My thoughts after a few weeks of use

#1

Endless OS has breathed a new lease of life into this laptop I’m using - the spec is broadly similar to many of the cheap ‘lapbook’ clones made in China - Intel Atom x5 Z8350 quad core processor, 2GB RAM, 64GB eemc mass storage and it came with Windows 10 pre-installed.

It worked just about OK with Windows but my intention was always to run Linux on it - my daughter has a laptop running Rosa and generally I use Linux Mint on my laptops for normal use.

Now, I’m a bit of a techie and I like to hack around with my installs to get them exactly how I want them - so it was a bit ‘jarring’ to find I was somewhat limited by what I could do when running Endless. However, once I had got my head around OSTree and the idea of Flatpack, it started to make sense to me what you guys were doing!

The plus points are:

  1. Locked down system which is better protected from malicious and accidental damage.
  2. Automatic updates if I want them.
  3. Some excellent ‘apps’ available - particularly the reference guides etc.
  4. The ability to function well without a connection to the internet.
  5. Simple, intuitive interface.
  6. Extremely suitable for both my 9 year old and my technophobic mother-in-law!

There are some negatives, but very few:

  1. Adding ‘un-common’ printers can be a bit hit-and-miss (mainly as the drivers need write access to protected parts of the OS) - once I’d got my head around that, and with help from Mario on these forums, I sorted that out quite quickly.
  2. Customisation is quite limited.

That’s about it really!

Given that the laptop is mainly used by my daughter, it just works and does everything she needs and more. If there was one thing I would wish to add it would be parental controls to limit internet access hours, white-listing / black-listing and site blocking. I’m doing all of this on my router currently so there are no issues there - however, she wants to take the laptop to her friends houses and I would have no control if she were to do that.

So, in summary, Endless is a great OS for the target audience. my daughter included. It just ‘works’ and does most of what we ask of it - it is the only Linux distro that has worked with the embedded sound-chip on this laptop and I’ve tried over 15 from other Debian based, Arch based, Fedora and even BSD!

So a big Thank You to all those that worked to get this together from a very happy 9 year-old and her Dad!

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#2
#3

Hi @LeandroStanger and thanks for the reply!

I have actually installed an extension to Chromium (I tend not to use Chrome as a rule as it ties me too closely into the “Google thing”).

It works quite well generally and I’m happy with it for the time being - at least until my daughter figures out how to add / remove extensions from a browser!

My train of thought was to pick up and include the product called DansGuardian (by a company called SmoothWall) which does pretty much anything one could want from a Parental Control point of view.

DansGuardian has been included in a number of Linux distros before (noteably Christian Linux ) and was a real USP for the creators of that distro - I feel if Endless were to include something like DansGuardian (allowing it to be installed or enabled via a setting of some sort) then this would be another USP for Endless and make the OS an even more family / education based prospect than it already is!

Thanks again for your reply and please pass on my thanks to the folks at Endless!

Cheers

John

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#4

while I completely agree, I think that this is now called e2guardian.

Pura vida.

#5

Indeed - e2guardian is a fork of the original DansGuardian. There are a number of others. I believe DansGuardian itself is no longer in development as a ‘program’ but still works and the black / white lists are still updated etc.

@nonline - thanks for highlighting that - I wonder if we can get e2guardian flatpacked or rolled into EOS by default? Now, that would be cool!

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