EasyOS was born in January 2017, and since then there have been bits and pieces written here and there about how and why it is different from other Linux distributions. This includes some rather technical descriptions. What is needed is a simple plain-English list, so that anyone can get a quick idea of what EasyOS is all about. So, here goes. Do note, though, that Easy is an experimental distribution, and the features may change, and some features are a work-in-progress. These items are not listed in any particular order...
Container-friendly EasyOS is designed from scratch to support containers. Any app can run in a container, in fact an entire desktop can run in a container. Container management is by a simple GUI, no messing around on the commandline. The container mechanism is named Easy Containers, and is designed from scratch (Docker, LXC, etc are not used). Easy Containers are extremely efficient, with almost no overhead -- the base size of each container is only several KB. Totally isolated running in RAM The boot menu has an option "Copy session to RAM & disable drives", which boots to a desktop with power of administrator (root) in all respects except totally isolated from the drives of the PC. This is an alternative to using containers, and is intended to be even more secure than containers. An introduction is here.
Run as root This is controversial, however, it is just a different philosophy. The user runs as administrator (root), apps may optionally run as user 'spot' or in containers as a "crippled root" or user 'zeus'. The practical outcome is that you never have to type "sudo" or "su" to run anything, nor get hung up with file permissions.
No ISO! ISO for optical media is a legacy format. Very few desktop PCs are sold these days, it is mostly laptops, and most of those do not have optical drives. Easy is provided as an image file that can be written to any Flash-stick of 4GB or greater (and will auto-grow to fill the drive). Or, the file can be opened up and directly installed to internal hard drive.
JWM-ROX desktop Everyone knows about Gnome, KDE, Mate, XFCE and LXDE desktops, very few are aware of JWM-ROX. This has been used by Puppy Linux since around 2004, and is an extremely lightweight (fast) yet powerful desktop. JWM is a window manager, and ROX is the ROX-Filer file-manager and desktop handler. They work extremely well together, and are the choice for Easy.
