today i'm going to be taking a look atan arch linux based distribution calledxero linux i've had several peoplerequest that i take a look at thisparticular distribution and i've got tosay it does look really cool for onething their website i like the blurb onthe front page it says zero linux is aneye candy lover's wet dream right sothis distribution better look goodbecause according to them it's all aboutthe aesthetics and i gotta say thescreenshots do look good and it lookslike they have three main editions theyhave kde plasma gnome and xfce accordingto their website it looks like kde isthe flagship edition so i'm going to goahead and download that the iso fortheir kde plasma edition is 2.8gigabytes in size and once i get thatdownloaded i'm going to run through aquick installation and do a first lookgive you my first impressions of xerolinux inside a virtual machineso i've booted into xero linux hereinside a virtual machine this vm i gavesix gigs of ram i gave it two threads ofmy 24 thread cpu and i gave it 25gigabytes of disk space because it beinga nearly three gig iso i'm assuming it'sgoing to install a lot of stuff so iwanted to make sure i had plenty ofspace in this vm 25 gigs should be morethan enough for most linux distributionsso i'm gonna go ahead and choose uh thestart xero linux installer here fromtheir welcome screenand this is the calamares installer it'sa very familiar installer it's one thatmost linux distributions use these dayswe get the welcome screen which you canchange the language if you need tochoose something other than americanenglish for me american english is fineso let me move my head out of the wayand i'm going to choose next and then weget the core and this is i guess uhwhere we can choose what kernel it saysstock arch kernel and that's the one iwant let's see we could also go aheadand install intel gpu drivers amd gpudrivers here in this vm everythingshould be open sourced and part of thekernel so i don't think i need to worryabout video drivers so i'm not going totake on any of this extra stuff i'm justgoing to go ahead and click next on thisand then other packages android and iostools add support for android and ios uhin this vm i'm not gonna bother audioand music tools well let's see whataudio and music to assist audio playersconverters and editors do i get a listif i click the arrow yeswe get lists and then audio players iguess by default it was going to installthem all i definitely don't want thatbut i don't mindwe'll just do something lightweightaudacious is fine g music browser is notbad i do like radio tray as well like ii could do some of these audio editorsuh well let's see what they offer so letme get the listaudacity is still here and that's goingto be the older version of audacity thatarch is still shipping with the one pretelemetry so typically i'd probablyinstall that or install one of theaudacity forks or door is here as wellbut for purposes of saving time i'm notgoing to install any of this stuffbecause i'm not going to be editingsoftware in this vm i'm not going toconvert any audio as well and then theother audio toolsthings that you can use to changemetadata and stuff like that i'll turnall of that off this is actually reallycool so i've seen a similar setup witharco linux orco linux has a they use thecalamari's installer and allow you toinstall a lot of extra packages righthere in the installer up front savingyou time and i'm assuming that's whatzero linux is also doing is uh they'rethey're trying to do the uh the arcomethod here with the calamari'sinstaller and i love that because ithink it's one of the things that makesarco a really great distribution so i'mreally happy that xero linux isfollowing the same path here let me putmy head back on the screen i'm going tomove this over and just quicklyi'm assuming that they're going to shipa default suite of applications likethis is just if i want extra stuff i'massumingso i'm actuallynot going to install any extra stuffbecause i want to see what they actuallyship with without me choosing anythingextra so i'm just going to choose nextthe time zone calamaris has figured outi'm in the central time zone in the usi'll just click next english us is mykeyboard layout so i don't need tochange that i'll click next and thenwhat do we want to do with the disk iwant to erase the disk and give theentire 25 gigabyte virtual diskto zero linux it looks like it's goingto create a butter fs file system and wehave the choice of doing no swap whichtypically in a vm i would do no swapthere's no reason to have a swap in a vmbut if this was on physical hardware youprobably want a swap and i'll do swapfile and it looks like we did have theoptions i guess if you didn't want to dobutter fs we could do either extend4 orxfs i'm fine with butter fs since it'sthe default so let's go with that thenlet's create our user so i'm going tocall my user dt and then we need tocreate a strong and complicated passwordfor the dt userand then repeat that strong andcomplicated password and then do we wantto log in automatically without askingfor a password no the reason you createa strong and complicated password is tomake sure that you have to enter apassword to get into your machine so i'mnot going to tick that on i will take onthe next option use the same passwordfor the administrator account that way idon't have to remember two differentpasswords that way the dt user'spassword is the same password for rootand sudo so let me go ahead and choosenext and then it gives me a summary ofeverything we chose and all that looksgood i'm going to click install and thenit's going to warn me that it's about toformat the drive and write the disk andinstall now this portion of theinstallation typically takes i