Feren OS Review - SANEST Defaults & Plasma Polish (Nov 2020)

welcome back ladies and gents it has been a while since we have done an honest-to-goodness good old-fashioned distro review and to be honest i've been holding off on looking at this distro for some time because i had some key questions that needed answering before i jumped in and gave this a run for its money and i'm talking of course about foreign os now uh if you haven't been around the internet and the linux world over the last few weeks fern os is they just had a recent snapshot release now fahren os is a bit of a middle ground in terms of it's kind of a rolling distribution but at the same time it's kind of not uh it has its own sort of release cadence based on when the developer slash developers can uh can update the features and the core of the os that they have and so today i'm going to be looking through it this could be a long video who knows because yeah i've got a lot of things that i want to address about this this operating system it's uh i've been keeping an eye on this one for a couple of years now or at least the last two years consciously and yeah it's been very interesting watching this one's development so let's roll the intro and we'll get into it [Music] okay so feren os where to begin well i could go into a big history lesson about where this distribution sits but in a nutshell this is my understanding originally fahren os was uh designed to be a little bit of a different spin of of linux mint so i believe it was based in part on linux mint and the repositories there it was running the cinnamon desktop originally and that was known eventually as fern os classic fern os classic is now going out of style and it's slowly being depreciated to the point where or deprecated depreciate anyway whichever word that is uh and we are now coming into a new era of farin os which we've had for uh i think at least one major release cycle now and that is based on the kde plasma desktop and as of this release the november 2020 snapshot uh they are now no longer based in any way shape or form on the linux mint project but they do utilize some of the software that you'll see on on linux mint from time to time so the way that i like to think of who this distribution is for and what might make it appealing to some people is that it essentially fills the gap that linux mint's kde spin used to fill there are not that many kde plasma based desktop operating systems that that go for sane defaults and so on one hand you've got the the remnants of the linux mint kde crowd they are looking for a solid well-tuned same default desktop that use the power and customization of kde plasma to its full advantage and then on the flip side you also have kind of the the the zorin os uh mantra of having a desktop operating system that's very accessible for a new user it's based on ubuntu and it tries to take the the one of the big desktop environments zoronos takes gnome and customizes it with its own settings and shell to make it into something unique and accessible for new linux users fern os does a very similar thing it's based on ubuntu and it takes a well-known linux desktop shell kde plasma and turns it into something that's accessible and customizable and just really really pretty and so fair and os has a lot going for it so let's jump in first of all we've got a just a welcome tour that uh that steps you through what's going on and the some of the first little things i'm going to say out of the gate here is that the the theming very adaptable based on colors we'll look at that in just a second the fonts they're using the interfont which i am a big fan of i use it by default in my own system the welcome tool that they have here is smart enough to know that you're running inside a virtual machine these are all tiny little um value adds that i think fern os adds up to so the sum of its parts is is really compelling so for example when i first booted this up and first went through the welcome tour it said hey look you're probably using a virtual machine be aware of the performance issues and do you want to install the guest additions or vm tools depending on what virtual machine provider you're running so i did that and that was all pretty cool now i just want to briefly address the fact that like i said before this is kind of a rolling release but kind of not and uh and to that end for people who were using fern os classic they they need to do a clean install for the for the new version and uh for the switch from cinnamon to plasma as you can imagine that's quite a big jump if you are still using fair and os classic and uh so um the fern os developer team i don't know if it's one or more but anyway the the development team behind fahren os have provided this little transfer tool which can help transfer your files and settings and stuff over to a new install and it prompts you right here on first boot which is awesome then you get to choose a desktop layout now what you'll notice is that we get a lot of different desktop layouts to choose from here we get a tablet mode which is suitable for tablets and touch screens we got familiar which is very similar to like a windows windows 10 or windows 7 sort of layout we've got the redmond layout which is similar to sort of windows xp and windows vista cupertino similar to mac os and ubuntu unity a lot of people are a huge fan of the ubuntu unity interface and being able to quickly switch the desktop layout of plasma without having to log in log out is uh is it speaks to two things a the power of kde plasma which i've talked about many times on this channel and b it speaks to again same defaults giving people an option upfront to pick a user interface that they are familiar with and fahren os they've really covered their bases to give the ones that people are familiar with so this welcome app so far has just