As one of the people behind elementary OS, this blog posts pretty much summarises how hard of a time I have when reading online criticism on elementary OS. Feedback is good, we love it and realize how important it is. However, for the most part the complaints are not about the OS itself but instead on some of these myths (or worse even, how we're "just a blatant copy of OS X" when we have our own ideas and identity).
We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.
Perhaps it could help make it easy for visitors of your site to know what elementaryOS is, even in broad strokes. I had to go to the main page and then scroll down a few screens until I found this sentence:
"elementary OS is a free replacement for Windows on the PC and OS X on the Mac."
Not having that at the top of the first screen, people do have to find this information elsewhere.
Indeed, they give how-the-sausage-is-made first and second billing, how-pretty-it-is third billing, and what-it-is in the fourth and final slot. It's almost exactly upside down.
First of all great work on Elementary. One thing that doesn't help with the "Copy of OSX" comments is the video on the front page where the desktop uses the Mountain Lion wallpaper.
It's not exactly the same as far as I know. You can use another picture of the same Galaxy without it being the same picture. Plus it appears for 5 seconds on the video and not all the time. They are other wallpapers shown in the video.
The fact that it needs defending is kind of the point. It looks similar enough to evoke the reaction from most people that it is similar to OS X, which is more than like a goal and not an accident. It may not be the exact image, but it doesn't have to be.
These replies do not help. For people who don't want to live on Ubuntu LTS versions (and such people probably don't want to install the first version of a new OS), Luna is "over 2 years old", and it was already seriously out of date when it came out.
Elementary OS know what people mean when they say Luna is out of date (all the packages are over 2 years old), yet give an answer that completely ignores that issue.
For another viewpoint I'm running dev of a side project on an elementary laptop. Since bleeding edge of postgres and python doesn't matter much for me it is actually quite good. (relational database, no scaling problem for now and python packages are installed using virtualenv and pip. Sublime text also works nicely on two year old kernel )
Looking at it from the other side, if you have newer hardware Elementary OS may not work properly on your machine because it has an older kernel that may not have the drivers.
If the target audience is laptop users this is definitely going to be an issue.
The thing about elementary and OS X is that elementary seems a whole lot better than OS X. This wouldn't count of course if I hadn't used OS X a few years. (Then again I mostly have used Linux whenever possible for the last 5-10 years and I also think Windows 8 is great.)
Things that are better (in my view) in elementary are for example: alt-tab, standard open source apps works nicely (no need to run in an extra x), no global menu.
Of course no Mac user should switch, but for anyone like me who almost like mac except for the:"stupid" parts elementary is great.
The warning is not for me, I understand these things, but it is a disturbing trend of people thinking copy and pasting command prompts is an OK thing to do.
After seeing some demos of the new UI features in Isis, which are pretty original and amazing, I don't think it's copying OSX any more than the later and iOS are copying Microsoft's modern UI with Yosemite.
We're working hard on the next release of elementary OS, called Isis, and we hope that it will bring a renewed interest in elementary.