Reader supplied reviews for Endless OS
Average rating
5.8 from 21 review(s)
Version: 5.1.1
Rating: 5
Date: 2024-02-03
Votes: 0
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There were a few issues getting Endless installed at first. Getting past those annoyances, I immediately felt at home with the OS. I couldn't help making comparisons with MacOS. While different in many ways, Endless did seem to be a match in terms of ease of use. Actually I would say it more closely resembles a laptop version of Android.
I've tried a number of distros that have been either mediocre at best or a dismal fail. I was beginning to think Linux wasn't going to work as a replacement for MacOS. But for one brief moment it seemed Endless might allow me to make a fairly painless transition. THEN there was the absolute deal killer.
As others stated in their reviews, downloading apps is unacceptably slow. They just didn't make it clear exactly how bad the situation is. So let me break it down. A test download of 20 measly megabytes was taking FOREVER. After more than 30 minutes the install was at 18 percent. So it was going to be a 3 hour download for one tiny app. As if that isn't bad enough, you can only choose one install at a time. So with all the apps I needed to download I was realistically looking at weeks of babysitting installs one at a time. And then what about updates? I shut down the OS and that was it for me. Deleted.
If you don't need to add any apps this distro may work nicely for you. There's a second version available weighing in at 18gb with a "mystery grab bag" of preinstalled apps. Otherwise you're going to understand exactly where they got the name "Endless" for this OS. It seems to do with waiting for apps to finish installing. I would have been happy to be able to rate this distro higher than I did.
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Version: 5.0.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2023-08-01
Votes: 4
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I have tried many different Linux OSes over the years on an old desktop, and I keep coming back to Endless because it just works with very little tweaking, includes easy installation of real Chrome, and is quite snappy on an older machine. I use and like Chromebooks too, and to me Endless is very similar in operation and benefits. My printer, which is often a problem on many distros, just worked instantly. My secondary storage drive just appeared and worked. My wifi just worked. Everything was good to go.
Cons: Not for power users, and since the interface is not like Windows some may find it takes a little learning time. If you are used to a Chromebook it will seem quite similar in many ways.
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Version: 5.0.2
Rating: 6
Date: 2023-05-12
Votes: 6
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This Distro is mainly meant for education and offline usage, it comes with pre-installed encyclopedias, educational content, custom games and activities specifically designed for this OS, The "Hack" app for example where you can explore the OS, write code and have some fun.
Lots of additional educational content and many games are available in the App Center, it can be very interesting to explore for kids age 8-15. Although the App Center itself is slow and can hang for a while after install/delete (more on it later).
The read only root file system means you can't install anything outside of the App Center, and can't really break anything by your own actions, at least not without deep linux knowledge to know how to break it.
Now the bad parts.
I have an old NVIDIA graphic card - GeForce 770 and Wayland driver is not available for this card, so I often had freezes and graphical glitches, for example in Anki, the hardware acceleration was not working either. But switching to Xorg at login manager didn't help, maybe because it was not using the proprietary driver? It's hard to tell, because you can't really use apt to install anything, and nvidia was not found in the App Center. I think the hardware detection and driver installation could be better.
The OS does not include any DNS filtering or parenting control by default so the 'bad' sites are fully accessible.
Endless OS 5.0.4 (May 2023) still doesn't support black theme in Gnome. Gnome itself is very limiting, I had to write configuration to .profile (which you can do since it's in a user home folder not the root fs)
Because you can't install anything which is not available in the App Center if this OS is broken for you out of the box it's very difficult to fix it, even if you know your way around other, traditional linuxes.
For some reason some apps were not available for me in the App Center - vscode(ium), vim, emacs. But I could find and install them from the flathub site, after which they started to show in the App Center.
App Center is too slow and buggy, it takes ~3-6 second for search. No availability to install with right click from the list of found apps, you have to go to each app page and install from there, but it takes ~5 seconds per each page load.
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If you don't have an old nvidia card and want to explore the pre-installed apps in an Offline setting it can be OK'is choice, for anything else I would not recommend it.
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See all 21 reader reviews of Endless OS...
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