ArcoLinux | A Fun Arch Based Distribution

okay welcome to another video now before we get straight into it of today's distribution i just want to say a massive thank you to everyone that sub to the channel so far we recently just passed a 20 000 subscriber mark which means a lot and also a massive thank you to those of you that have also supported me on patreon now my next door neighbors having a bit of construction work done in their garden so i'm hoping it's not too noisy to be picked up by the microphone with that out of the way the distro we're going to be taking a look at today is an archbase distro called arco linux which has appeared on the channel once before quite a while ago and we checked out of the deep in desktop environment today we're going to check out the default xfce install of arco linux l which has just released a new iso as of 13 hours ago with a file size of 2.6 gb with all that being said let's jump into the live environment and get this installed and here we are in the live environment now as always we are going to be installing this natively but for those of you like to skip the installation parts of these videos there'll be a timestamp down below which will take you straight to the installed desktop with that out of the way the installer it's going to be using is calamari so let's jump straight into it now as you can see on the left hand side of the window there's a lot more additional steps in this calamaris installation which will let you sort of fine-tune the applications you have installed out of the box but by default it should have pretty much everything covered for you so we're not going to choose too much there unless anything catches my eye so first start we're going to change our language which for me is a british english and then jump to the next step right so we've got a choice of kernel we've got the standard linux kernel which is installed by default we've got the linux lts kernel the hardened kernel the zen kernel and then the intel u code and the amd u code as this is installed by default i'm not going to worry about selecting it but i am going to grab the amd u code and then jump forward to drivers so i'm an amd user so i'm just going to go ahead and grab the xf 86 a video amd gpu but as you can see it's got all the stuff here for nvidia as well as intel just go ahead and select that and then jump to the next step so for login managers display managers we've got installed by default of sddm usually i would choose a light dm for an xfce kind of desktop but we'll leave it on the default and then go to the next step so for desktops again it's installed by default for xfce but as you can see we've got a whole load of other additional desktops and window managers we could choose on our base install now if we just expand that we can see that's also going to grab mousepad orage parol xf burn and the xfce4 artwork so let's jump to the next step so for communication we have arco linux teamviewer krdc no machine q docs reminer skype slack teams tiger vnc viber whatsapp wire desktop and zoom so you can't see anything like discord there but i do believe that is included in our base install which we will be using anyway so let's jump to the next step so for development i'm not really going to need any of that for today's video so we can jump straight forward into office now i am going to select the libreoffice fresh package with the nice up-to-date version of the libreoffice suite and that's going to grab all of the stuff we need like writer etc now we've got multimedia so again i'm not going to worry too much about choosing anything additional here because i want to see what it comes installed with out of the box so we'll go to the next step which is internet so you've got most of the sort of browsers you could want here so we've got brave we've got falcon we've got google chrome and i do believe chromium is also included in the base installation so i'm just going to leave that for now and jump to the next step which is theming so i am going to grab the arc icon theme because that's one of my favorites but that'll be enough for me and then we'll jump straight on to graphics so all we've got here is blender dark table digicam and critter so no so we'll see if that is installed by default now for gaming we could also grab the arco linux meta steam package as well as some other games but we're all good and we can even get lootrest there as well so let's jump to the next step which is terminals now i'm going to imagine it's going to include xfce4 terminal by default so i'm not going to worry about choosing an additional one but i am going to grab t-max because i do quite like using a t-marks on my own machines and now for file managers of course it should come installed with funeral but i'm also going to grab the terminal based file manager of ranger and then jump to the next step which is utilities there appears to be quite a lot here we've got some application launchers like albert and synapse we have screen fetch etc i'm not going to worry about that but i am going to grab flatback which will save us some stuff save us some time post installation now we can also grab some accessories some fonts get fun password managers privacy usb and then some virtualbox linux kernel but we're all good so we'll go to the next step so this is for the arco linux dev and we could also get the flame short git which we won't worry about and that's everything so it's already got the correct time zone for us which is europe london so we can go forward to the next step which is our keyboard layout now of course my layout is uk and we're just going to make sure the keyboard is behaving itself before we continue okay so we are going to do an erase disk but we're not going to be using an old spinning hard drive we'll use the samsung ssd 860 evo m.2 now we're going to do an erase disk and see what options it gives us for this swap partition so we can go for no swap swap no hibernate swap with hibernate which is going to create you a large enough amount of ram to suspend the disk with full hibernation and then we could do a way of the swap partition entirely and instead swap to