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Review: LastOSLinux 2025-05-25
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
When I first read about the LastOSLinux and its mission to essentially be a spin of Linux Mint for people migrating from Windows, I was a bit sceptical. Linux Mint is already a capable desktop distribution which is geared toward beginners and is configured in a way to make the transition from Windows to Linux fairly painless. Over the past 15 years I've handed Linux novices laptops with Linux Mint installed and they've generally found the transition to be a smooth one. I was curious if LastOS could improve on the situation at all and, if so, how it could clear Linux Mint's high bar for ease of use and consistent quality.
I will say that LastOS's first impressions were good. The distribution has a nice theme, it uses the friendly Calamares installer, and it worked well with my hardware. Once installed, I found LastOS ships with lots of software people moving from Windows will probably appreciate. WINE is included, there is an office suite, the popular-on-windows Chrome browser is installed for us, and there is an installer for Steam in the application menu. All of these things seem likely to appeal to Windows refugees.
There were some issues during my trial, most of them relating to installing and launching new applications. For example, having the package mirrors default to a specific server on the far side of the world was a problem - both in terms of speed and package synchronization. Using a CDN or picking a mirror at install time would have worked out better. Not having the update manager work on my first day was certainly a problem and not one that a new Linux user would likely to be able to fix on their own.
The LL Store application technically worked, but it is harder to navigate that Mint Install and provides less information while presenting a less flexible experience. I feel as though the developer could have made a better experience by creating their own repository of Deb packages and enabling it in Mint's software centre and it would have made for a better, smoother experience. Adding yet another package manager, one which doesn't look or act like most other software centres, is likely to confuse people. Likewise, LL Launcher sometimes displayed launchers for new applications, but only ones from LL Store and then only sometimes. Having yet another place from which to launch programs and one which isn't reliable is, again, just going to confuse people.
In other words, when LastOSLinux is just tweaking and polishing Linux Mint (setting up a dark theme, adding a welcome window, extending WINE support, and providing documentation) it does very well. These were all welcome adjustments to what I consider a great distribution. Where LastOS struggles is with its own, custom applications. They are new and awkward to use at this stage. They are not well explained yet in the documentation and not reliable. LastOS feels like a project which started as a good customization of Linux Mint, but then got too ambitious and overextended itself. (Or took on too many new features before they were polished.) It's a good early effort, but the problems introduced by LastOS outweigh the benefits the distribution provides over its parent.