Salient OS - An Arch Distro for Gamers and Multi-Media Enthusiasts

hello and welcome back to the otb channel today we're going to look at a distro that i've never looked at before i've been aware of it but always on the peripherals i don't know why because it's a little gem it's called salient os and it's an arch based distro that is targeted for gaming and multimedia enthusiasts so least i can do is give it a quick look i'll see you after the intro okay welcome back so salient os it's an arch-based distro it's an easy install arch based distro it's uh developed by a guy called silent robot who's the same silent robot that i've mentioned before alongside ben fitzpatrick when we looked at storm os which i believe is the distro that they they developed in partnership but salient os is silent robot's own distro and it's a uk distro so for that reason alone i'm surprised i haven't looked at it before and i don't really know why because i have been aware of it but for some reason it's not come to the fore and that seems to really describe salient it's only just hit distro watch even though it's been around for years as far as i know there's been regular releases all the way along and yet you don't hear a great deal about it but when you do hear something about it it always seems to be good and the video really that switched me on to this was uh it was probably a few months ago it was a video uh that was being done by english bob and he's a gamer and he made some comments about how salient is brilliant for gamers and why aren't more people showcasing this distro and i remember checking it off and thinking yeah you know i must do that i really must i'm no good for demonstrating gaming but i can look at it as a linux distro so um i did just that now first the caveat this this is a first look you've all seen arch before you've all seen xfce and plasma and they're the two desktops that this can be downloaded with um you've all seen a calamaris install so i'm not going to focus on those things you know in great depth i'm going to do a brief quick look with a view to perhaps doing an in-depth look in the what future i'm actually thinking about is that i'm going to install this on one of my laptops and live with it for a month or two on the laptop and see what i actually think because i'm always encouraged to give uk based distros a good go and this looks like it could be a little gem so before we get any further let's go over and have a quick look at uh the distributions web page well the official web web page is salient os dot github dot io and uh nothing to see here would largely seem to say what this is it's just a launch pad really and if you click on the button it will actually take you to the sourceforge page where salient os is hosted not a huge amount to say here it simply says it's a rolling release based distro very much aimed at multimedia and gaming gear enthusiasts it comes pre-configured with applications out of the box to help you get started quickly there is an installer there it's the calamaris installer and i'm assuming for gamers that this is going to be the big thing uh for those utilizing e-sync or dxvk lutrus steam proton the system and security limits have been configured accordingly to give the best performance out of the box saving you all of those additional steps now i i'm i've never configured any of these things and i'm gonna have to leave that to you the gamers to perhaps give me some feedback about what you actually think but from uh that the reviews that i've watched on youtube it would seem that it's pretty easy to get this up and running as far as a gaming system it comes with well you can choose between an xfce and a plasma version and yeah i've chosen this time the xfce version and if we have a look at the files here you can see that it looks to be pretty active you know july 20 january 21 another one in january 21 february 21 another one in february 21 march 21 and this is the one that i've installed the kde sorry the xfce version that was released only on the 6th of may so as he says there are a few minor changes and bits and pieces sorted out but it's clearly um it's clearly being actively developed and what does he say to install removed audio or application plugin plugins you can actually install some of those now in calamaris and he lists them there so okay let's have a look enough talking let's see what salient os is all about right so you should see the the salient desktop in front of you i've just booted the live cd and as you can see it's quite striking a very dark wallpaper with a picture of a deer reindeer whatever and uh the installer launches straight away and i'm pleased to see it's already set for british english so let's just move on it's got my time zone correct uh english uk is already set as the default keyboard and we're going to go for a raised disk uh let's go for no swap given that this is just a virtual machine and i'm just booting this in standard mbr mode rather than uefi so we'll put in our name and our password what i will do is i'll pause this once we get to a point where you've seen it all before so use the same password for the admin account yeah absolutely i just wanted to take you to this point so installs only the latest linux kernel or linux lts kernel um i actually like the lts kernel so i'm going to use that nvidia we don't need nvidia uh the cuda cuda tool kit support for davinci resolve and blender not quite sure what that means but uh i don't use either but if you need it there it is intel unicode amd u code well i'm on virtualbox so i don't need to worry too much about that and audio applications uh let's just install pulse mixer i see pipe wire is an option there already you can install jack here if you wish development applications i'm just whizzing through this really quite quickly just to see what we've got um i like genie so i'll install that device