RakuOS

Reader supplied reviews for RakuOS Average rating 9.0 from 3 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 RakuOS? 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: -- 2026.06.022026.04.22 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: 2026.06.02 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-06-10 Country: Thailand Votes: 1 My use case is multiple Chromebooks or Linux devices running most of the time web based apps, so I can easily switch between devices. I like Chromebook because of it's simplicity in maintenance. Lately you see more of these immutable atomic Linux distro's that behave similarly like chromebooks. Right now I am testing a few of these bare metal on my laptops: Bazzite, AerynOS and Origami Linux. Yesterday I moved Origami Linux to RakuOS, because Origami Linux merged into RakuOS. Both Bazzite and RakuOS are derivatives from Fedora atomic. Very stable, but rpm package installs take more time and requires a reboot. Bazzite tries to overcome this with distrobox and homebrew. RakuOS is unique, that it uses a writable overlay filesystem for it's packages. So you install rpm packages using "rakuos install" faster and without reboots. I like this concept a lot. Drawback is that booting will take a few seconds longer to setup the overlay system. The desktop I use is Cosmic. Many complain about bugs. Yes there are a few, but I can live with them. So RakuOS has the advantages of an immutable OS, with a rpm packages layer, which is faster to update and maintain without reboots, but is not immutable. And it uses the Fedora atomic infrastructure and the dnf/rpm repository base. Compare this to AerynOS, which is atomic but not immutable. It's faster because the package layer is writable as the rest of the operating system. And it uses a new package manager moss to implement the atomicity, however the repository base is quite shallow compared to dnf/rpm. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2026.06.16 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-05-18 Country: United States Votes: 1 Been using various Ublue distros over the last couple years, but settled on Bazzite last year, just moved one of my machines wholesale to RakuOS, there's ALOT of improvement there over the other ublues. The RakuOS Software app is especially interesting, lots of settings there in the gui. It's essentially the AIO for package management and looking forward to seeing how it evolves, but as is now pretty damn good. Support is solid; had some minor hiccups, but Matrix chat support was pretty quick to sort it out and now a new build will come to address those issues for others to not have to deal with them. For those on an existing Ublue distro, rebasing will keep your data, BUT will erase any overlays, flatpak, distrobox configs and such, honestly not a HUGE deal, just something to make note of before moving over (I think the dev is working on a means to relink all that). The more current kernel, the more cohesive UI experience with a setup, welcome app, etc, is already a pretty refined experience vs using ujust and such (which is not bad, just less intimidating for new users to Linux in general). This distro even in these earlier stages is shaping up to be a more evolved immutable distro. This is not a knock on the others out there, but this one already feels more newbie-friendly for those coming on. For the distrohopper I'd recommend this; only be mindful you'll need to reinstall overlays and flatpaks (data preserved, just need to reintegrate), if coming from another distro, tho the Dev team has stated they'd address that at some point so all that is relinked, reinstalled, for now the manual way is the way to go for reinstalling/relinking with existing data (and there are ways to do all that). Steam worked great, it installed, and just had to log back in and all my existing ondisk library games were there and ready to roll. The CachyOS kernel is a nice to have there. Up to date and such. Using the KDE variant. This is a happy medium between immutability and flexibility in packages. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2026.04.15 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-04-22 Country: United States Votes: 4 As a user of a custom Fedora Kinoite image for some time, I am very impressed with RakuOS. I am running it on a laptop at the moment. RakuOS is unique in it's approach of allowing users of Fedora's atomic spins to easily install packages with dnf (or rakuos install) -- something that Fedora atomic distros usually don't allow (instead the user has to manually keep track of their rpm-ostree overlays). That is a breath of fresh air that allows users to install packages without having to use Flatpaks, distroboxes, brew etc. (of course you can still do all that if you wish). It takes away the need for someone to develop their own custom base image using Blue Build type services. Instead you have complete freedom to decide what you want on your base system using familiar package managers, with the benefits of image rollback and automatic package updates. RakuOS comes with a nicely designed RakuOS Software application that allows you to set what base image you want ("main", more up to date "staging", and very nicely for those of us that like to be on the bleeding edge -- a rawhide version). The RakuOS update checker can be set for different frequencies and includes overlay packages, Flatpak updates and Appimage update. In addition the usual package search and install is provided by the GUI. There is also a nice RakuOS Welcome app that will set up Gaming, Virtualization and AI (with Ollama). I like that the developer allows users to shape their system. The flagship desktop is the KDE. Gnome and Cosmic are also offered. Cosmic is listed as "Beta", but it's what I've been using and works flawlessly. The one decision the developer has made for users is using the CachyOS kernel instead of the Fedora Kernel. For the NVIDIA version, this requires a DKMS build of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This is something gamers will probably appreciate and the CachyOS kernel is well regarded. I didn't give it a 10 simply because this OS is in early development and no doubt there is some room for improvement (online documentation will undoubtedly flesh out, for example), but honestly it's a really good OS in it's current state. Was this review helpful? Yes No