New Release of Archcraft OS. Will It Change My Mind?

today i wanted to take a look at the recently released arch craft os they had a release just a few days ago and the reason i want to take a look at arch craft again is when it first came out what people really were interested in arts craft i had a ton of viewers contact me hey man you got to take a look at arch craft you got to take a look at arch craft so i did a video about nine or ten months ago where i took a look at arch craft for the first time my first impression of arch craft and it's a 19 minute video and it is very negative and it was very negative not in an unfair way it was very fair i literally couldn't do anything in this operating system the font the system fonts and everything were so small i actually could not read anything i couldn't read the panel i couldn't read anything in the terminal couldn't read the fonts in the open box right click menu i couldn't do anything and people were like man all you needed to do was just change the font size and everything you'd be all right well how can you go through that menu and find the the program to change the font size in a menu where you can't even read the font and it was very frustrating and it was just painful you know my eyes my eyes aren't 20 20 vision but my eyes aren't terrible and that font was so small it was it was literally hurting me looking at the screen so you know that was not a positive uh review of arch craft os in any way and i don't like doing negative videos about free and open source software because the people that work on these things i mean if you're creating free and open source software in my opinion you know you're doing the lord's work right and i never want to shine a negative light on people that are working on free and open source software but unfortunately and so many people were interested in my thoughts on that and i couldn't just not make a video on it because then i gotta respond to comments like well i would do a video on arch craft but i i tried you know i took a look at it on my own time and it was horrible and then people are going to like what do you mean it's horrible why is it horrible they won't believe you until you actually show it to him on camera so i made the video knowing that probably the the main dev would eventually address some of those issues and he has he contacted me about the recent release of arch craft um just a few days ago and he's asked me specifically hey would you take another look at the operating system your video a few months ago you know it's very popular a lot of people still think that video is relevant and it would be great if you had a more recent video about arch craft because i don't want people to think that arch craft still has those problems that you had nine or ten months ago very fair right he's absolutely right and i don't want people to think that these kinds of open source projects don't change over time so i'm going to take another look at arch craft so i grabbed the latest iso i'm going to run through a quick installation here on camera and we're going to go ahead and take a look at archcraft os once again but before i run through the installation let me show you guys the website for arch craft it's at arch craft dash os dot github dot io i will link to their website in the show description but when you go to their website you get this uh release announcement that pops up so this was just released on may 26 today i'm recording it's may 29th so about three days ago they had this new release they updated the the installer there's two installers in arch craft there's the graphical calamari installer which probably most people would prefer to use there's also what they call the abif installer which they say is for expert users i don't know if it's for expert users it's a rather easy installation to go through to it's very reminiscent of the old debian incurses kind of installer i can actually show you some screenshots of the abf abif installer that is what they call it is you know it's just this in curses installer probably if you've run through a debian installation or like an ubuntu server installation or something you've never gone through one of these kinds of incurses installs you'd be fine with that for me i'm just going to choose the calamari's installer today i think that's what most people would prefer to use now one interesting thing is this note at the bottom that says important those of you that are already on arch craft you've got an installation of arch craft that you've been on for a while it says that you need to update your arch craft installation with this new iso so you probably just need to do a fresh install if you've done one of the older versions of arch craft i guess there's been enough changes that it's a pretty significant change from one version of the operating system to the next so even though it's based on arch or rolling release they suggest doing a fresh installation so i'm going to run through an installation here inside a virtual machine i'm going to install arch craft inside vert manager and i gave this virtual machine four gigs of ram and two threads of my 24 thread amd threadripper so plenty of system resources for pretty much any linux operating system now when you first boot up you you get i guess this live environment which i believe is open box because there are title bars and close buttons and everything by default you have two window managers installed you have open box and bs pwm and i think yeah right click menu that's open box you get