Element OS was supposed to be, when done, a Linux-based OS made for a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Sadly they cancelled the project and later removed the ISO file from their site. I got ahold of it before they removed it.

It’s obvious it’s still a release candidate. The menus and windows don’t function great, and the installer doesn’t work right.

The desktop, as you can see, is totally different.

I think it would work much better on a real HTPC, because running it in an emulator at 800*600 is downright terrible.
You have gigantic indicators as well as pretty buttons. There are no menus at all.

That thing in the upper left corner that appears to be a menu is actually nothing more than a shortcut launcher to the Application Finder, which serves basically as a menu for launching applications.

Element uses Thunar to do file management in case you absolutely need to store files other than entertainment files (which can be accessed in other ways actually) on your HTPC.

Element bundles it’s own YouTube client called “YouTube XL”. Fortunately it does not suffer from all the new layout changes and crud the actual website is put through.
It is very straightforward to use, and makes viewing videos much easier than it would viewing them on-site, although it isn’t as fast in terms of download speed.

For web browsing Element uses a heavily customized version of Firefox.

Note the fact that all the menus are hidden from view so that the appearance is cleaned up. You close the application by clicking that huge X in the top right corner.