Endless Mobile, Inc. is an American information technology company that develops thefreeEndlessOSdistribution of Linux and the reference platform hardware for it.[5] The company was founded in 2011 and is based inSan Francisco,California, U.S. with an additional office inRio de Janeiro, Brazil.[6]
Endless was founded in May 2012 inSan Francisco,California by Matthew Dalio and Marcelo Sampaio. In the first three years, the company focused on designing through field research inRocinha, the largestfavela in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, and also inGuatemala.
In April 2015, the company was launched for the general public through a campaign on the crowdfunding platformKickstarter. It raised $176,538 with 1,041 backers in less than 30 days.[7]
In November 2015, Endless started to sell computers atClaro stores in Guatemala. Before that, the product was being sold in own kiosks. January 2016 marked the launch of Endless Mini, a white spherical PC the size of agrapefruit, costing $79 and $99.[8]
On April 1, 2020, Endless became a nonprofit organization, Endless OS Foundation.[9]
According to the specifications found in their store[10] there will be several models based either on anIntelCeleron N2807 processors (Mission andEndless) or on a quad-CPUAMLogicS805Cortex A5ARM processor (Mission Mini andEndless Mini).
Endless OS is aDebian derivative distribution.[11][12][13][14] It is built on top of theLinux kernel and other open source technologies (Chromium,GNOME,GRUB,GTK,PulseAudio,systemd,X.Org, and many more). Unlike most Linux distributions, it uses a read-only root filesystem managed byOSTree andFlatpak for application delivery and update.[15] The user interface is based on a highly modifiedGNOME desktop environment. Endless Computers publish theirFOSS components and forks onGitHub.[16] They submit many of their patchesupstream.[17]
The first public release was Endless OS 2.1.0 in July 2014.[18] Endless OS 3.3.6 was released in mid-December 2017.[19] Endless OS 4.0.0 is via Direct Download or Torrent.[20][21] Endless OS 5.0.4 Basic, was released on January 27, 2023.[22] In May 2024 version 6.0 was released,[23][24] including Linux kernel 6.5, the GNOME 43.9 desktop environment, and support for dark mode.[25]
PC World said that the Endless computer can be useful for areas with limited Internet access since it comes preinstalled with a lot of useful software and content, but for users who have easy access to the Internet, there are alternatives that are significantly more powerful or significantly cheaper.[27]
