Q4OS is a

light-weight Linux distribution A light-weight Linux distribution is one that uses lower memory and/or has less processor-speed requirements than a more "feature-rich" Linux distribution. The lower demands on hardware ideally result in a more responsive machine, and/or all ...

, based on

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

, targeted as a replacement for

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

that are no longer supported on outdated hardware. The distribution is known for being similar in appearance to Microsoft Windows operating systems with some of its pre-installed themes inspired by the

look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, box ...

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was official ...

and

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

History

Development of Q4OS began in 2014 to coincide with

's end of extended support in the same year.

LXQt LXQt is a free and open source lightweight desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. Like its GTK predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own window manager, instead LXQt lets the use ...

Desktop Environment was included from April 2014 to June 2015. In 2018 TDE ( Trinity Desktop Environment) was included. In 2019, version 3.8 was released which was based on

Buster. The original KDE based version has been discontinued since around 2018. As of April 2020, the core developers of Q4OS, initially starting the project in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

, are now operating in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...

Features

It comes with either the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is a fork of K Desktop Environment 3. or

KDE Plasma 5 KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new defaul ...

LookSwitcher, which lets the user switch visual themes Desktop Profiler, which automatically installs some packages and programs that may be ideal for the user according to the profile that they choose Q4OS Software Centre, which lets the user install some recommended packages and programs from a list Q4OS Welcome Screen, which helps the user with some initial tweaks

Releases

Stable versions of Q4OS are derived from Debian's Stable release branch with

long-term support Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where it ...

that lasts five years after their initial release. Developmental "testing" versions of future releases are derived from the Debian Testing branch.

Reception

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

featured Q4OS as "Community Choice" Project of the Month in April 2020. In January 2022,

TechRadar ''TechRadar'' is an online publication owned by Future and focused on technology. It has editorial teams in the US, UK and Australia and provides news and reviews of tech products and gadgets. It was launched in 2007 and expanded to the US in ...

considered Q4OS as one of the best light-weight Linux distributions of the year for its Windows installer and support for older hardware, notably systems running on 32-bit processors.

Forks

The Linux distribution Quark is Q4OS with

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', '' Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All th ...

as the base instead of

References

External links

* *
Q4OS and TDE: A Juicy Little Linux Secret
IA-32 Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions Debian-based distributions {{linux-distro-stub