Archcraft | A Beautiful And Minimal Arch Distro

okay welcome to another video today we're going to check out an archbase distribution which i've never actually used before despite hearing a little bit about it and that is arch craft linux which i do believe has just been added to the distro watches waiting list making it the perfect time for us to check it out so it does have a little bit of information on the main page of the website here so what exactly is this another linux distribution made on top of arch linux with pre-configured settings and lightweight applications it's minimal only taking up 200 mb of memory which we'll check out once we are fully installed it's got a nice user interface that is super clean minimal and beautiful and gives you multiple styles to use arch craft is built on top of arch linux and it's pure arch linux and no custom kernel or anything else it includes the yay aui helper installed out of the box and it only uses window managers and i think the main one it uses is open box but we'll see that once we're in the live environment and if we scroll just down they've got a new iso out which is 1.5 gb in size with that being said let's jump into the live environment and get this installed okay so here we are in the live environment now we're going to skip the getting started page for now and we'll check that out once we are actually installed and running off disk so first things first we need to go ahead and launch the installer now left super appears to be bound to the application launcher and now we have install arch graph let's press enter it's going to ask you for the sudo password which for the live user is live user okay here we go so that's a little bit small so i'm just going to zoom everything in so we can all see what's going on okay so i think that should be big enough so first things first we need to select our language which for me is of course english okay so here we are at the main menu each step must be followed in order once complete select done to properly finalize the installation and this is going to guide you through all of the steps required to get a nice arch based distribution installed on your machine so first up we need to go into it and prepare the installation right so first things we need to do is set the virtual console which for me is going to be uk so we're going to press eu and then we're going to keep hitting down until we hit uk which is right about there and enter next up is the desktop keyboard layout now for me this is going to be gb so i'm going to press g and that takes us straight to gb perfect right list devices so this is going to basically do with lsblk so you can see the output of all the drives are currently inside your computer and you decide which one you're going to be partitioning on the next steps just press ok right so we've got a few clear disks here and we're going to be using sda which is the drevo x1 ssd so we know it's dev sda and now we can move on to partition the disk right so we know that this is the one we want right here which is dev sda so we've got a few different options there so an automatic partitioning option is available for beginners otherwise cf disk is recommended for bios parted for uefi so i'm going to go ahead and do the automatic partitioning and let's create the default partition layout for us okay so it's going to create a 512 mb boot partition followed by a second partition for our root partition if intending to use swap select the swap file option when mounting right will cross that bridge when we come to it and here we go so this is your disk layout so very simple two partitions there one for your efi and then the rest all assigned to your root partition okay so i'm going to skip encryption and i'm also going to skip volume management and now we're going to mount those partitions that we just created okay so ensure the correct choices for mounting and formatting are made as no warnings will be provided with the exception of the uefi boot partition okay so we now need to choose our root partition which will be a dev sda2 as dev sda1 is going to be our boot partition okay so ext4 is recommended not all file systems are viable for root or boot partitions all have different features and limitations so we're going to keep it super simple and stick with the recommended ext4 so that's going to run make fs or ext4 to create that file system for us okay and yes so that's now made the file systems next up we need to use space to select or deselect the desired mount options and review carefully please do not select multiple versions of the same option so i'm just going to stick the data journal it's pretty safe so let's go ahead and do that and press ok so confirm the following amount options yes so we've successfully mounted that and now we can choose how we're going to do our swap partition and i'm going to use the swap file so it will be initially set as the same size as your ram which for me is going to be quite large so we're probably going to bring that down to 4gb so okay as you can see there it set it to 32 gig of ram swap which we don't really need on this machine so we're going to bring it down and go 4096 which will be 4 gig and we'll press ok next up we need to select the uefi partition which is going to be dev sda1 so here's already been formatted reformat doing so will also erase all data already on that partition yeah why not okay so select the uefi mount point now i'm going to use boot efi and that's now been successfully mounted select additional partitions in any order or done to finish so we are done and we can go back to the main menu and go to the next step so next up we're going to be installing the base so packages to be installed