 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution I've never taken a look at before. And that distribution is called Spiral Linux. Spiral Linux, the reason I haven't taken a look at it before is because it hasn't been around that long. It's a rather new distribution, but they just had a release just about a week or so ago. Version 11.220925, a very bad version number, eight distributions that name their versions with such a lengthy strings of numbers. Of course, 11.220925. It's a Debian-based distribution, so the 11, I'm assuming, means it's based on Debian 11 and then .220925. That's a timestamp, right? So it was just released September 25th. Today is September 30th, so really about six days ago this new version came out. It's, again, based off of Debian, but what really makes this interesting and why I'm excited to check this out is the creator of Spiral Linux has also created another Linux distribution that I've always enjoyed when I've tested it out. He's the creator of Gecko Linux, which is an OpenSusa-based distribution. And I think that's great because now he's bringing what he's doing with Gecko Linux, which is a fantastic distribution, over to a Debian-based distribution and basically trying to recreate that same kind of thing where Gecko Linux takes OpenSusa and it creates all of these really nice polished desktop editions based off of OpenSusa and I'm hoping Spiral Linux is going to do the same. For Debian. So if I go to the Spiral Linux website, which is spirallinux.github.io, you can read a little bit about it. But one of the things is it mentions the desktop environments that are available. We have options for Cinnamon, XFCE, GNOME, Plasma, Mate, Budgie, LXQ, and then something called Builder. Now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to pick the Budgie edition to play with today. The reason I picked the Budgie edition is because alphabetically when I went to the downloads page, that was the first ISO to grab. So I went with it. And also I actually quite like the Budgie desktop environment. For a GTK-based desktop environment, I find Budgie rather familiar and easy to use. So that's the one I grabbed and I'm going to go ahead and spin up a virtual machine and we're going to run through a quick installation and first look of Spiral Linux Budgie. So we've come to the boot menu here and I'm going to go ahead and just boot into the live environment and we get some Debian branding here. One of the things about the creator of Gecko Linux is even Gecko Linux, like the splash screens and the boot menus and everything, they all say open SUSE because he doesn't want to rebrand everything as Gecko Linux. He acknowledges that for the most part his distribution is essentially open SUSE. I'm assuming that's what he's going to do with Spiral Linux is even though it's not really Debian, he's not going to try to hide the fact that it's Debian, right? So you're going to see a lot of Debian logo and Debian branding as you explore, for example, right here in the menu, right, the Debian logo, right? Instead of the Spiral Linux logo. So I'm going to go ahead and launch the installer and they are using the Calamari installer and the welcome screen as you to select a language for the installer by default. It's American English, which is fine for me. So I'm going to click next. And then the time zone and it has not chosen the correct time zone for me. It's chosen the Eastern time zone here in the US, but I am in the central time zone. So let me fix that. Then I'm going to click next and then selecting your keyboard layout. It has defaulted to English US and that is correct for me. So I'm going to click next and then let's go ahead and partition our drive. We can either erase disk giving the entire drive over to Spiral Linux or we can do some manual partitioning. And for me, I'm just going to do the automatic partitioning by choosing a race disk and letting Spiral Linux have the entire virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. And let's go ahead and decide whether we want to swap or not. I'm going to choose a swap file and it looks like it's going to default to a ButterFS file system, but we could choose XFS, F2FS or X104. Typically I do X104 on all my stuff, but I'm going to go with the default for ButterFS since that was chosen by default. So I'm going to click next. And now let's go ahead and enter a username. I'm going to call my user DT. Let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And now let's go ahead and click next. Then we get our summary screen. Location is good. Keyboard is good. The partition scheme is good. So I'm going to go ahead and click the install button and away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to ten minutes on my machine. So I'm going to pause the recording. And I'll be back once Spiral Linux has finished installation. And the installation has completed. That took about five minutes. So in the Calamari's installer to complete installation, what you need to do is tick on the box that says Restart now, and then you need to click Done. If I hide my head, I'm going to go ahead and click the Done button and it should automatically restart our virtual