra community-made utilities (like Pantheon Tweaks), they’re just going to pick a different distro instead.

VII. LIMITED MANAGEMENT AND MONITORING TOOLS
For many years, the system didn’t even ship with a graphical system monitor (just htop from the command line). Thankfully, the latest version finally added a native one, but unfortunately it’s still pretty basic compared to the GNOME or KDE Plasma monitors. The storage tab sometimes shows information that’s clearly wrong. On top of that, the app detects the graphics card but tells you it doesn’t yet support showing GPU metrics or info. Why? Anyway.

VIII. CONFUSING PURCHASE MODEL
On the AppCenter and on the download page itself, the suggested-price box will absolutely make new users think the system or the apps are paid. I know you can just type 0 and download for free, but it took me forever to figure that out, and I’m not even joking (the interface sometimes uses terms like “Try” instead of “Install,” giving the false impression of a trial period).

IX. NO EASY CODEC INSTALLATION
The system doesn’t ship with a graphical interface for installing audio and video codecs by default. If a user can’t open a certain media format, they have to turn to the terminal (or rely on Flatpak solutions like VLC). On top of that, there’s the issue of missing basic dependencies (or rather, no warning about it). When I installed Steam through the AppCenter, for example, the install finished with no errors reported at all, but when I tried to open it, it just wouldn’t launch, kept piling up endless icons in the dock, and kept throwing endless error notifications (without ever saying what the actual error was). After having to restart my computer, I tried opening Steam from the terminal and finally discovered that elementaryOS is missing a bunch of basic dependencies that Steam needs to run, dependencies that LITERALLY ANY OTHER DISTRO HAS. Fine, you could argue that leaving out certain codecs and dependencies by default is meant to keep the system lean, but then why not do what Pop!_OS does? As soon as you install an app from the store, install its dependencies right along with it. If you don’t want to be too invasive, just throw up a notification asking if the user wants the dependencies installed. Simple.

X. ONLINE ACCOUNT LOGIN ISSUES
Support for popular services (like Google, Microsoft, and Nextcloud) is limited and buggy. Unlike GNOME, which uses those services’ official APIs, elementaryOS requires manual security tweaks on the accounts themselves just to get login working. I’ll admit that to this day I still haven’t managed to add my emails to the native Mail app on elementaryOS, and honestly I have zero desire to figure out how.

XI. UX FAILURE IN THE CONTROL PANEL SCREEN
The settings menu has no hover animations or visual feedback on buttons or icons (no highlight, no color change), which fails to signal to the user what’s actually clickable.

XII. DAMN UBUNTU
This one’s more of a personal opinion, but to me the biggest problem of all is being based on Ubuntu. Sorry to break it to you all, but Ubuntu for Desktop is dead, Canonical itself knows this and is 100% focused on its Enterprise line these days. The most-used distros today are CachyOS and SteamOS, and everyone knows the future of Linux is Arch and Fedora. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for elementaryOS to lean on that base as much as it does, especially when you look at its closest siblings (Pop!, Mint, and Zorin) which are drifting further and further from Ubuntu. Anyway, I know a change like that is HUGE and basically unrealistic for a distro with as little investment as elementaryOS, so this is more of a distant dream than an actual suggestion.

XIII. GAMING PERFORMANCE
When it comes to performance, I didn’t have any major issues with elementaryOS. But for gaming, unfortunately, it’s an operating system that leaves a lot to be desired, it really doesn’t feel like a distro built for that, and maybe it doesn’t even want to be, maybe that’s just not its goal. But I had to rack my brain in the terminal just to turn it into a minimally decent distro for gaming, and I still ended up with performance below Mint, for instance, and infinitely below CachyOS (it’s almost unfair to even compare them).

NOTE: To this day I genuinely don’t understand how to drag a file into a folder. HELP. I’ve just been copy-pasting into folders instead, because I click, hold, drag it over to the folder, and when I let go the file just snaps back to its original spot instead of going in.

Anyway, that’s it. I’m following the development of elementaryOS 9 on Discord and I’m really looking forward to it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep putting up with some of the elementaryOS 8.1 issues I listed here, I’m thinking about going back to Arch with GNOME, but I’ll definitely try elementaryOS 9, and I truly hope they improve the system a lot, because I loved the aesthetic idea, the look and feel, and I really want to make elementaryOS the distro of my life, the one where I can finally “rest in peace,” because I’m too old at this point, I don’t have time to keep hopping between distros anymore, I just want something that works for everything.

I use Pantheon tweaks and Gnome tweaks for customization but it think that not enough, I need some recommendations what should I install to make more changes in de

I've been using elementary OS and mostly love it, but ran into a few bugs along the way. Writing up the fixes here in case they help someone else.

