AnduinOS: A New Choice for Windows Users?

Drop Windows and Install AnduinOS (Made By Microsoft Employee)

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Summary

A Microsoft developer has created AnduinOS, a Linux distribution that mimics the look and feel of Windows 11. Aimed at making the transition from Windows to Linux smoother, this distribution raises questions about its origins and intentions. However, the developer assures that it's free, open-source, and licensed under GPLv3. AnduinOS is based on Debian with Ubuntu repositories, offering a familiar interface with the Gnome desktop and graphical apps installed via Flatpak. The distribution is minimalist, user-friendly, and avoids any legal issues by steering clear of proprietary elements. Though it includes helpful features like a weather widget and uses a traditional installer, some choices like centered taskbars and design aesthetics have received mixed feedback. Nevertheless, AnduinOS appears to be a solid and legitimate addition to the Linux ecosystem, despite playful conspiracy theories about Microsoft's involvement.

Highlights

A Microsoft developer created AnduinOS, resembling Windows 11 to attract Windows users to Linux 🖥️.
Questions about it being a Microsoft honeypot arise, but it's proven free and open-source 🔍.
Debian-based, it includes Ubuntu repositories, promising a stable and familiar environment 🐧.
Dual license and privacy-focused, it boasts a clean and minimalist design 🎨.
Despite Flatpaks, some users question its app installation strategy 🤔.

Key Takeaways

AnduinOS mimics Windows 11 to help users transition to Linux seamlessly 🎨.
It's created by a Microsoft employee but licensed under GPLv3, ensuring it's open-source 🔓.
The OS is Ubuntu-based but leans heavily on Debian, with a lightweight and user-friendly interface 💻.
It poses no legal risks with its clean, non-proprietary design, despite its Windows-like appearance 🔍.
AnduinOS uses Flatpak for app management, avoiding snaps altogether 🚀.

Overview

AnduinOS is a fascinating entrant in the Linux world, designed by a Microsoft developer specifically to resemble Windows 11. The idea is to provide Windows users a familiar environment while transitioning to Linux, but this has also fueled some playful conspiracy theories about its true purpose. Despite this, the project prides itself on being free, open-source, and licensed under GPLv3, alleviating privacy concerns.

The distribution itself is built on Debian but incorporates Ubuntu repositories, resulting in a lightweight and user-friendly experience. With Gnome as the desktop environment and a focus on privacy, AnduinOS attempts to deliver a comfortable yet distinct Linux experience. Notably, it installs graphical applications via Flatpak rather than native Ubuntu packages or snaps, which is both a curious decision and a topic of debate among Linux enthusiasts.

