What’s wrong with Q4OS?
I’ve tried many operating systems and many desktop environments, but only Q4OS with Trinity DE has been installed on my laptop for less than six months. Usually, only a breakdown can force me to reinstall the OS. It’s a good, lightweight and fast Linux distribution, but… There were too many unpleasant nuances in its work!
What’s wrong with Q4OS?
Pros, cons, pitfalls
I often praise Q4OS as one of the best distributions for outdated computers, but, to be honest my interaction with the distro was limited to some live tests. So, I mostly praised it from the sidelines, for its attempt to revive a dead desktop environment, for its modest system requirements and for its decent appearance.
Unlike other lightweight Linux distributions, Q4OS really looks like a full-fledged operating system: window managers are to difficult for many casual users, and even if you don’t understand it, you still feel that something works too strange.
Why Q4OS?
As you remember, my Asus N61 doesn’t have a key to disable the touchpad. In AntiX, this problem was solved through the terminal, with just one command and permanently. Then the developers decided to switch from xserver-xorg-input-synaptic to xinput, and now it doesn’t work anymore.
I’ve tried to replace xinput with synaptic, but the mouse configuration utility and Control Center were also removed with xinput. It took me a whole evening to solve the issue, and I decided this was a sign: it was time to look for something new. The only distro I haven’t tried so far was Q4OS, specifically with Trinity.
Strange disk partitioning
Let’s go in chronological order.
I prefer to use automatic disk partitioning to be sure that the distribution works exactly the way the developers want it to. I don’t like reinstalling the operating system and I hate distrohoping, but I like the idea of resetting all the changes and returning to the default settings from time to time.
Q4OS works with the bootloader a little strangely. Usually, the bootloader is saved in a separate unencrypted partition, and you first choose the OS and then enter the encryption key. In Q4OS, I was supposed to be asked where to save the bootloader, but I don’t think I was asked, and as a result, it most likely it became a part of /boot or /root (to be honest, I I didn’t check it.).
It seems like a minor detail, but because of this Q4OS refused to work from an external HDD, complaining a broken or missing bootloader. I tried to google some commands, but none of them worked.
So, if you plan to use this HDD as an external one later, it’s better to deal with manual partitioning. It’s not as convenient as in AntiX, but you’ll probably figure it out.
Strange mouse and touchpad management
Of course, the first thing I checked was the mouse settings. but I couldn’t find touchpad settings there. By that time, I already knew many ways to disable the touchpad, but most of them just didn’t work: xserver-xorg-input-synaptic is installed, but doesn’t respond to any commands, and xinput is not installed, which means that Q4OS team uses something else.
Of all the methods I knew, only one worked:
sudo modprobe -r psmouseI even created a desktop shortcut to avoid typing the command manually, but then I realized: the superuser needs a password, without which the shortcut is useless and just opens the terminal.
In the end, it means I still had to open the terminal and disable the touchpad manually after each system reboot. Fortunately, you can use the arrow keys for this.
Strange clipboard
You quickly get used to something good, and the clipboard in Linux is implemented much better than in Windows. For example, I often have to copy texts and symbols, and it’s much more convenient to do this on Linux.
However, in Trinity, you have to add the clipboard manually (it’s works as a taskbar applet), and, for some reason, it forgets the text copied from already closed programs. I mean, you copy something from the browser, close it, open a document, and there’s nothing to paste already, so you have to go into the copy history and manually search for the needed line. Why? For security reasons, maybe?
Strange dark themes
Solus made me like dark themes, but Q4OS looks a bit like default Ubuntu: dark taskbar, white windows, and dark header bars.
I have only one complaint about the dark themes in Q4OS – they do not affect the fonts at all, and I couldn’t find where to change the font color. When I switched to Q4OS, dark themes were considered unstable, and I had to configure them manually. It’s been fixed now, but I haven’t noticed any difference.
In most cases, this is not so important: all the menus are readable, all the file names are displayed. But if you open some text editor, it will be almost impossible to read anything (especially code comments): black on dark gray. And the only way to fix it is to change the background color.
The second problem is slightly similar: some notifications (for example, a notification about updates) are displayed in white text on a light background. If you don’t know there’s text hidden there, you don’t see anything at all. Do you need to know how many updates are available or is it enough to know that some updates are available?