don'tknow about 10 minutes on my equipmentalthough it does warn me that theinstall could take upwards of 30 minutesnow that probably depends on how muchextra software you chose to installsince i didn't use any extra software ijust went with the base packageshopefully it won't take too long for mei'll pause the video until theinstallation has completedand that portion of the installer hascompleted that took about 10 or 12minutes on my machine now again i didn'tchoose any extra packages to installthat's why it was a little quicker forme if you chose a lot of extra packagesto install during the installationprocess then again they warned you thiscould take up to 30 minutes to installnow to go ahead and complete theinstallation we need to click restartthe system which will reboot the machinethat's what i'm going to do right nowand i rebooted the machine and wow thatwasa really interesting grub menuthat grub screen was only there foraboutthree or four seconds butit was one of the most interesting grubscreens i've ever seen i hope you guyscan appreciate what we're dealing withhere obviously when they say this is aneye candy lover's wet dream they'retaking it to some rather extremes but ihave to admit i'm kind of enjoying thisso let me go ahead and log into kdeplasma looks like by default they'regoing to use a wayland session whichwould probably be fine here in this vmbut i'm going to go ahead and choose thex11 session just to make sure everythingis goodand we have logged into our freshlyinstalled xero linux their kde editionlet me go ahead and configure thedisplay settings so i right click on thedesktop to get to this display settingsand i'm going to choose1920x1080 for resolutionuntil it to keep those changes and nowevery time i come back to this vm itshould always log me in at 1920 by 1080once again we get our welcome tool hereand we have our nvidia card checker andnvidia legacy drivers that's great thatthey include this becausemany desktop users of course are goingto have nvidia graphics cards andsometimes getting those proprietarydrivers that you need can be a littletrickywe have the shell configuration that isinteresting let's see use this tool toconfigure your shield switch to zsh andit looks like omzomzsh that framework is installed alongwith this and the p10k prompt the zshshell prompt is installed or we canrevert back to default bashso what do they use by default let me gointo the console and let's seewhat shell are we using they are usingbash by default because neofetch tellsme that the shell is bash 5.1.16is zsh installed it is but it's a veryplain vanilla zsh prompt so let me goahead and close the terminal and let'sswitch to zsh with the oh my zshframework a plugin system and the p10kthat's the power level 10k shell promptthemeand then it opens the terminal and we'regoing to need sudo privileges to installthose packages the oh my zsh and thepower10k themeand the installation script hascompleted and it tells us it's done nowlog out and back in to apply so i'm justgoing to close that terminal and open anew terminaland nownow we have the power level 10k themeand you can see because it actuallytells us this power level 10k let me seeif i can zoom hereyeah zoom in here in console and you cantell we got this little fancy uh shellprompt here and then that lets you knowyou're in zsh because if i switch overto bash it's just a standard you knowplain vanilla bash problem which is userat hostand not much else there's no realfanciness going on in their bash promptso let's exit out of bash to get backinto zsh i do like the neofetchinformation that they've included ofcourse we got the xero linux logo hereyou know it's very arch-like but it'sgot a like a x that's overlaid on top ofit and of course we got some informationhere including how many packages wereinstalled by default1250. so again i didn't install anyextra packages but 1250 packages areinstalled by default on the kde plasmaedition of xero linux looks like thelinux kernel is5.16.8 it's going to be rolling releaseright so you're always going to be onthe latest and greatest kernel you'realways going to have the latest andgreatest software with arch linux andany arch based distribution so let meexit out of that utility back to thewelcome screen butter fs tools it saysthat's coming soon configure samba idon't need a samba because i'm not goingto beinteracting with anycomputers that are going to have windowson it sambas for file sharing uh extrapackages i believe that isyeah where we can install some uh gamingstuff the gaming aio installerwhat is aiookay i click on that and then we caninstallsteam lutrus heroic proton ge that'svery cool so well we have a button toinstall doom emacs as well not going toinstall doomy max because it's a lengthyinstallation process takes about 10minutes or so to uh to install doomemacs and install kde windows tiling noi i wanted a tiling window manager i'dinstall a proper one the plugins to makekde italian window manager they're okaybut it's still not reallya proper telling window experience i'mnot going to botherplaying with that install kvm and qemuso this is virtual machines so kvm thatis the linux kernel virtual machine itallows you basically to use a programlike vert manager which is the virtualmachine program that i'm using actuallyto actually take a look at xero linux sothat's what i've got installed on mymachine to do this review here and itsays disable startup i'm not going tobother doing that either so let me exitout of that that's a really neat welcometool though there's there was a lot ofgood options there your video driversinstalling all your gaming stuffconfiguring the shield the zs8 shieldthe fact that you can install doom emacsthey put in a ton of work on thatwelcome