Arco Linux Xtended Has All The Window Managers

one of the most common questions i get from viewers of the channel is what is my favorite linux distribution i typically answer this in one of two ways i either tell you that i don't have a favorite linux distribution or i tell you my favorite linux distribution is the one i'm currently running well if that's the case here in the last couple of years my favorite linux distribution has been arco linux because that is what's running on my main production machine for about two years now and i love it i recommend it of course to you guys all the time because i just think it's fantastic it has a fantastic installation process it's got a graphical installer that's very easy to use it uses the calamares installer but it's been tweaked in such a way it allows you to pick and choose software during the installation process so you get to pick your desktop environment window managers multiple window managers or you know you get to pick and choose what you want for terminal emulators and file managers you get to pick your office suite if even if you want one and it's really really great i really love the installation process and of course you guys know i'm a big proponent of tiling window managers and a lot of you guys i hear from you hey i want to try out a tiling window manager but it looks hard because especially when you have to configure it from scratch you know you start with a blank canvas it can take you a few days sometimes even a few weeks to really configure a tiling window manager to make it usable you don't have to worry about that though with arco linux argo linux has pretty much every tiling window manager known to man built into it and if you want to use these tiling window managers they come already pre-configured so you already have a panel that's been configured for you and you have all your programs your software with it and you know so you're not starting from a completely blank slate and that's really cool it allows you to use these tiling window managers and you'll start using them a little bit and eventually you'll tweak them to your needs so arco linux has a number of different isos they've got like 18 or 20 different isos different editions of barco linux depending on what desktop environment or window manager you want to install but they have a really special edition called the extended edition the extended edition lets you choose from all of the desktop environments and window manager editions of arco so if you want you know 10 different window managers installed on arco you can choose those 10 window managers in the installation process i've actually never looked at the extended edition of varco so let me go ahead and grab the iso from arco linux.com i'm going to download that and let's go ahead and run through installation so i went ahead and grabbed arco linux b the extended edition and they had a recent release just earlier this month about two weeks ago now when you first boot up arco linux you have the choice of booting using the open source drivers and that's great for those of you that are using intel or amd graphics because those are open source drivers but those of you that are nvidia users you want to choose the uh nvidia option here you also have no mode set as an option and of course you have boot existing os if there was already something installed on the drive but this is a completely empty drive here inside this virtual machine i'm going to go ahead and boot using the open source drivers because i'm in a virtual machine and the drivers for this of course are open sourced all right and it loads us into a live environment it looks like the live environment is using some sort of window manager it might be open box because it is a floating window manager i believe because i can grab and drag the window around a little bit but anyway you get this welcome greeter here when you first boot into arko and what you want to do if you want to actually install arco is you want to run the calamari installer that's the name of the installer i'm going to click run and the installer launches let's see if i can make that full screen yes i can and you can see that the calamares installer in arco linux has a lot more steps to it than the calamari's installer and other linux distributions you have of course the welcome screen here where you choose your your language american english is the default and that's correct for me then we can choose our kernel now when you choose a kernel you have various editions of the kernel the two main types of the kernel are the standard linux kernel and that's the default if you don't choose anything you also have the lts kernel that's typically the one i go with on machines that don't have you know like really really bleeding edge new hardware because the the standard linux kernel is always getting nude hardware support added to it but unless you have like a really bleeding edge like graphics card that just came out yesterday the lts kernel i found is probably the best option you also have the zen kernel and that is like a high performance kernel it's really good for those of you that do gaming i'm just going to go with the lts kernel for purposes of this video then you have your video drivers now the video drivers you want to make sure that you actually install the right driver for your machine obviously if you're an intel user you want the intel driver if you are an amd user you want probably ati or aemd gpu if you want the proprietary amd driver i don't know why you would want a proprietary driver though because the open source drivers for amd cards are just as