got a lot of value packed in it already the other thing they prompt you for is changing the the menu the default application launcher so again this is all stuff that's default uh that that are capabilities that kde plasma has built into it but just highlighting where these things are for the new user is very very welcome so a bunch of different options you can choose from there particularly of note is the tiled menu that looks pretty down windows 10-ish like i think that's the closest i've ever seen to a windows 10 ish menu really good attention to detail so if i'm going to speak to the default one i'm just going to leave it with the simple menu and we'll come back to that later so then it gives you a quick tutorial about window management the system tray and desktop search now there is a little bit of functionality that is left out of this welcome tour app that is built into the previous welcome screen they used to have a very simple welcome screen that looks something like this and that used to handle a lot of the welcome stuff in my opinion this desktop tour feature that they have is so much more immensely helpful for new users because this what this does is this starts to show just how stonkingly powerful a desktop environment like kde plasma is i think that has all kinds of value and once again same defaults i'm going to keep saying it over and over again then finally they direct you to the software store which is i believe based on the linux mint software store which has flat pack integration and and it's just a solid all-round software store uh oh i forgot we can change the theme uh default light or dark and uh the themes look great and you can customize the colors as you can see on the very next screen so uh finally they just give you a quick heads up about kde connect once you're all done you can reduce the night uh night light color stuff the reducing blue light filter is very helpful and then it says you're all done ladies and gents this welcome tour has taken me i don't know quite a few minutes to get through just explaining it but if you are a new user this gives a fantastic first impression of just how much power is behind this desktop and just what it can do there's no other kde distribution that i know of that points out this many extremely helpful things first up and just for that alone uh fair and os has got me very impressed so software management really quickly can boil down to two different things for you depending on what camp you're in if you're wanting native repository software you can just find it here in the software repositories using the software store if you would like flat pack access they've just got a whole category of flat packs here that you can install flat pack is enabled by default on ferren os if you would like snap integration as well in the outgoing welcome screen so this is not the welcome screen that comes up by default anymore but there was there is a button here that says install software and you can say snap apps it says snap support is not installed would you like to install it you click yes and give it the root password and it will go out and grab the snap apps or snap app support and it will also download the snap store so that you can go and install whatever snap packages you need once again and as my fans spinning up because i'm asking you to do a fair bit right now they've got the bases covered in terms of quickly being able to access whatever software you want from wherever you want it native deb packages flat packs snaps that's the trifecta of package management in my opinion okay so we're going to let that do its thing let's talk really quickly about theming and customization because there is a global theme shortcut up here on the desktop and i just want to talk about some of the customizations that have been made here uh in ferren so first of all the the font i really appreciate the font i'm not entirely sure about the font smoothing in that some of these fonts look a little bit sharp or jagged and i don't know if it is uh sub pixel if it's the if it's the subpixel rendering or if it's the anti-aliasing i'm not quite sure something might be just a little off inter is a relatively recent ish font so i just don't know if it's been tuned absolutely spot on but it's getting very very close secondly i want to talk about the two categories that they have set out in here first of all they have one category here for desktop layout which is the arrangement of like the user interface that you interact with on a daily basis so like where the panels go where the window manager goes etc and these are the same ones that you saw in the tour app then you also have global theme this is what i've been wanting from kde plasma desktop os's for a long time the fact that kde can be customized to do whatever you like is super powerful but if you don't give people just some great polish defaults out of the box they're never going to know because most people just run with the default now luckily enough the default looks fine uh i do wonder if the the edges of the windows are a little bit sharp um and um yeah i don't know that's about my only criticism i think it's a very it's a very subjective thing the shadowing that they have under the the windows is nice kaywin is doing a great job um and all of these different color variations of the theme are really nice let's say i am a big fan of a dark theme with a cyan color highlight i click apply and that's going to change it through to a dark theme with a cyan highlight now one criticism that i do have is that while the uh you'll have to log in and log out to get every single app to respect that dark light theming because right now we've got a light themed file manager if i log in log out that'll fix itself up the other thing i just want to say is that that they only have two sets of icons and that is a light theme