Q4OS

Reader supplied reviews for Q4OS Average rating 8.7 from 195 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Q4OS? 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: -- 7.0-r56.65.94.123.162.71.8.80.5.29 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: 6.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-18 Country: United States Votes: 4 Perfection! Andromeda version 6.6. The installation went as planned (did not have to compromise any of my pre-conceived requirements, which I have had to do on various distro installers from time to time). I also loved that once finished and rebooted into the installed version it remembered all of my settings and tweaks from the live DVD. Next step was just to install codecs then a few of my favorite apps. I really like what the Q4OS developers have done with the update and software installation processes. It is "friendly," for want of a better word, and it is fast. You'll make your selection(s) from the extensive list presented or from entering your desired app in the search field, and then you'll see what's about to happen, select "okay," and then watch it happen. Don't blink, because it is a nice quick process, and you get what you want and that's that. This is an Acer Aspire a517-52 with 11th generation Intel Core i7 and 40 GB ram and Mesa Intel Iris XE graphics chip. This laptop was purchased new about 5 years ago. This is the fastest, most responsive distro I've ever seen on any machine, and certainly on this one. I've had many many distros on this, including several versions of GhostBSD (which comes in second for speed). I cannot rave enough about how impressed I am with the speed and overall instant functionality of Q4OS. All tweaks and personal changes are intuitively arrived at on the Q4OS iteration of KDE Plasma. I don't know how they did it, but when moving from one parameter to another things go so smoothly that I get the feeling they've discovered a lot of unnecessary code here and there and either changed it to work better or removed it; things you do happen NOW. ;o) It is very easy to award Q4OS a 10 rating. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.6 Rating: 4 Date: 2026-04-12 Country: United States Votes: 1 I have installed Q4OS on a number of unsusual targets in addition to standard PCs. Most recently, I put it on an old Macbook Air (A1466), and the only things that didn't work out of the box were the camera and wifi card. No problem, a quick Google search supplied me with the necessary command line fixes and I was up and running everything in a few minutes. Ths unit has a Core i5, 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD. It was in perfect physical condition, and you can't tell it from a new one except for one thing...the Apple logo on the lid LIGHTS UP! I picked up about 17 old Chromebooks for $100 at the same pawn shop and 10 were circa 2012-2015 HP and Lenovo models. Q4OS is ideal for those, because it allows you to select a "base" install right from the setup, which minimizes the drive space used. These Chromebooks only came with 16GB SSDs, so space was at a premium. From there, I added a few applications that would be important, leaving about 7GB free. Pop in an 8GB SD card and you've got yourself a really nice little netbook. Plus, you've got the power and flexibility of Plasma, rather thab settling for a barebones desktop environment like some of those lightweight distros package. By the way, everything worked out of the box, just like any other PC, once I overwrote the Chromebook firmware with the MrChromebook.tech firmware utility. Naturally, I have tried Q4OS on some more powerful laptops with more memory. My favorite is a `10 year-old Dell Inspiron 15 5559. with a 6th gen Core i5. I replaced the hard drive with a 500GB SSD and boosted the RAM from 8 to 16GB. Wow! what a great little machine for under $175, including a new battery and a power brick! Oh, and a case and mouse, too! So, where am I going with this? IMHO Q4OS is a well put together Plasma DE distro that can be used as a solution for a number of problems. These days, most distros end up being pretty much the same, so there are really no surprises here. One real plus is the choice Q4 gives you as to what type of installation you want during setup. And even if you take the more extensive installation, you don't end up with a lot of apps you will want to install later. There is full support for Flatpak, and other common package installers. There's even a quick app installer available from the Welcome! window that streamlines the installation of some of the favorite apps users will want. Q4OS is probably a good choice for someone moving from Windows to Linux or even Mac, although, as I pointed out, a new user might need some help if the command line comes into play. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 6.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-11 Country: Hungary Votes: 1 I installed Q4OS on an HP EliteBook 840 G3 with an Intel i7-6600U and 16 GB RAM. The installation process was straightforward and completed without issues. The system is very fast and responsive, even on this older hardware. Boot times are quick, and memory usage is low compared to many modern distributions. I primarily use it for web browsing, office work, and light development, and it has been stable during daily use. Hardware support is good; everything worked out of the box, including graphics and networking. The desktop environment is simple and efficient, though not as modern-looking as some alternatives. Overall, Q4OS is a reliable and lightweight distribution that works especially well on older laptops. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 195 reader reviews of Q4OS...