New Debian-Based Distribution Arrives on the Market

New Linux distributions pop up almost weekly, so it should come as no surprise that yet another Debian-based platform has hit the market. And like many others, TelOS aims to be a bit different. How? Outside of being touch-screen friendly (using the KDE Plasma 5.20.5 desktop environment), TelOS is ready to serve as your home theater center, thanks to the inclusion of the Kodi open-source media center software.

You’ll also find a mixture of KDE and GNOME apps installed, giving you a sort of best-of-both-worlds on the desktop. On the KDE front, you’ll find the standard software included (such as Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Ark, KTorrent, K3b, Kazam, KWrite, and KDE Connect). As for GNOME, the developers have added the Cheese webcam viewer, Disks disk utility, the Evolution groupware suite, the GNOME on-screen keyboard, the GNOME Clocks app, and the GNOME Sound Recorder.

But for open-source purists, TelOS might have a couple of deal-breakers included, as both the Chrome web browser and the TeamViewer remote desktop software come pre-installed.

Be warned, TelOS is pretty rough around the edges. Being a new distribution it has a long way to go before it’s ready for the masses. And when you go to install the distribution, there is a password (ion) associated with the installer. Once installed, you’ll also have to deal with a full-screen instance of the Chrome browser. Once you get past those things, you might find TelOS an interesting take on the Linux desktop.

Download an ISO of the latest version of TelOS and see if it might be your next Linux distribution of choice.