 Every so often I come across a distribution that I just have never heard of before and it makes me ask what the f is that distro and this has happened so often I've created a series of these videos and Over the course of that series I've learned that just because I've never heard of a distribution before doesn't mean that it's automatically bad So I've tried to learn to keep my mind open when it comes to these distributions And I think we actually have discovered a good one for today So today I'm going to be taking a look at a distribution called ultramarine Linux and This distribution is based on fedora now There are a ton of distributions out there based on Ubuntu arch Debian and those types of distros there just dozens of them all over the place You can't stumble into distro watch and not come across at least one Debian based distro or one arch based distro Which you can't find so many of our fedora based distributions There's just not a lot of them. So this one here should be pretty interesting So what we're going to do today is we're going to load this thing up in a virtual machine and take a look at it But before we do we should take a look at the website because as you know One of the best ways to judge a distribution is on its website. So a lot of the distributions I looked at in this series didn't actually have websites and usually that was a precursor to them being Not so great, but that's not the case today So let's go ahead and take a look at the ultramarine linux website, which looks like this So it's a very minimal website, but there is quite a bit of documentation here They have a wiki. So if you wanted to get some documentation on the distribution You could easily do so and other than that. It's just a fairly simple website It's well designed. It has all the information you should need So you can you can come here and just download it right with the download button Which is not a given based on my experience with some of these distributions Sometimes they hide the download button looking at you endeavor OS Anyways, one of the cool things about ultramarine linux is that if you have fedora installed already you could actually translate your existing fedora installation into an ultramarine installation by just using this bash command So that is actually kind of cool. It reminds me a little bit of regolith regolith is a i3 based distribution But they have a ppa that allows you to To migrate a traditional Ubuntu based distribution into regolith itself, which is kind of cool So this does something similar now Let's read a little bit about what ultramarine is ultramarine linux is a linux distribution based on fedora Our goal is to design an experience that satisfies the beginner with the simplicity while come while retaining the features of a Power user with demand. Here's what we have to offer based on fedora It's open source and it has same default. So those are all three things that are probably pretty good Other than that, there's not a lot of stuff here outside of the wiki now on that wiki You'll find all the information you need to install Some of the things that they tell you to do post installation Including installing the nvidia drivers and the codex that you would need because similar to fedora You're probably not going to get access to any of the non-free binaries that you'd get with the non-free repositories, which you have to enable in fedora So you'd probably have to do the exact same thing here So we'll come back to the wiki if we need to but let's go ahead now and install this thing So oh it before I do actually, uh, we should click that download button at the beginning because there are multiple versions So the flagship version runs the budgie desktop by default But they also have the cute fish version Which is the one we're going to take a look at today because I haven't taken a look at cute fish in a long time They also have a gnom version and a panthan version Which is actually the elementary os desktop environment, which is kind of cool You don't see other distributions have the pantheon as one of their defaults So that's kind of neat. I almost took a look at that one But I decided to go ahead with cute fish because like I said, I haven't looked at cute fish since it was like early in beta So that's what we're going to do today. Here we are in vert manager and this is the cute Fish display manager. I have no clue what the password is, but we're going to try live user like so We're going to try ultra marine like so We're going to try user Like so And we're going to try live all those failed. I wonder if there's no password at all. No, there's definitely a password Okay, well I'm going to remake the the live environment and not leave it here so long that it will lock me out because I'm I wonder if they have the the password out here somewhere Let's let's go to the wiki and find out because I'd rather really prefer not to have to recreate the Virtual machine a few moments later Okay, I ended up having to recreate the virtual machine because I could not find the password that they used Not a great user experience, but I'm the one that let it sit here for so long that it locked me out So I'll blame myself So let's go ahead and see if we can make this full screen now that I got the mouse back And From the grub menu there you saw that