Although AnduinOS aims to mimic Windows 11's aesthetic, it remains legally sound by avoiding proprietary assets. The inclusion of features like a weather widget enhances its appeal, but the centering of the taskbar has its detractors. Regardless, the distribution presents itself as a promising choice for those curious about Linux, albeit with a nod to the familiar look of its Windows counterpart.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Anduin OS The chapter discusses a new Linux distribution called Anduin OS, developed by a Microsoft developer. The distribution is designed to mimic the look and feel of Windows 11 to attract users familiar with Windows to transition to Linux. The narrator expresses skepticism about this development, questioning whether it is truly a Linux distribution.
01:00 - 03:00: Suspicion and Microsoft Involvement The chapter explores the suspicion surrounding Microsoft's potential involvement in creating a Linux distribution. It speculates whether Microsoft's interest in Linux could be a strategy to reach users who do not use Windows, allowing them to gather data and monitor activities. The discussion touches on conspiracy theories regarding Microsoft's motives and questions the sudden emergence of a new OS distribution called 'Anduin OS' that had been previously unknown.
03:00 - 06:00: Exploring Anduin OS Features The chapter explores the sudden increase in publicity for Anduin OS, questioning whether Microsoft is behind this surge through sponsoring journalists and content creators. It raises the question of potential payments being made to promote Anduin OS but clarifies that the speaker did not receive any corporate money, emphasizing their independence.
06:00 - 10:00: First Impressions and Installation The chapter begins by emphasizing a sense of independence from corporate influence, particularly Microsoft, setting the stage for an unbiased review of Anduin OS. The narrator then embarks on an exploratory journey with Anduin OS by visiting its website, highlighting their unfamiliarity with the system. They note that Anduin OS 1.0 was officially released in September last year, with more recent updates occurring frequently, indicating active development. The narrator observes a very recent release on a popular tech platform, Dro, showing the OS's continuous iteration and improvement. This sets the foundation for what seems to be a detailed exploration and review of the OS in future sections.
10:00 - 13:00: Interface and Usability This chapter discusses the interface and usability aspects of a software project, emphasizing its open-source nature. It highlights the project's use of GPLV3 licensing, ensuring that it is free and adheres to open-source principles. The verification of this licensing on the project's GitHub page is noted as a positive step in maintaining transparency and compliance with open-source standards.
13:00 - 16:00: System Resources and Closing Thoughts The chapter discusses the licensing choices made by companies like Microsoft when it comes to open source projects. It highlights a particular case with Anduin OS, where the developer chose the GPL license over other permissive licenses like MIT, which Microsoft often uses for their open-source projects. The developer of Anduin OS is noted to be an employee of Microsoft, but not a part of the Windows team, emphasizing the diverse range of projects and employees within the company.