a file now i'm someone that does use swap with fibonacc quite a lot so we'll use that in today's video and then that will give us three partitions or one for our efi one for our root partition which is using ext4 by default and then we have our swap partition let's go to the next step which is going to be creating your user and naming your computer and we're just going to call this arco type in our password and i'm not going to log in automatically because i want to see how the login manager has been used with sddms but we are going to use the same password for the administrator account okay that's everything so i'm going to pause the video here and then i'll come back once it's finished right installation has complete now it wasn't the fastest ever but it was still under 10 minutes so we can't complain too much and i do definitely appreciate the additional control it gives you over other packages to be included in your install with that being said just reboot and check out our freshly installed arco linux featuring xfce right so we've just booted up for the first time and here we are our login screen which i actually don't mind the theming of too much there so we've got the user account stuff to the left of a nice little sort of keyboard image as the background let's go and log in with the xfce session and start taking a look around and here we are so let's open up the arc linux welcome app which doesn't appear to have a whole lot here that we need to do so we can remove it from our auto start but we will use the update arch linux mirrors so it's going to ask you for your pseudo password right so we've now refreshed our mirror so as you can see it says done there so we can close that now we're going to see how much updates we have to get so we've got a total download size of 541.6 mb so we are going to pause the video here while this installs and we'll be back in just a moment right so update has complete but it's asking us to reboot for the required changes to take effect now before we do that we're just going to check that htop is installed out of the box so you can see how much i'm using on a fresh boot before we make any additional changes to our system now the kernel we are currently using is 5.12.13 the default session type is x11 and the default shell is bash so let's just check htop there we go so we do have page top installs let's do a reboot and see how much round this uses and then start playing around with things okay so we've just started back up on a fresh boot and run h top so we can see how much ram we're using before we make any changes to our system now as you can see it's quite a bit higher than what we'd usually expect for an xfce distro but under 700 mb are around about 671 but do bear in mind this is the full-fledged iso which includes a whole lot of applications and tools out of the box not including the few additional packages we chose in the calamares installer now just beneath that we can see that we do have our swap partition of 15 gb which should be enough on this machine to do full hibernation which we will test out towards the end of the video now all in all including the applications and packages we chose in the installer that's given us an even number of packages of 1200 all native pacman packages and of course our desktop environment is xfce 4.16. now i think that's where we'll start with the implementation of the desktop here so it's quite a clean simple xfce implementation with just a single panel at the bottom with your whisker menu at the very left hand side and then you have things like your user date and time or volume slider we have variety which is going to be changing your wallpapers on a set interval time we have our connections we have a clipboard manager and we have a nice little update icon here which will then open up the palmat gui where you can manage your updates as well as jump straight into the preferences and then set up things like the aur for those of you that like to grab any additional stuff from the aur arch user repository we then have our workspace switching and by default it's giving us four now if we open up a couple of terminals of course we will have four-way split on xfce on each corner or you can just do it to the side by dragging i don't know if they've got keyboard shortcuts set up for this let's have a quick test with just the left super key and then the directionals they don't so i'm going to imagine the left super key is bound to our whisker menu though it doesn't appear to so i think what we'll do is we'll go through the keyboard shortcuts and see exactly what is what in just a moment first up though let's see how many packages and applications we do have included out of the box there's going to be a lot so let's start in accessories so we have the archive manager we have the arco linux beta lock screen so here we can change the image for the lock screen okay interesting let's see how easy this would be so we'll enter the location there we'll load it refresh it we can even set the blur intensity and the resolution okay that's pretty cool let's get back into accessories and see what else we've got out of the box we didn't have the arco linux tweak tool and i remember checking this out when i checked out arco linux for the first time using the deep in desktop environment and if i remember it i really did quite enjoy it there's a lot that we could do here in so far as additional desktop environments and all of that good stuff so we can set our auto start here and as we can see it's got the clip man plug-in which is this bad boy right here variety and konky is currently disabled and of course conkey is like your desktop or widgets now if we go into desktop here's where we've got the desktop installer and there's a whole lot that we can do here with additional desktops so as you can see we have window managers desktops and all of that good stuff so we've got awesome bspwm budgie cinnamon cwm deep in dwm pretty much everything that one could want from a nice easy installer right here and i'll show you how easy that is towards the end of the video as well but for now we can also get in and customize our grub theming so