HefftorLinux - A Clean and Stylish Arch Distro

hello and welcome back to the otb channel today we're going to take a look at a distro an archbase distro that's been requested numerous times hefta linux i've downloaded the xfce version so let's see what we think okay welcome back um i know there's been a little bit of a hiatus a gap where uh i didn't post a video last week and normally i post my videos on a saturday but this time it's been a sunday so i thought i'd better provide a little bit of an explanation uh last week well we'd had some of our lockdown restrictions lifted and so i wanted to take the opportunity to go and visit family and and relatives many of whom i haven't seen for a long time so uh family is ultimately more important than a video so i i made the choice to do that um now yesterday why hasn't the or why didn't i publish a video on a saturday well that was an equally important reason and i'd call it a midlife crisis but actually i'm a bit old for a midlife crisis and i'll just show you uh what it's all about let me just move to my desk this is the reason there wasn't a video yesterday i uh finally finally uh hit the switch on a new motorbike a royal enfield 650 interceptor and it was delivered earlier in the week and uh yesterday was my first my first uh chance really to give it a go um so that's why um it seems a strange thing at my age buying a motorbike 60 years old and putting my leg across a bike well um it's been about 30 odd years since i last did it and i i took the view that at my age if it didn't do it now i'd never do it and i've been prevaricating for the last 10 years so i finally did it and uh brilliant so so that's why you're getting the video on sunday today so a little bit off topic but just to let you know what i've been doing so today um i'm going to look at hefty linux uh it's one of the distros that in your comments i i constantly keep getting requests for um and so i thought well why not let's take a look it i know it's an arch-based distro and it's meant to be a user-friendly arch-based distro now we're spoiled for choice aren't we as far as user-friendly distros are concerned based on the arch system but you know there can never be too many it's all about choice and uh i went in blind really i didn't watch any reviews i have since watched a review by tyler um who i think looked at an older version than i looked at but it pretty much looks quite similar so before we go and do that let's go to the hefta webpage and i keep wanting to say hester rather than hefter i don't know why let's go and have a look at the hefta webpage and uh see what it can tell us so here we are at uh the hefta linux website and uh have to linux.net and i've got to say that it exudes style as soon as you go to it um it's got a very modern look and as you work down um free does not mean ugly it says well absolutely true um say bye-bye to intrusive antivirus telemetry massive but unstable updates etc etc and then it talks about uh linux products hefty linux products so that'll be merch t-shirts and the like that you can buy it has some links to the youtube channel and it's telegram channel and then it talks about something called hefty linux studio i don't remember seeing this yesterday when i downloaded it maybe maybe it was just me maybe it's been added but apparently this is a professional build for des developers designers and artists okay so uh custom build for people who wish to take charge and have a working out-of-the-box professional build for all their development and artistic needs i perhaps would have downloaded that if i'd seen it but hey ho we then have a link to hefty linux downloads and uh we can keep scrolling and it tells us about installing it uses the calamaris installer uh it has a load of custom pro uh packages it talks about how to copy over to usb um and it says there are a number of different desktop versions available but the number one desktop is currently xfce so all good and you can still keep going down uh it's a brand new what's that heft alliance has a brand new tracker for their torrents this is based on a trial run for us to see the volume of downloads and also keep you safe right okay fine well i i did actually go to uh initially to the downloads page which you can see now and yesterday there didn't seem to be quite as many choices here it took me to an osdn page but um that was fine but i see now that we've got a number of choices we've got bspwm these are all produced on the 1st of may we have gnome we have kodi we have plasma and we have xfce which to be honest i'm quite surprised about because when i was reading about this initially it was all about merging um desktop environments with uh tiling window managers and and and basically creating the same flow and theming throughout so um i also found that they have a sourceforge page and this is where it tells us a little bit more so it's known arch is known as being fast powerful and lightweight provides cutting-edge software it's a rolling release obviously and hefta linux is a user-friendly spin-off of the distribution called arco linux so it has its roots in our code linux its main goal the mission is to provide a pre-rice but friendly arch experience to newbies and a ready-to-go system for experienced users and it aims to break the existing barrier between tiling window manager environments and a full desktop environments so bringing a unified concept theme in key bindings and tools which i think is actually quite interesting because if you look at the downloads i suppose we have bspwm there there's a tiling window manager and that's what they focus on i'm assuming you can also download the files here yes you can they do have uh well there's only three isos there they they do have three isos available on uh sourceforge they have the plasma version the xfce version and the bspwm version what i did notice though if i go back to the previous release which was the 12th of march they seem to have a few more maybe it's just that they haven't yet uploaded them to