must be downloaded from mirror servers the packstrap script installs the base system to build packages from the aur or with abs the base devil group is also required so the first step is to install the base packages so this is going to take a little bit of time so i'll pause the video here and come back once it's finished okay so the base has now been installed and next up we're going to run making it cpio so let's go ahead and do that now and now that leaves us the last part of this step which is to install the bootloader so let's press ok so it gives us a couple of options so we've got grub or system debut i'm going to go ahead with grub so we're going to press ok that's going to go ahead and run grub install right so some uefi firmware may not detect the bootloader unless it is set by default by copying its efi stub to boot efi efi boot and renaming it boot x64.efi it's recommended to do so unless already using a default bootloader or we're intending to use multiple bootloaders set bootloader as default yes so that's everything in the install base section so now we can go back to the main menu and see what's left for us to do and now we can configure the base okay so we've got a few more steps here before we are fully installed so first start we need to generate our fs tab file so let's go into it okay so the fs tab file sets what storage devices and partitions are to be mounted and how they are to be used universal unique identifier is recommended so let's go ahead and do that one next up we need to set our host name and i'm just going to leave it on the default which is arch graft and then we can set our system locale so i want en gb so we're going to press e and then scroll down to engb utf-8 and we're now going to set our time zone and clock which for me is going to be europe so we're going to press e and then we're going to press l and then keep going down until we hit london and move on to the next step after setting our time zone as europe london yes and we're also going to leave it on utc now we're going to set our root user password so we're just going to type that in we should probably have to confirm it and then the next step is to add our user so mine's just of course going to be tyler and then we're going to do our password and again we'll have to confirm that and then we are done with our user accounts and now we're on to the last step which is security and system d tweaks so a few useful and beginner friendly tweaks are available to improve system security and performance and here we can do things like amend journal debugging disable call dump login and restrict access to kernel log so i'm not too worried about that so we're gonna go back and i think that's everything so we can press done and then we can reboot and check out our freshly installed arch craft system okay so booting off disk for the first time and here we are at the grub screen so let's jump straight into it with arch craft linux okay so here we are our arch craft login screen which has actually been quite nicely themed now if we look down at the bottom left here we can see the words default and then pressing the downward arrow we'll see a few more options so as well as having open box pre-installed and pre-configured we also have bspwm which we'll also check out very briefly towards the end of the video we're going to leave it on default which i'm going to imagine is the open box install okay so here we are now before we go through the getting started screen we're going to jump into a clear workspace and just quickly run neofetch and have a look at everything that we've currently got running so as you can see there the os is indeed arch craft kernel version is 5.11.12. we have 790 pac-man packages pre-installed and the shell we are using is zsh and a desktop environment or window manager that we are currently using is open box and it's all theme with arc dark and arc for the icons which is a personal favorite of mine right let's quickly have a little run through the getting started screen so we get a bit of an idea for how everything's working on arch craft so the default desktop of arch craft is open box window manager pressing super and space or right clicking on the desktop will open the menu so this is a right click and let's try it with the super and space and there we go we'll go through this menu in just a moment or we can press the super key to run the app launcher and of course we can type in any application here hit enter to launch the application next up we have one more for the desktop which is ctrl o and space and this time it's going to open up a menu showing you application categories and then you can go into them and then choose the application inside of those categories it's all a bit small but we'll get into that in just a moment as well next up we have menu and output so rophi is used here for these menus annapolis just press super and n to open up the network menu there we go and then press super on m to open up the music menu okay cool so it says the title of the music there as well as some options to play and pause as well as repeat and shuffle and we also have a nice little widget in the center of our panel as well where we can play and skip as well so very cool next up we can press super and x to open up the power menu let's give that one again okay cool so not only does it show you your sort of options for locking logging out and all of that good stuff but it also shows you your uptime at the very top of the list which is very handy and while we're in here let's quickly check out our lock screen okay i'm very familiar with this wallpaper and then we have a very simple little clock at the bottom left so we can type in our password and