pearOS, a Linux distro that aims to look and behave like Apple’s macOS, is once again in active development with a new base, design, installer, and more.
French developer David Tavares initially created Pear OS back in 2011, based on Ubuntu and featuring the GNOME 3 desktop environment. The initial release, Pear OS 3, was based on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and shipped with Linux kernel 3.0.
While Ubuntu was using the Unity interface back then, Pear OS offered a Mac OS X look-alike with a dock. In 2012, David Tavares released a Debian Edition of Pear OS, and a month after that, the developer renamed Pear OS to Comice OS, and the next version was renamed once again to Pear OS Linux a few months later that year.
The idea is cool (not for me personally, but I see the merit).
But this project has flip-flopped its name, its flip-flopped its distro, its flip-flopped its Desktop Environment. Development has stopped and started multiple times.
I don’t think this distro or this project is something that can be relied upon.
Surely it’d make more sense to develop this as a theme that can be installed by Plasma users, rather than as an entire distro?
hopefully no one shows the developer NixOS…
I often look at these small purpose built niche distros and think to myself “this could just be a flake”.
you’re not wrong. A lot of them could simply be flakes or just cloned dotfiles. Just look at Omarchy, that’s basically Arch with in installer and dotfiles.
If I’m looking to use a distro I want something that improves whatever it’s based on, like CachyOS for example that has it’s own repos and kernel. Distros that essentially just tweak GNOME or KDE I’m going to pass on. Like this PearOS. you can just download virtually any distro and install Plasma and make it look the same.
Pourquoi 🤔
Pourquoi pas?
If you can use Mac, you can use Gnome.
This doesn’t seem like the most reliable developer or distro.
Genuine question, why would I trust my machines to something as inconsistent as this?
If it interests you, try it. If it doesn’t interest you, don’t install it.
Not all software projects need to be developed by teams of people with published release cycles. There are lots of passion projects out there.
It’s just a meme distro.
