Team at Elementary OS announced the new release this month, Elementary OS 5.1. Elementary OS 5.1 though termed a dot release, is significant enough to get its own name ‘Hera’. It uses Elementary OS 5 Juno as its core and is built upon its repositories and libraries. It does provide better and refined experience and lots of new things which we will talk about in this article in detail.

Elementary OS has improved a lot over the years which has attracted lots of Linux user. With a clean and easy to use Pantheon desktop and its own highly monitored AppCenter, it stands out from any other Debian-based (or rather Ubuntu-based) distributions. With the first beta release in February 2015, they have come a long way to Elementary OS Hera.

You can read more about Elementary OS in our previous article : Top 4 reasons to use Elementary OS.

Lets jump on and see what’s new in Elementary OS 5.1 Hera.

What’s new in Elementary OS 5.1 Hera

Hera introduces a lot of new features, lots of bug fixes and improvements and a better AppCenter with support for Flatpak. Lets see the detailed features Elementary OS 5.1 Hera has to offer.

Flatpak Support

Elementary OS 5.1 Hera has extended its support for FlatPak by adopting it for AppCenter and third party developer ecosystem.

This doesn’t mean Elementary OS is extending its support to Flathub. The team wants to stick to its AppCenter and native applications and will be providing its own hosted and curated FlatPak repo for AppCenter.

Side-loading of applications

Elementary OS always recommend using its own AppCenter which is extensively reviewed but understands that it may not fulfill all the user needs. They have introduced a utility called sideload, that warns (or, informs) about the download size and whether it will add a remote containing other app.

AppCenter Improvements

AppCenter is heavily improved in Elementary OS 5.1 Hera. Homepage loads up pretty quick, searching of applications is fast and there is an improved performance throughout the apps. This all results in a 10 times faster AppCenter experience.

AppCenter now supports Flatpak with the updates appearing alongside other updates and apps installed outside of AppCenter will be listed in uncurated apps. There is a better navigation system and gives you an option to choose from different sources if its listed in more than one place. Apps are distributed in various categories making it easier to find one.

While offline, you can browse caches apps and uninstall existing applications. Elementary OS 5.1 Hera back supports all the applications from 5.0 Juno.

User Interface improvements

There are changes to the login screen, new desktop wallpapers have been introduced and the applications are way better now in terms of design and usage.

Greeter and Onboarding

Newly designed login and lockscreen greeter with fixed focus and HiDPI issues. The lock screen now displays usernames for all users and with background as cards to make it more distinct.

Redesigned login screen
Redesigned login screen

Onboarding app handles common first time settings e.g. privacy settings, location, night sight, housekeeping etc.

Desktop

Picture-in-Picture now displays at the bottom right of the display where it’s expected to be. There is a redesigned Data & Time indicator and session indicator listing out the key board shortcuts for lock and log out.

It also includes improvements to Application Menu and addition of fade out effects in popovers. There is a refreshed system icons and mirrored icons for right to left languages. The icons are overall a bit more consistent with Elementary OS theme.

Hera introduced a new set of icons and an update to the default wallpaper. Color scheme remains similar to Juno with its purples, oranges and blue.

Elementary OS wallpapers
Elementary OS wallpapers

Applications

There are improvements to the default applications in Elementary OS 5.1. Calendar app’s design has been refreshed, camera has a better hardware compatibility and performance, UI of Photos app is better.

Sorting in Music app includes album, list and column views and there are more discover-able keyboard shortcuts. The video app automatically queues up episodes in binge-watching and shows audio track titles. Files, Code and terminal has been made better too.

Accessibility and system settings

There are many improvements to System Settings and accessibility options making the experience of Elementary OS 5.1 Hera better than earlier. Here’s some of the them

  • Sound settings have been improved resulting in a simpler way of picking your output device.
  • Mouse and touchpad settings have been redesigned and organised into sections.
  • Ignore when mouse is connected – to disable touchpad when a USB or wired mouse is connected because of the public demands.
  • Appearance changes which includes different text size support, reliable scaling factore settings and a new refresh rate option.
  • Bluetooth settings improvement for better pairing and a new pairing agent to make connection to PIN protected devices easier.
  • Cleaner Data & Time design and introduction of automatic timezone settings.
  • And much more…

Wrapping up

So what you are waiting for? Head over to the AppCenter and upgrade to Elementary OS 5.1 Hera for a overall better experience in terms of user interface and functionality.

Are you already using the latest of Elementary OS? Feel free to share your reviews in the comments.