Lernstick

Reader supplied reviews for Lernstick Average rating 8.3 from 3 review(s) What are your thoughts on Lernstick? 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: -- 12-2025-04-06 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: 12-2025-04-06 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-09-08 Votes: 1 You may need to select your language at startup, however Lernstick works very well for live booting with multiple desktop environments for 7 desktops in one and a lot of applications included, except the different desktop environment web browsers. The ISO is 20GB with 7 desktop environments included you can choose to boot from at the boot menu with GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, LXDE and Enlightenment. You can log out, select a different desktop environment and log in without fuss. The Exam Environment ISO is 8GB with only GNOME. There are 13 languages you can select from in the boot menu and the boot menu has four rarely used options for the live environment now simplified under Extended options. To start in English or another language, you need to navigate down, select the language, and select boot. If you press escape at any time in the boot menu, such as to get out of sub menu, an inconvenient terminal appears. When booted, there is a large amount of useful software installed for all uses. 94 flatpak applications from flatseal are installed, which take up 27.1GB. This is according to selecting the / directory in Disk Usage Analyzer, with 27.1GB in /var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects/. Nautilis shows there are 256 directories, totalling 28GB and containing 1,191,136 items for the flatpak objects directory. The Exam Environment contains exactly the same flatpak applications without only the GNOME Desktop. In the 2023 Lernstick, /var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects was 9.9GB in Disk Usage Analyzer, while Nautilus displayed that flatpak was 13.6GB with 136,304 items for the 16 flatpak installed in Flatseal. Another distro with a large amount of space consumed by flatpak applications is EndlessOS, however EndlessOS has one particularly large flatpak installed for offline content. Lernstick is pre-installed with a larger selection of flatpak software, 7 Desktop Environments, is 6GB smaller for the English version with 13 installed languages and can be booted live from the ISO. Lernstick has some menu entries, particularly under the Education sections of Lanuguages, Music, Geography or History as (online) desktop files which are links to websites as opposed to applications. This is not useful if running the distro offline. There could be more choice of web browsers installed. Selecting Choose What I Share after first opening Firefox has all options unticked, however opening the about:config editor in Firefox, searching for ping and scrolling to the bottom confirms that the default ping settings do ping telemetry among with other about:config settings for the default Firefox web browser. Chromium tracking in the Chromium flatpak is more invasive than the Firefox web browser and requires chrome://flags settings toggled with care. Other alternatives the user should be able to install and modify for better privacy from web tracking would be Brave, Midori, Opera, Iron, Falkon, Gnome-web, Konquerer, Morph, NetSurf, and many other small alternative web browsers such as Dillo for non-javascript or reliable and simple user interfaces. The default Firefox web browser is installed as a debian package, while Chromium and Tor Browser Bundle are installed as flatpak packages and Tor Browser Bundle first requires downloading and installing via the launcher. Any other web browser or debian package can very easily be installed with apt update && apt install. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 12-2025-04-06 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-09-08 Votes: 1 There are a lot of Instant Messengers pre-installed, three pinned to the GNOME taskbar. The variety of children's educational programs is extensive, along with a moderate choice of games. Printing applications are convenient for setting up printers, however some propriety software would need to be installed for some printers. Most programs an office user would require for basic PDF are available ready to use and the LibreOffice suite is compacted to a single entry in the menu, while the new context menu from right click has four types of libreoffice document options. Wine is available to install compatible Windows programs such as an older version of Microsoft Office. There are many free software applications for viewing and manipulating video, music and photo files if needed. Both Oracle Virtualbox and virt-manager are installed to choose between, however due to the way virtualisation technology is, only one hypervisor program can have a guest running at a time. Virtualbox is somewhat slower than virt-manager, however more user friendly for beginners. Virt-manager can be more buggy becoming disconnected at times requiring reconnecting and one time it resets the host machine from force reset. In each Desktop Environment, the other Desktop Environment native programs are hidden, however the other programs can be run from terminal. Openbox is an eighth desktop which can be logged into after logging out of any other desktop, however the Oba menu does not work. XFCE is okay waking up, logging out and in if booted from XFCE, however XFCE cannot be log into after logging into another desktop environment. Logging out and selecting XFCE to log into is dysfunctional. Since at least 2023, the minor bug of XFCE not logging in when switching to the desktop environment from other desktop environments has persisted. While GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, and Openbox desktop environments have good default program choices, the default programs for opening video and text files are inconvenient in Enlightenment, LXDE and KDE. In LXDE and Enlightenment, the MystiQ video converter opens when opening a video file and the E-book viewer opens when opening text a file. In KDE, the Avidemux video converter opens by default when opening a video file. These are not the right choices for opening these files. These default choices being inappropriate for LXDE, Enlightenment and KDE have not changed either. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 12 Rating: 7 Date: 2023-12-13 Votes: 35 It works quite well, it is easy to install it on another USB and the bios recognizes the UEFI input, it has persistence and enough programs to start programming.It comes with several desktops pre-installed (I don't know if this is a good idea, packages and terminals get mixed up). The problem comes when you want to update: then the surprises begin. The "apt" manager is blocked, when it is unlocked, it informs you that there are 8 broken packages, when you see the broken packages, it is the Libre Office installation that comes with the name "Lernstick Office" (?). It is a veteran distro made in Switzerland for schools and educational environments, I think it is a great idea. I think there is a better alternative which is "Linux Schools", where everything works and works very well, but it is based on Ubuntu and does not have persistence Was this review helpful? Yes No