DarkOs - A Lightweight Arch Distro For WM Fans

hello and welcome to the otb channel today i'm going to take a look at a distro that i've never heard of before today called dark os it's an arch-based distro which is quite minimal and from what i've read it seems to be a base that sets up a basic system with window managers for you and serves as a jumping off point for customization i've not seen any reviews of this distro i have no idea what to expect so i'm going to take you on the journey with me see you after the intro right welcome back so it's a little bit of a worry this because at the point when i'm recording this i i haven't actually looked at this thing yet i've downloaded it i've got the iso but that's all so i don't know what to expect this may be a positive review it may not be a positive review so at the moment it's all unknowns but i fancy doing something different and i've been thinking all week about what i'm actually going to look at today and this morning i thought well you know let's not think too hard about this go on to distro watch have a look at what distros are waiting to go on to distro watch you know still in the uh to be tested or evaluated category pick one and uh give it a spin so i did that um there were a few distros there that i've already heard of but this is one i haven't it was called dark os apparently it's an arch-based distro it's had a re recent release back in april of this year so you know it's not an old thing and from what i can see it offers a number of additions but the addition that has most parts to it if you like um consists of window managers rather than desktop environments and it consists of x monad uh herbs love wm and the awesome window manager so i like window managers i like arch linux what could go wrong who knows let's go and have a look at the website right so you should see uh the dark os web page uh in front of you um in fact it's just sourceforge page if if you scroll down to the bottom it does say there's a link to the dark os web page but if you open that well that's it it's just a list of the different uh versions that they do plus a download link that takes you back to this page so there's not much there really so what does it tell us well uh it's based on arch linux okay good it's designed to create a more enjoyable user experience experience and easy to use i i'm assuming from the way that's been worded we haven't got a native english speaker here i've only got the name here why bennell i don't know if we can go anywhere to have a look there casablanca in the united states okay fine that's all it really tells us uh projects dark os again it just links us back to the sourceforge page so we get nowhere really but anyway um coming back to the distro itself it comes in three editions one hell strange name super track and schmegging each edition has its own desktop or window manager and package list well i'm immediately thinking here they haven't mentioned a window manager sorry a desktop environment yet and so each edition has its own desktop stroke window manager well which one is it i can't see it on the list here one hell comes with x-monad herbs love wm and awesome apparently and a minimal amount of packages okay that's the one i'm going to download super track comes with no desktop or window manager it uses xfce as a delivery environment to provide you with the installer but that's going to be removed once it's finished it's got no essential packages in no browser text editor terminal etc so you'll get to choose what you want while installing right okay so i'm assuming it's going to use some sort of graphical installer and you'll be able to choose some options from there and last but not least we have schmeding if i'm pronouncing that correctly uh no desktop or window manager only a tty shell and you're going to have to do the installation manually on your own but it provides an optional end curse is a store installer if you're too lazy to do the work i'm a little bit confused there because if you're just going to install from a tty shell why do you need this you just download a normal arch iso so presumably the n cursors installer is going to be similar to that arch install script that we saw but that's all we're told we are told that uh dark os has some new changes coming up so stay tuned okay so if this is good it's good to see that you know this is being worked on and what of its main features minimal and easy customize what you want easy installing the schmeding edition with the n cursors installer gives you full control blah blah blah blah choose what's perfect for you so pretty generic stuff really project samples what have we got in the pictures okay window managers obviously and that looks to me like it's going to be the end curses installer it is shmedding installer okay which is obviously another customized way of doing it i want to see what's out of the box though so i'm going to go for this one hell edition with x monad herbs loved and awesome let's just have a a quick la uh click around the reviews it appears to only have one review i don't actually know what that says so i'm going to just do a google translate i'm going to enter my text here can't install a new version does not connect to the internet to download the packages please correct okay so that's not that encouraging so that so far is the only review what about support come on sourceforge please move i find source forge so slow it's slow even getting to the next tab unfortunately this project hasn't indicated the best way to get help check out the other support