Drop Windows and Install AnduinOS (Made By Microsoft Employee) Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 So, I've been hearing a lot about this new Linux distribution that was developed by a Microsoft developer, somebody that actually works currently at Microsoft. He's created a Linux distribution and it's designed to attract people that are used to Windows 11 and, you know, transition them over to Linux because he's created this Linux distribution that should mimic and look and feel kind of like Microsoft Windows 11. And this all sounds very suspicious to me, right? Is this an actual Linux
00:30 - 01:00 distribution or is this some kind of Microsoft honeypot where they're trying to basically try to get to all of you Linux users because they want to data mine you and spy on you and everything for if you use Windows, right? But those of us that don't use Windows, how are they going to get to us? Well, they want to create their own Linux distribution, possibly. Conspiracy theory, right? Yeah, it could be. But you also I have noticed that all of a sudden this Anduin OS distribution that I never heard of
01:00 - 01:30 until a couple of days ago. You know, all of a sudden there's news articles everywhere about it and YouTube videos about it. It's almost like there's some kind of money behind it, like there's a campaign possibly from Microsoft. Is Microsoft paying all of these journalists and YouTube reviewers and things, you know, all these people? Is Microsoft actually paying people to talk about Anduin OS? Did Microsoft pay me to make this video about Anduin OS? You guys know I do not take corporate money, so obviously I didn't take any money
01:30 - 02:00 from Microsoft. Of course, if I was one of those people that would take money from Microsoft, then I'd still answer no to the question. I just lie to you. But let's go ahead and take a quick first look at Anduin OS. So, the very first thing I did is, of course, I went to their website because I I didn't know too much about this, but And OS 1.0. So, I just saw a 1.0 0 release September of last year. They also had more recent releases. Matter of fact, over on Dro, I noticed that they had a release here in the last week or two. So, I went and
02:00 - 02:30 grabbed the latest ISO. One other thing I noticed is some of the tags here at the top of the page. One of them is open- source and then free and then GPLV3 license. So, that is an actual step in the right direction. the fact that this project does tout that it is free and open source and that it is actually GPL v3 licensed. I did verify that. I went to the um GitHub page for Android OS and it is actually licensed under the GPL. Good job. Because I kind of expected it to be under u not
02:30 - 03:00 necessarily a proprietary license, but I thought maybe they would license it under a more permissive free license like MIT, which you know Microsoft typically does license a lot of their stuff under MIT if they're doing open source. But I'm happy that they went with the GPL. One thing to note about the developer behind Anduin OS, he works at Microsoft, but he does not work on Windows. Microsoft is a gigantic company, and most employees at Microsoft don't actually work on Windows. And he's one of those people that doesn't work on Windows. Why choose Anduin OS here? It's
03:00 - 03:30 because it's ready to use. The ISO is only 2 GB inside, so it's not a terribly big or bloated distribution. It's based on Auntu. Abuntu itself is not terribly big or bloated uh typically unless you're adding a bunch of extra stuff on top of it. Uh it has a friendly interface. They're going to use the Gnome desktop. Now, of course, you get privacy and open- source containerized. Now, this is interesting because, you know, I'm not sure everyone's going to love this. Graphical applications are installed via flatpack and keep themselves separate from the base
03:30 - 04:00 system. So, I don't know why you wouldn't use native Ubuntu packaging, right? Why are you going with flatback? Um, of course, Abuntu also already has snaps if you wanted to do the whole containerized thing. Uh, it just seems like a a strange choice. By the way, this distribution is based on actually when I say it's an iuntu based distribution, it's actually based on Debian. They do add some Ubuntu repositories on top of it. So you can
04:00 - 04:30 kind of say it's based on both Debian and Auntu. You've got three different versions here. You've got an old LTS based on Jammy Jellyfish. You've got a recent LTS of Noble Numbat. And then Plucky Puffin is based on Iuntu 254. I actually downloaded this and I'm going to go ahead and spin up a virtual machine and check out Anduin OS inside of VM. Now I've already run through an installation of Anduin OS. It uses the standard Iuntu installer. And by Auntu installer, I mean the old iuntu installer, the Ubiquiti installer, which
04:30 - 05:00 is a fine installer. Of course, iuntu now has a new Flutterbased uh installation application that they use, but this is still using the tried andrue ubiquity installer. It installed just fine. Uh nothing to see in the installation, but you know, on first login, and this is my first time logging in and and actually checking this out, I've got to say it does look very Windows-like. you have not a Windows like background. I mean, it's Windows like, but it's not the same as the Windows 11 wallpaper. Probably for