good if not better you also need the proprietary drivers if you are an nvidia user so if i was a nvidia user and i had the lts kernel installed i would choose nvidia lts that would be the driver i would take on i but for purposes of this virtual machine here i actually don't need any of these video drivers so i'm just going to bypass that for now then our login manager what login manager do you want to use i like light dm and if i do the drop down menu here you can see it's going to also install the light dm gtk reader that's very important and you're also going to get some arco linux wallpapers probably because it's going to use one of those wallpapers as the background for light dm so that's really neat i'm going to click next and then we get to pick and choose our desktop environment slash window managers now i don't want to just install everything but i do want to check out some of them one of my favorites is awesome window manager it's one i recommend to new telling window manager users especially awesome is rather easy to get up and running and uh it's kind of easy to understand it's it's very full featured it comes with a panel it comes with a menu system so it's not as a jarring experience as you know some of the more hardcore tiling window managers like dwm which i might install and uh x monad especially which is probably my favorite but xmo net is definitely not for the faint of heart i wouldn't recommend trying x monet as your very first tiling window manager but in arco linux you can try it out because they're already going to have it configured for you i'm also going to check out q-tile again i love the q-tile window manager it's one of my favorites i'm just going to go with those four for now and then we have some communication software i really don't need any of this in this vm on a real machine i'd probably install you know i have been using mail spring as my email client but i don't need that for this vm i sometimes also use remina that's a remote desktop application but again i won't be using that in this vm some of you guys may need zoom especially now that so many things are done via zoom calls you may want to install that i'm just going to click next and then we have the development category and we have various ides and text editors typically i would install emacs sometimes i like a simpler plain text editor so i might install something like notepad qq to go along with it that's what i would do on a real installation but this would just be wasted time installing these programs in this vm i'm not going to do anything with them so i'm just going to skip that for now then we have our office programs here typically you want an office suite so you may want to do something like libre office you also have other options here such as open office only office i don't know anything about those i don't know what kind of licensing they are in wps office people tell me good things about that that is not free and open source software though that is proprietary software i'm just going to go without installing an office suite for now the multimedia category this is something personally i would probably install a bunch of these on my main production machine because this is the kind of software i use to make these kinds of videos so you know i probably would want an audio editor audacity now that audacity is turned into basically proprietary spyware probably wouldn't install audacity anymore i'd probably try hard door then i need a music player audacious is pretty cool i also like dead beef dead beef is here a gu vc view is what i would need for a like a webcam application i edit all of my videos using caden live so i would install that of course i record all my videos using obs studio so i would install that i need a video player i'd install mpv i would probably also install vlc for a video player i really like vlc but i'm going to go ahead and tick off all of these boxes the only thing i'm going to install is mpv that'll serve as my video slash audio player in case i need one in this vm then we have the internet category we need to install a browser i'm going to install the brave browser those of you that prefer chromium or firefox or opera is also here it's proprietary vivaldi is a proprietary web browser but hey if you want to install those you're free to do that the great thing about arch linux is you know it's not free software only those of us that care about trying to run free software of course we're not going to install things like that but those of you that don't care you know you want to install your proprietary software you are more than welcome to do so and of course they have this proprietary software actually in the repository so it's not like you have to go get it you know through a third-party source and and hope that it's you know not actually malware or anything i'm just gonna install the brave browser from the internet category then we have some theming i'm just gonna click on some theme options i'm really not sure what i want for theming we'll get some of the new mix themes these are pretty cool i like the papyrus icon set anything else i think we clicked a few things here are them graphics now typically i would install the on everything i may actually install the here in this vm in case it's the vm i actually use uh going forward because i like to keep a few arch based virtual machines around to do work in sometimes then we have a games category uh typically you probably would want to install steam if it's not already installed you have steam buddy and steam tweaks i'm not sure what these are i love zonatic a great open source first