screen now since thisdistribution said it was all about theeye candy let's talk about aesthetics ilike it i like the icon setthe circle icons look good i like thedefault wallpaper i like the themingit's interesting because we've got thistop panel up herethey've got some spacing around theborders here that's kind of ainteresting touch and then you've gotyour bottom center dock so it's a verymac os 10experience right with the top panel andthen the bottom dock and this dock whatdock are they using are they using plankor they may be using latte dock which isa dock designed to be used with kdeplasma so i'm going tohover over the dock i'm going to do acontrol right click to see if i can getany kind of informationedit dock so if i edit the dock latte sothat is latte doc and i'm not going tobother changing the dock i just wantedto see which program that was so that islatte doc let's see what programs areinstalled under development for mostpeople you're not going to be interestedin any of this stuff but you knowthere's some cute stuff obviously kdeplasma's cute based uh desktopenvironment cmakegraphics it looks like we have k-coloredchooser and windview wind view is yourimage viewer in kde plasma underinternet we have the avahi server kdeconnect that allows you to sync yourmobile devices to your computer and thenwe have vivaldi is the default browserthat's an interesting choice vivaldi isproprietary software rather than freeand open sourceit is based on chromium so i wouldexpect it to be you know just as good asany other chromium based browser as faras performance unfortunately the licenseprevents somebody like me from using itlooks like it is vivaldi 5.1.2567.39let me close that out i don't know toomuch about the vivaldi browser i havenot used itvery often occasionally i come acrosslinux distributions that do ship it bydefault and occasionally open it just tolook at it but i've never used it formore thantwo or three minutes at a time of courseduring the installation process we couldhave chose probably a dozen differentweb browsers to install so i can't faultthis particular linux distribution forshipping uh proprietary software out ofthe box arco linux also does the samething and people often ask me you knowyou talk about how you love arko and andi'm enjoying zero linux right now butthey shipunnecessary proprietary software like aproprietary web browser and you don'tcomplain well they did offer me choicesright i just went with the defaults forpurposes of this video but obviously iwould probably switch vivaldi out withsomething like brave or cute browser orlibrewolf you know any of the free andopen source browsers that we haveavailable on linux getting back into themenu system we have a lost and foundcategory that's interesting nothingreally in there multimedia we have videofor linux v4l2that's a usually used for webcam stuffand under office no office suite so wehave a program called localize i don'tactually know what that isit says you do not have to be a softwaredeveloper to be a member of the kde teamso i'm assuming this isfor kde development i don't knowbut we don't have anything likelibreoffice or i didn't even see a pdfviewer actually installed becausetypically that would be under the officecategory as well so i actually did notinstall that much software then we haveuh settings stuff so this is where youwould add remove software so let's seethey are using is this paymac let me goto about yeah pamac 10.3.0so pamac is a software center agraphical software center available onarch linux and archbase distributionsand the great thing about it is it's apackage manager and it has support fornot just the standard arch packages butyou can also turn on the aur whichalmost every arch user is going to wantaur packages but you could also turn onflat pack and snap support as wellnownot a lot of art users use flat packsand snaps because the aur really haseverything but it's nice to have that asan option because sometimes i findpackages that are broken in the aur andthen i have to you know try a flat backor a snap and i'm glad that's availableas an option to take on and off here inthe software centergoing back into the settings categorysome other stuff we have a r and r whichis a graphical front end to xor and r sothis allows you to configure yourmonitors now this program a r and r isreally important i actually use it allthe time well not all the time but youknow anytime i reinstall linuxdistributions you know i have triplemonitors i have three monitors sometimeswhen you plug it into your graphicscards the monitors are not arranged inthe correct order right so how would youarrange them in the correct order youuse a r and r because you would havethree screens here and then you wouldjust drag them into the the exact layoutyou want basically and then you would dothe check box to save that layout whichis just a shell script and it's actuallya shell script that executes that xorand or command x render commandthen what you would do is in your autostart programsthat script that x render script putthat there and it will always configureyour monitors correctly when you log inother stuff in settings we have our grubcustomizer which is interesting so i'mgoing to have to give root permissionshere to do anything with grub but i'massuming this is where you could changethat really fancygrub screen now i don't really want tochange it there's that really coolbackground that we saw when i firstbooted up the system yeahyeah i'd like all of that i'm not goingto change that and then we have systemsettings so this is just your settingsmanager in kde plasma where you canchange themes let's talk about themes sowe have a breeze breeze dark breezetwilight layin and layin solid yeah sosome pretty