support xbox drive or solar some of you may like that graphical applications so you can have blender dark table uh let's have dark table uh inkscape why not the always my fallback internet applications so what have we got here um well let's have firefox um and let's also install chromium office applications yeah so let's go for the libreoffice fresh system applications it's interesting so it even includes bleach bit um cpu power so if you've got a laptop probably a good thing gufw yeah let's have a graphical firewall to help us out there d editor why not and ventoy bin so it isn't even as ventoy on this terminals will have alacrity video applications let's have a look it's quite hard to see the sidebar here because uh um well it is it's it's a dark theme gu vc view well i haven't got a um any sort of webcam on this handbrake caden live let's go for obs studio let's go for shot cut that are my two uh favorite vlc and simple screen recorder and do we want virtualbox we don't need virtualbox at this stage nice to have a little bit of customization here and i think it's quite sensible it doesn't kind of drown you with options so let's hit next it's telling me what it's going to do it's going to create basically an ext4 partition for the full 32 gig virtual drive i'm going to click install install now and we'll come back once this is finished right so that didn't take long at all we're all done uh so i'm gonna reboot now and we'll come back and have a look at the install system okay so uh i shut the system down the iso hadn't automatically been removed and just just because i found this quite often i tend not to do an automatic restart i'll always shut down remove the iso if it's still there and reboot but anyway it's rebooted fine and i have to say that i i quite like this you obviously need to be a real fan of dark themes for this because it's very dark uh we we have a panel up here or i presume it's a panel up here or part of a panel uh with your system tray i don't know why i'm having issues with this at the moment but uh with the virtualbox menu coming up but hey ho i've shifted it to the top so it's uh not so much in the way we've got the whisker menu there we've got another panel down here uh which is giving us access to steam lutrus okay desktop desktop background menu and icon behavior let's see what that brings up whoa hold on hold on now we have got quite a few uh wallpapers here we certainly have and you can tell it's built for gaming because it's very much those sort of themed wallpapers let me just have a look here and see what what i perhaps fancy um let's go for this one oh i like that that's quite nice and and just when you've got a dark theme anyway i think i think you need a slightly lighter wallpaper if it's all dark it can be too much so i'm just going to leave that there but okay so we've got a nice looking desktop the thing that always strikes me about xfce is in its vanilla form it's the most uninspiring desktop you've ever seen but with just a few tweaks you can turn it into something really special i quite like the way that this is themed just with a panel at the bottom which is great your standard menu up there your whisker menu and let's just have a quick look what's here so you've got the terminal you've got the file manager uh file manager i'm assuming is going to be thuna which it is and uh i quite like the blue icons i've got no problem with the look and feel of this so far um so let's have a look so we've got our accessories including covanta theme manager we've got nitrogen in there although xfce in its basic form isn't going to use nitrogen but if you want to install a window manager really good notepad qq you've got pycon i don't know what piper is to be honest does it tell me uh i don't know let's just launch it and see uh-oh something went wrong please make sure your device is supported and plugged in as i don't know what it is i'm not going to comment on that um let's have a look so what else have we got here a sensor viewer task manager vim and wine tricks installed from the get go on development we've got genie i obviously asked for that to be installed and notepad qq is there anyway so this is a linux text editor which is pretty similar to notepad plus plus for those guys who are used to the window side come on get out of the way that's it it's gone again right um education we've got libreoffice math games so we've got gamehub lutrus steam in its native and runtime format now i'm not a gamer i'm really not and i'm clueless when it comes to games so all i'm going to do is say that this is a distro that is optimized for multimedia and gaming so if you're looking at doing gaming on linux this really is not a bad thing to start off with um so all your gaming stuff's there graphics we've got dark table and the and inkscape all of which i opted to install multimedia we've got chromium and firefox sorry internet chromium and firefox multimedia we've got obs studio installed out of the box and shortcut and vlc and simple screen recorder so it's clearly done everything we asked it to do in the installer and you can't really say much else we've got libreoffice base there that's the fresh version and then of course we've got all of our settings here so we'll have a look at settings in a minute including gufw so let's just launch that and it should bring up the graphical firewall at the moment it's not running but i can turn it on as simple as that and there we are on its default deny everything coming in allow everything going out set up um what else we got here anything interesting um standard stuff really and then of course in our system we've got alacrity and add remove software so what's ad remove software right okay so this appears to be for mac it is indeed um just out of interest let's just see if the aur is installed by default so let me have a look advanced third party enable eur aur support