and a dark theme it would be kind of cool in my head anyway to have a color appropriate folder icons so that when you open up a file manager or something like that that you see the the kind of the main feature color switch to that as well i believe zara os does this with changing the folder um color icons it's a small thing but i think it might help with that color personalization thing who knows it might just look terrible with all too much of the same color but it's my two cents so i thought i'd throw it in there we shall return to the default theme and i think i will leave the rest of these system settings to where they usually belong if you've never gone through kde plasma system settings there's a bunch here it's all united under the one roof which is great and the search capability is really really powerful so moving on from there i wanted to speak briefly about the fact that they do mention kde's amazing keyboard launcher uh known as krunner now krunner by default is mapped to the alt f2 keyboard shortcut i do feel like the alt f2 is a little weird for muscle memory most people if they're used to a mac are used to command space and if you're on a windows machine most of the time you just hit the windows button i think they even i think windows 10 now has a keyboard launcher that launches with either command space or alt space or maybe even windows key space i'm not really sure but in either case i've remapped mine to alt space because that's what i'm used to but k runner is amazing and the fact that they've pointed that out in the welcome tour like i mentioned already is very very powerful now i want to quickly continue our theme on oh and newsflash we've just got a little fyi we just get a little notice saying hey by the way things might not work the first time around sorry about that uh we're working on it and it'll fix it up in a little bit again really great attention to detail was not expecting that looks a little threatening but this isn't an error don't worry nice i won't appreciate it uh so this is because the uh this is because the snapstore has now loaded up and i can download and install some snaps very nice i really appreciate these little messages that the uh fahren os dev leaves for us very helpful okay so back to talking about same defaults um the i really love the application selection here because uh in the case of fern os i honestly believe that the developer has chosen like the best apps for the job as opposed to respecting like gtk apps on a gnome desktop or kde apps on a plasma desktop uh so thing the app selection here is really really freaking good vivaldi is a web browser excellent like excellent web browser um in my opinion firefox trumps it a little bit but that's my own opinion and uh they bundle in the web browser manager which i believe has its origins in xaron os from way back in the day and all this does is it gives you a really comprehensive list of the web browsers that are available both in repositories and elsewhere that you can choose to install so as you can see you'll have to forgive the sluggish performance the the screen recording and vmware is really buggy today so i've got a bunch of different web browsers i can choose from here including edge coming soon that's a nice touch there's just so many little tiny little tweaks that that ferran os has has made here that for a distribution that's being developed in one's spare time there's a lot of love that's going into this distro i'll speak into the future of this distro a little bit here in a little bit so they use the same photos app as the one that ships with the elementary desktop they also use the same email client or a very similar email client to the one that ships with elementary which i'm a big fan of they have vlc and cheese which is pretty straightforward libreoffice running at whatever the latest version is i believe they actually have a more recent version that what comes in the the default ubuntu focal fossa repositories let me just double check that yeah 7.0.2.2 so very nice and also there's some uh great inclusions here that we don't see very often anymore things like synaptic package manager being able to adjust the software sources and the mirrors and i believe that they use similar tools to what linux mint has as opposed to the one that ships on ubuntu itself so you can see a lot of the fern os stuff comes from git lab whereas the you can change the mirror via an auto speed test to a local download mirror so that your updates for this distro are nice and speedy uh you can see the ppas that are there we have the graphics drivers ppas for the latest uh nvidia drivers for this os which is nice by default there are nvidia drivers built into the to the distro but if you want a more up-to-date one you can come in here enable that and uh and get a more up-to-date in video driver which is cool also it is worth mentioning the actual update manager itself once again it is the linux mint update manager which i believe is one of the most solid comprehensive update managers that there is built in with system snap shots which also tie in with a lovely addition of time shift now if you're not sure what time shift is it's basically like a system snapshot backup tool that can help protect your system against anything melting and going wrong one thing i do notice is that any application that opens as root has the standard sans font as opposed to the inter font not quite sure why that is but that is what it is i guess also you're noticing the network management popping up here occasionally i don't know what that's about but you'll notice that the notifications are popping up in the top right instead of down here down in the toolbar i appreciate that it's a nice touch let's quickly run through the different desktop layouts and see if we can't get a crash here out of plasma so first of all cupertino is the