KANOTIX

Reader supplied reviews for KANOTIX Average rating 8.8 from 12 review(s) What are your thoughts on KANOTIX? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- nightly2024201420132011-0520102005-042005-032004-09 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: nightly Rating: 9 Date: 2025-03-01 Votes: 1 Been using Kanotix for over two years now, and I do recommend it. With laptop Intel I7 I have been using the KDE version. On my Dell Optiplex 9020 I have been using the LXDE version. Both are stable and so far, fingers crossed, will remain so. I installed the lxde on my banking computer. In doing so, I updated to the latest Testing Kernel, and removed many programs that could possibly be considered a future security liability – such as Chromium and Thunderbird. I replaced the E-mail client with Claws, and also installed Bleachbit. Checking and reviewing all the Firefox settings to secure things up. My banking computer is exclusively that. I ensure that I am only using a wired ethernet connection, which is promptly unplugged after my business is completed. Security updates are prompt due to being “bookworm” Overall this machine in this usage has been A+ My Laptop – I installed the KDE version to the hard drive – set it up perfectly with the latest kernel. However, I leave that drive alone and only rely on it for emergency use only……. Especially lately with all the security bugs on the Internet. So what I did - was to install the Kanotix “Live Persistent” on a USB Solid State drive and run “it” as my daily internet machine on my laptop. If anything ever went South, a quick reinstall onto the SSD is very easy. If a major security breach happened on the updates, I can easily use my emergency system without an update. Overall – the KDE version is a tad slower than the LXDE. But that is not an issue with this particular laptop, however, it is an issue with my older laptop. Kanotix does not come with Wayland. For me that’s a good thing. It seems like other distros that have this occasionally break on updating. So I’m not at all fond of it. With the Live persistent version, I cannot update the kernel. But that is not really a major issue, as the nightly builds always have the near latest kernel. Something disappointing. I have a HP Smart tank printer , scanner. Kanotix prints just fine, but setting up the Scanner function is beyond my abilities. Tried using several programs – such as Gnome Simple Scan. However, it simply won’t see it. Believe it or not – it sets up lickity split without a hitch with Linux Mint. … go figure. So for the rare occasions I need to scan a page, I reboot into Mint. Overall – I’m pleased. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: nightly Rating: 6 Date: 2025-02-15 Votes: 0 Pros: + Works as expected Cons: - Boring (in the negative sense of the word). It looks and feels now just like it did the last time I used it a few years ago. - Poor support. It seems the user base is very small and mainly German-speaking. The chances of getting help in the forum are slim. Conclusion: The original maintainer "kano" has left the project. It seems the current maintainers are not in his level. There is no point in maintaining a distribution just for keeping it alive and without innovating it. There are better Debian+KDE distributions out there. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: nightly Rating: 8 Date: 2024-05-31 Votes: 1 * Kanotix slowfire-nightly-eeepc4G, on an eeePC 4G with 2GiB RAM I'll try to be as objective as possible and not slate Kanotix with a bad score purely on my experimental experience with this particular version, as Kanotix is an excellent project, and its other versions do work well. Because I wanted to have a persistent live USB version, I installed to a USB flashdrive via "sudo dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdx bs=1M", which worked as should be expected; and it booted without problem, albeit very slowly. And Kanotix successfully installed, via the the user-friendly Acritoinstaller, leaving about 512MiB free, which is quite remarkable for a Debian 12 based distro. However, it is clearly not suited to the eeePC 4G (Surf?), for several reasons. Firstly, Compiz gets in the way and slows everything down. Why put compiz in a release for such an old machine? The website does mention booting using the 'nocompiz' cheatcode, but Compiz with LXDE makes no sense to me. It can also be booted with a 'toram' cheatcode, but that will take a long time to copy to RAM. Graphically, this version is a disaster. Almost all application windows are too big for the 7" screen. Then the default NetSurf browser is unusable, set to block everything. But even other browsers would not connect, so there must be a systemic problem. But it is just too slow, and really a distro for an eeePC 4G should overclock by default/design (cpufrequtils/cpufreqd and clockmod). But it has been an interesting experiment. Maybe antiX or a minimal Debian netinstall would be a better option, or maybe just a Puppy. As for Kanotix in general: It's a good ongoing experiment, and Kanotix seems to be an experiment ('nighlty, rolling-stable'!) rather than an attempt at the mainstream, and I respect it as such. I doubt that I would ever favour Kanotix over Debian Stable, but that's not a negative. Kanotix does not claim to be the mainstream 'slayer', unlike some other other distros that always seem to disappoint. The only real negative I have of Kanotix is that its documentation is sorely neglected and long out of date, like most of its website. So a well earned 8/10. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 12 reader reviews of KANOTIX...