pearOS

Reader supplied reviews for pearOS Average rating 6.7 from 3 review(s) Version: 2026.02 Rating: 5 Date: 2026-02-13 Country: Ireland Votes: 2 Nice looking distro but not ready for prime time yet. I only ran it from usb but the issue I had with it was with the settings menu and sub menus. The first issue was when you try to maximise the settings menu, it does not fill the screen, it takes up the middle of the screen with large chunks of desktop on either side. Two finger scrolling does not work correctly in settings either. For example if you scroll wallpaper in settings it will only go down so far and act like its at the end when its not. You have to use the down arrow to go down. This happens in all settings options. The curves around the windows are complemented by transparent corners of what they were originally. While it does look really nice on first impression, it is unfinished. I did not proceed with the installation. I ran on a dell laptop which is well supported on other distros with integrated graphics. I did not encounter any of these issues on standard kde or previous installs of arch. Version: 2026.02 Rating: 7 Date: 2026-02-11 Country: Thailand Votes: 1 Can you say twilight zone? First impressions were that the installer is bad. It takes forever and the timer goes back and forth, you think that it's locked up and has failed. I tested using boxes on my Dell i7,16gb of ram. I have it 8gb of ram and 128gb of space. When it finally did finish I was greeted by a stunning colorful, animated text saying hello and welcome. The desktop was a cross between mac Os and XFCE to me although it was kde. The kernel was 6.18 which was nice and of course it's a rolling release. It was quite responsive after the desktop finally loaded. This distro has a lot of potential. Can't say I recommend it at this point but it has it's good points. Looking forward to the future to see what it has in store and hope the developer continues to work on it. Asking for money up front when the user has not even installed was a turn off for me. If I were to use it as my daily driver I would certainly contribute. If you are a patient person and love the Mac OS effect this might be for you. Version: 2025.12 Rating: 8 Date: 2026-01-01 Votes: 2 My noobish review of pearOS-NiceC0re-2025.12-x86_64: 1) Tried installing it in GNOME Boxes on a 27” 5K iMac running the latest Mint Cinnamon. Booted up but couldn’t install as “no internet connection”. {???} Never had that issue B4 with any other of the many distros I’ve installed in Boxes. 2) Used Disk Image Writer and got the ISO onto a thumb drive. Decided to install on a mid 2011 21.5” Intel Core i5 SSD iMac I have as a spare for experimenting. Booted up fine and went through the very Mac-ish setup. Went for a coffee; came back after about 30 minutes to see 3 sub-screens indicating some crash or another. Removed the reports and saw that there was still 4 minutes left to complete the install. Went away and found the screen stuck = 4 minutes still left after 20 minutes. (Did I just walk into and out of “The Twilight Zone”?) 3) Thought: “Oh well... guess it didn’t take”. Rebooted to see if the previous distro had been wiped out and, to my surprise and delight, it went straight to pearOS-NiceC0re-2025. {?!?!} A curious hiccup. 4) After more “Alice-in-Wonderland” escapades, I did a ‘sudo pacman –Syu’ and everything smoothed out!!! Still getting familiar with the pros and cons, or rather what it can and can’t do, but I’ll be keeping this distro on the spare for some time to come in order to explore further. In summary: The fellow who put this OS together is, IMO, brilliant! Thanks to Alexandru Bălan (?) for bringing pearOS back to life. I hope he keeps running with it so Linux users have yet another incredibly beautiful desktop OS to choose from. [Or, he somehow hooks up with the CachyOS team and offers the pearOS desktop to them as an addition to the desktops they offer? Maybe as a contributing team member? Now there’s a thought.] This OS is a 10-star-in-the-making! Only gave it an 8 due to the odd hiccups.