I found Q4OS while trying to help my neighbor get off their Windows XP machine. But why Q4OS? Because it offered a similar interface (with the Q4XP theme pack), ran incredibly well on their old Pentium-era hardware, and was safe to run.
I had recently revived my decade-old Dell laptop with Damn Small Linux. While it worked, it wasn’t as efficient as I had hoped it would be. Since I had already seen Q4OS in action recently, I decided to give my own laptop the same Windows-like makeover. And the results were even better than I expected.
Why Q4OS?
A Windows look-alike that makes sense
I wasn’t sure about another Linux distro pretending to be Windows. If all I wanted were a Windows-like experience for modern desktops, Zorin OS, with its polished Windows-like interface, would be my first choice. Q4OS, on the other hand, caters to anyone transitioning from their old XP-era PC.
Q4OS can run on systems with just 256MB RAM and a 350MHz CPU, so it should cover even PCs from the early 2000s. It still offers 32-bit support, which most distributions dropped years ago. My neighbor’s Pentium machine from 2005 handled it without much of a hassle, so that was assuring.
Another solid reason to go with Q4OS is that it’s more than a hobby project. Q4OS has a decent-sized user base and active development. The Trinity Desktop Environment may be considered outdated technology, but it remains stable and predictable. Once installed, even an average user can tell where everything is.
If you are coming from Windows, most of the things feel oddly familiar. The file manager and control panel look more or less the same, and system settings use Windows terminology. For someone who’s used Windows for decades, this familiarity matters more than having the latest desktop effects.
Installing and setting up Q4OS
Trinity wins for old hardware
Q4OS offers multiple desktop environments—KDE Plasma for modern machines, LXQt for a bit of everything, and Trinity for the lightest footprint. For my decade-old Dell, Trinity was the obvious choice. It’s based on KDE3, which stopped development in 2008, but that’s precisely why it runs so well on old hardware.
You can download the Trinity ISO from the Q4OS website. Then use Ventoy to create a bootable USB. Once done, drop the Q4OS ISO into the USB drive. You can also use Refus or balenaEtcher to create a bootable media, but I prefer Ventoy. It has become my go-to for testing different operating systems due to its multi-boot support.
Next, connect the bootable media to your PC, press the Power button, and start pressing the Esc key to view the Startup menu. Then go to the Boot Menu, and choose Ventoy drive as the boot drive.
In the Ventoy boot menu, select the Q4OS ISO to boot into the installer. Next, double-click Install Q4OS to launch the installer, pick your language, partition your drive, and create a user account. The whole process took about 10 minutes on my PC.
After rebooting, Q4OS shows a welcome screen with a desktop profiler. You can choose between a fully-featured desktop with browsers and office apps, a basic desktop, or a minimal installation. I opted for the full version to set everything up at once.
You can also download it as an installer and run from within Windows, installing Q4OS like a regular application. However, the complications with dual-boot setups aren’t worth the supposed convenience.
Performance
Not blazing fast, but stable
Q4OS boots reasonably quickly at 20 seconds. Not lightning quick, but not a dealbreaker either. Applications launch without the agonizing delays I’d grown used to with Windows 10 on this hardware.
The Trinity desktop idles at 400-450MB of RAM usage. Windows 10 on the same machine would gobble up 2GB just sitting there. Q4OS can handle multiple browser tabs, LibreOffice documents, and music playing simultaneously.
For web browsing, I went with the Chromium browser, the lightest browser we have tested. The lightweight Konqueror browser that came pre-installed, though snappier for basic browsing, struggled with JavaScript-heavy sites. The included Chromium browser managed most modern sites, including YouTube, at a respectable 720P resolution.
Hardware support mostly worked: Wi-Fi, sound, and USB devices were all detected immediately. My old HP printer also worked without hunting for drivers. My Bluetooth mouse and headphones connected with some hiccups, but worked fine once connected.
To make the Q4OS look more like Windows XP, you need to pair it with the XPQ4 theme. Once installed, launch the app and choose from the visual TDE themes such as WindowsXP_Classic, Luna, or leave it at the Q4OS_Default theme. Then click Apply Theme and log out. When you log back in, everything from the Start menu to the File Manager and desktop context menu will look and work like classic XP.
What’s not good
The dated bits show their age
Trinity Desktop Environment is old, and it shows. It doesn’t have smooth window animations, no desktop widgets, or advanced window snapping. Some system tray icons look out of place, and pop-up windows occasionally disappear behind other windows.
The heavy Windows mimicry creates its own problems. You get duplicate software everywhere—multiple email clients, multiple browsers, redundant system utilities. The Software Center is simple enough, but if you venture into Synaptic for advanced package management, things get confusing real fast.
Q4OS is a stable and familiar operating system for old hardware
Q4OS delivers a familiar Windows XP experience on outdated hardware. It’s not as barebones as most lightweight Linux distros chasing performance over substance. But it offers a sweet balance between performance and usability.
For anyone with an aging Windows machine thinking of putting it to good use, Q4OS can turn it into a perfectly functional computer for everyday tasks, and that’s brilliant.