issues below okay project trackers and we'll wait for sourceforge to move on and there's nothing there just a link that talks about source availability so we've seen issues okay there's nothing let's just go to files then i'm always a little bit worried these flipping adverts on sourceforge irritate the heck out of me i'm always a little bit worried when there's no documentation at all no sort of write up about what the distro's all about how you would install it at the moment we don't know anything i know that potentially i have a distro that has herbs love dex monad and uh awesome on it but i don't know whether it's a graphical installer whether it's a command line installer i don't know what i'm going to expect all i know is there's the files there's one hell and if i expand that i can see that we do have an iso there of two gigs seems to have been downloaded 25 times so far um and that's about it guys we know nothing about this distro so um yeah what can i say there's nothing there to give me a clue what we're looking at we have a couple of images this sort of feels to me like this is somebody's own project that they have put it together for themself and they stuffed it up here on on sourceforge so i've no idea at the moment what what the us you know unique selling point is i can only guess that it's got some easy way of doing the installation and it's quite minimal in the fact that it gives you a base a foundation if you like for then adding your own customizations on board i am assuming here and it is an assumption that the x monad the awesome and the uh herbs love wm will at least have some sort of configuration files and will have been started off for you because if it's just a blank canvas my first question would be well what would be the point of this you would simply install arch as normal or use one of the other easy arch installers and add your own configuration um so i i'm starting to think okay not sure what's special about this i think it's a one-person distro probably created for themselves but let's see what it has to offer we're not gonna know until we boot it so let's go and have a look so here we are um didn't really know what to expect when i booted this because there is so little information here uh but as you can see uh this is the screen that you are eventually presented with as the system boots it wasn't initially in full hd mode so i had to use the terminal which you can see is embedded at the bottom to use an x r and r command you know minus s 1920 by 1080 and you're now seeing it in full screen mode um it's obviously a window manager here i'm not sure what the window manager is but it seems to have i think it's calamaris i think it's calamaris has launched automatically and as soon as it started it asked me to set my language and i couldn't do anything else until i'd done that so first impressions um it looks a bit amateurish if i'm honest but you know i'm going to suspend any judgment and we'll just work our way through it so next right and we go straight to a list of packages so this is you know do it yourself and i'm gonna choose linux lts okay desktop environment now strangely enough i think this comes automatically with um x monad heard herbs luff wm and the awesome window manager so i wasn't really expecting to see an option here to choose uh desktop environments but you know something as i've got the option i'm going to choose them anyway i'm going to put a marte desktop on there just in case we have problems right in terms of window managers what do we want i'm actually quite surprised that uh this is meant to be fully configured already so i'm gonna just click awesome herbs love wm and x monad and of course x monad contrib and haskell d bus not sure if i i need to use that but do you know let's click everything x monad and see what happens terminal well i'm going to choose alacrity and i think it's probably a good idea to put x term on there as well just in case and let's see what else i might need browser let's just pick firefox for now i'm trying to keep this as minimal as possible and we're going to see what we end up with um right you have quite a lot of choice there which is good communication do we need anything there no i'm not gonna bother with any of those uh editors i'll pick genie that'll do us for that um file managers wow you really do get to choose the whole lot let's see if we've got pc man fm there yeah i'm going to choose that multimedia well let's stick vlc in there uh anything else i'm gonna need there i don't think so for this and this initial go what i am quite impressed there at actually is the sheer volume of different packages that you can choose from here which is all good office uh yeah why not choose libreoffice fresh and the file the locale files for it utilities don't want anything there i'm just scrolling through these to see what's what you've got a lot of choice you really have i'm going to choose lx appearance as well just in case i want to see what it what it installs out of the box and it may not install very much to be honest but wow we've got we've got quite a lot here you've got more than quite a lot you've got a massive selection applications let's have a look is there anything in particular i think i need well let's go for awesome terminal fonts uh deja vu roboto the ubuntu font family let's just make sure we've got something there um bitstream vera terminus font that should probably do us to start off with uh that seems to be repeating itself now ttf deja vu but okay fine and let's just move on linux lts headers yeah why not