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After a year of development, Endless OS 5 is available now as a free upgrade to Endless OS 4 and as a free download for new installations. Visit the release notes to learn all about what's new and improved in this release.
Once you've upgraded to or installed Endless OS 5… what's next? Here are the top five things we recommend you explore first.
Note: If you're on the "basic" version of Endless OS downloaded from our website, it does not come with much of the below-mentioned content out of the box for download size reasons—you can open the included Kolibri app and add your own channels from the online Kolibri Studio, plus install any of the mentioned apps from the included App Center.
5. Learn with content in Kolibri and the default apps
If you've already been using Endless OS, you're probably familiar with the default learning apps and Kolibri, the education platform that comes with the OS. But if not, now's a great time to take a look!
Search from the desktop or tap the ❖ Super key (the ⊞ Windows, ⌘ Command, or logo key on your keyboard) to open the Activities overview, then just start typing to find what you want to learn about. For example, you can type "math" to discover math lessons, or the name of an animal to look it up in the included encyclopedia.
4. Learn by playing included games
Learning doesn't have to look like poring over written materials, either; on Endless OS, you have access to a wide range of educational games designed to help with digital literacy, math skills, and even coding.
Included games like Frog Squash, Tank Warriors, Fablemaker, Midnightmare Teddy, The Passage, Dragon's Apprentice, and more are fun in their own right, but also let you hack them in various ways to learn basic logic and coding.
Or, play the ever-popular Tux Paint, Tux Typing, and Tux of Math Command to learn various skills with the adorable Linux mascot.
3. Explore App Center to find new apps
Endless OS comes with a ton of apps, games, and learning content out of the box, but of course you might want to find a new app to solve a particular problem. Search from the desktop or Activities view to look for a specific app, or open the App Center itself to explore the thousands of apps available to install.
There are tons of apps built specifically for Linux—what Endless OS is built on—plus popular apps you might know from other OSes, like Spotify, Discord, Zoom, Steam, Minecraft, Slack, Telegram, and many more.
2. Supplement your experience with web apps
Sometimes a service you want to use doesn't have an app available for Endless OS, but they have a web version—with built-in web app support, Endless OS 5 makes it easy. Just open the default Chromium or Google Chrome web browser, navigate to the site, and hit the Install button when shown on the toolbar. If the site doesn't automatically support being installed, you can still install a shortcut to the site from the Chromium/Chrome menu → More tools → Create shortcut….
Either way you do it, this lets you install popular services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, and many more right on your desktop. This works particularly great with video streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Twitch, and Disney+ to make it easy to jump into your favorite movies, shows, and videos right on Endless OS.
1. Multitask more efficiently with workspaces and gestures
Finally, you can put the refined desktop experience to work on Endless OS 5 with the new workspaces and gestures; tap the ❖ Super key or swipe up from anywhere with three fingers on a trackpad to open the Activities overview where you can see all your open apps. Separate your work out across workspaces to stay organized, and swipe between from anywhere them with three fingers on a trackpad.
It might sound overwhelming at first, but just try it out—you may find you love how quickly you can switch tasks and organize everything you do on Endless OS.
Get Endless OS 5 Now
Try these tips out yourself by downloading Endless OS 5 for free, or upgrading from Endless OS 4 in App Center!
Cassidy is passionate about helping design and build useful, usable, and delightful products using open technologies. In the past he co-founded elementary OS and served as the chief experience architect, and he's worked as a UX architect, web developer, and writer—and worn many, many other hats. He contributes to GNOME and Flatpak.
Outside of work and open source he enjoys mobile photography, playing video games, watching and reading almost everything Star Wars, collecting way too much media on his Plex server, and being a dad.