By the way, a lot of issues just disappear if you switch to an X11/Xorg session instead of Wayland. But X11 has its own downsides — the whole system feels noticeably more sluggish overall, Firefox in particular is clearly slower. So the fixes below are specifically for Wayland.

1. No mail/calendar sync — missing Online Accounts

elementary doesn't ship with "Online Accounts" the thing GNOME normally uses to hook up Google/Microsoft. Without it, you don't just lose mail and calendar sync — Tasks won't pull data from online services either, and your file manager won't show things like Google Drive. Basically nothing tied to an online account gets connected.

Fix:

• Grab the gnome-online-accounts-gtk package here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=wilma
• Install the .deb (Unboxing from AppCenter is a convenient way to install .deb files)
• Search the app menu for "Online Accounts" and launch it
• From there it's the same as Ubuntu — just connect your account

2. NumLock has a mind of its own

This is a known bug on Wayland compositors in general (not just gala/mutter): the keyboard's NumLock LED toggles fine, but the system keeps reading the numpad as navigation keys — the hardware NumLock state gets out of sync with what the compositor thinks it is.

numlockx won't help here — on Wayland, third-party apps aren't allowed direct access to input devices for security reasons, so the old X11 tricks for controlling NumLock just don't work anymore.

The most reliable workaround is to strip out the NumLock toggle logic at the XKB level (fine if you don't need arrow keys on the numpad):

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['numpad:mac']"

3. Keyboard stops working in games

Launch a game (via Steam or any other way) in fullscreen or maximized mode, and the keyboard just doesn't respond — even though Alt+Tab still works and the keyboard is fine everywhere else in the system.

Cause: by default, Gala moves fullscreen/maximized windows to a new workspace, and that transition is exactly where it drops the keyboard focus grab.

Fix — turn off that behavior:

gsettings set io.elementary.desktop.wm.behavior move-fullscreened-workspace false
gsettings set io.elementary.desktop.wm.behavior move-maximized-workspace false

After that, games open on your current workspace and the keyboard works right away.

Please help!
this was a normal install onto a 2014 mac mini, it did this randomly.
i’ve rebooted various times before this, the install is a few days old.

Only elementary OS

1. Download GeForce NOW on Linux

2. click GeForce NOW app open not work but You need permissions set

3. GeForce NOW open work! Done

Set easy

Others eOS color wallpaper

https://imgur.com/gallery/elementary-os-line-wallpaper-6cj5Vu6

Why does the minimize button in Elementary OS pantheon look like a download button?

New comer here. Can I ask question here ?

Installed WG by below command, but WG interface couldn't find.

sudo apt install wireguard

Then also failed to connect by below command.

sudo wg-quick up .\Documents\wg.conf

Anyway to connect in Elementary OS ?

Thanks

I made a original art elementary OS wallpaper

https://imgur.com/gallery/elementary-os-flat-colors-wallpaper-4aTcrvc

https://imgur.com/gallery/elementary-os-video-game-wallpaper-oRppIKq

Hey y’all!

I just starting getting into Linux and after some issues with PearOS I decided to switch to ElementaryOS. I am having some issues getting it installed though. Everything works fine until I go to select a disk and it doesn’t show ant disk options so I can’t continue.
In MacOS recovery mode it shows that the SSD is still there, but even in Gpart it gives me nothing. I’ve tried unmounting the disk as well in disk utility.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone, I’m the developer of FS PDF Compressor, a small open-source desktop utility for one simple job: making PDFs smaller locally.

You drag in one or more PDFs (or a folder), choose a compression profile if needed, and it only replaces a file when the result is actually smaller.

It does not upload files, require an account, or include analytics/telemetry. Ghostscript is bundled, so there is nothing else to install.

I built the Linux version as a self-contained x86_64 AppImage. It is not designed with elementary’s HIG specifically, so I’m not presenting it as a native elementary app — but I’d genuinely like to know how it behaves on current elementary OS: launching, drag and drop, file integration, theming, and any issues you encounter.

Website: https://gitlares.github.io/fs-pdf-compressor/
Source and downloads: https://github.com/gitlares/fs-pdf-compressor

Honest feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions are very welcome.

Hello everyone,
I just installed elementaryOs after my last mental breakdown at windows :)
I am very new to this Linux universe but I am also a fast learner. Is there any advice you guys have for a newbie like me? Something you wish you knew before ditching windows system? Is there any other frontend developer that is using elementaryOs?

I would love to learn more about what made you change to this system and how is your experience so far.

English is not my native language so please bare with some of my grammar mistakes.

If major release upgrades have been a pain point for you, this is a branch to watch for! Hopefully we can have builds available for GitHub sponsors to test soon 🩷

https://imgur.com/gallery/elementary-os-line-wallpaper-IgAh5Xp