gOS is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution and a GUI largely imitative of Mac OS X Leopard. The earlier versions (1 and 2-beta) used the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, to create a desktop that had similar usability to Mac OS X. This was possible because of the flexibility of Enlightenment. Enlightenment acts both as an X window manager, and as a desktop environment. Therefore early versions gOS worked on systems as low end as a 350 MHz Pentium II with 196 MB of RAM.[8] But a typical gOS system would have used as a minimum a 1 GHz Pentium III with 256 MB RAM. After gOS2-beta the later versions of gOS abandoned the use as Enlightenment as desktop manager (although some E17 code still seems to be used), in favour of using GNOME, with Compiz Fusion and the Avant Window Navigator. This increased the need for memory to values similar to normal Ubuntu.