a welcome screen really a nice attractive welcome screen i gotta say aesthetically this looks great right i love the color scheme very minimal not a lot of busy colors in everything so i i prefer like minimal backgrounds i love the wallpaper the poly bar at the top is themed rather nicely maybe you know a little busy for my taste like you got some kind of almost like gradient things going on here uh but not bad not bad i i mean i i wouldn't have to change that bar i could run it as is now looking at the welcome screen is there a link to the installer here it doesn't look like it there's about os get start i'm assuming that's supposed to be get started maybe it is get started and they just ran out of room to display the rest of the word i'm not sure but i wanted to mention that on camera in case the div in case it actually does say get start instead of get started they should probably correct that a gallery of thumbnails yeah doesn't look like there's a link to the installer here in the live environment so what i'm assuming is we'll find the installer and the open box right click menu so i'm going to right click and typically an installer probably would be under a like a system category let's see applications system there we go install arch craft and install arch craft expert expert's going to be the in curses installer and just the regular link to install arch craft should be the calamares installers i'm going to click on that yep and this is the very familiar calamarius installer if you've seen one installation with this installer you've seen seen everything right i've done a million of these installs but i'll do this very quick on camera so we've got the welcome screen where you choose your language it's already selected american english for me i'll click next and then the location it's already chosen the central time zone in the us for me that's correct i'll click next english us is my keyboard layout it's already chosen that for me i'll click next what do we want to do with the disk i want to erase the entire disk and give arch craft the entire 20 gig disk in this virtual machine that i created now do i want to swap i'm going to choose no swap since this is a vm but if you wanted to you could create a swap or you could create a swap file for me no swap for the vm click next and then we need to create our username and password my username is going to be dt his name is going to be dt uh his password i need to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons so let's create our strong and complicated password and login automatically without using a password is ticked on by default i want to take that off by default i mean the reason you create a password is for privacy right you don't want anybody to just be able to log into your computer you want to have to enter a password to enter your computer and then use the same password for the administrator account is also ticked on by default that one i do want to be on by default so what this does is it sets my dt user's password and the sudo password to be the same password and that's nice because otherwise you'd have to remember two different passwords then i'm going to click next and then we get a review here a summary of everything we've done so far everything looks correct location keyboard partition scheme yes i'm going to click install and this portion of the installation on my machine typically takes uh five to ten minutes i'm going to pause the recording i'll be back once the installation has completed so the installation completed and we successfully rebooted into our freshly installed arch craft and we get our login screen and the login screen we have three different options we have default for a desktop we also have vspwm and open box i believe default which is what's ticked on at first it's going to be open box so let's go ahead and select our user we have our user dt already selected here and then let's enter our strong and complicated password for the dt user and we log into open box um the wallpaper didn't display correctly that's just a vm problem i'm going to open a terminal and do nitrogen space dash dash restore and what was really interesting about that and i didn't expect it is just my mind is so engrained with super enter to open a terminal from running tiling window managers forever i just instinctually hit super enter and started typing nitrogen space dash dash restore and that actually worked i and i didn't even recognize it that's kind of cool that super enter here in open box does open a terminal uh what closes it super shift c maybe super x super c no what did we we opened up something here so uh super c so super enter opens a terminal super c closes the window that has focus that's very nice so open box is a very lightweight very minimal window manager that when you first install it if you do a vanilla installation of open box it's a black screen it doesn't set wallpaper doesn't have a panel doesn't have a dock it's one of those window managers when you log in for the first time you think you broke something because you just get a black screen you know open box is very minimal you have to build everything around it you have to build a proper desktop environment around it by adding a panel and systray and various applications and daemons running in the background and things like that something to set the wallpaper and this is a really attractive open box desktop here i like the panel the panel looks good we have five workspaces by default if i do a mouse click we go to workspace two back to