person shooter but it's a very large game and it would take up a ton of space in the small virtual machine so i'm actually not going to install any games terminals i need a terminal emulator i like alacrity that's the only one i'm going to install file manager by default arco always ships with the thundar file manager which is the standard file manager that xfce ships with i like pc man fm though it's the one i've used for a few years now the one i prefer we have a utilities category utilities for time shift and butter fs i won't be using butter fs and i won't be using a time shift to do any kind of snapshots any kind of backups we also have a very large list of other utilities some of these i might install i know for sure h-top i'm going to be needing it calculator if you need a calculator flat pack eventually you're probably going to want to install snaps and or flat packs and or app images so i would definitely tick on flat pack i would go ahead and take on snap if it's in here yeah there's snap d just to make sure that if the need arises and you need to actually install a snap or flat back that you actually can under accessories we have cheese which is a webcam viewer i don't need that nitrogen for setting wallpapers i do use that program often and most of this other stuff i think i can skip and then we have arco linux development i don't need any of this stuff either and then you get to the main part of the installer where you choose your time zone it's correctly chosen the central time zone in the us for me then english us for the keyboard layout is correct i'm going to choose erase disk and give the entire 25 gig virtual hard drive in this virtual machine to arco linux you could also choose manual partitioning and set up the partitioning yourself and then for swap i'm going to swap to file i like using a swap file rather than a standard swap partition then i'm going to click next and then we need to create our name and our password so my name is going to be dt the hostname of this computer i'm going to call this arco extended and then we need to choose a strong and complicated password and then repeat the password and then use the same password as the administrator account i'm going to tick that on that way the sudo password and dt's password are the same then i'm going to click next and we get a summary of everything we've chosen so far i'm going to click install now this installation process typically takes around 10 minutes on my hardware so i'm going to pause the video i'll be back once this finishes and the installation has completed and we've rebooted our freshly installed arco linux the extended edition now during the installation process i specified that i wanted light dm installed for our login manager but this doesn't appear to be light dm i'm pretty sure this is sddm which is the standard login manager i think for kde plasma i don't mind using sddm but since i specified light dm i think i would rather go ahead and try to get light dm working so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and switch to a tty here what this is on a real computer you would hit control alt and f3 through f6 or something one of the function keys to get to a tty basically a command prompt i'm going to log in my username remember was dt i need to enter his password and what i'm going to do is i'm going to do a well first of all let me make sure that was in fact sddm so i'm going to go ahead and launch h-top and yeah i already see instances of sdd-m actually running here in h top so i'm going to q to quit out of h top and what i'm going to do is i'm going to run this command sudo system ctl so we're going to do something with system d here and i'm going to tell it to disable sddm i don't want sddm to ever run again on boot and then i'm going to up arrow and i'm going to run this command sudo system ctl enable light dm and then i'm going to reboot and if all of that worked correctly instead of seeing sddm when we log in we should now see light dm and that is light dm although it's not configured in any way we don't actually get a pretty background picture like we had with sddm i could fix that i'll fix that off camera though but that's weird that it installed like dm force but it really didn't set it up as the default login manager you still had sddm installed so just know that's the case justin you know if you guys have this problem as well so let's go ahead and check out some of the window managers that i had installed so we installed dwm let's well it actually installed i only installed dwm qtile x monad and awesome it looks like by default it also installs some other stuff kind of like it also installed sddm4s it also installed open box bspwm herbsliftwmi3 and spectre wm all fine window managers i don't mind having them installed it's just i didn't necessarily want them installed i could remove them though it's not like these programs are that hard to remove and of course this is arco linux it's already a pre-configured pre-themed dwm it comes with a cocky here on the side and if i move my head out of the way this cocky gives you some of the shortcuts some of the key bindings just in case you didn't know the key bindings and you're actually going to need this because especially if you're used to like the default key bindings for things like dwm and xmonad they have changed the default key bindings so you do need to to have that cocky up and running at first once you've learned the key bindings you can actually just get rid of this little cocky window of course you have your greeter here as well i believe super cute kills a window yeah super enter