The Linux Desktop That Windows 11 Wishes It Could Be

a lot of windows users are really excited about the upcoming release of windows 11 because it has a more modern look and feel to it right it's got a better aesthetic to it it really makes windows a more attractive operating system compared to some of the competition because when you look at what mac os is doing chrome os and what of course the various gnu slash linux distributions are doing you know windows is kind of lagging behind it was starting to look a little old and dated and now windows 11 brings this fresh modern look the problem is though it's a little late to the party because honestly the windows 11 aesthetic that they revealed in their previews linux has been doing this for going on a decade now you've been able to pretty much get all of the effects and everything that windows 11 is touting in linux for many years and one of the most popular linux desktop environments is called kde plasma it's a very customizable desktop environment it has a lot of flexibility to it where you can make your desktop environment look and feel however it is you want it to look and feel like so if you want it to mimic you know windows 7 you can make it do that if you wanted to mimic windows 11 you can make it do that of course you can have it mimic things like mac os or even chrome os i don't know why you'd want to do that but you have that option with kde plasma and today i wanted to show you how you can make kde plasma mimic windows 11. so this is the kde plasma desktop and vermin and it's a very beautiful desktop environment a gorgeous wallpaper it has a gorgeous theme it has a very nice icon set it is probably one of the most attractive if not the most attractive desktop environments we have available on linux now you can install kde plasma on any linux distribution it doesn't matter what linux operating system you happen to be running you could be running ubuntu or linux mint or arch linux manjaro fedora it doesn't matter you can install kde plasma on any of them for purposes of this video this is a virtual machine that i had of debian unstable so i installed kde plasma on top of debian for this video so let me go ahead and transform kde plasma into windows 11. we're going to get that windows 11 look and feel and the most important thing of course is going to be the wallpaper because when you don't have any programs open all you see is a wallpaper it takes up pretty much 100 of the screen so let me go ahead and open up firefox which is the default browser in debian and in most linux distributions and i'm going to go ahead and do a search for windows 11 wallpaper download and it should default to doing a google search here in firefox and i'm going to go to the images tab here in google and the very first image here i'm going to click on that that is from wccftech.com i guess they had the full sized dark image there and that's the one i want because a lot of people choose the the lighter image you know with the nearly white background i want a darker wallpaper because honestly i think windows 11 did it wrong because windows 11 has a very light panel and menu system and then they did that light wallpaper that's too much light you need some contrast so i'm going to go ahead and grab the dark version of their wallpaper i'm going to click on it and i'm going to save image as and i'm going to save it to my pictures directory here i'm going to click save and now that i've got that i'm going to close out firefox it's going to warn me that i've got multiple tabs open i'm going to tick that off so it never warns me about that again and now what i want to do is i want to right click on the desktop and i want to configure desktop and wallpaper and then what i want to do is i want to add an image and i want to go to my pictures directory and add that image and now somewhere in this list of pictures i should see the wallpaper yeah and then i'm gonna click apply and just like that we're already most of the way there but just by changing a wallpaper and you can see that by having the dark wallpaper against the light panel that really is a nice contrast that actually stands out i don't know why the microsoft guys chose the light wallpaper with the light panel that aesthetically that doesn't make as much sense now that we've got that squared away i think we need to go and get an icon set now i love the icon set here in kde plasma these blue icons i actually think they're much more attractive than anything that you're going to get on windows but for purposes of this video of course we're going to go grab the windows 11 icon set so i'm going to do windows 11 icon set linux and the very first link is the window 11 icon theme from the kde store which is great because we're running the kde plasma desktop environment and this icon set that looks okay i'm going to go ahead and click this download link here and click one of the tar archives here and download and that should download that into our downloads directory if we click save file here and that should just take a second to download and once the download is complete i'm going to close firefox again i'm going to open up our file browser here this is the dolphin file manager and then i'm going to click into downloads and there is that tar and i'm going to click on it and it'll open it what i'm going to do is i'm going to extract it and i'm just going to extract it right here in the directory it's already in so there is