machine. And it says please remove the live medium. So if you're installing this on physical hardware, this is where you should unplug the USB stick from the computer on reboot. In my case, I need to detach the ISO that I booted off of before the VM will reboot properly. And it rebooted just fine. And you can see we get to our login manager. The login manager looks to be LightDM. Let's go ahead and log in to what should be the budgie desktop environment. And we are logged in. And now let's go ahead, before I get started, let me go ahead and search for display, or maybe it is monitor. Maybe it is resolution. I need to change the screen resolution here. Would Control-Alt-T bring up a terminal? It will not. If I hit the super key, I'll get the menu again. Let me search for terminal. And I will just do this from the command line, since I can't find a graphical tool to do this. I'm going to do xRender-S1920 by 1080. And change to a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. Now, what's interesting about this is this actually has a Gecko Linux kind of feel to it, even though it's Debian-based. I've seen this wallpaper before, this green raindrop wallpaper in Gecko and OpenSusa. And I think they're trying to bring that OpenSusa green to Debian. And I think Debian could use a little more green. We have our top panel here. Now, budgie is configurable. You can move the panel from the top to the bottom if you wanted. But they're doing a top panel by default with a bottom dock. They're kind of going for that, I guess, macOS kind of paradigm, which is fine for me. I'm going to go into the menu system. Let's see what is installed by default. Let's break it down by category. So let's go into accessories. Accessories, we have our file search utility, catfish, which is a standard XFCE program for searching for files. You have files, which should be our file manager. But let's see which one they're actually using, since files is not a very descriptive name, right? So they are using Nemo 4.8.6. So Nemo is typically the file manager I believe that the Cinnamon desktop environment uses. Also under accessories, we have firmware. It says install firmware on devices. I'm in a virtual machine. Everything should be fully free and open source that the virtual machine needs. So I don't think I'm going to need that. I don't think it would do anything for me in the VM if I clicked on it. Then we have our menu editor. So this is, I'm assuming, is an application where I could edit what appears in our menu system here. So that could be useful if you need to add a link to maybe a custom script of yours or something that doesn't create its own .desktop file. So therefore, it normally wouldn't appear in the menu, but you can force stuff to appear in this menu. Then you have Parcelite, which is a really cool clipboard manager. You can see it's already launched by default. I actually haven't clicked on it, but this is Parcelite over here. If I go to About Parcelite 1.2.1, if I just click on it, you can see Edit Clipboard, and I could put stuff in the clipboard. Right now the clipboard is empty because I've never used it. So there's nothing to do just yet. Then also under Accessories, we have our quick character control. I'm not sure what that is. Run quick character, use shortcut key super alt C. I'm not sure what that does. So I better just leave it alone since I don't know what it actually does. Then we have Text Editor. Let's see what Text Editor they are using. It looks like gEdit. Let's see about Text Editor. Yeah, gEdit3.38.1. So this is GNOME's plain Text Editor. So already you can see they're using a mix of XFCE apps, Cinnamon apps, GNOME apps, all GTK based desktops, and Budgie of course is a GTK based desktop. Also under Accessories, we have Wall Street Control. This is another one I've never heard. Run Wall Street, use Random Wallpaper. So I guess this is a wallpaper utility. Yeah, sync to lock screen. So yeah, this is probably something to change wallpapers every few minutes. So a few guys are familiar with other wallpaper changing programs. I know a lot of people use the program called variety. Variety, well, you can set it to change to a random wallpaper every few minutes, every hour or whatever it happens to be. And that seems like that's a similar kind of program to variety. Then we have Windows Shuffler Control. I'm not sure what this is either. So this looks like window controls for things like tiling and snapping. So I go to tiling. Control Alt 7 gets us to the top left. Let's try it. So Control Alt 7 didn't work on that window, but maybe that's some kind of special window that normally that wouldn't work. Let's try Control Alt 7 on the file manager. Yeah, so if Control Alt 7 is supposed to be for tiling, it's definitely not working right now unless maybe I haven't turned it on, enable Windows Shuffler. Okay, now that I've enabled it, now let me go back to the file manager. Control Alt 7, now it works. Control Alt 6, Control Alt 5, just open something else it looks like. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah, I'm probably gonna turn that off for now just so I don't accidentally hit some key bindings. Under administration, we have our grub customizer so you can change the look of the grub menu, all right? And then you have light DM greeter settings so that you can change the theme and the wallpaper of your light DM login manager. Then you have Synaptic Package Manager, which I was actually hoping we would find here. So this is a GUI package manager for Debian and Debian-based distributions. Synaptic is a wonderful program that if you're on any Debian-based distribution, I would strongly recommend installing because it's just a great program as far as installing, removing packages, updating your system, changing repositories. A matter of fact, by default, Spiral Linux is based on Debian stable, but if I go into settings and I go to repositories, let's see if I can change to testing or maybe even the unstable branch of Debian if I was kind of crazy, right? So I could, if I wanted to, tick off all of the standard Debian sources here and then if I go to other sources, there is the testing repository that I could turn on and there is the unstable repository that I could turn on. I'm not gonna do that, but for those of you that want to live a little bit on the rolling edge, right? You wanna make it a rolling distribution. You can do that through the Synaptic Package Manager. Let me get back into the menu. Also under administration, we have our time and date utility and then we have users and groups if you need to create extra users on the system. Under the graphics category, we really don't have much here. We have a drawing program. We have our image viewer. We have two image viewers. We have G thumb and then one just called image viewer. I'm assuming with the generic name, it's probably GNOME's image viewer. It is the GNOME image viewer 3.38.2. Strange that there's two different image viewers installed. Then we have a library office draw. Under internet, our default browser is Firefox ESR. That's the extended support release of Firefox. Let me make it full screen here. And if I go into help and about Firefox, you can see. Version 102.3.0 ESR. So Firefox, of course, the most popular free and open source web browser on the planet. And it's typically the default browser on most Linux systems. Also under internet, we have pigeon for internet messaging. I guess something very few people have a need for these days. Not too many people need an IM program, but it's there if you need it. And Thunderbird, which honestly these days, not too many people need a desktop email client. I still use desktop email. So I'm happy that distributions still include something like Thunderbird because it's a great program, honestly, for a email client. Then we have transmission, which is our BitTorrent client. This is part of the GNOME suite of applications. So transmission, if I go to about, you'll see this is transmission 3.0, a fast and easy BitTorrent client. Under the office category, we have just a few of the LibreOffice programs here. We don't have the entire suite of applications. This is the most popular ones. We have Calc, Impress, and Rider. Calc is the spreadsheet program. Impress is the presentation program. And of course, LibreOffice Rider is the word processor. And let's see what version they are on being based on Demian Stable. You know, there could be some older packages here. This is LibreOffice 7.0.4.2. Then we have a other category, and we have the Snapper GUI. Now let me go ahead and open this because I've got some idea what this is because of the name Snapper. I'm assuming this has to do with our ButterFS snapshots because they default to ButterFS for a file system, which makes sense because Gecko Linux defaulted to ButterFS for a file system. Actually, OpenSUSA defaults to ButterFS for a file system and has done that for years. And the thing with ButterFS as a file system is it has the ability to create snapshots for you. You can create them yourself. Actually, looking at the documentation for Spiral Linux, I did notice that in their documentation, they do mention that the optimal ButterFS subvolume layout with Z-standard transparent compression and automatic snapper snapshots, bootable via grub, yada, yada, yada. A lot of talk, but if I click the link, you can see working with ButterFS snapshots and rollbacks. It says, by default, Spiral Linux uses ButterFS with a subvolume layout conducive to booting read-only snapshots and performing proper rollbacks. So it's going to take snapshots for you and you're going to be able to rollback if something goes wrong. If you get a bad update, you can rollback to the previous snapshot, the previous working state of your machine. And it looks like it can do this automatically for you every time you add or remove packages via the apt package manager. So anytime you install, remove or update your system, it should take a snapshot for you or you can do it yourself. You can manage this stuff yourself using that snapper GUI tool that we just showed. And then we have our preferences category. Not much is in preference other than the settings panel. So this should be like our settings manager. And of course, the first thing that pops up are backgrounds and the backgrounds look like our standard Debian