Applications and drivers not available - no use - no work

Endless OS does not support certain models of printers and scanners. So I cannot use my gear. Also I cannot find any CAD for electrical/plumping etc, but many available for other OS. I cannot work.
I am very frustrated and looking to replace it with a new laptop with NON Endless OS.
Endless OS has very few applications available and does not allow to install other debian/linux modules.
What is the purpose of an open source OS in a closed circle of applications? Does not make sense.
I think this project has lost the plot.
Goodbye!

Thanks for giving Endless OS a try anyway, sad to hear that it doesn’t meet your needs.
We would appreciate knowing what specific apps you found unavailable & which printer/scanner you were not able to use.
Our available apps come from the wider Flathub community.

We have been through this several times in the past, questions, logs etc…all this wasted time for nothing. Not for nothing, to help endless OS become better, what an ambition in life, I am thrilled…
No need to reinvent the wheel, Linux was there long time ago, it was working fine and still does, what is the point to make a OS that does not work? Waste of time, recourses, energy…

HP 2600 serie Envye Deskjet doesn’t have driver in eos. I told you that several times… Not solved yet.

As already mentioned, these kind of questions pop up regulary on the boards.

The reason because EOS is the way it is, has simply to do with relability. And there’s always a tradeoff between relability and flexability.

EOS is based at it’s core on OSTree which is a layer of abstraction for versioning filesystem trees similar to Git repositories. With this technology in hand, the Base OS with all it’s components needed can be updated in a atomic manner without breaking things. Not breaking things is a absolutely important aspect and many other distributions suffer from such issues, because their entire root filesystem is built from files coming from individual packages, installed by the user, so the system has no defined state at any given time. As already mentioned, in EOS this is different. A specific version of EOS has a almost defined state of files in it’s root filesystem.

Atop of this root filesystem are the applications and user files. As the applications need to be seperate from the base operation system, Flatpak has been chosen as the technology for providing applications. There’s not only the benefit of having applications self-contained, providing all the necessary files when installing them, but also a security feature called sandboxing. Applications can only access those resources on your system necessary for properly running.

So with the overall architecture of EOS, the average user gets a tool in it’s hand which provides a stable and secure day-to-day computing experience.

Sure, there are users out there which have specific needs, not fulfilled by EOS out of the Box. For those users, there are various choices too. The first one comes in form of Podman, which is a container technology and allows one to run a entire different OS like Fedora or Debian atop of EOS and sharing resources. This allows one to run every application available for this distribution. There are some tutorials available on the boards on how to set up this. The other option is - sad to say but unfortunately true - to move along and user either another Distribution or a entire different OS like Windows which better suits the needs from a technological and workflow standpoint.

And for the drivers - this is a well known problem for many Distributions. Some vendors simply produce hardware with no or bad linux support. HP for example produced a huge amount of printers using proprietary interface protocols only partially covered by their open-source and even closed-source printer drivers. As vendors move on to use standardized protocols like PCL5/6 things get better in this area. The HP 2600 for example has issues on most other Distributions like Ubuntu too.

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Endless OS was not reliable to me, it crashed, regularly. I could only reset by hard restart.
I have installed Ubuntu, works fine, plug and play, no need to install drivers for my HP gear and most importantly, does not crash.
All other info explain nothing, only tech talk.

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