theming i quite like the arc icon theme so let's go for that no idea what we're going to end up with here in terms of graphics i would normally install but actually i'm not that bothered and i'm not that bothered about any games let's just move to next where am i it's already picked london okay great that's a next uh uk english keyboard okay that's default what do i want to do i just want to erase the disk and i don't need to create a swap partition so it's just going to interestingly create a butter fs partition by default i would probably normally go for ext4 just out of personal preference but you know what i'm just gonna go with whatever it suggests and let's just put my standard username and password in use the same password for the admin account yeah that'll suit me good to go looks like it to me and off we go look we'll come back once it's done right well uh i rebooted and uh quite rightly on the grub menu linux lts was selected as the default and despite trying various things it failed to boot so i went into the advanced settings and luckily the standard linux kernel was there and as soon as i selected the standard linux kernel it did boot um so it's got to lose some marks for the fact that it didn't boot with my preferred configuration but what you see now is uh clearly or what i think is probably light dm which has come down i'm pretty sure with marty because i installed the mate desktop and i can see that marty up here is actually selected by default but we do have x monad awesome and herbs love wm so i don't really know what to expect if i'm honest so let's kind of tread carefully let's go with marty to start off with so let's just log in and see what we get and it looks to me like we have a just a plain vanilla mate desktop which i'm not necessarily unhappy about i would pretty much have expected that i'm just opening up now to see if there's any backgrounds that are specific and i can't actually see anything there they seem to just be standard backgrounds so nothing special the arc and our dark themes are already installed um okay let's shut that what about applications right we seem to have quite a lot here uh already uh we do have nitrogen which is useful if i browse nitrogen aha so it looks to me that like we do have um some specific wallpapers that are presumably um dark os orientated i'm not going to select any of them now we'll wait until we get into the window manager but okay it makes sense we do at least have nitrogen installed we have pycom installed anything else libreoffice math the standard you've got flame shot automatically we've got firefox and i see it's uh already installed q bit torrent and lftp libreoffice which i asked for it to install gm run a run prompt is already there genie and various bits and pieces simple screen recorder well i didn't ask for that to be installed so it's obviously done that just by default okay i'm just going to bring up the mart a system monitor here uh what's it using 677 megs we're in a virtual machine so so that's not dreadful what i am interested though in seeing is whether or not we've already got the configuration files here for the window managers so let's just go to view and show hidden files and i can see we've got a dot x monad directory and there's our xmonad dot hs let's open this up and okay so it's not blank we have actually got something there in fact there's quite a lot of configuration steps in here by the look of it um tree select is already configured it looks like it may possibly have been borrowing some some of dt's configurations here but it's a fairly long configuration file so i'm not necessarily expecting to see an absolute vanilla uh x-monad here i would perhaps like to see something that has some light customization now i think light dm was probably installed due to me installing mate but i can see the there's a x in it rc um file let's just see what that's got in it and it has a default entry there exec x monad so if you install this and uh you just got to your normal ttr tty booting you would be able to log in you'd be able to type start x and it would start x monad and give you something to work with we've got a face file with a little pussycat there okay fine uh what about bash rc are there any particular customizations always worth looking at uh yeah there's a few bits and pieces here any particular aliases yet there's a few aliases there including aliases to yay pac-man okay so it gives you a start it's worth looking at what about if we go into our config directory we have our awesome config rc.lua um what do i want to open that with just let's open it with a text editor i don't use autumn awesome personally so i don't know if this is default or not we'll find out when we launch it but at least it does have a configuration file there and we've also got a configuration file for herb's luff wm and i see here it's also got one for jg menu so that's presumably installed somewhere and polybar is already installed along with xmobile uh we have the potential there for two instances of xmobile let's just have a quick look at that to see if it's configured in any way and yes it does seem to have a basic configuration there so yeah i'm not necessarily expecting to see something that's completely vanilla but at the same time possibly not something that uh is highly configured so marty is pretty much what i expected it's vanilla essentially what i want to do now is have a quick look at the window managers starting with x monad so we're back now at our light dm screen so let's log into x monad and see where we get to that's