workspace one i'm assuming super two would take us yeah to the second workspace super three would take us to the third workspace super one takes us back to the first workspace one of the things i really like already is that i can actually read the panel the font is uh actually not that small this is about the size font i would use on my 1920x1080 you know 24 inch monitors where before the font size was very very tiny like i don't know what kind of monitor the main div uses but he was using uh such a small font size that i i'm sure i'm not the only one that had serious problems getting the previous versions to work for me we have a cartoon on and on and is this media controls if i click on it something is probably playing but i don't have uh it is playing let me pause that i don't know how that sounded here on the recording i'm not monitoring what you guys just heard it's not coming through the speakers thankfully because it would you know bleed through the mic i'm actually going to pause this section of the recording i'm going to go back and listen to that and see how that sounded and i took about 30 seconds to go back and listen to the previous clip that i recorded and yeah i could hear the music playing on the recording i just wanted to make sure it didn't mess up my speaking through the microphone as well so that's very cool by the way the volume here is set to 46 i'm not sure why but if i click on it it mutes it does a mouse scroll wheel yeah mouse scroll wheel goes up and down the volume so that's a really nice little widget here in the poly bar and then we have time and date clicking on time and date i see it switches between the time and the date kind of cool and then of course we have a power button here i'm assuming that would give us like a power session menu for restart shutdown and all of that which it does if i right click on the desktop of course we get our right click menu here in open box and you know you have a bunch of applications installed by default i'm not really i'm going to show all the applications here i'm just going to quickly uh highlight some of what is installed pcman fm is the file manager nitrogen is what sets our wallpaper our terminal emulator we should take a look at because it says choose preferred application uh yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure what it's trying to do there uh terminal emulator if i click on that link we actually do get a terminal emulator and is this alacrity i think it is i think it was termite before termite is no longer on the system though because termite's a dead project and this is alacrity so um my preferred terminal i really like alacrity i did notice the shell prompt it's a little slow loading in this vm now it could be a vm problem but i don't know i'm also got a warning here about lib egl warning when i tried to launch alacrity here from another instance of allegri that's kind of weird what shell are we in so i'm going to do an echo dollar sign shell all caps and slash bin slash zsh so csh is the shell that could be part of what's slowing the prompt down if they're using oh my zsh which i'm sure they are you know if you got a lot of plugins and doing fancy stuff with the prompt sometimes these prompts can be a little slow so it could be a oh my zsh problem i don't know it could also just be that i'm taking a look at this in a vm on real hardware it might be fine we should actually do a u name dash r let's see what kernel version we're on being archbased you would expect to be the latest it's 5.12.6 and then let me launch h-top assuming h-top is installed it is and how much ram are we using i gave this vm 4 gigs of ram we're using 341 megs of ram that's pretty normal for open box open box lightweight not much going on i mean there's h top and the terminals running and polybar's got some stuff going on but you know 341 megs of ram that is pretty minimal let me just quickly highlight some of the other default programs we saw that alacrity was the default terminal let's see what our default web browser is is this midori i think this is the midori web browser i don't know why they would choose this midori 9.0 a lightweight web browser i don't think anybody anybody would use this browser i think every single person that installs archcraft is probably going to install you know a firefox or chromium-based browser they're not going to run midori so that's that's a strange choice because you're installing a lot of applications anyway i mean you're installing a little bit of stuff here you might as well install a proper web browser that most people are probably going to use so you know if you stick to free and open source obviously you know go ahead and install firefox out of the box because you know it's kind of the default on most linux distributions anyway if you wanted to you could go with chromium or one of the chromium based browsers as well but nobody's going to use midori i think that that's just wasted space on the iso the file manager we've already mentioned this pc man fm i really like that eye concept too very colorful text editor our gui text editor is going to be jeannie uh jeannie's really nice i like jenny i'm getting back in the right-click menu one cool thing is they have this category here apps as root because many times you want sudo privileges when you open a terminal or a file manager and they've got you know links to that already here so you can open up alacrity or your thunder file manager which i'm wondering why they got thunar here is it actually thunar let's see let me