Q4OS

Reader supplied reviews for Q4OS Average rating 8.7 from 185 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 Q4OS? 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: -- 6.25.84.123.162.71.8.80.5.29 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: 6.2 Rating: 3 Date: 2025-10-28 Votes: 1 Many users that rank Q4OS high are using the Trinity variant on old computers but what about KDE Plasma which Q4OS team evidently presents as their main offering, their "flagship" in a way? Q4OS uses Calamares installer which normally makes installation a breeze. Debian proper offers Calamares with the live ISOs but these are oddly hidden from the public eye. Moreover Q4OS installer offers several "profiles": "desktop", basic, live, pure. This is nice. I went for "Desktop" for a first-hand experience of what Q4OS maintainers consider as ideal KDE. Installation led me to an unmistakably vanilla-looking Plasma similar to the Plasma desktop you get in Debian or Fedora. I tried to track down the differences. Chromium instead of Firefox. Not my choice. KTorrent by default which cannot hold the candle to Qbittorrent. Clementine! Clementine is an example of pseudo-development. Its maintainer changes a letter in a translation and builds a new release out of it. It is a dead app. q4os team does not know that Strawberry Music Player exists. Same basically app with Clementine but in active development. ufw instead of firewalld with gufw as a gui instead of the integrated in KDE System Settings Firewall settings. ufw is more accessible but gufw (GTK3) has shown buggier behaviour in newer systems/distros. I have to give to Q4OS that at least their KDE is not bloated. No kmail/korganizer/akonadi services creating unneeded activity in the background. Beyond the debatable choices for default applications, desktop is too vanilla, alarmingly vanilla Debian. Fastfetch says Debian 13 Trixie, system info in Plasma settings says Debian 13 Trixie, cat /etc/os-release says... Debian 13 Trixie. So what is this? Just Debian with Calamares? There are only 3 apps that reminded me I have installed Q4OS and not plain Debian. "Software Centre", "Welcome Screen" and "Q4OS imager" for writing ISOs to USB sticks. Software Centre (uncommon BE spelling for an AE locale) is not a full-blown replacement for Discover but a "curated" collection of software. Something like "Q4os suggests". Well the collection is a mixed bag. Mostly a showcase for their copying of install-shield setup wizard. Guys these imitations of windows-styled installers do not look so polished against the backdrop of modern KDE. They look -and not amusingly so- retro in this context. 61 out of the 85 programs referenced in "Centre" have a rating lower than 5/10. Also it lists some unverified flatpaks while official debian packages are available from developers themselves. This is a too thin, too weak, too unconvincing, too low-effort layer of customization on top of Debian proper. I noticed there was not any splash screen. I added "splash" to grub bootloader arguments. No joy. Plymouth and plymouth-themes are not installed by default. I have reasons to believe this is because Q4OS does not offer its own custom plymouth theme and all users can get is vanilla Debian boot screens. But if you're not going to provide a plymouth theme with your distro, then why the loglevel=3 grub boot argument, dearies? Well KDE-Plasma looks like an afterthought for Q4OS. If you turn on "Show Hidden Files", you can find a bunch of hidden files that have nothing to do with KDE in your home directory: .trinity and .trinitykde folders, .compton-tde.conf, .gtkrc-lxqt-q4os (!). Compton? lxqt? These are obviously some common configuration files for the occasional Q4OS app. But the worst thing about Q40S that negates in advance any argument of the type "We make installation of Debian easy for new Linux users" is that KDEWallet is not preconfigured for the user as system keyring. This is simply unacceptable for a distro that is around for years and does not purport to be hardcore-ish. New users who install Chrome, Vivaldi and a bunch of other high-profile apps that use system keyring to store credentials are in for a treat... Sorry Q40S team but I will definitely direct my donations elsewhere... Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.2 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-10-26 Votes: 7 it's a distro that i can do more things compared to arch ( Manjaro ) After a recent update my cinnamon de on manjaro starts sucking up 1.7gb idle memory and my ideatab has 4gb only and it's like 3.4gb available left for me. i couldn't even watch youtube videos. 1440p videos impossible. 2160p videos don't bother to imagine. i actually installed zram and configured but still it did not solve my problem. my cpu is pentium Gold 8800 something with 6 cores built in intel gpu. so i decided to give it a try to Q4OS. i left 8 gb swap for sure because i have low memory 3.4gb left for me. well. - System is super responsive. - İ can able to watch 1440p and 4k videos on google chrome with external monitor. 27 inches qhd. - while im watching videos i can use facebook-twitter- and google search - deepseek with tabs without issues. - im happy so far and i liked the trinity de. - there was tearing issue and i found a fix want to share with yours if you are having tearing issue because renderer is x11. Solution : Go to your home folder/your name Enable show hidden files you will see .compton.tde.conf. change the lines with these: backend = "glx"; vsync = "opengl-swc"; save it and reboot. now tearing is gone and vsync is enabled. The person who helped me for this solution is the guy named HM7. Credits to HM7. i highly recommend you to this distro. the only cons ( maybe because im noob ) i couldn't find the touch screen driver because my ideatab is also tablet i mean has a touchscreen. i can touch and it dedects but not like touching more like secondary mouse. gnome de was perfect for this. but meh not necessarry now. but i will still look for solutions i hope i can fix it too. Cheers. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.2 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-10-23 Votes: 3 Hi all, I should point out that my opinion is that of a novice who has been using Linux for less than five years, with very limited computer knowledge. I discovered Q4OS about two years ago. I installed it on one of my work computers (a humanitarian association). For three other PCs, I juggled between Mint LMDE and SpiralLinux. The PCs in question are all quite old (more than 1à years). I ended up installing Q4OS on all four PCs. In terms of stability, the three distributions I tested are equivalent, as they are all based on Debian stable. However, when it comes to supporting old hardware, Q4OS performs best. Fast startup and smooth performance are top. I should also mention that I have installed the KDE environment, which I find more user-friendly. In our association, we welcome a very diverse public, most of whom have little computer skills. KDE Plasma seems to appeal to the majority of people. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 185 reader reviews of Q4OS...