PrimeOS 0.4.5

John Knight reviews a beautiful and promising desktop Android distro, but before falling in love he finds it clouded by a particularly thorny issue.

- John Knight

IN BRIEF

An Android distribution for x86, provides standard PC controls for Android applications and integrates with Google’s Play store. Comes in three editions, 32-bit, 64-bit, and 64-bit ‘Mainline’ for new PCs; requires 16GB hard disk space and SSE4.2 support for 64-bit editions. Provides compatibility for Arm apps, and a gaming utility for remapping touch controls to a mouse and keyboard.

The desktop Android scene has multiple distros competing for this growing market, but a newer competitor has been slowly gathering momentum in the background – PrimeOS. The homepage claims that PrimeOS “gives a complete desktop experience similar to Windows or MacOS (sic) with access to millions of Android apps. It is designed to bring you the best of both worlds – a complete fusion of Android and PC.”

The website provides an executable installer for Windows users and a regular ISO image for the rest of us. Overall, the installation process was much quicker and less painful than its rivals, with fewer screens overall, and its GRUB2 prompt actually works.

PrimeOS has excellent boot scripting built in, with detection for Windows and most major Linux flavours and derivatives, preserving GRUB entries while adding its own. Without any complicated partitioning, the installation should be done in around a minute.