that's pretty cool as well i didn't mind the default image that it was using i'll show you when we do a start up in just a moment but again we can change that quite easily from the arco linux tweak tool we then have privacy so we can enable h block we then have light dm which we don't have installed at the moment i do believe we are using sddm i don't know if that is installed though and then we have the neofetch editor which again very cool and then we have pac-man so here we can do some sort of configuration of our repos and all of that good stuff so as you can see under our arc linux repos we have the arc linux repo the third party repo and then the x large repo and then we could also enable any additional repos here as well and they even have the chaotix repo right there too we're going to have termites so these are just little termite themes i do believe so a whole lot here as well so again that's something i really do like about arco linux is just how much sort of configuration has been done for you to get the desktop or window manager that you're using to work for you very cool and the arc linux tweet tool does make it easier to switch out in between things so for this theme switcher it says change your themes on i free or awesome so i guess if it was running the i3 or awesome window manager here's where we could quickly and easily change the theme so again very cool so we don't use zsh by default we're using the bash shell but if we were to switch to zsh you can change the theme all from within here as well so that is a very cool a very cool little application or tool to be included let's keep it moving so we then have atom we have the clipboard manager conkey conkey's in font manager font viewer we have calculator it has the phantom theming manager installed out of the box logs notes i think this is going to be just your sort of desktop sticky notes it is indeed let's quit that and keep it moving is there anything else and accessories worth jumping into and having a look we then have plank installed out of the box as well which is something i usually always install on xfce myself because i like to put the panel to the top and then have a nice little dock at the bottom so it's cool that plank is installed out of the box i wonder if in fact let's quickly open it and see if there's any additional plank theme so already we can see some nice little theming there so if we go into the preferences let's have a look at the additional themes that we have for the plank well a whole lot included does it have my favorite of shade though let's have a look it does indeed brilliant i'm a big fan of how much sort of theming here that is included out of the box so it should pretty much have any kind of look that you are going for it even has one called unity like so you could use that to expand the sort of side of your screen and give yourself a little sort of unity look so that's very cool as well so let's close off our doctor now and keep it moving so i don't know if there's anything else in accessories that we do need to take a look at screenshot we have some usb image writer and stick formatters we have variety so i'm sure a lot of you have seen this before but as you can see we can change the wallpaper and set it at times interval and then it will change your wallpaper throughout the day based on the time that you set very cool little program for those of you that do like to sort of refresh the look of your desktop without having to do too much manual intervention now i think that's pretty much everything that we need to see in accessories and we also have vim installed out of the box as well which is my preferred sort of terminal based text editor now in development we have atom get ahead meld and sublime text for education we have the libreoffice map which will be included in the fresh package that we chose in the calamari installation now graphics i'm quite intrigued to see what we do have so we have the document scanner document viewer good so we do have installed out of the box i was wondering that that would be the case as it wasn't included in the additional applications in graphics but it is there installed out of the box and ready to go so that's all good and let's have a look at what else we have in graphics we have gpa gpic inkscape libreoffice draw again included in the liberal office fresh package no max peak i've not used peak before let's have a look at what peak is record short animated gifs okay so if we had a moving sort of image on our screen we could then quickly record a nice little gif and then share it on whatever social medias or things that you guys might use so again a very cool and handy little tool to be included and then we have the ristretto image viewer now for internet so we have a bit more here than what i think is personally necessary so we have the chromium web browser which i did think was installed out of the box we have discord and if you'd like to join the tireless tech discord server there's a link down below where you can chat with other linux users we then have firefox qubit touring which is quite a cool little torrent application i don't mind it too much i'd either use this or transmission either one is usually sort of i'm happy to use there so i'm not too worried about that let's keep it moving and then as you can see there we have our notification in the top right letting us know that qubit torrent is running in the background we didn't have the telegram desktop which is cool i use telegram and then we have vavaldi so we've got one two three web browsers included in this install and we didn't choose any of the additional ones in the actual calamaris installation screen so we could have got things like brave as well as that so i don't think we quite need that many web browsers included in this base install so we've got chromium firefox and vivaldi so vivaldi is one that i've not really used too much i know a lot of people quite like how easy it is to theme and stuff but again it's not really a web browser i tend to use i usually just stick between firefox and chromium because i like to have like an additional web browser firefox but there we