Linux software
A 15GB ISO for a distro designed for areas with poor connectivity sounds oxymoronic, but that was just Mayank Sharma being short-sighted.
FREE | WWW.ENDLESSOS.COM
The first thing that strikes you about Endless OS (besides the humongous size of its ISO) is that it doesn’t resemble any desktop environment. To call it a customised Gnome desktop is doing a disservice to the Endless developers. It’s not like some other desktops that use an extension or two. Dubbed the EOS Shell, Endless’s desktop is a complete departure from the typical Gnome 3 interface. For starter’s there’s no application launcher menu; you get application icons and groups on the desktop. There’s also a global search bar at the top that you can use to hunt applications or search for the entered text on the web. At the bottom you get the traditional panel that’s got a few system icons for the sound, network and power management, as well as a couple of quick-launch icons.
Endless is available in two flavours. As well as the 15GB Full edition, there is also a Basic release that weighs in at a far more manageable 2GB. Like its contemporaries, the distro boots into a live installable environment. Endless uses a custom installer that’s designed to take over the entire disk, which makes it all pretty simple to operate. You don’t even get to choose a custom layout or a partitioning scheme.
The installer is just one of its departures from convention in the effort to make Endless a bit more suitable for non-technical users. Another striking difference that sets Endless apart from a more typical distro is the pre-cooked locked-down environment. There’s not much else to do besides clicking on an app icon on the desktop to launch it. Even the Gnome System Settings panel is tucked away under the user’s icon in the bottom right corner of the desktop.
ONE WITH EVERYTHING
Just because the ISO is 15GB doesn’t mean the distro is chock-full of apps. Sure, it has all the usual productivity ones, but the majority of the space is commandeered by education content that’s included in the form of apps, documentation, and even games. Besides an encyclopedia app (which is basically an offline version of Wikipedia), you’ll get learning materials neatly categorised by field and subject. For instance, there’s all sorts of content on maths, animals, physics, biology and more as well as HTML and CSS tutorials, and Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects.
Besides apps, several icons on the desktop are wrappers for online apps such as YouTube, Gmail, Duolingo, Twitter, and more. It goes without saying that you’ll need an active connection to the internet to access these wrapped online apps. In addition to these two types of icon, the desktop also lists a few to help you quickly fetch some popular apps from the App Store, such as VLC, Skype and Spotify. Talking of music, the distro ships with 79 CC-licensed tracks from different genres totalling over five hours of audio.
Another factor that sets the distro apart from its peers is its package management system. Endless uses the Gnome Software app to help you flesh out your installation. But instead of relying on DEBs (being based on Debian), it only allows you to install flatpaks via the FlatHub repository. It complements its use of flatpaks by using the OSTree update mechanism to perform atomic upgrades that’s also used by CentOS Atomic.
Despite its size, the distro didn’t feel lethargic on any of our test machines, which were i3s and i5s with 4-12GB of RAM. It does include some documentation, but really the developers have done a good job to make it fairly intuitive for anyone who’s ever operated a computer. If you are out looking for a distro for educational purposes, Endless will fit the bill to the letter
“There’s all sorts of content on maths, animals, physics, biology and more. ”