Endless OS - a good Youtube video review

[ssfc72]

I found this video review to be well done and it makes me interested in trying the distro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_MkmhXn5co

[fox]

I looked at that one briefly until I read the Distrowatch review. They noted that you can't install it in a partition; it requires the whole disk. Also, the review described it as "very locked down", and although the reviewer wasn't specific about what was locked down, I took it to mean that you can't tinker with it very much.

[ssfc72]

EndlessOS  can apparently be run on a virtual machine.
There apparently is also an image of EndlessOS from their webpage, that can be run on a Raspberry  Pi 4

[Jason]

I looked at that one briefly until I read the Distrowatch review. They noted that you can't install it in a partition; it requires the whole disk.

I found a way to do it in their support section but only for Windows. They have a Windows-based installer that you use. They say that the reason they don't support multi-booting other than with Windows is because of technical build issues. It's assembled very differently from other Linux OSes (operating systems). They explain it a little on another page:

The other Linux distributions targeting advanced/technical users have a very complicated installer which supports advanced partitioning, dynamic bootloader configuration, etc - all functionality which must be specified, implemented and tested in 100s of different circumstances, none of which we expect to find in the users Endless was originally made for.

It's also not trivial for us to re-use this work within Endless, because due to the robust/atomic ostree updater we use, we have a patched version of the grub bootloader to allow updates to work seamlessly in Endless. With the right technical knowledge, it's, of course, possible to arrange Endless OS to dual boot alongside another Linux system, but it's not something that we can justify the time to implement, QA and support.

Here's another video on it which gives quite a tour of Endless. You can see in the video how it's made for education and first-time users to Linux. I know a lot of distros say that they are but this one goes to great depths to make it easy. Only elementaryOS seems to be as simple. But it comes with a lot more installed software and built-in resources that work even without an internet connection. In short, this OS wasn't created for us. New users might not be able to deal with an installer that asks if you want to partition the disk. I remember when Lindows/Linspire years ago had a similar approach. A fast, easy installer that asked as little as possible.

I know everyone is different but honestly, the only non-OS desktop I have on my desktop or laptop is Windows. On my desktop, I stay with a distro for quite a long time, I mean, at least for months. ;-) My laptop has just Linux. If I want to try another Linux distro, I wipe out the existing one. I see little benefit in having multiple Linux distros on the same machine. That's just me. But I seriously doubt that new users need this ability which is the point of the distro.

Another way that Endless is different is that you don't install programs the usual way. You synaptic guys are going to weep when you see how they do things. Under the FAQ entitled, "Why can't I use apt-get, dpkg, dnf, or rpm commands?"

Most desktop Linux distributions are oriented towards tech-savvy users and developers, but Endless OS isn't your typical Linux distribution. We have a different target user. We don’t use rpm, apt, or any other packaging system. We use a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with application installed using Flatpak.

You may notice that the apt-get and dpkg commands are installed. This is because Endless OS is based on Debian, and these commands are used while creating Endless OS. Each release is a read-only snapshot, so you can use commands like dpkg -l which do not make changes to the system, but you cannot use commands like apt-get install.