This
week saw the first Long Term Support release of q4os, Q4OS 1.4 Orion,
an unusual little desktop operating system. Q4os is available as a
bootable installation CD or a live CD (308MB and 643MB respectively)
and features the rarely seen Trinity Desktop Environment on top of
Debian Jessie. Trinity is to KDE what MATE is to Gnome: a throwback
fork of an earlier iteration designed, at least partially, to avoid
the bloat of its parent.
The
initial installation from the Live CD is fast and relatively painless
before the user is given three levels of installation: Desktop, Basic
and Pure. The desktop gives a range of software, basic very little
and pure almost nothing. After choosing Desktop the system downloads
Chrome, Libreoffice, Thunderbird, VLC and a number of other
applications to go on top of basic KDE utilities like Konqueror and
Kwrite.
Going
back to a basic KDE environment was a surprisingly comforting
experience and, without the traditional resetting of the keyboard
after install (what do they have against French keyboards?), a
reasonably painless one. Everything worked and worked fast. Memory
usage bottomed out at around 250MB reaching 513MB with Chrome,
Libreoffice Writer and VLC running together.
Q4os
does have a few quirks. There is no integrated screenshot program,
necessitating the use xwd in command line (hence the paucity of
screenshots in this review) or pinta and no torrent client. Additionally,
neither Konqueror nor Chrome could handle Magnet links and the usual
Chrome fix does not work with the Trinity Desktop Environment and
Debian Jessie. To get 1080 video to work on low spec systems you'll
need to install xbmc in synaptic; its an old version but works fine.
All
in all Q4os, and the Trinity Desktop Environment, are quite good and
with support until “May 2020 at least” should gain a good number
of users. It's KDE the way it used to be; for good or ill.
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