okay so it isn't enabled by default but it's really not a problem let's just see if yay is there and yay is indeed installed so that's quite nice to start off with i'm not going to go into great detail on this um it's arch you all know that uh arch is my preferred distro so this is just another easy to install variant of arch i'm just looking at the settings here and i want to look at appearance and you've got a fair old number of styles there so the nordic darker standard buttons we have installed but you can have arc dark arc darker and these are qga dark hugo mangaro window let's just uh see if we can open up a file manager and have a look and see what this does so if we went for art dark which is the one that i normally go for okay breeze dark does that even work with gtk doesn't oh yes it does it does it's a little bit dark for me we've had a look at the nordic darker we'll move back to that uh cube quote okay quo gear manjaro quo gear mangiaro dark quo gear ubuntu upon too dark you get the idea there's plenty there i'm just going to set it back to uh nordic darker what about the icons uh anything specific here not as many it's mainly papyrus icons but easy enough to add and the font set is deja vu sans which is absolutely fine so let's go back to all settings again uh your standard stuff here obviously you've got your phantom theme manager you've got your panel your panel profiles your display it went straight to full hd 1920 by 1080 so no issue there you've got your keyboard there and obviously you can set all your shortcuts in that let's go back to all settings add and remove software obviously takes us to a mac again session and start open the login window okay so it's xfce it's nicely themed it has a lot of nice wallpaper here i i will say that um in fact let's uh let's see if we can go to appearance again actually it's not there is it where do i set the wallpaper in xfce i can't remember it's use i'm sure it used to be on the right click maybe it's me so really like some of these wallpapers that's quite striking okay or the chickens or your very traditional arch type wallpaper you get the idea there's lots to play with here there really is so guys that salience it looks to me like uh a another easy installable arch system it comes with it its own theme but to be honest you can change the theme to to look like whatever you want it allows you a choice of packages to install at the installation stage and perhaps most importantly for the gamers out there all your gaming apps you know lutress and steam are already installed and i believe they're configured so yeah it's an option let's have a chat right so that's salient os i mean a very brief look today um but first impressions are really good i know i didn't do a h top on the video but but i did do one after i hit the stop recording button i know it was too late but it was showing about 480 megs which for xfce is fine um it's a pretty lightweight distro and if you're using xfce that that's around the level that you'd expect now i liked quite a few things about it i did like the dark theme but that's me you know i'm i like dark themes generally i like the calamaris install where you've got options and you can choose the software that you want a sensible range of options though you're not overloaded with choices just enough in my opinion and i generally like the theming i suppose on the downside you could say well hold on this is a one-man distro steve you know should we really be looking at one man distros how robust are they going to be for the future and i generally agree with you that i'm always a little bit wary about one man distros um but at the end of the day it's an archbase so so it's an arched base distro with theming and configurations thrown in that at the end of the day you can all change um although it's targeted for multimedia and gaming enthusiasts at the end of the day it's arch so you can change it as you want to i think it's a little gem um i'm gonna put it on my uh hmm i'm not i'm not quite sure i might put it on my tiny little x131e and see how it does on that it's likely to get the most use there because i i've often got that in front of me uh when i'm watching tv at night and i'm just trying to check emails or or use a web browser so i i will come back to it after i've used it in anger but that's it for today guys um i'd like to say thanks everybody for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it um i must do another live stream soon as well because i really enjoyed that uh you you sort of need a hook to hang those on but i'll be giving that some thought in the next week or two thanks everybody and if you'd like to come and join me on the facebook group do please if you'd like to watch this on library again or odyssey please do although we all know that the future of that platform is up in the air at the moment i've no idea what's going to happen to it um what i would like to say i'm just going over to my patreons now as normal uh thanks to the patreons for supporting me guys it's been a real help and that's robert gary aristotle storm pick stephen mike david richard thai forest patrick glenn magnus skipper john m and david thank you so much for your support guys it's quite a short one today so that's it for this week and i'll see you next saturday

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 6,378

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, salient os, salient linux, silent robot, salient arch linux distro, easy arch linux distribution, easy arch installation, linux for gamers, arch linux for gamers, salient linux for gamers, best linux gaming, best gaming linux distribution, best linux distribution for gaming, arch, arch based, salient os gaming, salient os review, wine, wine tricks, best linux distro, salient os xfce edition, storm os

Id: sTvdC0BdPY0

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021