Q4OS

Reader supplied reviews for Q4OS Average rating 8.7 from 197 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: -- 7.0-r56.85.94.123.162.71.8.80.5.29 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: 7.0-r5 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-06-01 Country: United States Votes: 6 I've been using the Windows .exe version of Q4OS for years, but recently I got handed a real challenge: an ancient Gateway laptop with 4 GB of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor, and an SSD. I tried six different Linux distributions, each promising to breathe new life into old hardware. Most were either sluggish, incomplete, or required too much tinkering. Out of sheer desperation, I downloaded the Q4OS ISO and gave it a shot. The installation took a while—longer than most modern distros—but it was surprisingly efficient. No drama, no cryptic errors, no hunting down missing drivers. Just a methodical install process doing its thing. Then came the payoff. A fully functional desktop. Network access working immediately through a USB-tethered phone. Everything responsive. Everything where it should be. No wrestling with configuration files, no post-install scavenger hunt. As a quick test, I fired up the famous Costa Rica 4K nature video on YouTube. Obviously this old machine isn't pushing native 4K, but Q4OS handled playback smoothly at 720p, which honestly surprised me given the hardware. That's the sort of real-world performance that matters on a system of this vintage. I won't get wordy about it: it just works. What impressed me most is that Q4OS doesn't feel like a compromise. It runs comfortably on older hardware while still looking clean and polished. It respects limited resources without looking like a relic from 2005. In a Linux world full of flashy newcomers and heavyweight desktop environments, Q4OS quietly gets the job done. If you've got aging hardware gathering dust and you're starting to think it's beyond saving, give Q4OS a serious look. Sometimes the best distro isn't the newest or the most popular—it's the one that simply works. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-05-27 Country: United States Votes: 7 On 4/12/26, I posted a review of Q4OS Andromeda Plasma and gave it a 10 rating for all the reasons described there. Somehow, that rating later got changed to a 4. It should not have been. I don't know how it happened, but it did. The Q4OS implementation of Plasma is pretty slick. I have used KDE in the past, many years ago even, but eventually moved to GNOME desktops. I still like them, but I am curiously drawn back to KDE with this distro. I started using it while refurbishing some 11 year-old HP G4 Chromebooks. I was frankly amazed at the performance of Q4 on those old, underpowered machines, so I tried Q4 on some more powerful machines. The results were very good, and I am currently running it on my daily driver. I toy around a lot with restoring old laptops to service, ones that are no longer supported by their manufacturers or the operating systems that came with them. I run Zorin, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, MX, Mageia, Winux, Feren and more. Actually, I like all of them at least some, but Q4 is one of my new favorites, thanks for its performance on an old Dell XPS 18. It runs better now than it did on Windows 13 years ago! And that, my friends, is worth a 10! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-18 Country: United States Votes: 7 Perfection! Andromeda version 6.6. The installation went as planned (did not have to compromise any of my pre-conceived requirements, which I have had to do on various distro installers from time to time). I also loved that once finished and rebooted into the installed version it remembered all of my settings and tweaks from the live DVD. Next step was just to install codecs then a few of my favorite apps. I really like what the Q4OS developers have done with the update and software installation processes. It is "friendly," for want of a better word, and it is fast. You'll make your selection(s) from the extensive list presented or from entering your desired app in the search field, and then you'll see what's about to happen, select "okay," and then watch it happen. Don't blink, because it is a nice quick process, and you get what you want and that's that. This is an Acer Aspire a517-52 with 11th generation Intel Core i7 and 40 GB ram and Mesa Intel Iris XE graphics chip. This laptop was purchased new about 5 years ago. This is the fastest, most responsive distro I've ever seen on any machine, and certainly on this one. I've had many many distros on this, including several versions of GhostBSD (which comes in second for speed). I cannot rave enough about how impressed I am with the speed and overall instant functionality of Q4OS. All tweaks and personal changes are intuitively arrived at on the Q4OS iteration of KDE Plasma. I don't know how they did it, but when moving from one parameter to another things go so smoothly that I get the feeling they've discovered a lot of unnecessary code here and there and either changed it to work better or removed it; things you do happen NOW. ;o) It is very easy to award Q4OS a 10 rating. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 197 reader reviews of Q4OS...