go so let's see what else we've got in our application so i think that was all of the internet there so for multimedia we have a gut view so you can sort of capture yourself camera on your screen there again we have peak we have prague which is a nice sort of easy to use music library player very simple and sleek interface what else was that installed on that i checked out the other day i think it might even be on opensuse as base xfce install i can't remember we then have the pulse audio equalizer the v4 l2 test and capture note just the video capture utility simple screen recorder and then we have the best media player of all at least for me which is vlc media player so as well as peak to get a short animated gif you can also use the simple screen recorder to get a very simple sort of desktop capture so it doesn't appear that we've got things like obs installed out of the box but i think simple screen recorder is a happy medium for those of you that don't need the sort of full flesh features that obs offers let's keep it moving so i think that's everything in multimedia so office wise we have the dictionary we have document viewer we have the base libreoffice libreoffice and let's open up writer and see if it's all set up with our dictionary as well for automatic spell checking so we don't need those tips so we're going to help annabelle we will of course be using the nice new version of 7.1.4.2 and we do have the local of engb so i think we should be all good with automatic spell checking doesn't appear to have the dictionary all set up for us for this automatic spell checking to work but not to worry that's easy enough to set up yourself anyway okay let's keep it going so we won't be saving that what else have we got in office so i think that's pretty much everything so you've got your full libreoffice suite there now in settings what have we got so we've got of course our adder remove software which is our pamac gui we have appearance if we open up appearance we can see all of the additional fonts uh sort of icons and styles and themes that we have and it is a lot so i do quite like that they have all of the variations of arc that a user could want there do they have arc darkest though that's the question let's have a look i don't see it we have arctory darker a lot of these arc themes i've not even used before okay so you've got most of the art theming there with its variations and the icon theme that we are using is sardi arc but in the installation process we did choose to also install the standard arc theme which i'm going to go and change it over for the icons because i prefer just like a nice squared icon with a rounded corner so let's go ahead and choose arc and now we should have all of our arc icons there we might need to do a bit of a refresh in a moment to get it to take proper effect and fun wise we are using a notto sounds regular for the default and in the mono space is a mono space or regular that's pretty much everything there that we need to check out for our appearance so let's go back into the settings in fact let's go back into the icons for the moment and put it back into saudi ark so we've not got any missing icons while we're having a look through i'll put it back on art dark in just a moment on the arc icons there right what else have we got then so in settings we then have the better lock screen which we've already seen we have the arc linux tweak tool we have the welcome screen which we've removed from our auto start as i said there's not really a whole lot that you'd need to refer back to here unless you wanted to quickly update your arch linux mirrors what else do we have so we have bluetooth clipboard manager color profiles con key we have the deconf editor installed out of the box desktop disk so that'll be known disks and if we go into our sort of main drive here we can see all of the partitions that were created for us and of course we will be testing out hibernation so what else is that most of what we need to see in settings there so we have the nice sort of front end for the firewall here very simple and easy to use i'm sure a lot of you have used this before simple easy to use firewall program here for your profile so you can change from home office or public set the status and then do your deny allow and set your rules rapport and logging let's keep it moving so that was firewall is there anything else in here we have fixed hard coded icons so it has gparted installed out of the box if you want to take it a bit further than what discs will allow you for your partitions and all of that good stuff covanton once more panel panel profiles privileges granting we have the qt5 settings there screen saver the stdm configuration session and startup settings manager and i think that's pretty much everything we need to check out in its settings and in system i don't think there's going to be too much additional stuff here we need we have the cubs web interface to manage printing and print settings ranger we chose to install ourselves see in the installation sort of process where you can open up a terminal type in ranger and then you go through all of your sort of files open and view things in there as well a very cool and handy little file manager that resides in your terminal now is there anything else in the system that we need to take a look at no so termite is a terminal we also have ur xvt and then of course the standard xfce terminal so i think that's all of the applications we need to take a look at for now so we've made a few slight changes to our desktop we've added plain to our startup and we've put a panel to the top and remove the window buttons so the only place we can launch and minimize applications are from is going to be from our plank or dock at the bottom and we've changed the icon theme to the new mix circles which has been picked up absolutely fine now as far as the keyboard shortcuts go let's have a look at what's what so we don't have it appears anything for tiling in uh ready to go out of the box so we will set that up in just a moment but while we're here let's have a look at the alt tabber we'll have a very nice a full screen