mac layout and it is complete with a dock at the bottom global menu at the top and the uh and yeah icons and stuff on the desktop system tray moves at the top and even the notification tray and desktop search is exactly where you'd expect it to be if you're coming from a mac again ridiculously good attention to detail here now one thing i did notice is that without logging in logging out and logging in again the global menus for gtk apps such as nemo the default file browser it doesn't come up but when you log out log back in again all those all those global menus will sort themselves out which is great so if we then jump back to familiar that's going to give us the icon only taskbar oriented to the left like we're used to seeing on windows 7 and windows 10 so that is once again fairly familiar and it's interesting again how they've added the change the location of the notification tray uh so that it seems similar to what we're used to on windows 10. these aren't just slapped together there's actually some really good matching going on here to what we're used to ubuntu unity is the other one that really strikes me as it utilizes the latte dock i believe on the side here to act as the unity launcher we get a full screen type to launch app launcher as well as you know the categories on the side here and we can also access some widgets here if we want to add them to our desktop as well there is just so much power going on under the hood with plasma these days it's pretty ridiculous and what i've always wanted out of a plasma distro is sane defaults and exposure to new users about just how much this desktop can do and i feel like fern os nails that brief so i'm going to go back to fair and os as the default because funnily enough this is actually how i have my windows 10 machine that i use at work set up with the centered taskbar and the rest of it i really like the wallpapers that come here it's a really shallow thing to say so i'm going to spend 10 seconds saying it brilliant selection of wallpapers much love do appreciate some clean wallpapers i also really appreciate the attribution that goes to the original authors of these wallpapers as opposed to just randomly grabbing some images off the internet and throwing them in with no credit to who came up with them so good work and i think that about wraps us up at the end of the day who is this distribution for this is the question that motivates a lot of the distro reviews that i do and to me the the ideal user for this distribution is anybody that's wanting to utilize the the power that kde plasma has to offer but is so sick and tired of having to tweak everything when they arrive on a on a brand new install what i will say is it is a bit of a shame that plasma 5.20 is not available as as of right now because ultimately this is using the software that's in the ubuntu focal repositories for the most part but that's not to say that it might not land in a future update because judging by the amount of software that is specific to fahren os and that comes from the fahren os repository you can see here just in in synaptic just the amount of packages that are being packaged specifically for this distribution there is a lot of stuff going on here including back ports from kde neon we've got libreoffice going in here we've got a lot of different linux mint stuff that's made its way into here so this is where i want to wrap things up a little bit because the primary concern that i have about this distribution and that i had in the past about this distribution is project longevity so many linux distributions have come and gone over the years i've been looking at linux distros for about 10 years now and in that time a lot of great looking well-polished linux distros have fallen by the wayside and uh and i my sincere hope is that uh fahren os uh has has legs to go um my best understanding of fair and os is that it's been around for almost five years now i could be a little bit off for that but i believe that's about how long it's been around which is already a great sign uh that it's that it's you know been around in some form or other for that long um but i guess the the some of the biggest concerns that i have is that um financially speaking you know these distributions can't just fund themselves so there needs to be some sort of business model behind it i guess we've seen projects like linux mint tackle this in different ways we've seen ubuntu maybe make some big mistakes in the monetization department and we've seen projects like zoran os take an ultimate edition business model and elementary takes the donation first business model and there's every uh every successful distribution that you see nowadays has a successful business model behind it i'm still figuring out where fair and os sits in that regard and therefore the longevity of the project so um i really like this os and uh it is extremely tempting for me to just jump into this world and just live and swim around kde for a while because this distro has by far made uh kde the most appealing it's ever been to me i was already getting super curious about kde plasma and running it as my daily driver but just the same defaults and level of polish that fahren os has that ferran developer has put into this os is makes it ridiculously tempting so i think that's where i will leave the video for today let me know what you think about this distribution in the comments below and uh thank you so much for watching like subscribe comment all that good stuff i will see you in the next video peace out ladies and gentlemen you

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 24,706

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, feren os, feren os desktop, ubuntu 20.04 kde, linux mint kde alternative, kde neon, feren os 2020.11

Id: vdJ0dx54rHc

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020