05:00 - 05:30 copyright reasons. I know some distributions get a little loose with trademarks and copyrights and they use a lot of images and icons and things that, you know, are directly ripped from Microsoft Windows. Thankfully, we're not doing anything here. There should be no legal problems with this distribution. But we have a Windows-like wallpaper. We have a panel, our Gnome panel here at the bottom of the screen, just like your panel on Windows is at the bottom of the screen. We have our start menu if you
05:30 - 06:00 will, that is right here. And then we have our quick launchers, our taskbar essentially, that is all centered on the panel, which I'm not a fan of centering things on the panel, especially things that you're going to be clicking all the time. Most things that happen on modern applications, especially web browsers, they always happen on the left hand side of the screen. your uh forward and back buttons are at the top left. So, putting things at the bottom and center, especially something like the menu, which you would click all the time, you're going to be traveling a lot from
06:00 - 06:30 the top of the screen, especially when you're using things like a web browser, all the way to the bottom of the screen to click on things if you're a mouse user. So, just for, you know, I I understand aesthetics, I guess it might look good. But as far as just mouse travel and just being easy on your hands and on your wrist, I think this is a a poor choice. But again, the aim of this distribution is to actually mimic Windows 11, which if they're if that's your goal, it's done this pretty well.
06:30 - 07:00 Some other things on the panel, we have our little weather widget here, and this is actually kind of cool. Um, it says I'm in San Francisco. Of course, I'm not in San Francisco. It's 14°. I'm assuming it's not 14° Fahrenheit in San Francisco. US obviously uses Fahrenheit. I'm assuming this is defaulting to Celsius uh temperatures as well. So, yeah, you got some work to do as far as changing the settings here. I'm not going to do that as far as, you know, sharing geo location of exactly where I'm at. So, I'm not going to actually
07:00 - 07:30 configure this widget. But, this is a nice widget. I actually really think this is sharp having that weather widget here. I think already I mean just the very first thing I look at. I'm impressed that they've included that. I'm assuming that's a Gnome extension. Some other things you have over here in this area. Let me move my head out of the way. We have what looks to be a cyst tray and of course your standard kind of uh gnome cyray where you can switch for example the style from dark to light. You've got some networking stuff going on as well. I'm not going to play with
07:30 - 08:00 any of that. And then of course you have your clock. If I click on the clock, we get our calendar and we get our notifications. Let's see what's installed out of the box because they talk about this being kind of a minimal lightweight distribution as far as the ISO is not very big. So let's go ahead and do all apps. Um let's see back. Yeah. Is this actually all the applications? This is all the applications. This is actually pretty awesome because you know it's going to let you I guess install the applications you actually want to run. And it just
08:00 - 08:30 has a few basic things. Of course, it's got the Firefox web browser, which also has a quick launcher down here. But let's launch Firefox. And let's go ahead and check what version of Firefox we are on. If I go to help and about Firefox, this is Firefox 138. And I'm assuming that that was installed as a flatp pack. I wonder if I can open a terminal here. Uh, Ctrl Alt T does actually open a terminal. And let me zoom in here. If I do a flatp
08:30 - 09:00 pack list, let's actually just quickly see if there's anything installed as a flatp pack. Where is flatpack? So flatpack is here, but flatpack list doesn't actually list anything. So uh I I thought they said all the graphical applications would be installed as a flatp pack, I guess. Is that going forward? Is everything a native package? uh on here at first. Let me actually do a apt list dash i for apt list and then just the installed packages. It's going to give me everything that's installed.
09:00 - 09:30 And if I u let me up arrow and grip for firefox. Let's just see what package Firefox Firefox was installed via the apt package manager. You see there is Firefox. So it was not installed as a snap. It was not installed as a flat pack. Snap is probably not even here if they've got uh flatp packs uh enabled. Yeah, snapd is not even on the system. So, flatpack is here, but nothing out of the box is installed as a flatp pack. Back to the menu system files. I'm assuming that is Gnome's Nautilus file
09:30 - 10:00 manager, and it is a okay file manager. Nothing wrong with it. We also have console. Console of course was the terminal. And if I click on it, it's back into the terminal. I noticed it remembered that I zoomed in, right? cuz I had zoomed in earlier. If I zoom back out, let me Oh, there we go. Had to remember the key binding. And then let me exit. And if I control alt t to launch the terminal again. Yeah, it remembers that. Zoom back out.
10:00 - 10:30 Exit. Crl alt t. Yeah, that is neat. I I have never seen a terminal remember if you were zoomed in or not on uh exit. So, uh I don't know if that's strictly a console feature or if they've done any uh additional work to that, but that is actually very nice. Then we have our software center. I actually do want to play with this. Let's actually install something and actually see if we do actually get flatbacks. So, let's install uh I don't know something that's