then get back into our system very nice next up we have super and i to open up the internet menu let's give that a go interestingly it shows you your public ip there that i could probably do without so i'll have to blur that when i come to edit this video and then we can see we're connected to internet open bandwidth monitor open network manager or open the connection editor so while we're here let's have a look at the bandwidth monitor so this is beam on there and it's going to show you any traffic on your sort of network devices very cool and then next up we have super s to open screenshot menu let's give that one a go i like the way it's all opening up in the top right of the screen as well so to take a shot with the whole desktop or selected area or a focus window let's give it a go with the selected area so we're going to drag this box all the way around our getting started screen and that's going to open up in an application i think that might be view noir and here we can do things like crop resizing all of that good stuff okay let's close that off and keep moving and then we also have some nice keyboard shortcuts to launch applications suppressing super and return or super and t will launch a terminal and it also does work with control alt t as well we can then press super and f to open the file manager which i think is pc man fm it is indeed and we've got some quite nice icons there for our folders very nice super and e to launch the text editor now i did see genie so i think that's what it's going to open and there we go and we do have vim installed out of the box as well so super w will launch the web let's give that a go okay that doesn't appear to be doing anything i do believe we've got midori installed out of the box though so i'm not sure why that's not working but i think what i'll do is i'll install firefox and set that as the default and then we can see if we can get that shortcut working to launch the web browser we didn't have control and then vr h to launch a vm ranger or h top so while we're here let's give it a go with h stop so that's going to be a control o and h and then that's going to open up a window with h stop running very nice and then we also have control alt and l to get into our log lock screen which we've already seen before moving on to control system the um function keys for laptops are all fully configured so it should be things for brightness and audio and while we're here let's test out the audio there we go a nice clean little drop down sort of widget there on the top right as well and then pressing the print key will also take a screenshot and then we have manage windows so pressing super alt and tab or super slash alt and tab to switch between windows let's open up our file manager which was super and f i do believe and now we're going to use alt and tab to check out the switcher it's a very simple little list there but should be pretty much all you need to switch to different applications let's close that for now and then we also have old m and r to toggle move and resize respectively and then we have super h j k and l to place windows at corners okay like be pretty handy so h j k l okay that's very cool as well so what else have we got for managing windows so super and s to kill a window and super indeed to toggle the desktop using alt f5 and f6 to minimize and maximize windows and there's more in ob menu which now brings us to the workspaces and tiling so these are our workspaces at the top and we have five by default using the super key and then the numbers one to five you can switch to them and then we also have some shortcut keys to move them to the next workspace so using super and shift and left and right we'll then move them along one workspace at a time or of course you can just grab the window and then drag it to the side of the screen and as you can see in the top left it is moving and it's on a cycle so once you get to the last one it will then bring you back to your first workspace we again can press alt z x or c and super and keypad to tile the windows let's open up a file manager once more so with super and f we're going to open up our file manager now alt and z so let's give that one a go so we're going to press alt z and now we're going to press alt x on the games actually won't do it getting started let's open up let's go into applications launcher and open up let's say genie now in genie we're going to use alt and x let's give that one again okay so that's going to centralize it very cool and then i guess c is going to do the same thing on the last bit of screen real estate we have there so that's using o and c so let's give that a go nice i like that it's very nicely sort of tidying it with gaps around it a very cool little sort of configuration there for open box and brilliant let's close all these off and then what else have we got so i think that's everything there and then we can change styles interesting so there are many styles available in arch craft to change the style run open box menu go to preferences change style and click on the style you want to use very cool let's have a look at how this all works so we're going to right click and go straight into preferences and then we're going to go to change style okay so we've got quite a lot here so let's start with beach interesting so that's changed quite a lot there it's changed our whole sort of bar there not only this position but the way it's all been set up but the icons are a little bit different as well as the placement and it's also changed our wallpaper let's see if an application looks any different while we're here as well so even the applications launch has been themed differently i really like this let's try pc