 Today, I'm going to be taking a quick first look at the recently released Magia 8. This was released about a week ago, and I haven't taken a look at Magia in a long time on the channel. And really, I don't often review RPM-based distributions. I've never been a RPM guy, I've never really lived in things like Fedora or Sousa. I've always been more of a Debian guy, and of course, here recently more of an arch-based Linux distribution kind of guy. Basically you've got three kind of groups of distributions. You've got the Debian family, the RPM family, and then you've got the Arch family. And I'm comfortable with Debian, I'm comfortable with Arch. I've never made myself, though, live in any of the RPM-based distributions. Not that I have anything against them, I've never been that familiar with them. Today, though, I wanted to take a look at Magia 8, their Plasma Edition. Before I get started, I should mention a little bit about Magia, because I know many people are probably going to watch this that have never heard of this particular Linux distribution, but it does have some interesting history to it. It's got an interesting lineage to it. You can really trace its roots all the way back to the old Mandrake Linux distribution, which has been dead for many, many years, a couple of decades. But you go back 15, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, I think, you would find that Mandrake was probably the most popular desktop Linux distribution. It was the new user-friendly desktop Linux distribution. You know, this was before Ubuntu came into being. You know, Ubuntu started late 2004. Ubuntu really became popular around 2006. But before that, Mandrake was that new user-friendly distribution that everybody recommended. Mandrake ended up dying and it ended up being turned into a new project called Mandrake, because there were two different groups of people. The old Mandrake crowd and then there was a Brazilian distribution called Connectiva, and they combined forces to make Mandrake. So Mandrake became Mandrake. There was a company behind Mandrake that company died around 2010. I think it went bankrupt or something. And some of the employees of that company that was maintaining Mandrake, those employees decided to fork the project and create Magia. Magia has never really been a very popular Linux distribution. I know it doesn't get very much love in the community, and it really doesn't get much love from a lot of Linux YouTubers. I know I haven't really shined a spotlight on it very often. So today I really wanted to give a little bit of a bit of a history before we dive into the installation and first look. I will install this inside a virtual machine today. I'm going to install this inside Vert Manager. Let me switch over to my desktop here and I gave this VM four gigs of RAM and I gave it two threads of my 24 thread thread rippers. So plenty of system resources. Plasma is not a terribly heavy desktop environment these days. Plasma has really become a pretty lightweight in terms of system resource usage. So plenty of resources for this VM. And I'm going to install Magia Live. Let's run through the installation. And it took a couple of minutes for the installer to finally load. It does look like it's going to be a graphical installer. There's no wallpaper or anything, but this is obviously a GUI program. So the mouse should work for us if we just wanted to click next or OK a few times. By default, it looks like it's selected American English as my language, which is correct. So I'm going to click next on that. We do need to read and then accept a license here. I'm not sure what kind of license this is going to be. But we'll go ahead and just accept it and move on. Time zone, it's selected New York inside the US for the time zone, which is the Eastern time zone. I actually live in the central time zone. So let me pick a city that is in the central time zone. Chicago is always in these lists. So I will pick Chicago date, clock and time zone settings. Do we want to do local time or UTC time? It really doesn't matter. UTC is ticked on by default. I'll go with that for a keyboard. US keyboard is the layout for me. And the wizard will help you to install the live distribution. I'm just going to click next. And we have our 25 gigabyte virtual hard drive that I created in this virtual machine. I want to give the entire 25 gigs, of course, to Magia. There's not going to be any other operating systems in this particular VM. So use free space. Yeah, that is fine. So computing total size. We'll just let it do the automatic partitioning. We have detected that some packages are not needed for your system configuration. We will remove the following packages unless you choose otherwise. Unused hardware support, unused localization. There's no need to keep those packages on the system. All right. And it looks like the installer is going here. Got a little progress bar. I'll pause the video for a couple of minutes and I'll be back once this portion of the installation has completed. That part of the installation finished. It took just a couple of minutes and now we get to the installation of the bootloader. Grub two with a graphical menu. That's fine. And it's going to put it on slash dev slash VDA, which should be the only device in the VM at the moment. So I don't have any other options. Of course, if you're doing this on physical hardware and you've got multiple drives, there may be other devices more than just one in the list for you. Main options delayed before booting default image. So I'll just leave it at 10, which was set for default. We need a password or privacy reasons. And now that we've created that strong and complicated password, let's click next. And now it's installing grub says please wait. This is Splash quiet. It's just setting some some modules here. I'm just going to go with the defaults, finish that. And it finished the bootloader installation. And it says you now have the opportunity to set up online media. This allows you to install security