10:30 - 11:00 probably not here out of the box. GIMP's kind of a big program, but let's go ahead and install it. Yeah, it's going to default to installing it from FlatHub. You do have the option though to install the deb package. So, I'm glad that that is here as well cuz probably most people will probably want the native packages for most things because u especially if you're running something like Auntu, you're not necessarily wanting a rolling release. You're not wanting packages that autoupdate typically for most things. You know, some things you may want things that are
11:00 - 11:30 constantly rolling like your web browser. It's kind of important to have an up-to-date web browser, but for things like, you know, for example, you know, I just give me the the latest version that's in the Ubuntu repos. And I I really don't need a container for that. Back to the menu system, we have shot well for our u image viewer, our our photo organizer, if you will. Camera. What the hell is camera? Such a generic name. Gnome really makes me mad with these names. It's it's camera 47. data. That's not
11:30 - 12:00 the actual binary name of this program. I have no idea what the actual name is. Um, but it doesn't matter. If if Gnome doesn't want to take the names of their applications seriously, then I'm not going to take it seriously either. We also have weather. No, Gnome weather. Welcome to weather. I'm not going to set that up. Uh, text editor. Yeah. Is this gedit? Uh, let's see if I go to about text editor. This is not gedit. It's
12:00 - 12:30 just text editor. the Gnome project text editor. Uh yeah, yeah, now anyway, there's not really much here. They do install my favorite calculator program, Calculate, which is a GTK application. This is much better than the standard Gnome calculator. This is calculate GTK 5.5.1. That is a really smart choice. So, I've got to give the Anduin div uh credit for that. I think that's a really smart choice. Events is our PDF viewer. Get on videos for playing video. Rhythm
12:30 - 13:00 box is our music player. I think that's a smart choice as well. I go into the menu system and about rhythm box. This is 3.4.8 a music manager and playback software or Gnome. Let's close that window. And other than that, we have uh some system settings tools. So, let's actually go into the settings here. And if I go all the way down and go to system, and if I go into about, this is Endwin
13:00 - 13:30 1.3.0. Uh I gave the system 6 gigs of RAM. I I gave this uh virtual machine 20 gigs of space as well. I was going to see if it gave any details about uh you know, Gnome as far as what version we're on. We're obviously using Whand. Um other than that, you know what? I'll just go to the terminal for a lot of this stuff. It'll make my life easier. Let's first run htop. Let's see what kind of system resources we're using. Now, I did just open and close a lot of things. So, this may be a little higher
13:30 - 14:00 than say a fresh cold reboot, but right now it's using not much CPU. And then the RAM, it's using about 1.1 gigs of RAM. That's pretty standard for Gnome. Let's check what kernel we have installed. If I do a NAMA-R, this is kernel 6.14.0. Now, that is interesting that HTOP was installed out of the box. Auntu typically doesn't install. There's two things I always complain about. HTOP is not installed out of the box on Auntu
14:00 - 14:30 and Vim. It's Vim here. If I do a Vim on the bash RC, Vim is not installed. So, that's one thing I think the Anduin OS devs probably should add is add a real text editor. I I'm sure nano is here. Nano is not something that uh a lot of especially power users are going to want. leave Nano on the system for for people that want it, but install Vim. Just people will complain if Vim's not there. One last thing I want to do, let's check out the wallpapers that are installed out of the box. So, if I right
14:30 - 15:00 click on the desktop and go to change background, let's see if they include any cool wallpapers. They do not. They have a light and a dark version. So, if I change from dark mode to light mode, we get a different wallpaper to fit the light theme. Although to be honest, I would rather do the dark wallpaper with the light theme. And for dark mode, I would actually rather do the light wallpaper with the dark theme for me. I like the contrast, but I understand a lot of people want dark on dark. Um, so
15:00 - 15:30 yeah, and that's probably the way I would run it. I actually do quite like the default theming here in Anduin OS. So there you have it. A quick and cursory look at Anduin OS. Fine distribution. Those few minutes I spent with it. It's Auntu based. Tabuntu is a fine distribution, so I'm sure Anduin OS is solid as far as if you actually wanted to install it and run it. I'm sure there wouldn't be, you know, any kind of major hiccups or anything. And I was kind of joking earlier. I know this is not a Microsoft honeypot. It's not
15:30 - 16:00 some kind of secret plan to get at us Linux users and steal all our data. Uh, at least I was paid to say that. Now, before I go, I need to actually thank my producers. I need to thank these guys here. Matt, Steve, 40 millimeter, CapK, Mandara, Flee, Jersey Killer, Mark Methos, Arion, Paul, Peace, Haror, Reality, Forless, Red, Profit, Roland, Wentto, Abuntu, Willie, and Microsoft. I'd also like to thank each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. Without
16:00 - 16:30 these guys, this quick look at Anduin OS would not have been possible. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Anduin OS, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.