brings up a terminal what terminal is this this is ur xvt even though i asked for alacrity but i could probably get a run prompt yeah super p gets me d menu and i could launch alacrity and this is alacrity so they actually look exactly the same so they did a good job on the theming on both of those terminals but uh i don't need urx vt installed but so some of this you know now there's downsides to everything right i didn't have to pre-configure dwm or awesome or qtile or any of these other tiling window managers when i log in but the downside is not having to configure it myself there's a lot of extra stuff to them that i don't necessarily need so instead of spending a whole lot of time installing software you know doing it this way typically you're going to spend a whole lot of time uninstalling software you don't need you know having something pre-configured it's basically a pre-configured desktop environment using tiling window managers i'm getting back into the vm here so dwm works you know you guys have seen dwm that's a standard dynamic tiling window manager that uses the master and stack super enter opens a terminal super p gets you the d menu run prompt escape if you don't want to do anything in d menu super q quits out of a program super x exits out of the window manager or at least it gets you this exit program where you could choose to log out reboot shutdown suspend etc i'm going to choose log out so that was dwm and let's go ahead and check out the qtile version really quickly it's a really nice panel that they've got going as the standard qtile panel has a panel built into it but it looks very similar let me get rid of the greeter so super cute to heal the window with focus super enter again gets us terminals and again it's a master and stack dynamic tiler very similar to dwm that's part of the reason why i installed those four tiling window managers as they're all very similar and i quite like dynamic tilers rather than manual tilers let me go ahead and super x to log out and i just want to verify that all these window managers that i wanted actually were installed correctly let's try out xmo ned and once again we get the greeter super q will kill that window x moned this is poly bar they're using instead of x mo bar i've never really cared for poly bar with xmo.net especially on multi-monitor systems because it just doesn't display all the information especially regarding workspaces with xmobile it'll actually tell you which windows have focus as far as which monitor has stuff open whether it has stuff open on it and the monitor has focus or if it's unseen workspace things like our hidden workspace anyway super x will kill or get us to the log out menu where i choose log out and the other one that i specifically wanted to install was the awesome window manager the awesome window manager is one of those window managers i often tell you guys is a fantastic first tiling window manager it's really easy to configure and it just looks good it's got a panel built into it it's also got a right click menu similar to like an open box right click menu so it's especially for new to tiling window manager users the awesome window manager is very easy to get into and the default layout just like the other three tiling window managers i've shown you is the standard master and stack layout super queue and arco has done a great job as far as standardizing the key bindings between all the various editions so you don't have one set of key bindings and one tiling window manager and a completely different set in another right and that's really cool it's one of the things i've spent a lot of time in my own personal configs doing the same thing because i know so many of you guys use my tiling window manager configs and i've really tried to make them as close as possible so that's just a very very quick look at arco linux and really i just wanted to show you guys the installation process showing you guys the window managers themselves i mean if you're going to use a window manager typically you're going to use your own configurations that's what i typically do i install arco linux but i never really see this right because i have my own awesome config and qtile config and dwm config right i just install my own configs which overwrites all of this stuff so i i rarely ever see the default archos stuff but for those of you that don't have your own configs this is a really great way to start now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode absie gabe james mitchell paul west okami allen chuck kurt david dillon gregory hi co eryan alexander peace and fedor polytech raver scott steven and willie these guys they're my highest eared patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors it's just me and you guys the community if you like my work and want to support me consider subscribing to distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace i run arco by the way

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 82,120

Keywords: arch linux, window manager, gnu linux, first look, arco linux, arch linux installation, dwm window manager, linux installation, arcolinux installation, arcolinux review, install arcolinux, arcolinux i3, window managers linux, desktop environment, linux, free software, open source, best linux distro, top linux distro, best linux distro 2021, how to install linux, linux installation step by step, linux installation tutorial for beginners, distrotube

Id: J5mkCQ5YnH4

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Lol how big is the iso

[u/Steeler_Train]

I love arco but it's so confusing on which distro does what.