Strange desktop environment incompatible with some programs
YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and many other popular sites are blocked in my country. Many popular VPNs that I can trust are unavailable too. The only thing that really can’t be blocked is Tor: the official website is unavailable, the repository and popular mirrors too, but if you can download a browser and find the bridge, it will work. It’s a good news. The bad one: if you download the browser as tar.xz, you won’t be able to run it.
It looks like all programs downloaded as archives can not run in Trinity: they just don’t know how to work with the environment. I tried to google it and found similar complaints dating back to 2019. I didn’t find any ready-made solution, so I had to create a Frankenstein monster from several tips from several forums. It was a shortcut to a shortcut, but not to the shortcut used to launch the browser, but to the one that this shortcut referred to. Gosh, it’s hard to explain even in Russian. I hope you have understood this matryoshka doll.
Strange default program settings
What’s the main feature of Trinity? It’s a fork of old KDE3 and it’s focused on old KDE applications. I don’t like Konqueror, but I like the idea to use one app as a browser, a file manager and a control center. It’s really interesting idea, but it works so bad. That’s why I was so happy to learn that after installation, the operating system would automatically download old versions of Dolphin, Discover, and other KDE apps. The problem is that choosing them as default programs is extremely difficult for me. I’ve never use KDE3 before and for me it’s like in the old Windows: there are a bunch of file types, and for each of them you can select preferred applications. It’s too hard and doesn’t work at all!
For example, Vivaldi has its own utility for screenshots, which automatically opens the folder where the screenshot is saved. It works even in AntiX and Puppy, but Q4OS with Trinity just throws an error and complains that it doesn’t know which program to use to open the folder. Weird? Weird. I tried to configure this, but in my best attempt instead of an error message I ended up in a file search utility that wasn’t even in the list of available applications. How is that possible?
And it gets worse when you install new applications: by the end, links from Telegram opened in Chromium, images from Konqueror and Dolphin opened in Gwenview, and images from SpaceFM, which I find much more convenient than the old Dolphin, suddenly opened in Brave. And that was the last straw!
Flatpak disguised as native deb-packages
This is my personal pain.
You can throw stones at me, but I don’t think that Flatpak is better than Snap. What? Third-party stores? OK, but you, guys, use only Flathub!
In my opinion, Flatpak makes sense only if all your applications are Flatpak. Literally all your apps. Not some of them. All. But if you install one or two Flatpaks that aren’t available as native packages for your OS, you’re just adding potential problems.
To be honest, almost all the configuration issues I encountered were related to the fact that I installed a bunch of programs in Flatpak format. Why? Because no one warned me that it was Flatpak!
Q4OS has its own App Center (most likely, it’s a fork of old version of Discover, but I’m not sure). There are very few programs, and some of them are marked as [flatpak]. Some are not. Do you think the [flatpak] mark indicates Flatpak? Yep, but the absence of this mark does not mark otherwise!
I was determined not to mix Flatpak and DEB and deliberately avoided everything marked as [flatpak]. But in the end, almost everything (or everything, who knows?) I installed from the Q4OS App Center turned out to be Flatpak.
When I noticed this, I went back to the App Center, but almost all the apps I checked were marked as [flatpak]. Either the devs replaced .deb with Flatpak, or originally they just forgot to check the box and added it later. I would never install Vivaldi and Brave as Flatpak if I could just add a 3-d party repository and install native packages!
Flatpak was the main reason why I couldn’t configure the system as I wanted: I couldn’t add a shortcut to the desktop, couldn’t choose applications by default, and couldn’t make the system remember windows positions. I understand that all of this is just my quirks. But why did they do that?
However even knowing about this peculiarity of Q4OS, I’m not sure that you’ll be able to avoid it, because almost all pre-installed programs in fact will be downloaded during the system installation. Who said this is DEB?
Conclusion
Despite the fact that I’ve complained for several minutes, I still consider Q4OS a really good distribution (especially when if we talk about really old PCs). I would even say that in my subjective ranking of lightweight Linux distributions, Q4OS confidently holds a spot in the top three, and if you are looking for a lightweight distribution with a nice interface, Q4OS is undoubtedly among the leaders.
And I really believe that Q4OS is an excellent option for beginners: they don’t know about other file managers or application formats and they have nothing to compare it to. Windows users are likely not even used to changing default programs and simply launch everything through desktop shortcuts, and, as long as you work with the software that is already installed, you won’t encounter any problems.
If I were asked which OS to install on a very old PC to avoid serious problem, I would recommend Q4OS. However, It just didn’t work for me.
January 30, 2025
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