pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree

Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen

The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop.

Pear Linux was a French distro by David Tavares, based on Ubuntu and GNOME but heavily themed with custom fonts, icons, menu layouts, and more, all intended to make it visually resemble Apple's Mac OS X as closely as possible. As DistroWatch records, it went through some seven releases between 2011 and 2013, before Tavares announced that an unnamed company had bought it, and the distro vanished. Some contemporary reviews of PearOS 3.0 (2012), PearOS 7.0, and PearOS 8.0 (both 2013) – especially their screenshots – will give you an idea of how well it accomplished that. The idea has enduring appeal. After it disappeared, there were attempts to revive it, including Pearl Linux and Clementine OS, both in 2014, but neither got far.

Over a decade later, a young Romanian developer called Alexandru Balan has released a new pearOS distro, rebuilt on a new basis of Arch Linux and the latest KDE Plasma 6.5.4. The release announcement calls this basis NiceC0re, and as the screenshots there show, this pearOS is styled to look like this year's macOS 26 "Tahoe."

This is more than just a custom theme slapped onto a default KDE Plasma setup. There's a working global menu bar, with a pear menu in place of an apple menu at top left. This contains a single-column Settings app, which resembles the iOS style Settings app of macOS 13 Ventura and above. Within is an optimistic array of macOS-like features, many of which, such as Focus Mode, don't open and instead display:

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There's a Pear Piri option (in place of Siri) with a Pear Intelligence feature, the desktop is called "Pinder," there's a pCloud section, and "Wallet and Pear Pay," and so on. We certainly can't fault the ambition here. Since quite a bit of its functionality is yet to be implemented, it's a good thing that this is in addition to KDE's standard System Settings app.

Rather than KDE's Dolphin file manager, it uses the GNOME Files app, but most of the accessories are KDE ones: the Kate text editor, Discover app store, and so on. It ships with Flatpak installed, but no Flatpak apps. The default browser is the latest Firefox, and there's no office suite, just KWrite.

It's not a lightweight distro. It takes about 12 GB of disk and 1.2 GB of RAM at idle. The installation medium's boot menu offers a choice of using the latest Nvidia drivers, or FOSS drivers. With the latter, it was able to bring up the second screen on our testbed ThinkPad W520, although it's attached to a long-unsupported GPU. We weren't able to install it on that machine, though.

The installer is custom and one of the more unfinished areas of the distro. It comes up with a choice of just three languages: Romanian, Czech, or English. However, selecting them won't help you, as there is no Next or Continue button. It took us considerable experimentation to determine that the only way to get the button to display was to press the Tab key to move the selection, and then a big right-facing arrow became visible. This quickly revealed a very significant limitation. Much like that other FOSS macOS-like, the Hello System, the installer will only let you select a whole drive. There's no way to dual-boot with another OS unless you have two separate physical drives – and we could tell that this was unexpected, because when we tried again on another machine with two SSDs, the icon for the second appeared completely off the bottom of the installer window and floating over the desktop. It doesn't show its best under VMs either.

With that hiccup overcome, it installed fine and ran well. It uses X11 rather than Wayland and adding a user account is postponed until post-installation like in Fedora.

From the project's GitHub page, it looks to have been under construction for several years, and we found traces on the Internet Archive of several earlier versions of this restarted project. Even so, there are a number of sections in the Settings app that clearly aim to resemble Apple features that Linux doesn't really do just yet.

Compatibility-wise, it's Arch with the latest KDE. Pretty much everything you could want is here or in the AUR repository. Functionally, it's KDE, but it's a lovely and very functional take on KDE. Appearances are of course subjective, but The Reg FOSS desk isn't fond of any of the modern themes or looks included with KDE, and it lacks anything as simple as Xfce's Panel Profiles to load different desktop layouts with a single click. It's a bit of fun in the bleak midwinter (for those of us in the northern hemisphere). We rather like it. ®