Endless OS.........................
Jonni Bidwell believes computers should be hard to use, so he was sceptical when Endless OS came along with promises of making them easy…
Jonni Bidwell wonders what he’s done to deserve this? Brain the size of a cryptographer and he’s sat here reviewing a beginners’ Linux distro, at least it’s pretty.
Endless OS is fairly unique in that it was originally only available on Endless’s range of budget machines, launched in January following a successful Kickstarter last year. Its machines (the Mini and the One) were aimed squarely at developing countries where internet access is a luxury, with a good portion of their storage devoted to an offline edition of Wikipedia, besides all manner of other useful apps. Indeed, if you choose to download the full version of Endless OS, brace yourself for a whopping 16GB download (and that’s gzipped, so you’ll need a 32GB stick to install it, but a lighter 2GB download is also available). The Endless Mini is an ARM-based machine, but the newly released OS is a strictly x86_64 affair, in the interests of only supporting one architecture. This might upset users of 32-bit hardware, but it also sidesteps a bunch of angry users with ancient graphics cards saturating their support channels–just one of the reasons x86 is seeing less support from smaller distros. Endless OS looks great, but the neat desktop effects would cause problems for such hardware dinosaurs.
Endless seems reluctant to admit that it’s a Linux distribution. In a similar manner to elementary OS, Endless’s shiny Bootstrap website only describes the OS as ‘free, easy-to-use’, and with ‘everything your family needs’. Has Linux become a dirty word? Will our wholesome, family magazine be banished to the top shelf? We hope not. Once the OS is running a little snooping betrays that it’s penguin powered, even if the developers are reticent to admit it. However, this isn’t just Ubuntu Gnome with a layer of graphical flim flam. Yes, it is built using some Ubuntu packages and some heavily customised bits of Gnome (there are some Gnome devs on the Endless team), but these are essentially hard-wired into the system. There is no apt-get (well, there is, but it’s a defunct relic), there’s not even a terminal until it’s installed from the app store. Like ChromeOS, Endless doesn’t want its users to be fiddling around with the OS plumbing.
Limited appeal
Unlike ChromeOS though, and indeed unlike most operating systems nowadays, Endless OS is not entirely useless without an internet connection. This might actually be of interest in a few niche cases outside of the developing world: perhaps as a naughty kid’s machine (for when they keep sidestepping your parental controls/ firewalls) or for users in the remote outback. Applications can be added to the desktop easily and many of them are shipped on the installation media so can be added without being connected. Endless claim that when an internet connection is available, it won’t be hammered by constant updates. Indeed, the OS is built as an OSTree image, a read-only filesystem that’s updated atomically. Apps are overlaid on top with the idea being that the whole process should be more robust.
Endless OS does what it sets out to do admirably, and what it set out to do is pretty ambitious. For the most part though, we’d wager that Endless won’t be of interest to most of our readers. Yes, it is so simple and well laid out (there’s even a nice five minute introduction on first install) that your Aunt Ethel could use it, but if Aunt Ethel then wanted to learn a bit of system administration or assembly programming, she’d have to find another OS.