not good error detected while loading x monad configuration file okay um can i even open a terminal from here can i do anything uh so i'm doing super shift q no i seem to be locked so i'm gonna have to come out of here and we'll try again right well i didn't even attempt to uh go through the errors that x monad was throwing up because as far as i'm concerned if it's claiming to have x monad installed from the get-go it should just work so let's try another window manager let's try awesome this time and see where we get to with that okay so awesome has actually launched without a problem and i see that we have a bar that's configured there do we have a menu is this our jg menu i'm clicking on it but nothing's happening hmm is that to open a file or are these just different workspaces they may just be different workspaces i don't know there's obviously a couple of places in fact i think that's probably what it is we're just talking about different workspaces so uh right clicking does give us um a little menu as such so something has been done on this i'm just gonna open a terminal here once again i'm seeing the these i don't like this this this doesn't suit me but it looks like that stuff that dt has on his terminal um the terminal is looking pretty small i wonder if i can make that bigger no no no no that doesn't do it okay what about that no that doesn't do it okay um let me go into full screen again guys i'm gonna see if i can recompile x monad because it might just be that it needs recompiling no unfortunately not uh error detected while loading x monad configuration file couldn't load module blah blah blah blah okay i would need to troubleshoot that i'm not gonna do it now at the end of the day i don't think that should actually be there so okay i'm gonna click that normally with awesome there is a way to actually bring up the hot keys and there you go we've got our hot keys so how do we actually uh close an item here okay uh i've just found it it's a super shift c to close applications okay so i do quite like this by the way this particular menu screen so if i do super shift c yeah that shuts so i can open the terminal presumably here and then super shift c okay so that closes all good so you have a i i'm i'm not that familiar with awesome but uh certainly if you want to give it a try this gives you a starting point and some sort of configuration um it's not to my tastes if i'm honest and i think i would prefer to start from scratch but nevertheless if you'd like to make a start on the configuration file it does give you something to to start you off with i think it's pretty bad though that we haven't got the fonts installed they're going to show up all the icons in the taskbar okay well let's let's go and look at herb's love wm just to finish this off so we're back at light dm now let's just pick herbs luff wm and see where we get to from there and again um i can see that we've got a bar here i'm not sure if that's poly bar i suspect it is given that we've got a a polybar uh directory in our config folder and you can see that you've got some little modules here it actually looks a lot neater this than anything else that i've seen on this so we've obviously got some disk space there i presume that cpu actually is that that might be memory 414 megs yeah and 22.5 8 free disk space we have volume oh no yeah muted or unmuted and we have network manager there okay that's fine i seem to be on the first workspace so if i just do super and enter great it opens up a terminal for me i'm wondering if it's the same shortcut uh super shift c shuts it if i want to move to the second workspace yet it's just super one two three four five wherever you want to go so i can keep opening workspaces like this and then shut them down oops there we go like that okay well you know configuring window managers is a very personal thing i'm not going to play around with the configuration of these window managers and i certainly can't do x monad but ultimately you know um if you want to have a play and want to start with something that has got some work done to it it might be an option for you ultimately though i think we need to have a chat about this distro right dark os hmm let's be fair okay let's be completely fair with this if this has been created by one person um just for themselves and they've decided to share it on distro watch because it's obviously been submitted well fair enough um [Music] but for me i'm struggling to see the points um let's just put the errors to one side to start off with if you're creating your own distro and you're creating well you're configuring your own window managers your xmonage you're awesome your herbs love wm and you want to share the configurations absolutely great just share them on github or gitlab and people can add them themselves as they want to um i don't know why you need to add a distro just to showcase your configuration files because i can't really see what the point of it is other than that to showcase your particular configuration files um maybe that's just me and that's that's a little bit unfair because there's a lot of work involved in producing a distro so i don't want to completely rubbish this but uh yeah i i've come away less than impressed um no documentation not even an install guide on sourceforge so i think that's pretty poor to start off with secondly uh when you get to installing it i i thought the installer screen it was fine as far as it went but it but it looked pretty amateurish to me very kind of early 90s but that's a look that's a thing you know so i'm