it's very close to fedora So that it was basically the fedora grub screen now I said we're going to be taking a look at q fish and this is what the q fish desktop looks like So we're going to go ahead and install this before we take a look around So let's go ahead and install the hard drive now This is the fedora installer by default So from what I read they are working on an An installer that is custom to them, but they're still using this for now because that one's not ready yet So we're just going to go ahead and go through the anaconda installer now Now this is actually more similar to the fedora server installation instead of the workstation installation because and I say that because In the user the work spit the workstation installation of fedora You don't create a user until afterwards, but that's not the same in the server version of fedora So we're going to go ahead and choose the proper hard drive, which I always do that wrong It's all it's all it's already selected for you. You just have to click done Not the most intuitive of things, but I've learned And we'll go ahead and create our user now. So so and like so not This adds pseudo privileges And it does require a password. So that's good. And then what is the advanced options here? So this oh, this is for group membership and Specifying a regular id. Okay, so we'll just cancel out of that Hit done up here and then it's it will ask you to press done twice if your password isn't strong enough I used a very strong password. It's good enough. So we're going to go ahead and hit begin installation and We'll wait for this to be done and then I'll come back. Okay. Now that is done And uh, you can see that it's done if I move my face here and uh, it took about Probably five minutes or so so about the same as other distributions that you'd expect in this class So let's go ahead and finish installation. It should reboot the system Or it might be like fedora and genom where it's going to ask me to Reboot the system on my own. So we'll do that. So Like so, I think that's actually gonna yeah Reboot, okay, so we're going to reboot the system Get back here. So this is the actual glit grub screen here and that's similar to the fedora splash screen as well um Hmm, that's fascinating Why would the on-screen keyboard show up instead of the display manager because the display manager flashed up there for a second Let's see. Oh, there we go. All right. So This looks like sddm and this is definitely not the display manager We saw there at the beginning when I was locked out So it's weird that this it's using a different display manager or maybe it's not and that's just a specialized lock screen Let's go ahead and enter password here and here is cute fish desktop on ultramarine linux So I have no clue what I'm doing here because I've like I said, I've only used cute fish there for a little while When it was still in beta So we're gonna be taking a true first look here today before we get into anything else Let's open up the terminal and while that is really bright. So I saw a dark mode switch up here Let's switch that on because that's gonna make things look way better. So let's go ahead and see if neo fetch is installed It is not okay What what's with the delay when a command is not found? That's really weird See that's weird. Okay, so we're gonna do sudo dnf install Neo fetch just because it can so and we're gonna wait for dnf to install that thing Which is gonna take a few minutes because dnf is pretty slow But let's go ahead and take a while we're waiting for that Take a look at the rest of the system. So is this a menu up here? No, that's like an activities thing probably Um, it's just the title of the application actually. So All right, so this looks like what is this is this nautilus because it's kind of designed like nautilus I'm but I'm betting that it's not because we don't have we don't have like the about screen here anywhere Like you would a nautilus. So this is not nautilus. It looks like it though, doesn't it just a little bit All right, so we got a hit yes here. There we go So clear this and then we're going to do neo fetch like so So we have it's very own ascii art and it says it's an ultramarine linux This is running zsh as a default shell. So that's kind of cool This is the cute fish desktop environment and this is the cute fish terminal and One of the things that I remember from cute fish from before is that the applications don't seem to have any settings So I don't know what this is all about this period up here. I'm not sure what that's for or what the x is for Okay, oh, you want to that's a that's a tab. I bet you that's a tab So if we ran we're running like a dnf pseudo dnf Update thing here like this and it doesn't change the title of it still just says the period That's odd But if we add another tab, that's the that's a tab It I don't like how the close button is so big. It just makes me think I'm closing the window You know, those are equal size. Uh, it's a little weird But I don't think that that is the ultramarine guy's fault. That's just a choice that the cute fish guys have made Okay, so we'll let it do its update thing. There's no reason why it can't let's go ahead and take a look at the settings So this is the cute fish settings application. I would bet that this is at least Take some