updates, yada, yada, yada. You need a working internet connection. So I'll go ahead and let it install those security updates. Even though in this VM, I doubt I'm going to keep this VM around very long. I just want to make sure that the installation does work correctly. And that just took about a minute. And now we have this next screen. You now have the opportunity to download updated packages. Do we want to do that? Yes, go ahead and update the system. Shouldn't be a lot of updates. Again, this was released about a week ago and Magia is a static release distribution. It's not rolling release. So it's not going to be one of those distributions where, you know, a week from release, you've got, you know, 300 updates. You know, this isn't arched. This isn't it's not gen two, right? So probably just a handful of packages probably need updating. It looks like we were going to get a new VLC, a new Firefox. All right. And it says you should restart your computer for Colonel desktop 5.10.19. So there was a colonel update. And of course, you got to reboot to use the new colonel. So let's click finish. And let's see if this reboots correctly by itself. I have to remove the live medium. So in this portion of the installation, if you were doing this on physical hardware, this is where you need to unplug the USB stick that you're installing from. In my case, I just need to go and vert manager and detach the ISO that I booted off of. So I detach the ISO and I rebooted the VM and we get a grub menu. So it looks like the installation worked just fine. I'm going to go ahead and click enter here. And hopefully we boot into a nice KDE plasma desktop environment. This is taking a few seconds here. I've been waiting about 30 seconds now for this to finish booting up. This may be a little slow because it's still doing some installation stuff. I mean, we never really created a user name and things like that. So I'm sure the installation is not complete. So that may be why this boot up is taking a long time. OK, and now we've come to the part where we can create a user and create a password. Let's do the root password. So let's do that. And then let's do a icon for the user. It doesn't matter. Let me do my real name, DT. My login name is going to be DT as well. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then confirm it and then click next. All right. And now we finally come to the login manager here. So let me go ahead and log in and see if our plasma desktop looks right. I think I'm going to have to fix the screen resolution. All right, welcome to Magia. Before we get started, though, let me go in here and search for display, display configuration and then change the screen resolution to 1920 by 1080. Click apply. And then it just immediately goes back to the smaller resolution. I think the problem is going to be the graphics driver in the VM. Plasma does not like one of the graphics drivers inside for manager. I think you always need to do QXL for the video driver. Actually, QXL is the one it doesn't like. It's Vert IO that you need to switch to do the Vert IO graphics driver invert manager. And it should fix this weird bug that plasma has. So let me go ahead and shut down and do a reboot with the correct driver. And now that I've rebooted with the correct video driver, we've got a nice 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. I will say even on the second reboot, you know, so the installation is completely finished. It still took a long time for a reboot. I'm assuming that's a problem just running this in a virtual machine because booting up is typically very fast, especially on distributions that use system D as the init system. And Magia is a system D distro. So I'm not sure why it took almost a minute to boot up. So Magia 8 uses KDE Plasma 5.20.4, that's the version it ships with. It uses Xorg, but you can use Wayland if you want to. You need to install an extra package, I think, to use Wayland with Magia's Plasma. You need to install plasma dash workspace dash Wayland as the plasma meta package. And then you should have the option in the login manager to use plasma with Wayland. We have this nice little welcome screen here. When we first log in, we've got a welcome message, then we have media sources. I think this lets us know about some of the Magia repositories. Magia has a couple of different repositories. The main ones, of course, are the core repositories. That's where you're going to find all your great free and open source software. Then there's a non free repository. That's where you're going to find closed source proprietary things. And that'll be where you go and grab your proprietary Nvidia drivers, for example, if you use an Nvidia card and your proprietary Wi-Fi drivers, which unfortunately is still the case with many brands of laptops. You also have a third repository. I want to briefly mention called Tainted. Tainted is free and open source software, but there's legal problems with this free and open source software listed in this particular repository. So this is going to be things that involve like multimedia codecs and things like that, because a lot of times those infringe on patents or copyright laws, depending on the country you're in. So that's why they've named it Tainted. Now, if I click the button edit software sources, we have to give our root password and let's click OK. And we could quickly tick on and off the repositories that we wanted to use. It looks like we do have some non free repositories ticked on. A lot of them are not, though. You see most of the repositories that are available are not checked on here. I'm actually not going to play with that at the moment. Then I'm going to click on the update tab here and check system updates. Now, we should have updated the system during the installation. So I'm not going to run another update here, MCC. This is the Magia Control Center. This is a set of tools to help us configure our system. So let me launch that. And we have to launch the Magia Control Center as root. And this