on EasyOS

https://easyos.org

https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html

EasyOS is the latest distribution from the guy behind Puppy Linux. It has a bunch of cool ideas regarding security, mostly stemming from it being built around containers. I think it's supposed to make it easy to create isolated containers on the fly, for e.g. building random software or whatnot. It has some nice X11 sandboxing features too. Besides that, it has first class support for live USBs, which is always nice.

getting it to boot

If you just try to run it with `qemu -hda easyos.img`, it will get stuck. This happens when the media it boots from has no free space, I fixed it by running `truncate --size 2G easyos.img`. I couldn't get graphic acceleration to work, I had to use the vesa driver. After solving those two issues I was able to boot.

actually using it

After you finally get to the desktop, you get bombarded with a bunch of dialogs. The locale dropdowns sadly lack any search, they're a pain to use. I do like the desktop, though. It's clean and fast even without acceleration.

If you try to launch one of the builtin containers, nothing will happen. Not even an error message. Turns out they're broken if you don't have accelerated graphics. To fix this, you need to set EC_ACCESS=DRI='false' in /mnt/wkg/containers/*/configuration. I'm not sure what's the point of the default term container - it has access to your X11 session, so it's easy to break out of it. dunfell, the desktop container, seems to actually be properly isolated. I really like how it's integrated with the regular desktop, too. I tried to create a terminal-only container, which the Easy Containers tool seems to imply is possible, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I found that tool pretty confusing in general.

the part where i say that despite it's flaws, it's an interesting os

despite it's flaws, it's an interesting os

For real though, I like how bold it is. It's good to have people trying out new ideas and, if you ignore all the jank, I think it's a step in the right direction.