design cues from the genome software settings because it's kind of laid out the same very simple That's uh weird. Okay. So I clicked on wlan and then I clicked on display and then it doesn't actually It goes it goes to Appearance just fine, but if you click on display it goes to wlan Okay Weird, okay, so you get to check who's accent colors. So that's cool. We'll choose purple. Why not purple's good Minimize animation system effects dim wallpaper in dark theme. I don't really need that but that's cool Uh, let's see here. You can change fonts from here, which is a noted upgrade over genome Let's see here You can choose your background. So we see what wallpaper as it comes with as the fedora 36 wallpaper Other than that just a couple other extra ones notice on here. You can also choose a solid color if you wanted to We'll choose this one the dock So you can choose between a full And a centered dock you can choose between the left right and bottom for the placement of the dock the size of the dock and The display modes always show always hide smart hide. That's cool. So lots of options there I'm still not sure why the display tab doesn't work. I'm guessing that this is going to be a window or a virtual machine problem Let's go ahead and see if we can change that resolution in the terminals 1920 by 10 80 not 1070 like so. Oh Okay, so that must mean that this is using wayland I wouldn't see any other reason why x render wouldn't be installed by default I wonder how I would find out that it was if it was actually installed if it was actually Using wayland or not. I don't actually know how would how I would know other than googling it. I suppose All right, so let's go ahead and take a look at the launcher here. So Uh, here's another interesting thing that I have a problem problem I'm all about finding the problems. These icons are really super small. Like why are why are they so small compared to these? That's a little weird So let's go ahead and see what version of firefox we've got going here This should be the most recent version of firefox, which it is this is version 100 and I apologize for the resolution problems because it doesn't seem that I can change it Let's go ahead and help about Yep version 100.0.1, which is exactly the most recent version. I believe And then what else do we have installed here? So we have calculator can gel preferences I have no clue what that is input method only characters common to hong kong could be inputted by default Um, I'm not sure what that is has something to do with different languages. Okay a file manager firefox firewall input method selector kate console So a lot of the stuff is going to be based on katie. That's the reason why it's using stdm A livery office is here cute qt5 settings That's going to be for theming cute applications, by the way That is it That is all the software you get two terminals a text editor A firewall thing a browser a file manager A livery office and a settings application. I don't know what b livet gui is. It needs sudo advocate Okay, so b livet gui is going to be a disc manager So similar to gnome disks. I've never heard of that before like never ever Like I wonder if that's custom to cute fish or custom to Ultimate marine. I don't know it is cool how it separates out the butter fs volumes So that's neat. That's something that gnome disks doesn't do. Okay I'm really interested to know what the other versions of ultimate marine look like because this is very very very bare There's not a lot of stuff here. So if we actually if we go ahead and close some of this stuff here And we can see free dash And now this isn't going to be a hundred percent accurate because Actually, I can get a better idea. Let's go ahead and log out. Let me log out of this And so we can get an accurate version A reading of the memory log out It's taking a while. Okay Let's go to full screen and go back into full screen to that help. No Interesting. Okay. So what we're going to do here is we'll force off And we'll start up started up again That was really weird. Definitely not that And then the keyboard can begin that almost is certainly a virtual box problem because I've never seen that before Not virtual box but a virtual machine problem. Let's see if there's an xorg version Of this that there's not so either it is using xorg and x render is not installed or it's using what Using wayland and I just don't know it. Again, I'm not sure how I would figure that out I'm sure there's a way. So let's go ahead and then run that command here like so This is using 656. I'm glad I restarted because it was using 1100 before So that means there was stuff running in the background. So 656 megs out of the box Completely idle. Nothing has been run yet. That's not bad For what it is, you know, I've there's obviously ones that have been using the way less than that but It's not gnomes. So it's not using a gigabyte out of the box So that's good. Let's see you name a so it's using kernel 5.17 Which is that might be the absolute most recent one actually This is pretty bare now. I don't know if it's bare Because it is cute fish or if it's bare because that's the way ultimate marine likes it So what I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly Off-camera install the flagship version, which is budgie I'm going to take a look at it