is a nice graphical way to install and remove software, update your system. That's when you need root privileges to do that. You always need root privileges to install and remove software and to update your system. There's some hardware configuration we could do from here. Network system network sharing. It looks like it's just your standard control center configuration manager that you find in most Linux distributions. I have a button here for install software. And this is to install and remove software with Magia. You will find software in media repositories. Yada, yada, yada. We have RPM Drake and DNF Dragora. I believe DNF Dragora is just a front end to DNF, of course. But it did not actually run that. Let me run RPM Drake then. OK, and this is a nice graphical package manager. Now, I typically don't use these kinds of graphical package managers. Typically, I do everything in the terminal. So I'm actually going to close this out. And let's see, would Control Alt T bring up a terminal? It does. Very nice, Magia. Glad they had that. And let me see if I can zoom in here inside KDE's console. So for those of you that are not very familiar with DNF and I'm not that familiar with DNF, I'm just going to show you some of the basic commands that I know. So I don't think Magia has sudo installed out of the box. So I'm going to switch over to the root user with SU, give the root password. And of course, now we are the root user. You can see because I'm not DT at Linux anymore. I'm root at Linux. Also, the prompt changes. The dollar symbol means I'm a normal user. The hash symbol, the pound sign, that means I am the root user. That's how you always know when you're logged in as root and when you're logged in as a normal user. So some of the basic DNF commands are DNF IN for install. Now you can type the full word install, but for shorthand, just DNF IN H top, for example, if I wanted to install H top, and then it's going to sync the repositories if it needs to sync. That didn't look like it needed to because I ran a recent sync. And then it asked me, do I really want to install this? And yes, I do because I will use H top later. Let's see how long that takes to install very quick. The command to remove software is DNF space R M for remove. Again, you could write the full word removed, but DNF remove H top. And it's going to ask me, do I really want to remove H top? And actually I don't. So let's not remove H top. And let me clear the screen. Another common command you'll use is the update command or the upgrade command, actually. So DNF upgrade full word or just DNF up would upgrade the system. There's nothing to do. So it says it's complete. Again, we upgraded the system during the installation. The only other DNF command you'd probably use on a regular basis is searching for packages. So if I did DNF search the full word or just SE, and you don't have to be root to search for packages, you do have to be root to install and remove packages and upgrade the system. But for searching, we could do this as a normal user or the root user. It really doesn't matter. DNF space SE for search and then search for something. I don't know. It's X-mode ad is in the repositories and it does not look like X-mode ad is in the repository. Surely the awesome window manager is in the repositories. Yeah, looks like they've got awesome. That is weird. Nobody from a G is packaging X-mode ad shame on those guys. So I'm going to exit out of the root user here and clear the screen. Let's do a quick username space dash R. So the kernel is five dot ten dot nineteen. Let me run a quick H top because let's get H top really on a cold boot. I haven't opened anything other than the terminal. So let's see what RAM usage looks like. RAM usage is a little higher than I would expect for a Plasma desktop. We're using 900 megs of the four gigs of RAM. I gave this VM I typically I find that number to be closer to like 500 megs on Plasma desktops these days. But, you know, still still that's lighter than probably what you're going to get with things like GNOME and Cinnamon deep in, you know, typically those things push a gig or more often on a cold boot, at least Plasma stays under a gig. Let me quit out of each top queue to kill each top. I'm going to go ahead and close the terminal. And let's just very quickly take a look at the suite of applications that is installed by default on Magia. So we have our internet category and our default terminal is Firefox. Let me open up Firefox and see what version they are on. Make that full screen and let's go into help about Firefox. This is version seventy eight dot eight dot zero. This is the ESR. That's the extended support release Firefox. So that's why the version is a little different. I'm Firefox is on version 80 something, you know, like in the standard versions of Firefox, but they are using the extended support release version. It makes sense. Again, this static release distribution. Kind of meant to be more of a stable kind of distribution. Also under internet, we have K mail for our email client. KDE connect is to sync your mobile devices. We have conqueror. Now conqueror is interesting. Conqueror is a nice little file manager and web browser. It's a lot of things all in one. Not too many people really use conqueror, but it is an interesting program. It was probably more popular, you know, 15, 20 years ago than it is now. Nobody would browse the web with conqueror these days. Conversation with a K, of course, is our IRC chat client. And let's see if it actually connects to like an official Magia support channel. All right. And it looks like, yeah, we can connect to hashtag Magia here in the free node network. So very nice that that does connect us in case we need to get some immediate support after installation. Also under the internet category, really not much else to mention the network center, the sieve editor under the office category. We have quite a bit of stuff. We have the main programs of the LibreOffice suite, which are writer, calc, impress, draw, K