man fm okay and that's more in a sort of a lighter kind of theme this is very cool so can we close out is that just to maximize we can close this at the left side okay let's try a different one then so that was i can't remember what i want that was beach i do believe let's go back into preferences change style so that was beach let's check out forest okay so our bar's now back at the top and again it's got some different kind of fonting there as well as the way it's looking and let's again open up our file manager and we are back to the dark theme i like it the fonts also change very cool let's go back into the preferences and check out a couple more so we have grid let's check out grid okay i'm not a huge fan of grid it looks a bit too sort of messy for me so let's go back into a different one now so we're going to go to change style once more we've got manhattan oh manhattan's very nice i like the color scheming there the wallpaper is nice and now our workspace switching is in the center part of the panel very cool i like the way it's got this all set up and pretty configured out of the box if you want a quick change of how things are looking and feeling you can just do a couple of clicks in your menu and you've got a whole new set up let's check out slime okay so again we've got another light theme kind of one there with the panel at the top and now let's check out the last couple of ones and then we'll keep going so again we're going to go into change style and let's check out spark well that's the biggest change so far so let's change the sort of no longer does the panel go edge to edge and it's now sort of slightly off of the screen edge and we've got a nice wallpaper of some different colors there and let's quickly open up our file manager one more time and there we go and it's also changed to sort of action button so we've got minimized clothes and stuff in a kind of macosy kind of theme there i really like this and now i think we've got one more and then we'll go back onto the defaults let's go back to change style and then we have wave oh that's really nice as well i like these wallpapers so this is wave we've now got hearts for our workspaces okay very cool let's go back onto the default and then we'll finish up with the welcome screen so last up we've got a very quick and easy way to change the font size so it is quite small i did notice that things were looking very small so to quickly adjust that we can open our menu go to preferences change font and globally so let's give that a go let's go to preferences change font globally okay that's opened up a new little window here so we can also change the font type i'm not going to change the font i'm just going to change the size so i'm going to put it on 12 and that should be big enough for us all to see what's going on so at the moment that's the size of our sort of fonting theming and let's go to select to apply that and as you can see things should be a little bit easier for us to see so i think what i'm going to do now is reboot and then we can check how much round we're using on a fresh boot and then we'll start playing around with things but so far i'm really enjoying it okay so we've just booted back up and ram usage isn't looking too bad actually so we're using under 500 mb at 406 and there is the sort file that we created in the installation of 4gb in size so if we go into our application launcher we can see some of our pre-installed applications so we have genie we have termite for our terminal we've got funeral file manager there as well as pc mana fm which is set to the default file manager we have vim we have ranger the terminal base file manager leafpad vue noir settings manager which i think is going to be kind of like the xfc settings manager it does appear to be let's go back into the applications and then we have settings editor power manager keyboard mouse and touchpad we have the appearance i'm going to imagine this lx appearance or it could also be the xfce4 appearance so in style the theming set in here is adapter nocto and the icons are hybrid a mixture of breeze and love and that's where the folder icons are coming from we're gonna have nitrogen which is what it's going to be using to set the wallpapers customized look and feel open box configuration manager a chill document viewer x archiver display file manager we've got midori there i don't know if that was opening and there we go so adobe is now opening as well so that should now work with the keyboard shortcut of super w doesn't appear to be working with that just yet so perhaps that isn't actually set as the default let's keep going so that was midori what else have we got we have time shift installed out of the box and that's pretty much it so i think what i'm gonna go ahead and do myself is install a few applications and see how it's all working on arch craft okay so we're gonna go ahead and install firefox and vlc that should be pretty much all i need for the rest of this video i did notice when i was looking at the applications there wasn't really any media applications installed out of the box however if we do a right click and go on to our main menu here we have the shortcuts and in here we do have things like a little music player which is a cool little terminal based music player that you can play music from there so that being said i'm going to go ahead and install these packages and i'll come back once they're finished okay so our applications have been installed and the shortcut super w from the door is actually working now i'm not too sure what the issue was beforehand but there we go however i've gone into the rc.xml file for openbox because i'm going to change the command from the dory over to