We'll take or we'll take a look at that once I get it installed and see if it has some differences a few moments later Okay, here we are With the budgie edition, which is their flagship edition. This is using Light DM as their display manager. So we'll enter the password The installation was almost exactly the same as it was with the cute fish version The only thing I will say is that when I rebooted it took about four minutes to reboot, which I don't know why It had one of those weird Timers that went down you that you see sometimes in linux that says A job is trying to complete. It has two minutes to do so or something like that. It was really weird So I don't I'm assuming again that that's going to be a virtual machine problem So this is the budgie desktop. Let's go ahead and see if there are any differences here So first let's open up a terminal. So the control t does not open up a terminal, which is disappointing But what we'll do here is do x render dash s 1920 by 1080 Because I'm pretty sure in fact positive that this is x-ray that this is xorg But x render is still not here pseudo dnf install x render Okay, now that that's installed that took a good minute and a half or so dash s 1920 by 1080 So there we go. Yeah, this is x work I'm wondering if cute fishes was x work to an x render just was not installed that is very odd because x render is all I was positive that x render was a like a dependency for xorg that it was automatically installed anytime you installed x Over or whatever it is, but maybe I was wrong. Apparently I am wrong because it wasn't installed by default here It doesn't matter, but it's still a little weird. Okay, so so let's go ahead and take a look at the Applications that are installed here. So there's definitely more here than there was in the cute fish version So I'm wondering if I either missed something in the cute fish version. Let me move my face now that I see that I'm in the wrong place Let's go ahead and just remove my face completely Let's see here. So accessories we have connections files, which is going to be This is Nautilus right here. That's for sure. I know that So if we go here to about files, yeah files 42.1 with one. Yep, that's Nautilus Okay, so this is going to be used a lot of the GNOME software stuff. So we got g edit GNOME GNOME clocks maps quick care control wall Wall Street control what the hell is that one wall? Okay, so I think that that's going to be a wallpaper switcher I'm guessing that that's what that is When I saw wall street though, I assumed stocks Because of course they did Anyways weather which is GNOME weather a window shuffle shuffler shuffler control Settings control applications for window shuffler. What is that? I don't know what that is either Looks like it might be a like a tiling tool, huh? Oh for like Huh weird. I don't know what that is Okay, so there's some stuff here that I don't I don't recognize at all So go education that LibreOffice math graphics comes with draw and photos. There's no gimp here installed. So you have to install that Firefox is for internet. Again, there's not a lot of stuff here So you're not going to consider this an uploaded application or a bloated distro By any means LibreOffice and calendar here other firewall light dm gtk reading settings And previews control sound and video with cheese sound recorder and video So that's probably going to be GNOME videos. Yep, that's GNOME videos I always get confused because if you look here the color there reminds me a lot of the mpv icon But it's GNOME videos. Uh, we got the blivot GUI, which is that disc manager thing that we saw before H top is installed by default budgie desktop settings Software utilities, which is going to be most of the budgie settings weird It also comes with GNOME disks installed as well. So okay, so let's go ahead and uh open up a terminal We'll do Free dash m again like so using 1129, but we opened up a couple things. So that's probably going to be less than that Let's see here. What else let's go ahead and look at those settings. So budgie desktop settings So this is going to be somewhat similar to GNOME tweaks If I remember right, so you're going to be able to change the widgets and the icons and the Theme and a lot of settings to do with the desktop and windows themselves where the panel is and so on and so forth That's really cool. I don't know why they call the theme widgets It's really weird, but they I think they've always done that. So if we change to a different A theme so they come looks like they have two different themes here This one here. That's Basically, I don't wait to this one's basically the same and uh, yeah So a couple different things that it comes with and you can choose between different icons, which it has um Just that one icon back. Okay So not a lot of selection, but you could easily install stuff easily enough using putting it in the proper directory or whatever In order to do that. So you could there's a lot of customization here that you can get with this which you wouldn't be able to get with, you know This is the raven menu, which is What the raven menu has always been where you'd see some widgets and then your notifications and then what else So if we open up htop, let's go ahead and see what we got going here So a budget it seems to be taking up the majority of