give it my root password and uh that's weird you've got both pc man fm and thunar installed if that's the case let me do an about yeah that is actually through gnar so two different file managers that's weird i don't know why you wouldn't want pc man fm open as root so you got one file manager not root privileges and another one with root privileges um then you got a leaf pad here with root privileges so that's your text editor jeannie also another text editor and one thing i haven't thought about to look for yet is a run launcher is something like d menu or roofie installed so um well that that's actually easy to figure out the super key by itself so super with no other key bindings behind it opens roofie this i'm assuming this is the rophi launcher it looks like it and from here you know i could search for something i don't know just alacrity because we know it's here and then super c to close and then super by itself to get the run launcher again i do like the the animation so the animations are a little slow for me i i don't like i like things opening up instantly but i know a lot of people like a little visual feedback they like opening and closing animations and drop shadowing and stuff and i will say you know it's not bad like it's not over the top so let me do the animations again yeah yeah you know it's not horribly slow i can get down with that of course you can always adjust that so that would be you know like your picom settings i'm assuming if i go in here and there is a preference category we have open box settings and this is where you could edit your open box config so your key bindings or the entries in the right click menu here you could do all of that and this and then the compositor settings we could enable blur effect which uh it's kind of texting on the cpu so i'm not going to do that especially in a vm we could also just disable compositing all together we could edit our compton config it's actually picom these days it's been renamed to pycom and fort because compton is no longer developed we could change style this could be interesting i actually didn't know this was here so if i did beach what does that do we get new wallpaper and a new panel new theme new open box theme that is very nice now that was pretty smooth i gotta admit i i kind of like what they did there if i did forest we get forest wallpaper new polybar new open box theme and let's do one more change style and let's do nordic everybody loves the nordic theme actually i don't quite i don't like the nordic theme really i find it not it's not contrasty enough right for for me so i i'm actually going to go back and change it one more time and let's go ahead and change to spark wow that's that's blinding white so i said you know what i'm gonna go back and change it one more time because hey what was the default the default was kind of nice let's go back to this one there we go yeah that's that's a little easier on the eyes i'm going to right click one more time and go back into preferences one thing other than changing the style i do notice the entry right below it change the font i i like that so now people that have severe problems with the fonts you know if it's just way too small you can't even read it way too big or whatever now you have the change font what do you want to change the font for polybar rophia alacrity open box dunce which is your notification system or the gtk fonts that's your you know application fonts so and then globally as well i guess that would change you know set the font size for everything so that is really nice change launcher what does this do so i'm just going to pick one because i really don't know what this does i'm going to do column is that for yeah that is for rophie i like that i mean i don't actually like that right-hand panel but i like the fact that you can change the uh the theme for rophe let's do uh app drawer let's see what that does now now i i don't mind it being on the left hand side with a bigger column and then the theme the little search thing you know what i'm just going to leave that for now i i can i can deal with that one thing we haven't taken a look at is wallpapers uh i'm assuming i can probably click change wallpaper and that would launch nitrogen which it does and let's make nitrogen full screen actually i didn't need it full screen because it's not that many wallpapers here so we've got the default and then some of the other wallpapers which we saw when we changed the theme other than that we have some arch craft miranda wallpapers here such as this one here nice and minimal i i don't mind these wallpapers either i could just go with one of these branded minimal wallpapers as well yeah some of the other wallpapers here which i probably are part of some of the theme packs that we didn't enable very nice very nice since we have a dark theme i actually liked this light wallpaper i didn't like the white theme that went with it one of the things is you know typically when you have dark themes you want light wallpapers and when you have light themes you want dark wallpapers and the the theme that went with this wallpaper earlier was a white theme and it didn't make any sense because it's kind of like white on white no real contrast but having a dark theme with a light wallpaper really makes a lot of sense now before i get out of here i do want to check out the bspwm window manager that's also on the system so i'm going to log out of open box it's asking me are you sure i'm assuming typing yes and hitting enter would allow me to exit