the windows 11 folder now it's got two different icon sets the standard windows 11 and the windows 11 dark icon set the dark icon set of course would be used against a dark panel that's why that's there now to use these two icon sets that are in this folder the win11 and the win 11-dark icon sets we need to move them to a different directory we need to move them to a directory at slash usr slash share slash icons and you need sudo privileges to move them into that directory so this would actually be easier to do in the terminal rather than in the file manager so i'm going to open the menu system and i'm going to start typing console with a k that is kde's terminal and let's open that i'm going to zoom in here so you guys can see the commands i type the first thing you want to do is cd into the downloads directory so just cd space and start typing downloads and then hit tab complete to fill out the whole path and hit enter and then do a ls to list the contents of that directory and you see the win11 directory let's see the into that directory as well and i could do a ls into that directory and you see that directory includes the two icon sets win win11 and win11 dash dark so with sudo privileges do sudo space mv for move space and then win11 space and then we want to move the win11 directory to slash user share slash icons slash and then give it your sudo password and we just move the windows 11 icon set into that directory i'm going to up arrow to run the same command except this time i want to move 11 dash into user share icons and hit enter you don't have to enter the sudo password the second time since you just entered it before it remembers it for a few minutes and now that we've moved those directories i'm going to close that out you can see the directories were actually moved in the file manager as well close all of that out now let's open up the kde plasma system settings and i have an icon for it if you wanted to you could search for it in the menu system with system and system settings and this is your control panel so think of it kind of like as the windows control panel and the very first selections of things you have to choose from are the appearance settings including a icons uh sub tab here and you can see we now have a windows 11 and a windows 11 dark icon set to choose from these top three at weight up breeze and breeze dark are defaults here in the kde plasma desktop so i'm going to choose the windows 11 and then i'm gonna do apply and now you see our icon set has changed if i did the file manager once again you can see instead of the big blue icon set that we had had before you know we've got some different colors you know these uh yellowish you know kinds of folders that are common in windows when you know so those have changed these were all blue icons before so we've got the icon set now the next thing i want to do is i want to change this panel because one of the big things about the windows 11 panel is that we're going to have a centered taskbar and a centered start menu so what i want to do is i want to right click on the panel and choose edit panel and then what i want to do is i want to add a spacer i'm going to click add spacer and you see it added a spacer to the end of the panel which is fine and then i want to add a second spacer because i want to add a spacer at the beginning of the panel as well and then that pretty much effectively centers everything and then i'm going to close out the little edit mode here so that gets us out of being able to edit the panel now it's locked in place i think a nice touch would be to change the start menu icon the kde logo here if we could change that to a microsoft windows logo that would be cool so once again i'm going to open up firefox here and in firefox i'm going to do a search for windows 11 icon and let's just find a nice icon that we can use for this so i'm going to once again click on the images tab and let's see here is a nice logo it's got a transparent background and it's the right size 256 by 256 that's a good icon size i'm going to open image in new tab now that i've opened it in this new tab just to get a good look at it yeah i like that so i'm going to right click on it i'm going to save image as and i'm going to download that into the downloads directory click save and then i can close out firefox now and then what i want to do is want to right click on this and then i want to configure the application launcher and then you see a preview of the icon that it's using here which is the standard kde logo i'm going to click on it and then i want to choose a different icon we have the system icons here but i'm going to choose other icons and i'm going to go search for something on the system of course i want to search for the windows 11 ping that we had downloaded and then i choose that i click apply and now we have a windows logo where the kde logo used to be i don't know why people want to do that but occasionally some people do so there's how you do that and i do think the panel actually is a little too big here so what i would probably do is i would make this a little smaller once again i'll click edit panel and let's make that instead of 46 pixels tall let me do 44. 