I’m sure you’re already aware but, as of elementary OS 5.1 Hera, you can easily upgrade from one release to another. The only caveat is that you need to be running at least 5.0 Juno, i.e. if you want to upgrade from 0.4 Loki then you’ll still have to do a fresh install. Great news going forward though.

Looking around for what was going to be the least trouble and smost stable, I decided Elemenatry would be the trick. I’ve had it on my Dell Inspiron laptop for almost a month now and my impressions are as follows.

1. Clean and neat but it can be difficult telling what is running and switching between Apps and managing their windows.

2. No major problems so far except the number of attempted upgrades or extra Apps I try to install that fail for one reason or another. After a while it gets difficult to keep track of what worked/didn’t work or actually installed. I’ve lost count of how many times I have tried to install Elemenetary Tweaks which will allow me to add further features/Apps.

3. Coming from macOS I can’t help but comment on the dearth of Apps, their generally low quality and the difficulty of working out what they do, what they require, whether they are worth installing and then actually installing them.

4. My Dell Inspiron is a touchscreen 2 in 1. It seems somewhat slow and clumsy running elementary OS and the WiFi is almost always only on 1 bar unless I am within sight of my router. Why that is so has me puzzzled.

5. The combination of the above plus a few other factors too involved to go into, does make my laptop feel really limited and time wasting. I have not got it back to where I can just get anything done.

Especially when you hit options in Terminal like:

“0̷ to upgrade, 0̷ to newly install, 0̷ to remove and 0̷ not to upgrade”

Mind you, I’m not advocating the “stealth bomber” approach of Microsoft, whence you walked away from your Windows 7 PC and returned to a Win10 one. But it would be nice since they’re based off of Ubuntu if they could figure out some kind of way to allow you to do in-place upgrades. Maybe just give they user a popup stating “There’s A New Version Of ElementaryOS”…click here to download and install/upgrade.?? Just a suggestion, and remember, I am speaking only for myself not the entire Linux-using community. So please don’t everyone attack my comments as if they came from Linux Torvalds himself!…LoL!

It was an oversight and I meant to write something else. Thanks for pointing it out.

I’d say it feels a bit more like GNOME IMO… The general idea of simplicity, status bar on the top right, app launcher on the top left, a dock (this one is a bit different though), no minimize by default…

I agree it’s not based on KDE, but you’re also mixing up your terminology a bit. GTK+ is the widget toolkit Pantheon uses; you can compare it to Qt but not really to KDE.