mail again, contacts for your contact list. K organizer, they open up K organizer. I never really take a look at this program. I'm not much of a appointment list and scheduler kind of person, but those of you that are K organizer, they're on version 5.16.0. Under the graphics category, we have DigiCam for our webcam. I'm in a virtual machine, so I don't have a webcam that can be used in this VM, not to mention I'm using my camera for recording this video at the moment. We have GIMP. This is your standard alternative to Photoshop. It's basically our free and open source photoshop alternative. And let's see what version of GIMP they're on. They're on 2.10.20, which I believe is the latest version of GIMP also under graphics. We have WinView, which is your image viewer, K color chooser, color paint, color paint with a K. So let's see what version they're on. 20.12.0, simple paint tool. And a lot of people ask me all the time about simple little paint tools. People really miss, I guess, MS paint when they switch to Linux from Windows. I was like, hey man, do you have anything like paint? And actually we have dozens of little paint alternatives. Under the sound and video category, we have Clementine. Now, Clementine is a fantastic audio player. Really nice, very fully featured. It's got a ton of options. That was about QT. I don't want to read about the QT toolkit. I wanted to read about Clementine version 1.4 RC2. We could view our files. There's nothing here, of course. This VM is empty, playlist, internet. This is where we could connect to various internet streaming services and get song info, artist info. I wish I had something in the VM to show you guys how Clementine works. It really is a nice media player. It does minimize it down here in the system tray. So let me go ahead and quit that. And then let me close out some of the other stuff going on here in the system tray so it doesn't slow down this VM. Also under sound and video, we have the dragon player. That's going to be your video player, standard video player in KDE. Alisa, which is another audio player. I don't know why they have both Clementine and Alisa. Clementine's probably going to be the better player. So Alisa's there if you guys want to try that out. VLC is another media player. It can be used for video or audio. So you've got two audio players, two video players. Let's see what version of VLC they're on here. So if I go to about, this is version 3.0.12.1. And we have a tools category. So this is where you're going to find things like your archive manager called Arc. K3B is your disburning utility. I've actually, I'm a huge fan of K3B. I think it's the best disburning utility available on Linux. Most people don't have a need to burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays anymore. But if you still burn, I still actually do burn CDs occasionally. K3B is a really nice application. Also under tools, we have K-alarm. They're just setting alarms for things. K-Calc, which is your standard calculator. Note taking out K-notes. Console with a K, of course, is the terminal. We have Spectacle, which I believe is the screenshot utility, yeah, for KDE. And we have a development category. Not much to it. Education, just a geography category. KDE Marble. And this is the only thing in there. We have a sciences category. And once again, KDE Marble and LibreOfficeMath. We've seen those programs in other categories. There's a documentation category for getting information about how to use Magia. Out of the box, you do have some quick launchers down here in the panel. It looks like we can quickly launch Dolphin, which is KDE's file manager. Really nice file manager. We can also get the system settings up. KDE's system settings for changing various things. The Magia Control Center is right there. I'm not going to show that again. And you do have a link here, a quick launcher for Firefox. I'm going to right click on the desktop. And I'm going to choose Configure Desktop and Wallpaper. Let's see what kind of wallpapers there are to choose from. We have just the standard Magia default wallpaper or the Plasma default wallpaper, which in this version is called SHILL. And I actually like the default Plasma wallpaper better than the Magia branded wallpaper. Yeah, that's a much nicer look. I think I would prefer a dark theme though. So let's go into the KDE Plasma system settings here and go to Global Theme. And let's choose Breeze Dark, because that's the one I like. Click Apply. And now you can see we have a nice dark theme by opening up the Dolphin file manager. Yeah, much nicer. So this was just a very quick cursory look at the recently released Magia 8. I think Magia is a nice distribution. I think it's very suitable for the new user. For those of you maybe looking for something different, maybe Debian or Debian-based distributions don't work on your particular hardware, because sometimes picking a distribution does come down to hardware support. Sometimes people find that one particular distribution just never works right on their machine. And if that's the case, if you're having a problem with Ubuntu or Mint or something like that and you want to check out some of the RPM-based distributions, I think Magia deserves a serious look. The installation is very easy. If you can install Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora, you can install Magia. Now before I go, I do need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Absi Dallas Gay Blue, Mitchell Allen, Akami Arch 5530, Chuck David, David, Dylan, Gregory Louis Paul, Scott Wess and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. I couldn't have done this quick look at Magia 8. Well, I probably could have, but I do thank them for their support. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All those names you're seeing right now on the screen, those are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. And if you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. How can you not have Xmonad in your repository?