MiniOS

Reader supplied reviews for MiniOS Average rating 9.3 from 14 review(s) What are your thoughts on MiniOS? 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: -- 5.0.04.1.2 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: 4.1.2 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-11-07 Votes: 2 I'm using miniOS 4. I started by using miniOS 5, but I accidentally pressed the "restart" button at booting, which, to my regret, wiped out all my previous settings. I have installed miniOS 4 on VirtualBox, so I'm not sure if drivers will work properly when installed normally, but it's a lightweight distro. It can be used even on older PCs. The limited language support is a bit of a shame. It took a lot of effort to set it to Japanese and enable Japanese input. (I use fcitx5 for the first time because it doesn't seem to work well with ficitx4, which I have used on others.) It's Debian, so updates aren't so frequent, which is a good thing. This is a small but good news. On Debian I couldn't install winetricks with "apt", while this distro is OK with "apt". I use lightweight distros such as bunsen too, but I find it more convenient to have icons on my desktop like here. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 5.0.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-10-27 Votes: 7 So far MiniOS has proven to be very flexible and reliable. I have now used MiniOS for about 3 weeks and installed the Standard Edition it in 4 old computers--3 laptops and 1 desktop--just as an experiment. All of these computers were built for Win XP and had Intel Core 2 Duo processors of different models, DDR2, standard hard drives and 4 GiBs of RAM, which I increased from 2 Gib before the installs. I didn't test the installs with 2 GB RAM but I'm confident that it could work too based in my observation that other similarly light distros have worked with 2 GB RAM. One thing that I believe it will make this distro even snappier is to install it in a cheap SSD (you can get a 120 GB for about $10). Customization was easy as well: I removed the extra language packs from the system and Firefox, added some extra security, including a VPN and 2 more secure browsers (secret sauce), synaptic (I'm not afraid of the command line but like the extra layer of help), and other packages and it all worked well. I was ready to give these computers to the recycling, which is sad, but now these computers have a new life. I can give them to kids that needs them or a granny or grandpa to check their email or watch a video. I will keep one as a tool box and for those times where you need an extra "personality" to get in the Internet. I noticed that this distro has some similarity to other light distros in how it is stored and loaded into memory, which I like, and this likely why is uses more memory but also why it is more responsive than other distros. Good job MiniOS developers, keep going, you have my support. LifeSaver Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 5.0.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-10-25 Votes: 0 i think this os is very good because i use it and it works pretty well . I've been using MiniOS for several months now and I'm very pleased. I installed it on an old pc with 4 GB of RAM, and the system just flies! I had tried various "lightweight" distributions before, but MiniOS exceeded all expectations in terms of speed and responsiveness. The system is very stable, being based on Debian, which speaks for itself. I haven't had a single crash the entire time I've used it. I especially like how fast everything works "out of the box" without needing lengthy configurations. I use it for work on the go, carrying it on a flash drive. It boots up instantly, and all my settings are saved. As for minor downsides, I noticed that the RAM usage is a bit higher than I expected, especially with several applications open. However, it hardly affects the overall performance. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 14 reader reviews of MiniOS...