Endless Mobile, Inc. is an American information technology company that develops the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

Endless OS and reference platform hardware for it. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, U.S. with an additional office in

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a ...

, Brazil.

History

Endless was founded in May 2012 in

by Matthew Dalio and Marcelo Sampaio. In the first three years, the company focused on designing through field research in

Rocinha Rocinha (, ''little farm'') is the largest favela in Brazil, located in Rio de Janeiro's South Zone between the districts of São Conrado and Gávea. Rocinha is built on a steep hillside overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and is located about o ...

, the largest

favela Favela () is an umbrella name for several types of working-class neighborhoods in Brazil. The term was first used in the Providência neighborhood in the center of Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century, which was built by soldiers who had ...

in Rio de Janeiro,

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

, and also in Guatemala. In April 2015, the company was launched for the general public through a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. It raised $176,538 with 1,041 backers in less than 30 days. In November 2015, Endless started to sell computers at Claro 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 a grapefruit, costing $79 and $99. On April 1, 2020, Endless became a nonprofit organization, Endless OS Foundation.

Product

Hardware

According to the specifications found in their store there will be several models based either on an

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Celeron Celeron is Intel's brand name for low-end IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessor models targeted at low-cost personal computers. Celeron processors are compatible with IA-32 software. They typically offer less performance per clock speed com ...

N2807 processors (''Mission'' and ''Endless'') or on a quad-CPU AMLogic S805 Cortex A5

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

processor (''Mission Mini'' and ''Endless Mini'').

Software

Endless OS is a Debian derivative distribution. It is built on top of the Linux kernel and other open source technologies ( Chromium, GNOME,

GRUB Grub can refer to Grub (larva), of the beetle superfamily Scarabaeoidea, or as a slang term for food. It can also refer to: Places * Grub, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland * Grub, St. Gallen, Switzerland * Grub (Amerang), a hamlet in Bavar ...

, GTK+,

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operat ...

, systemd, X.Org, and many more). Unlike most Linux distributions, it uses a read-only root filesystem managed by

OSTree libostree (previously OSTree) is a system for versioning updates of Linux-based operating systems. It can be considered as "Git for operating system binaries". It operates in userspace, and will work on top of any Linux file system. At its core ...

and

Flatpak Flatpak, formerly known as xdg-app, is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. ...

for application delivery and update. The user interface is based on a highly modified

GNOME desktop A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its charact ...

environment. Endless Computers publish their

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies * Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company *Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway * Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...

components and forks on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

. They submit many of their patches upstream. The first public release was Endless OS 2.1.0 in July 2014. Endless OS 3.3.6 was released in mid-December 2017. The latest version of Endless OS is 4.0.3, which was released on 4 February 2022.

Reception

Endless Mini was awarded CES Editors' Choice at

CES 2016 CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to Reviewed.com. Endless Mini was selected by TechSpot as one of the best devices showcased at the 2016 Mobile World Congress.

Reviews

''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.

References

External links

* PC World: * PC World: * TechCrunch: * The Washington Post: * CBS: * Wired: * CNN: * CNN International: * CNN Expansion: * BBC: * HuffPost: * OpenSourceFeed: {{cite web , url = https://www.opensourcefeed.org/1-endless-os-3.6-screenshots/ , title = Endless OS 3.6 - Exploring the rock solid system , date = 2019-06-15 , website = OpenSourceFeed , access-date = 2019-06-19 Free software companies GNOME companies Linux companies