Endless OS - you are not welcome here

 I recently decided to try installing Android on a VM; I want to start pklaying around with  some of the stuff thats available on the platform now and thats a lot easier when its a VM.

Andoid is just Linux right? Turns out to be a bit more tricky than that. I downloaded the official image and installed it on PVE VM. It would not recognise the Virtio NIC. After changing that to an e1000 it worked....sort of. It was just a painful exercise.

I decided to try a different tack and go with Waydroid (which runs as a container) so I needed a VM running Wayland. First I tried Bunsenlabs Carbon - this refused to recognise any keysctrokes via the (VNC) console. Then Endless OS. 

I went to the endlessOS homepage to download it. Go and have a look for your self. There is no download link! Nothing but multiple screenfuls of marketing effluvium. This should have been my first warning. I had used the link from distrowatch - interestingly if you type "Endless OS" into Google, the download links rank much higher than this homepage.

So I downloaded and installed it.

Installation was a little strange. "Formatting" the disk took over 7 minutes to complete on the 20G ssd-backed volume I had provisioned (typically this takes around 20 seconds). It was just ext4 on a single partition - nothing fancy. I was then required to agree to the terms and conditions which immediately asserted Endless OS's IP rights:

It does go on to briefly mention Gnu on page 3 or 4.

There seems to have been a lot of design effort put into creating a tablet/phone experience. But all this sits on top of Debian - actually Debian 12 (v13 is only a month old at the time of writing so I can forgive them that). I started a terminal to run the usual apt get / apt update, only to get "error: unable to access the dpkg database directory /var/lib/dpkg: Read-only file system"

There is a GUI package manager provided, but you need to look for it. It's not present in the "All appplications" view - you need to open settings and start it from there. And it turns out that it will only lt you install applications which have the Endless OS blessing. And that is a very short list. Apparently this list only permits flatpaks.

It looks pretty but it smells like someone trying to create another commercialized Linux and falling  into the same predictable traps. 

VM deleted.