yes it does and then back at the login menu we have bspwm as an option i'm just going to quickly login bspwm just to make sure just to verify that it works and it does we have a different polybar theme and a different wallpaper when we log into bspwm so very easy to figure out you know which window manager you're in super enter i'm assuming would still get us the alacrity terminal it does it's a bigger font size and bspwm in the terminal than it was uh maybe it's part of the theme maybe this particular theme has bigger font size for some reason but it's just something visually i noticed immediately is the prop is a little bigger let me close that i do notice it does seem to load the shell prompt and everything quicker in bs bwm here than it did in open box that doesn't make any sense because this is the same terminal i'm assuming it's still zsh as our default shelia so you know it's kind of weird uh so bs pwm is a manual tiling window manager meaning it's not uh dynamic like xmlned and awesome and q-tile so there's no master and stack layout i don't know what the default layout is unless they've set a master and stack as default it's typically it's this weird dwindle kind of layout where things start getting divided more and more toward the bottom right hand corner which is okay i mean most people are never gonna go beyond probably three or four windows anyway so nobody's ever gonna get all of those really tiny windows in the corner where open box we had five workspaces on bspwm we have eight workspaces i'm assuming if i did super eight yeah we'd go to the eighth workspace super one goes to the first workspace let me open up a terminal and super 8 would well actually i accidentally launched something with rophie there but that's fine this is ranger the ranger file manager what i'll do is super shift 2 sends ranger to the second workspace and now you see the second workspace is a different color letting me know hey something's on that workspace if i do super two i'll go to that workspace super c closes that super one goes back to the first workspace super c closes that window super by itself once again gets us ropey and i think that's all i'm gonna do on this very cursory overview of archcraft os the the latest release that was just released about three days ago i've got to say very impressed this is so much better than it was nine or ten months ago for one thing i could actually get around you know because i could see the fonts weren't so incredibly small it was completely unusable the last time i used it now that is one of the best open box desktops i think i've ever reviewed on a linux distribution not even kidding and i've reviewed some really good open box linux distributions bunsen labs crunchbane plus plus archbang archlabs arco linux makes a great open box edition uh manjaro has a community open box edition that's really good may box i don't know if they're still under development they do a really good arch based open box distribution but this was really good their open box i was very impressed with and it had everything already set up for you you could very easily change themes and change the the layout of poly polybar and change the layout of rophie and change my font sizes and everything uh it was really really cool that they've done so much work for you you know setting up that menu with all those options because again open box out of the box is very minimal there's a ton of work that goes in to properly theming a nice open box desktop so i i i myself being a former open box user used open box for many many years i can appreciate the kind of work that went into creating that desktop and even though i only spent just a few minutes in the bs pwm desktop uh that was really nice too everything worked as expected all the key bindings and everything just i had no problems i felt very comfortable just the few minutes i spent bspm so job well done i'm really glad that the dev for arch craft reached out to me and asked me to take another look at this it was something i needed to do and uh i i've been putting it off for a little while or you know he's got so many other things going on in my mind i'm glad he reached out and kind of reminded me hey man you really should take a look at arch craft again your first time looking at it i know it was bad but give it another shot yeah and he was absolutely right job well done now before i go i want to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode absolutely dallas gay blue mitchell allen and community architecture 30. david the other david dilling gregory lewis paul polytech scott steven smith wes and willie these guys they are the producers of this episode without these guys this quick look at the recently released arch craft it wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work please consider subscribe to distrotube over on patreon all right thanks guys peace now he just has to add qtile as a desktop

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 49,558

Keywords: archcraft os, arch linux, archcraft linux, archcraft review, archcraft linux os, archcraft os review, archcraft distro, archcraft linux review, archcraft bspwm, best looking linux distro, beautiful linux distro, archgraft openbox, linux, gnu linux, archcraft install guide, window manager, linux window managers, openbox window manager, bspwm winow manager, best openbox linux distro, best linux distro 2021, distrotube

Id: 8qSeZ7ET7PQ

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021

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