cool themes uh the defaultis layin yeah i'm good with the defaulti don't think i want to play with thatthere was also a zero linux system tooland that is our welcome screenand we have a system category with someof the same stuff that we've alreadyseen hereyeah not much to see here let's open upthe system monitor let's seesystem resource usage looks like we'reusing 1.3 gigs of the six gigs that igave this vm we're using about 10 gigsof the 25 gigs of disk space so itactually didn't really install that muchstuff cpu usage it's wellit's hovering all over the place butaround 8 to16 percent you knowoccasionally it spikes up a littlehigherbut again this is a virtual machine soperformance inside a virtual machine isnot indicative of performance on actualhardwareunder the utilities category we havearc which is the archive manager for zipand unzip things like that we have anemoji selector which is always importantwe have calculator which is ourcalculator that's interesting that's agtk calculator but i would assume thatcalc with a k would also be installedfor kde plasma it is notwell that's interesting that thecube based calculator wasn't installedbut calculator is installed whichcalculators find program is justtypically when people make theseeditions of kde plasma for example theywant all cube based applications or withgnome they want all gtk basedapplications anything else interestinghere spectacle is the screenshot toolsynapse is installed let me launch thatso synapse is a run launcher uh it saysand press the down key to browse anyrecent activity but we don't have anyrecent activity i used synapse a littlebitprobably12 years ago i a long long time agosynapse was a really cool run launcherthat a lot of people used in linux iactually haven't heard about that in awhile but that's cool that they go aheadand ship it out of the box of course youdo have a k runner usually with kdeplasma krunner actually here it doesn'tlook like it so you got somedifferent stuff so they have swapped outsome of the default plasma stuff withsome other options now let me rightclick on the desktop i'm going toconfigure desktop and wallpaper becausei would like to seewhat kind of wallpaper pack they haveand i i like the default wallpaper butyou know some of the other options herehoneywave that actually looks reallygoodyeah very plasma like right thisabstract artvery very plasma like that may be one ofthe default plasma wallpapers uh thisone is really nice zero plasma onethere is zero plasma 10.yeah i think with the kind oftranslucent theme they've got going ona lighter wallpaper would probably be anorder maybe this one hereyeah like i couldi could get down with that right thenthat is a sexy looking desktopand i think that's one of the nicestlooking kde plasma desktops that i'veseen around it it's right up there withgaruda's version of kde plasma they'redragonized edition now you are not stuckwith the theming options that are hereby default because if i go back to theweb page for xero linux you know at thevery bottom of the front page you havecustomization rises and themes and thenyou have these four themes zero layinis that default theme right that is whatwe were looking athere by default but they have threeother options that you could choose fromso there was zero dracool which i'massuming is a dracula theme yeah comeswith some different widgets and it usesthe dracula theme and they have aninstallation guide if you click on itit's a github page right you go andprobably clone this particulargithub repositoryand yeah they give you some installationinstructions actually what you need todo is you need to edit your pacman.confand then i'm assuming you can justinstall a package directly from pacmanso that's kind of cool other than thexerodrag dracule option you had zeronord which is a nord theme and againsome different stuff going on with somewidgets there and then zero sweetwhich is a very gerudo-like it's usingthose candy icons you know those reallycool icons so yeahoverall i am incredibly impressed withxero linux you know one of the thingswith yes so many arch linux baseddistributions out there and many of themare really just themed arch linux rightthey just throw some wallpapers sometheming you know some icon sets and callit a day and call ita distribution you know something uniquebut xero linux really did take thisto another level again i think it rivalsgaruda because garuda is very heavilycustomized and you know zero linux ontheir page an eye candy lovers wet dreamyeahi think they hit it out of the park ifthat was their goal overallyeah i think it's a good distribution ifyou guys want to check it out i willlink to the xero linux website in theshow description check it out spin it upin a vm if you want to give it a shotbefore you actually install it onphysical hardware now before i go i needto thank a few special people i need tothank the producers of this episode andof course i'm talking about devin gabejames matt michael mitchell paul scottwest allen chuck commander angry diocodillon george lee linux ninja maxim mikearyan alexander peace archer fedorpolytech red prophet stephen and williethese guys they're my highest tieredpatrons over on patreon without theseguys this episode you just watched wouldnot have been possible the show was alsobrought to you by each and every one ofthese ladies and gentlemen as well allthese names you're seeing on the screenright now these are all my supportersover on patreon because i don't have anycorporate sponsors i'm just sponsored byyou guys the community if you like mywork and you want to see more videosabout linux and free and open sourcesoftware please subscribe to distro 2over on patreon alright guyspeaceme personally i would have went withfish over csh