firefox and in that way every time we do that keyboard shortcut of super w it's going to go ahead and open up firefox instead so we're just going to get rid of that type in firefox and then save that file and now with the super w as you can see it's going to go ahead and open up firefox now as opposed to midori what i want to do now is do a little screen tearing test because i have noticed a bit of tearing here and there so i want to see if there is any tearing and whether we need to fix it or not okay so i've run a quick little simple screen tearing test and as you can see already we've got some quite gnarly breaks in these lines which means we're going to have to go into it and fix something in our exhaust file and add the tear free option to get rid of those breaks but as we can see here in the install packages we do have the exhaust server along with all of the drivers for amd intel etc i'm on amd so i'm going to go ahead and create my exhaust file now with the tear free option and hopefully we should be back with a tear free system okay so we've done all that we needed to do with our exhaust file and as you can see there we no longer have any breaks in those lines which means screen tearing is no longer an issue for those of you who aren't quite sure how to do that with your exhaust file they do have quite clear simple instructions on the archwiki and of course it will depend on your graphics hardware okay so now that we've got our screen tearing all fixed i think we're going to do is spend a very little bit of time going over the menu and then we'll log out and jump into the bspwm and see how that's all set up out of the box on arch craft so first up we have some quick links for our terminal emulator web browser file manager and text editor we then have our applications and of course it will open up the categories which is going to be the same as if you used to press ctrl alt and space and that will just open straight up to your applications categories now going back into the menu we have this here which is apps as root which is pretty cool so anything inside of this will be opening up as a root user so we have our terminal which is termite we have a file manager of funera we have a text editor of genie and then we have an alt for leave pad and then we have cli for both file manager and text editor using ranger or vim we're going to have our shortcuts for color chooser sticky notes comfy terminal music player which we've already seen and visualizer and then we have some quick links to popular websites such as go google facebook twitter github reddit gmail and youtube and then private right at the bottom and then the screenshots this is pretty cool not only can we instantly take a screenshot but it's also got quick little options there for five or ten seconds and then we can also choose to take a screenshot of an area or a window places please pretty self-explanatory click in any of these places here will open up your file manager to that place and then any of your recent files that you've opened will also appear here in your recent files now in preferences this is where you're going to get to all of the settings for kind of your windows manager and all of that good stuff so on open box we can go straight into the settings or edit the menu or rc.xmls edit the autostart or then we can also reconfigure and restart open box and now in our compositor we can choose to enable the blur effect we can restart the compositor disable it entirely or go and edit the config for compton now change styles it's got all of those course pre-configured styles that we saw at the beginning of the welcome screen and now in font we can change status bar launchers terminal desktop notifications applications or like we did at the beginning we can do it all globally we can then also change the launcher change the power menu generate wallpaper change the wallpaper jump to the appearance settings and then we have our power settings our audio settings our settings manager about developer and then we have our system status and as you can see we are all good so i think what we'll do then is log out and check out bspwm okay and here we are in their bspwm session and much like their open box it's very nice clean and minimalist out of the box so we've got the same kind of bar at the top but there will be a few differences so we've still got the clock here and then clicking that will give you a bit more information about the date and time we don't have our volume icon and clicking that is going to mute all your audio entirely and then we have the same little music widget in the middle of the screen there and then we have the workspace switching but it appears we've got a few more present here then on the open box which had five and on here it looks like we've got eight and then just to the left here it says tiled so of course all of your windows by default are gonna tile but you can go into sort of a floating mode as well now a lot of the screenshots are the same but a lot of them are also different so i do know that left super is still going to open up the application launcher and now we're going to jump onto their website and see some of the default shortcuts and have a little play around with things right so we're on the arch craft website where they list all of the commonly used key bindings which makes life a whole lot easier now anytime we see the w on the left that's going to be referring to your left super key or your windows key on most keyboards so first up we're going to check out the terminal in the tile mode which is going to be using left super and returns let's give that a go and as we're in timing mode let's open a few more and see how nicely it tiles things there