42 how about 40. i think 40 is pretty good there i think that's the right size for a panel one of the things that is kind of new to windows is virtual desktops virtual desktops though have been around on linux for decades not even kidding we've had virtual desktops for a long time so i'm going to get back into the system settings and let's configure a little bit of the virtual desktop so you hit the appearance settings here underneath it you have workspace settings and you have workspace behavior and you could click on that and then it got some animation speed stuff you can also choose whether you want to do single click to open files or double click i'm a double click guy so i actually would change that but single click could be interesting for some people but most windows users are probably used to double clicking things so that's probably a good thing to to know where that setting is because you you may want to change it then i'm going to go into desktop effects it's asking me do i want to apply these settings before i leave this page i actually do and then let's get into desktop effects actually let's get into virtual desktops that's the one we want by default we only have desktop one let's add some desktops i'm going to add 4 is a good number for virtual desktops especially for full desktop environments so i'm going to create desktop 2 and then i'm going to edit and create desktop 3. it doesn't really matter what you name these you never really see the names of the desktops i'm going to click apply and now in our panel here we have this desktop switcher that has four squares and if you hover above it it'll give you the name desktop one two three and if you have something open on that workspace for example i have this here open obviously on desktop one you can see desktop one has a window open on it it shows you a little representation of a window being opened if i open the dolphin file manager once again you know it will show you a representation of these two windows being open kind of where they're at on the screen so that's very cool if i had something open on workspaces two three or four you would see those and you could very quickly switch to those workspaces you can actually just use the mouse to switch you can also use the keyboard to change virtual workspaces so if you do control and then f1 through four in my case i can switch between the four different desktops so if i did control f4 i switched to desktop four if i do control f1 i switch back to the very first desktop some other cool things that you can do in linux with virtual desktops is let me go back here and in workspace behavior i want to do desktop effects and i'm going to scroll down to workspace management by default you do have a desktop grid effect that's turned on and if i do configure let's look for the key binding control f8 what this does it gives you a desktop grid view of all of your virtual desktops so if i did ctrl f8 you see a four paned grid here and it would show you all the windows that are currently opened on these desktops if i do control f8 again that goes away another effect that you can turn on is you can turn on the desktop cube let me click that on and hit apply and let me find the key binding for the cube i believe it is ctrl f11 yup so now what happens if i do ctrl f11 instead of a grid i get this cube it's basically got four walls to it because i have four desktops and i can just spin it around and when i find a desktop i want to be on such as desktop four i can double click it or i could hit escape on the keyboard either one works and i'm on workspace four i wanted to i could control f11 again and spin back around to desktop one and then just click on it and i'm back on desktop one another cool window management effect is the present windows effect that's ticked on by default if i click on the configure button to get the key bindings there's three key bindings control f10 control f9 and control f7 they do different things so ctrl f10 shows you all the windows that are available on all the desktop so i'm going to switch to a second workspace and let's open up the file manager so i've got three different windows open on two different workspaces if i did control f10 it presents all of those windows right here in front of me so i can quickly navigate between them and choose one let's go back to the first workspace you see control f9 presents windows only on the current desktop so control f9 only shows me the two system settings windows it doesn't show me the file manager open over on workspace 2. now control f7 only shows you windows of the same window class so right now i have two system settings windows open here let me open up a file manager as well on desktop one and now what i want to do is i'm going to highlight one of the system settings windows here and i'm going to do control f7 it's only going to show me the two system settings windows it didn't show me the file manager window now i could do control f7 here on the file manager window and watch what happens we get a present windows effect but it shows me just the two file manager windows and these are open on two different desktops this is the one open on desktop one this is the one opened over on desktop two so i could quickly you know switch over to the the file manager that was opened on desktop two i'm gonna go ahead and close that out and move back to desktop one i'm gonna go ahead and close all of this out one of the neat things people like to do on their windows desktop is to add cool little widgets such as date and time widgets and weather widgets and things like that to their desktop you can do that here in kde plasma as well i can right click on the desktop and i can choose add widgets