sourceforge so wherever you download it from you can download it from sourceforge you can download it from the hefta linux page let's see what it's all about um i don't know what to expect really i've looked at arco linux i obviously know all about uh arch linux if i'm honest i'm expecting this to be about theming more than anything else but we're not gonna know until we go and take a look so let's do that so on your screens now you should see hefta linux i haven't showed you the installation because to be blunt it's just your standard calamaris install where you do also get to choose whether or not you want uh the nvidia driver included and what sort of kernel you want included i believe by default this has a zen kernel which is optimized for the desktop but i've essentially installed it i booted it up i ran all of the updates and i've just relaunched it and this is what you get it's um it's a very pleasant looking desktop i have to say so this is xfce and there's a transparent panel from what i can see along the top with a little icon with the old horns there and that opens up what i presume is your whisker menu let's just check yeah it's the whisker menu so yeah the wisco menu is great i love it use it all the time down at the bottom we have plank and obviously we've got the developers choices here we've got the brave browser which i believe is default thuna sublime text catfish file search vlc qbit torrent unusual to have that rather than transmission i've never used it i've only ever used transmission i must admit but i'm sure it's absolutely fine you have your terminal and a little bit of a strange choice for the terminal uh urx vt hmm a bit a bit old school i've used it in the past it's fine there's nothing wrong with it i'm assuming perhaps that they've defaulted to urx vt because they do do some other versions with straightforward tiling window managers such as bspwm you've got your settings manager there a show desktop icon your trash can okay uh a little icon that shows us our cpu load in our memory and here i actually have um the welcome screen which is presented to you as soon as you you log in it's a very dark theme you'll already see and the welcome screen isn't that complex and that can be a good thing to be honest i think some of them try and do too much but it just gives you a little bit of an idea it tells you the default kernel there is the zen kernel they found that they got better performance from it on average they've released a kodi build still in development our official kodi config application okay thanks for downloading and i think if i just move that there what you actually have is a code uh sorry um a con key configuration there with the date the time and i'm assuming if you're playing music that's going to show up exactly what track you're playing there i haven't got any music on here so i can't really test that as you go through to applications you have a select number of applications that you can install i've just installed firefox using this method but for instance if i decided i wanted filezilla installed i simply click on it i enter my password and off it goes it goes and does its thing and and there's not a huge amount of applications here it's uh simply oh there we go so filezilla is presumably installed now let's just have a look at internet yes there it is filezilla is installed so you've got the choice of firefox thunderbird plank is already installed when um an application is installed what it seems to do is it uses these large capital letters font next to the icon so you know it's installed you can install the game time shift telegram discord supertux cart and you also have quick links there for installing lootrisk steam and wine tricks should you work so wish going onto the social tab the simply links to what you would expect really twitter facebook twitch etc etc and last but not least you have some links to the patreon page uh i presume donate to have to linux is uh paypal and uh we have the hefta linux page as well so let's just open the hefta linux page um this seems to be opening it is opening brave by default you saw this before i installed i wanted to check the community link uh to see if they do actually have a community page i didn't do that initially but i know one of the criticisms of the early releases was there wasn't really any documentation but i'm actually looking here they seem to have this forum here and looking at well the activity hmm it's medium i suppose it's certainly active but i can't actually see anything there for may i think february march april so it doesn't look as if it's that active but hey ho you could say that if you're going to install an arch system perhaps you don't really need that much community support but i know that goes against the grain really because this is very much meant to be a user-friendly system so let's close down that welcome screen this is what we're presented with it is clean it's stylish it's not to my taste i'll say that out of the box but if you like this look that's absolutely fine let's have a look at the desktop settings to see what wallpaper choices you've got there you've got a variety of choices but actually not not a huge amount i quite like that they obviously really like the dark theme that's quite nice quite striking yeah i mean if you don't like the dark themes you've obviously got a bit of work to do here i personally like the dark v but i do like a lighter wallpaper with it so i'm just going to uh put that on for the time being i think if you have a dark theme you need a little bit of contrast what about the icons actually we're not looking in the right place there we'll check for them afterwards let's just open the thuna file manager right okay well by default those icons are pretty big but of course you can change them to suit i'm presuming i can just hold down control yeah you you can resize them to suit i think they look quite smart i've no idea what they are but we'll get to that as we go along and this is your thuna file manager right i did run the uh