we go and we have the nice gaps in between so let's close that off now and i do believe to do that we're going to use left super and c and then we can close all of those windows and then using left super room 2 we can go back to the workspace which has got our web browser on it now as well as opening up a terminal entitled we can also launch in floating mode using the same shortcuts but this time throwing a shift in so it's going to be left super shift and enter and of course we can open up another one then it's going to open up directly on top of that now again left super and c we can close them and then go through some of the others we then have shortcuts for applications such as our file manager web browser etc so using left super shift and then f we can go ahead and open up our file manager of pc man fm and there is where we're getting the arc icons from and the open box version we was using the mixture of love and the other themes let's now go back into our second workspace and see what else we've got so for the things our roofing network and stuff i don't think it's going to open it up in this part of the screen so let's have a look at what it does so to open up the network we're going to do left super and n and there we go so it's the same little sort of roofy kind of widget there but this time it's going to be opening up in the central part of our screen and then just beneath that we have a rophi screenshot internet or theme menu so i think we're going to look at theme menus and see what other themes we have so using control alt and t we're going to open up the theme menus but we're going to do that enough clear workspace let's go to our fourth workspace and now we're going to do ctrl o and t cool that's going to open up a few themes in the middle of our screen so we've got nord grove box dark cyberpunk groot and rick so let's have a look at a couple of these so i think nord is the one that we are currently on so let's go back and check out grav box there we go that's the grav box one and let's open up our file manager and see if that looks any different there we go so it's the same kind of theme in there for our file manager so let's close that off and then let's go back into control alt t and then have a look at some of the other themes we then have dark there we go so that's changed the wallpaper as well as the way the panel is looking at the top there of the colors for the workspaces are very nice let's go back into ctrl alt and now let's check out cyberpunk okay i'm not too sure i like the bright colors of cyberpunk but i'm sure a lot of you do so let's go back into control alt t in fact first let's open up file manager so it appears that that theme is always going to kind of stay the same but as you can see the border around the focus window is that reddish pink kind of color so let's close that one off and now we're going to go back into control alt t and have a look at groot which i've got to imagine some greeny brownie kind of colors there we go and of course i am root i like that wallpaper i might have to steal it now let's go back into control.lt and check out the last one which is rick so rick and morty or something there we go quite like that as well so peace among worlds let's go back to the default and have a look at some of these other shortcuts and then we'll reboot check out the ram and start to wrap things up and then we have shortcuts for things like media control screenshots and all of that good stuff and the last thing i really want to check out is the toggle between floating and tiled mode and then we'll check how much round we are using so we're currently in title mode so to toggle to floating mode we're going to press left super and space like so and then to go back to it i guess we do the same thing and now we are back in straight tiled mode now let's reboot and check how much round this is using compared to the open box version and start to wrap things up okay so we've just booted up and as we can see there ram usage is looking even better than it did on the open box version by about 50 or so mb clocking in at around about 347 mb which really is quite impressive and that is where i'm going to wrap up with my first look of arch craft all in all i've really quite enjoyed it and i didn't expect to like it quite as much as i do i like the fact that it comes pre-configured with two window managers and they're both set up very nicely out of the box and the fact that you can adapt them further still with the different themes included i think is very cool it's definitely one to try out if you're one of those arch users that likes a nice minimal setup but don't like quite going for the whole rigmarole yourself the only thing i wasn't super keen on was the actual arch installation method felt a little bit long-winded but other than that definitely one to recommend thank you for watching if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe and if you really enjoyed it you can support me on patreon join the discord there's a link in the description i'll see you on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Tyler's Tech

Views: 35,387

Rating: 4.9621992 out of 5

Keywords: Archcraft, archcraft, Archcraft Linux, Archcraft review, arch craft, archcraft review, beautiful linux distro, best looking linux distro, beautiful openbox, beautiful bspwm, best looking arch based distro, Archcraft Linux review openbox, stunning linux distro, minimal linux distro, arch linux openbox, Archcraft os, archcraft os review, Archcraft os review, beautiful arch distro, archcraft linux os, archcraft linux review, archcraft bspwm, best arch distro, bspwm arch

Id: p0AXeaaRFBY

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021