the CPU usage 161 tasks 300 33 threads, which is A little high to be honest with you Especially considering that it doesn't appear that there's much here that we've opened up that is actually running I don't see anything that I've opened up here that is actually running other than htop itself Um, but that's okay. I mean, it's not the most it's not the most It's not the worst and you got to remember this is using a lot of the gtk stacks So that's the reason why it's going to take up more of your resources. So that is The budgie desktop and it does come with more applications than the q-fish version That's for sure And the budgie desktop is going to be more complete because as far as I know and I'm just assuming here The q-fish desktop is still in its very early development. That's the reason why there are so many of those problems Like a lot of the set the applications don't have their own settings panel Those icons are really small things like that stuff like that is probably still going to be fixed in the future So I don't want to be I don't want to judge too hard. So here's the question Now that we've looked at two different versions Of ultimate marine linux. What's the point? I think as I use linux more and I've used linux longer I'm always searching for a reason for something to exist So just being created by a person that is interested in making their own distro doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to exist It's okay. Like if there's nothing wrong with it It just I'm looking for something that it does, you know different, right? And I'm not sure that there's anything here that it does different now There is a possibility that I missed something because I only looked at this for 20 minutes or so and you know It's a good chance that I did miss something but from my brief view of this It doesn't look like there's anything here that you couldn't get with just Installing fedora. What does ultimate marine offer that is different than fedora other than it being Based on fedora, but not fedora. And that's the question that I don't know Uh, one of the things that I didn't check is is flat pack installed by default So I'm assuming that flat pack is like so. So if we run flat pack List here We get nothing. We don't get an error though. So Flat pack install. Let's just say OBS. Yep. Flat pack is here. So we don't actually need to install that So flat pack is here and it looks like flat hub is already installed one of the things that I didn't see here Okay, maybe I missed it. Oh, yep right here. I did miss it So this is the gunam software center I'm glad that's here because the one thing that I didn't see in the keep fish version was a gooey Software center. Now again, I might have missed it, but I don't explicitly remember seeing it also As slow as that is that reminds me of a snap snaps not installed by default. Is it? Nope Good, I just want to make sure Well, as slow as that was I wanted to make sure that that was definitely not a snap, which it's not Okay, good. So flat pack is installed just like it is in fedora. So that's again not a differentiator. So If snap had been installed that would have at least been something that is different than fedora, right? But it's not it still uses the same fedora Flat pack integration that fedora has right now one thing that is definitely different is that from what I saw rpm Repositories are enabled by default So that's something that you have to do on fedora if you want to do that You have to do it yourself here. They're automatically installed at least it was on the budget edition I don't remember seeing it in the keep fish edition But I wasn't really paying attention during the update. I was doing other things right I was messing around with the desktop environment So that is one differentiator, but the given that the fact that Enabling those third party repositories is just the Swipe of a of a lever or whatever during the initial setup of fedora I don't think that that's a really big selling point. So I'm like I said, I'm not sure Like there's nothing wrong with this distro. Don't let me be wrong I sometimes come across as like super negative about these distributions and some of them for good reason But there's nothing wrong with this distribution. I just don't know what the purpose of it is why Is different than fedora other than just having a different name So that is it for this video if you Are interested in looking at ultramarine linux or using it you can leave those comments in the comment section below You can follow me on twitter at the linux cast if you're interested in following me on Mastodon you can find that link in the video description along with all my other social media stuff store the store and stuff like that as well You can also support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast. I'd like to thank my current patrons Robert Sid, Devon, Patrick, Fred, Kramer, Tridevel, Antoine, Magland, Jack Snipers, Steve A. Sebrega, Linux, Geerick, CML, KB, TGB, Keefe, Andy, UncleBone, Head Gary, Ross, Mitchell, J.Dug, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Marni, Eduardo, Bartson, Elliott, Mislav, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter A. Crucibel, Darkman, and Six Primus, PM, Harlock, One, and Phillip. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.