EndlessOS 6 is a toughened and much-simplified immutable Debian 12 with a friendly GNOME-based desktop, aimed at kids, education, and novice users.

It's the latest version of Endless OS, a radical Linux-based OS and possibly the longest-established immutable distribution around. We looked at Endless OS 5 early last year, and while it was quite different from older versions, the new release seems to be a more modest, incremental update.

Version 6 is based on Debian 12.5, with a custom desktop based on GNOME 43.9, which defaults to Wayland for its display. It uses the Pipewire 1.0 sound server, the Red Hat-backed OStree tool for atomic OS upgrades, and comes with both GNOME Web and Chromium browsers - ready-configured to block adverts - and the GNOME Software application for Flatpack apps and system updates. This is not a ChromeOS rival: it's a general-purpose OS, more useful offline than most, able to run on modestly specified computers and aimed at teaching novices and getting them online safely.

Like many distros, it's intended to be robust and simple to use - but to achieve this, its designers have gone further than almost any other distro. It is far more locked down than most distros. It installs into one big ext4 partition, but most of it is read-only, even to root, the Unix "superuser". Unlike older versions, the apt command is still installed - but you can't use it. The whole /usr directory tree is write-protected, and since that's where most of the OS and its component programs are stored, there's little you can do even if you have full permissions. The only way to install apps is as Flatpaks, so the fact that it's a Debian-based system is largely academic. The GNOME Software store also handles OS updates, which are delivered over the same OStree system that Flatpak uses under the covers.

Updating an Endless box is much like updating a phone: periodically, you get a whole new OS image from the vendor, and you install the whole thing in a single operation. If it goes wrong, it rolls back to the old version on its own, and you can free up some disk space and try again. If you don't manually install OS and app updates, the OS does it itself automatically in the background.

Endless was founded in 2011 - the same year that the first Chromebooks appeared. A few years later, it put out its first public release, version 2.1.0 in 2014. In 2020, the company restructured to become the non-profit Endless OS Foundation.

The Reg FOSS desk met some of the team at a Fedora Flock conference some years ago, and they were kind enough to loan us one of their budget-priced computers, and we've been watching the OS develop and mature since version 3.

Over time, the distro is gradually becoming less radical rather than more. Its desktop is now much closer to stock GNOME than a few versions ago: the only difference we spotted is that it puts application groups right on the desktop, rather than in GNOME's "Activities" overlay screen. If you can work a smartphone or a tablet, you'll probably be able to successfully use this - which was the original goal of GNOME 3 anyway, so we've been told. Its system requirements are modest enough: a 64-bit CPU, minimum 2GB of RAM and 32GB of disk. 4GB memory is recommended, and 8GB if you plan to multitask, which seems reasonable, and that's a spec that a decade-old Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, discarded due to sluggishness, should easily meet.

If you're a distro hopper looking for the next thing to try, then this is probably not for you. If you're looking for something simple enough to give to a technophobic relative and resilient enough to survive with next to no maintenance, though, Endless OS could be just the tool for the job.

It's also a solid choice for a school computer lab or something similar, and the Foundation offers a Windows installer to make it easier to get started, as well as a USB image for installing on to multiple computers. It can run directly from USB key, too. There's an Arm version for various Arm-based computers including the Raspberry Pi 4 and PineBook Pro, plus a bundle of the educational apps and tools that can run on top of ChromeOS, Windows, or other Linux distros, called the Endless Key. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/05/31/endless_os_6/