and you get a widget selection tool and there is a ton of built-in kde plasma widgets that you could add i'm going to search for clock and the clock i want to add i want to add the digital clock so i'm just going to drag that over here and i'm going to put this over on the right side of the screen now let me get out of that and let me enter edit mode and now i can drag this what i could do is i could also resize it make it as big as i want it to be i could add a background to it as well i probably would want to add a background to make that stand out i wonder can i edit the font here let me configure digital clock let me see what kind of settings i have here you have font style what i'm going to do is instead of using one of the standard system fonts let's see how about urw gothic l i don't know what that is but yeah that's a more modern sleek looking font i would go with that i think i'm going to click ok now what i want to do is i want to add another widget so instead of right clicking on the desktop since i'm still in edit mode here i'm just going to click the add widget button and now let me go ahead and add a weather widget because those are always fun and i'm just going to drag this over here and click the configure button because obviously we're not going to get anything displayed until we tell it actually where we're at let's see choose a location here we go i'm going to choose the noaa that's the national weather service here in the u.s location i'm in louisiana but for purposes of this video let's give chicago as a location it's going to do a search let's choose this first one i'm going to select that we'll tell it to update the weather every 30 minutes and click apply and then go to appearance what do we want display temperature wind pressure humidity sure why not units let's make sure that that is in fahrenheit it is since we're in the us i guess it's smartly figured we wanted fahrenheit temperatures i'm going to click ok on that and then what i'd like to do is actually get this sized similar to the clock i think that would make a lot of sense how you can only make it so small though because it's displaying a ton of information so let's resize the clock then to be about the same size and then we can get these into position where they're rather close and close up the widget selection tool yeah i really like that that is a very clean looking desktop right i think any windows user i think would be shocked at how amazingly gorgeous that kde plasma this particular desktop environment can be on linux and by the way the blurring effect that the windows 11 team was uh touting you know blurred menus and backgrounds and things like that you have the the blurring of your menus and things in kde plasma as well that's kind of a default setting these days in kde so i think it's really great that windows 11 has adopted some of these really incredible features that have been available in linux for years but honestly i don't know why you would want windows 11 because it still lags behind it's still light years behind what linux is able to do and and to be honest if you are thinking about upgrading to windows 11 from windows 10 you have to make sure that your machine can even run windows 11 because windows 11 is going to have some very high system requirements that for linux linux even these very sleek modern looking desktop environments that we have on linux most of these can run on machines that are five six eight years old even you don't need the latest and greatest hardware to run linux we're very conscious about this right we don't want people to have to buy new hardware to run linux that's not what we do in our community we're very environmentally friendly in a lot of ways because we like to have these machines last years and years sometimes more than a decade we don't like people being forced into planned obsolescence where they buy a laptop and three years later they have to buy a new one because they can't even upgrade to the latest version of that operating system that's not the way it works here so if you guys are on windows 10 or maybe some of you guys are still running windows 7 even i strongly urge you to consider trying out linux now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode and of course i'm talking about absi gabe james mitchell paul west sakami alan chuck curt david dilling gregory heiko aryan alexander peace arch and fedora polytech raver red prophet scott steven and willie these guys they're my highest year patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen this ever growing list of names on the screen you're seeing these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you guys appreciate my work and want to consider supporting me check out distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace kde is better at windows 11 than windows 11.

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 172,135

Keywords: windows 11, how to, windows 10, operating system, system requirements, windows 11 upgrade from windows 10, windows 11 review, open source, windows 11 install, linux, gnu linux, ubuntu, linux mint, manjaro, kde plasma, linux desktop, linux desktop environment, linux kde, desktop environments, linux operating system, linux for beginners 2021, linux vs windows, linux os, linux tutorial 2021, distrotube

Id: S6Zf16gYzIY

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Phydoux]

Your 1,111th video should be about how terrible Windows 11 is. 😀