AxOS

Reader supplied reviews for AxOS Average rating 7.0 from 3 review(s) What are your thoughts on AxOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 25.06 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 25.06 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-06-04 Votes: 0 Tried it on a real PC, I wanted to see it's prime. First impressions? Surprisingly polished. The install process is smoother than an average Arch-based setup. It’s not Calamares-level hand-holding, but it’s clean, guided, and doesn’t require sacrificing a goat to get Wi-Fi working. The real standout, though, is the desktop experience. AxOS uses a custom DE called Sleex, based on Hyprland with the AGS widget system. It's slick, and surprisingly cohesive, like someone actually thought about UX instead of just slapping a rice-filled config together. Animations are snappy, the widgets are useful, and the overall layout feels modern even being a little bit bloated. Performance-wise? Kind of fast. It boots in seconds, and multitasking doesn’t slow it down at all, even better with the tiling window management. I ran some dev tools, Docker containers, and even some light gaming (Proton works great) without a hiccup. The downsides? It’s still a young project. Documentation can be sparse, and if you run into something weird, you might be on your own—or digging through the GitHub issues. There’s a Discord, but the community isn’t huge yet (111 members as I'm writing this). Also, while the design is clean, it’s very opinionated. If you don’t vibe with the aesthetic, you can change it if you're good with JavaScript, which I'm not. Bugs are here, but I contacted the maintainer via email and answered in the next 10 hours to help me. If you like bleeding edge with some elegance, AxOS is a surprisingly solid choice. Just keep Timeshift handy, just in case. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 25.06 Rating: 6 Date: 2025-06-03 Votes: 3 I decided to give AxOS a try on an AMD laptop, mostly for Sleek and the overall look. The install was easy with minimal options. It seems to default to GRUB MBR by default, so had to go back and do manual partitioning for EFI through the GUI installer and it worked fine. Sleek looks nice but has some rough patches: keybinding "cheat sheet" is blank in the control center, many of the key combos listed on the Sleek webpage do not work. I am not sure what if any advantages there are from having Epsi but it works well. Overall I think I think this distro has a bright future and look forward to its evolution, but perhaps it should still have a 'beta' tag, especially with Sleek the default Desktop now. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 25.06 Rating: 7 Date: 2025-06-01 Votes: 8 I prefer Arch-based distros, it's very frustrating to deal with years old bugs in Debian based software and missing out on new features that I'm already accustomed to. So, when I saw AxOS was Arch based, I knew I had to try it. I will be honest, I tried the first iso for 2025. It failed to launch hyprland and I had to poke around and figure out what was broken. I actually like the challenge and it was just an out-dated package (turns out) and a missing library link. I reported it, and the next day there was a new ISO with that corrected. I've found a couple of other things, all promptly addressed and pretty much all instantly answered on the discord channel. As far as I know, all problems reported have been fixed and rebased by the next day. Now, as to the distro itself: 1) Slim lined, not much extra software there, though of course all the Arch and AUR repos are available if you want something. 2) The custom HyprLand environment (Sleex) is more aesthetically designed and modem feeling that most (if not all?) HyprLand rollouts, some might even call it sleek and slick. 3) Good and bad, the install is an online install, which means you have up-to-date software from the get-go, as well as any current warts. Usually warts in Arch based distros fade quickly (ie get fixed and re-released). I truly look forward to seeing what comes down the pipeline. Was this review helpful? Yes No