FreedomBox

Reader supplied reviews for FreedomBox Average rating 5.0 from 1 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on FreedomBox? 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: -- 2025-11-052024-09-022021-08-282020-08-30 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: 2025-10-08 Rating: 5 Date: 2025-10-09 Votes: 5 I tried Freedombox some time ago and again more recently. It’s been around for 15 years and its aims are admirable. Compared to offerings like UmbrelOS, Yunohost and IceWhale’s CasaOS and ZimaOS, it doesn’t appear to have evolved much in all that time. All these products aim to make setup and operation a lot easier than it has been in the past. In that respect, they all succeed but I stress that, while they make things easier, you still have to understand what you’re doing. Freedombox lists 42 apps in its store. Some of them are ones you’d expect and find really useful, such as Nextcloud, Samba, Calibre, Sharing and Wordpress. Most seem rather obscure. The other products offer literally hundreds of apps covering a huge range of use cases. They also have very polished user interfaces but Freedombox is a real plain Jane. That wouldn’t matter if everything worked well. One click installs are great and the System screens and Cockpit adminstration tool are very nice to interact with. However, some apps I tried just didn’t work. Launching Cockpit would check for updates and report there were none but if you clicked Software Updates it would say the opposite and list the available updates. Installing them very often resulted in a message saying Packagekit had crashed although everything seemed to be working. Nextcloud installation was easy but the resulting setup had the minimum of Nextcloud’s functionality. Setting up Samba shares was very easy indeed but restricted to those shares that Freedombox decided were sensible defaults. In all of my time using Linux Samba has given me the biggest headache of all trying to get it to do what I want. If the default setup suits you, it’s a godsend. I wrestled with Syncthing trying to get it to sync with my Android phone and, after many failed attempts, admitted defeat. Visiting the forums I found a helpful community and it’s clear there are happy Freedombox users but many people reported serious issues. For me, the software just doesn’t seem robust enough and, given its long history, I have to ask myself why this is so when IceWhale have made huge strides forward in a much shorter timescale. In the end it had to go. I will look at it again sometime in the future. Was this review helpful? Yes No