not going to criticize it for style and i did like the calamaris installer because it gave you so many options what i found a little bit confusing though was the fact that awesome herbs w herbs love wm and x monad still had options for me to click to install them if they were already installed by default and i presume they were why would they be offered as additional options and did i cause any problems by selecting them again i don't know i may have done i'm also aware that i'm doing this within virtualbox so what you see on hardware may not be the experience you're going to get sorry on virtualbox may not be the experience you're going to get on hardware that's always going to be the case nevertheless you know there are some things it's not going to make any difference with and what you didn't see as it was installing it took a while because it's doing an online install there was a slideshow and the slideshow kept saying you know that dark os was developed in 2013 but basically it was closed down it was abandoned and then there was a slide that says uh dark os uses plasma as its base and i was thinking hold on i thought this was a window manager only distro so it was quite confused but it worked and it installed we then had the problem of course with uh trying to boot the lts kernel it just wouldn't do it it just fell back to a root shell luckily though it installed the standard linux kernel and it booted fine from there so okay these things happen that could be a virtual box issue i don't know um but not that impressed from the get-go marty well it's installed the vanilla mate desktop that's fine i didn't see an issue with that the package selection okay there's more packages installed than i expected that's obviously the the personal preference from the developer again no issue with that what i wasn't happy with really was um x-monad now i know the x-monad configuration file can be a real pain and sometimes when there's updates it screws up your configuration and you have to make changes um but to my to my knowledge there hasn't been anything drastic happened for a while um i haven't had to update my xmo nad config for quite a long time and this this distro was only produced in in april and everything was fine then so i feel that needs to have been checked and i can't see that virtualbox would have had any impact on x mode on x monad not working so that was that was a bit of a down point uh awesome and uh herbs love wm did work fine um i can't say that the customizations were to my liking but at the end of the day it's better to start off with somebody else's template and then customize it to how you like it than it is starting from a blank slate i could have played with it more but to be honest i'd run out of patience i couldn't see the point i come back to the fact that if you want an easy install arch distro there are lots out there endeavour manjaro easy arch by esnix to name but three of them all of which you could have installed and you could have pulled down the config files from this developer or another developer even me i've got some config files up on the git lab and you could have tested out their configurations and played with them until you've got them looking like you wanted so i suppose i i have to say at the end of this yes there were errors it looks like a work in progress i don't want to overly criticize it because there's a lot of work put into these things but my view is it's clearly not ready for prime time yet i'd encourage the developer to to carry on doing what he's doing um but he needs some documentation he needs an installation guide and he needs to make sure those configurations for his window managers actually work so i said this could be positive or negative and it's come out largely negative and that wasn't my intention from the start but i'm afraid guys i say what i see and uh this isn't ready uh be interesting to see if it actually gets on to distro watch because it's not been evaluated as yet so that's it for this week i'll see you next maybe see you next saturday actually uh we're potentially getting our lockdown restrictions uh quite significantly lifted on monday if that happens i may take next saturday out to go and visit relatives that i haven't seen for the best part of a year but the indian variant of this thing seems to be spiking in the northwest of england at the moment so anything could still change uh so it's been a bit of a moving target so i may see you i may not see you other than that i hope you enjoyed the video come and join me on the facebook page try library by all means um we still don't know really what's happening there and i would like to of course thank my patreons thanks so much for your help guys i'm talking about robert gary aristotelis storm pick stephen mike david richard ty forrest patrick glenn magnus skipper john m and david appreciate all your help guys that's it until next week or potentially the week after cheers

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 5,906

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, DarkOs, DarkOs Linux, Linux, DarkOs Arch Distribution, DarkOs One Hell, DarkOs xmonad, xmonad, DarkOs Awesome WM, DarkOs Herbsluftwm, awesome wm, herbstluftwm, arch linux installation, arch linux review, linux window managers, linux pre-configured window manager, window manager, desktop environment, window manager arch linux, install arch linux virtualbox, xmonad arch linux, xmonad config, one hell, dark os

Id: Oili4qZj54s

Length: 39min 16sec (2356 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021