htop command when i first logged into here and as you can see it's using 657 megs of ram which is perhaps a little bit on the heavy side to be honest uh for xfce but at the end of the day you know 656 megs it's not a huge amount the vast majority of people these days you know have three or four giga ram at the very least so he's going to be able to cope with this and it does feel quite snappy the desktop i'm running this in virtualbox i've given it a 8 gig of ram and it feels quite responsive let's have a look what we've got in the menu uh so in the whisker menu okay recently used we've got conkey and file manager there accessories the catfish file manager you've got disks you've got plank so it is planked down at the bottom uh let's have a look task manager then you've got vim installed by default which is always good to see i'll take it that's the graphical theme perhaps not but okay so what about development you've got icon browser and meld which is uh an application where you can compare and merge your files so you you can do a diff essentially in a graphical uh in a graphical environment and the sublime text editor okay in graphics the ristretto image viewer peak you can record short animated gifs i haven't got anything on here that i can really show you with that i have seen a demo of that but uh could be quite useful um and you've got a document viewer built in internet well i've installed filezilla and firefox so what came as default was brave and q bit torrents but this is an arch system it's dead easy to install anything you want what do we have in multimedia so we have our pulse audio controls vlc despite the criticisms it's still my default multimedia application so it's good to see that there is no office by default but as you know once again with an arch system it's simplicity itself to install whatever you want what's in other gm run okay so that's going to bring up a box to execute a command there you go useful uh little application that that i often use uh personally um on all my tiling window managers what have we got here the settings manager the appearance yeah yeah a better lock struck screen gui let's have a look okay so this gives you the eye the opportunity to change the image that you're using for your lock screen there's some quite nice images there i would have liked to have seen them available as wallpaper out of the box uh to be honest uh what else have we got ar and r always useful to have color profiles default applications let's just have a look at what we've got as default applications so we have got brave as our web browser thunaur is our file manager ur xvt is our terminal and obviously there's a range of other applications there okay that's fine what else have we got on system or settings should i say i'm jumping ahead here we've got the hefta scale gui safeguard your configuration i think this heralds back to the arco linux roots of this distro whenever a developer releases updates to configuration files generally on installation they're kept in the etc scale directory and they will be copied across but as um a developer continually updates settings if you're using a role release rolling release those settings aren't necessarily going to come down and affect your particular uh your system so you can as it's updated back up your own home directory and or home directory it'll be your dot config directory in your dot local directory i would imagine and copy over the latest dot config and dot local directories from the etc scale directory i'm just having a look here at what we've got we've got backups and we've got main upgrade bash okay add remove add file add folder run backup first run the command scale which would copy everything across okay i've never used this before i haven't found a need for it because generally speaking i run plain arch and the configuration files are my own custom configuration files anyway so i don't want them overwritten but i know arco linux does this as a command so that somebody is using arco and using the arco configuration they can keep their system up to date that way so yeah useful if that's something you're you're going to find well off some utility what else have we got here i think we've just got the standard stuff notifications the panel power manager removable drives and media session and startup shared folders and we have got the xfc terminal settings there by the look of it and what if we go to system you've got d-conf editor there which is good gr sync brilliant h-top is already installed printing's already installed by the look of it shared folder dialog for sharing over the likes of samba system profiler and benchmark users and groups and the xfce terminal okay so it's it's pretty much what you'd expect so let's go into settings what i want to look at here i should say by the way this went immediately to full hd so i didn't need to mess about the live uh iso went straight to full full uh hd in virtual box and it's full hd now so it wasn't a problem so it's obviously got the uh the drivers loaded already let's go to appearance right so the icons or or rather the style that we've got is called juno pale night let me open up the file manager and i just want to change a few things to see what it looks like so i'm using juno pale knight it's very dark what about if we go to juno ocean it's even darker juno mirage okay uh it's obviously got these orange hints on it straightforward juno um okay that comes with any of the without any of the highlighting and we've obviously got the arc arc darker the standard things that you tend to find i i i really like art dark it tends to be my my preferred um style but let's go back to this juno pale night i want to see what icons are installed teller blue dark now i've never heard of teller um but we seem to have quite a few color choices here it seems to be mainly teller so we can change these to tell a pink dark if if that's your thing or we can make them purple or red or dark red that's quite nice quite striking or ubuntu-esque teller ubuntu or we can go