view of what's going on in your windows there and let's now also go ahead and check the xfce pop-up whisker menu it's using old f1 as opposed to something like your left super key so all we need to do is press alt f1 and then that will launch our application launcher of the whisker so if you wanted to you could change that to something like your left super key but i'll leave it on there for now and instead we're going to go into our tiling window and then choose super left and right to snap windows to the left or right hand side of our screens so for tightening to the left we're just going to use a very simple super and left and we'll do the same for super and right and let's just open up a few terminals now and make sure that's worked there we go perfect so we know this distribution includes a whole lot of tools and applications out of the box to get most users up and running before i need to run to their package managers and install new applications so we know that we set up flat pack support but let's see if it has snap support out of the box as well so we're just going to type in snap list it does so as you can see there no snaps are installed but the actual snapd package is installed so between snap flat pack and of course the aui should be pretty much covered for any additional applications you might need now another cool thing that archive in this does to make things a bit easier to use is if you type in alias you'll notice there's a whole lot of commands simplified here so it'll take a whole lot of time to go through but let's just grab a couple random ones so if you want to do a quick update all you have to do is type in update and that's going to run the sudo pacman dash s yyu command for you so let's give that a go now by typing in update so it's going to ask you for your pseudo password and it's going to go ahead and start updating for you and as you can see we are all good to go so what we're going to do now is test out the hibernation and make sure that's all been set up for us correctly with our selection of swap with hibernate in the calamares installer now all that we need for this to work is that these two application windows are open when we go into a low powered state and then start back up those applications still need to be right there where we've left them for hibernation to have worked now we do have a nice little gooey way of getting to it so we won't need to summon it with the terminal this time so we're going to click log out and then we get all of the extended options here so we don't want to suspend we want to do a full hibernate here we are on our boot screen let's jump into our code linux install and see if hibernation has worked and there they are both applications of fun art and terminal or right where we left them perfect so i think before we start to wrap up we was going to test out the arco linux tweak tool and install the new desktop or window manager so to keep things nice and simple i think we're just going to go ahead and install a small window manager perhaps i3 so let's go ahead and grab i3 so we've made our selection so we got here select a clear cache before reinstall we don't need to do that we're doing a fresh install and then we'll back up and overwrite your config when installing desktops backup is in dot config hyphen att folder let's go ahead and do that now by pressing install right so that was quite literally done in a matter of seconds let's log out and get into our login screen and jump into the ivory session and make sure it's all working as it should right so all we want to do is go to session and now choose i3 type in our password and get into it and there we go so it's all up and running and ready to go and we've got a nice conkey widget on our desktop there i'll just move my face very quickly so you can see what that looks like so we get a nice bit of system information for your resources and then we also get some commonly used shortcut keys very cool now before we begin to wrap things up i do remember that when we opened up the arc linux tweak tool in xfce it said that it could easily change our theming when we're on a window manager like i3 so i think we'll quickly check that out and then we'll wrap things up just go on to our first workspace or tag so as you can see at the top it says the window manager we are currently using is i3 we get a nice little preview sample here and then we have a whole list of all different themes that we can go for and it also has a toggle poly bar there as well so i think we'll just test any old random one very quickly let's go for arco linux and mango so we're going to apply that but we'll need to sort of reload our window manager using supershift and r and that should change the look of our desktop and there we go so i think that is where we're going to wrap up with my refresh look of arco linux at this time featuring xfce and a tiny bit of i3 there towards the end all in all though i'm just going to sort of parrot my same feelings as before when i checked out feature and deep in i do actually think it's a very fun distribution to use and i like that it's gone out of the way to include little tweak tools to make things a bit easier for new users as well as all of the additional aliases i'll leave a link in the description below if you would like to check out yourself thank you for watching and if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe and if you've really enjoyed it you can support me on patreon join the discord there's a link in the description below i'll see you on the next one bye-bye

Channel: Tyler's Tech

Views: 22,098

Keywords: arcolinux, arcolinux i3, arcolinux xfce, arcolinux review, install arcolinux, arcolinux os, arcolinux distro, arcolinux desktop, best arch distro, best arch based distro, arch based distribution, ArcoLinux review, arcolinuxl, arcolinuxl review, archolinux xfve review, beautiful xfce distro, ArcoLinux 21.07.3, arcolinux 21.07.3 review, arcolinux os 21.07.3, arcolinuxl xfce review, arcolinux 2021, arcolinux xfce 21.07.3, arco, arco linux, arcolinux xfce 2021, arco 21.07.3

Id: 2bBBRLhtRow

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021