wallpaper pack, right? So I choose one of these. Why did the wallpaper not change? Is there something else I need to click? I don't see anything else in this window. I make the window full screen. Now that's very weird. The wallpaper is not changing. That could just be some issue with the virtual machine. I'm not sure. So I won't complain too much about that but this is your standard, almost like your GNOME control panel, GNOME settings manager, right? With your standard options for, if you need to change settings for things like sound and power, there's the display so we could change the resolution which already did via the command line. You can see it's reflected here in the GUI as well. So no need to play with that anymore. Under sound and video, we have Clementine for our audio player. So this would be, of course, your music player. Clementine is a really old kind of audio player. I don't think it sees any development or not much at all anymore. Nowadays, most people that were using Clementine have moved to a more modern fork of Clementine called Strawberry. I believe, you know, fruit names, Clementine, Strawberry. So, but again, this is based off of Debian Stable and there may not be a Strawberry in the Debian Stable repositories. I don't know if I go to about Clementine here. Clementine version 1.4 RC2. Also under sound and video, we have our post audio volume control and we also have VLC for a media player and this is mainly for movies but you could also play audio in VLC if you choose to. What version of VLC are they on? This is version 3.0.17.4. Let's go ahead and close that out. And I see Clementine when I closed it actually just minimized to an icon sitting in the sys tray here. So let me click on that and all the way quit out of Clementine. Let me go ahead and open a terminal one more time. I really don't like the blinding white background of the terminal before I continue. Let's go to preferences. Just because people that are watching this video, I know you guys are gonna be very annoyed. So let's choose any theme that has a dark theme. Ganon dark, for example, whatever that happens to be. Let's add just some light text on a dark background and let's do a uname dash R. So the kernel version is 5.18.0. Let's see if Htop is installed. It is and right now our budgie desktop environment it is using 845 megs of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. So not terribly heavy, not terribly light. It's about standard for a desktop environment these days on Linux. Let me go ahead and cue to quit out of Htop. Let's see how many packages are installed on Spiral Linux. So if I do apt list dash dash installed, we should get a one package on a line list of everything that is installed on Spiral Linux. Now if I take that and then pipe that into WC the word count program dash L for a line count rather than a word count, how many lines were in that output? 1,756 lines. So that means 1,756 packages are currently installed on Spiral Linux and because I haven't installed anything at all, that's what it is by default at least on the budgie desktop edition. So that was just a very cursory look at the latest Spiral Linux. And I think Spiral Linux is rather unique. I think it's actually very polished. It is a lot like Gecko Linux. If you like Gecko Linux, but you'd rather be on a Debian based distribution rather than something based on open SUSE, then it makes sense. You don't see a lot of Linux distribution maintainers that maintain two different versions essentially of their Linux distribution as far as two different bases. Linux Mint is unique in that they base some distributions off of Ubuntu and some of their distributions off of Debian, right? They kind of maintain two different things. Although Debian and Ubuntu are a lot more similar than say SUSE and Debian, which is what Gecko Linux and Spiral Linux are doing. So I think this is a great addition as far as, you know, we have so many Linux distributions. Some people would argue there's too many out there, but I think this is gonna be a welcome addition to the community. And I think a lot of people that want Debian with some good customized desktop environments already installed with graphical tools, such as the Snapper GUI for the ButterFS rollbacks and the Synaptic Package Manager, which allows you to change from the stable repositories to the testing repositories, to the SID repositories, just like that, that I think a lot of people will find appealing. I know I wouldn't. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Mehmet Mitchell, Paul West. Why ya ballin' on me? Alex Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Rangary Dayoka, George Lee, Marstrum Nate Erion, Alexander Paul, Peace Archimvedor, Polytech Realities for Lust, Red Profits, Brolin, Steven, Tulsa Devler, Willie, these guys. They're my house, tiered patrons, over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. 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 sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, I wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Spiral Linux. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. Debian distros, they don't die, they multiply.