for yellow um i think if i'm honest i'm gonna go back to the teleglu which i think is quite nice i've not seen this icon set before but it's a nice flat quite stylish look and feel to it okay what else have we got on our main settings panel anything that uh is slightly unusual it all looks pretty standard from what i can see oh yeah i know what i wanted to look at the system defaults will be restored next time you log in right okay i wasn't sure i've done that much right so i wanted to look at the application shortcuts and wow we seem to have quite a few already set here perhaps this is what they meant by the trying to almost merge the look and feel of desktop environments and tiling window managers and certainly if you use the tiling window managers you're going to use shortcuts and i see there's an awful lot of shortcuts here including rofi roofie so rophee would be hold on is that super plus m it's quite hard to see here hold on no it's not super plus f12 so okay super plus f12 oh roofies installed nice okay yeah yeah like that uh uh rxvt we can do super tea so super tea and there it is this thing here um i don't think it's neo fetch but it's obviously doing something similar um terminal font is actually hack okay the kernel is the zen kernel um i'm not sure i like it if i'm honest i i don't even like neo fetch really i i tend to um stop that uh so we've got something for opening although i know isn't installed we've got x killer what's that super plus escape screenshot tool in fact you've got a load of uh a load of uh key bindings already set for brave catfish chromium even though chromium isn't installed firefox so firefox is super f oh no hold on it's ctrl alt f so let's just try that ctrl alt f does that open up firefox for us oh yes it does i was going to say it doesn't but clearly that's fine if you use keyboard shortcuts the chances are you're going to want to use your own shortcuts rather than somebody else's but this does at least give give you a starting point so i'm quite happy to see that is there anything else there add or remove software let's just see what that is and that brings us back to pamac so with pomack what i noticed right from the outset and let me just insert my password here was i'm not sure that this theme necessarily works with uh per max interface it looks a little too dark but if i go on to advanced you've obviously got the standard things that you can enable and i have enabled aur support interestingly um it has a number of different repositories here so it's not just working off the arch deposit repositories it seems to have added three separate repositories the hefta repo the hefta apps repo and the hefta 3p repo okay the reason the distro developers tend to have their own repos as far as i can see is they want to include packages that perhaps aren't available on the standard or in the standard arch repos or are only available in the aur and they want to offer a pre-compiled version personally i tend to shy away from distros with customized repos which is why i prefer plain arch but it's fine i suppose it makes life a little bit easier for you and means that you're not going to rely on the aur for similar basics uh everything else there looks pretty much as i would expect so that's hefta linux it's a very nice clean xfce desktop it's based on arch and it's certainly as user-friendly as any of these things get so let's go and have a chat so that's hefta linux what do i think well we've got a huge range of easy arch distros out there now so we're spoiled for choice in a way what did i think of this i thought as far as things go if you like the theming and styling it may well be for you it wasn't something that floated my boat in as much as i i wouldn't download a distro just because of the colors and the icons that it uses but if you like something pre-configured and this does it for you well all well and good um and and i think a lot of people do actually choose a distro based on that personally uh if i want something quick and fast i would still use endeavour or esnix but but they're quite lightly themed and you still need to do most of the work yourself for me that's something i prefer but hey this is an arch distro what's not to like and if you like how it looks and you like the wallpaper go for it i don't think i really have anything else to say about it i broadly positive it was snappy i quite like the way they themed xfce but it was all about theming in style um and okay they have they have some custom repos but i i'm pretty much guessing that most of the packages in the custom repos are probably available in the aur should you want them anyway so that's it for today guys um i hope you enjoyed this video i know it's been a little bit different uh being on a sunday morning instead but it's not too long because uh i'm actually going we've got a lovely sunny day outside and i'm going to take my uh my new toy out for another little spin so thanks for watching come and join me on library if you prefer to watch on that platform or odyssey thank you so much for subscribing and if you haven't subscribed already please do so we're just right on the verge of knocking into 15 000 and of course my patreons thank you guys um i seem to have lost my patreon page with the name so i need to create a new one but guys thank you so much for for your support it's meant a huge amount and i'll see you next week

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 4,819

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, old tech bloke youtube, oldtechbloke youtube, hefftorlinux, arcolinux, arch linux, hefftorlinux review, hefftorlinux installation, stylish arch distro, arch distro for newbies, arch distro with gui tools, beautiful linux distro, hefftorlinux xfce, hefftorlinux xfce review, best looking xfce desktop, arch linux install 2021, arch linux desktop environment, best linux distros 2021, best linux distros for beginners, best linux distro 2021 for developers

Id: 7ArbD7FHbdo

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021