 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that I've never taken a look at before. This distribution is called CacheOS. CacheOS is rather new. It is based on Arch Linux. If I switch over to their website here, cacheos.org, you can see the blurb at the top of the screen. Blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution. If you read their website here, the front page on the web page, they really talk about how customizable this distribution is. It offers a wide variety of desktop environments and window managers to choose from. And they really talk about the speed and the optimization of this particular Linux distribution. If I scroll down, you can see Discover the Benefits of CacheOS. And one of the things they talk about here is CacheOS features the optimized Linux CacheOS kernel utilizing the Advanced Boar Scheduler, that's B-O-R-E, for unparalleled performance. So, you know, they've done some work, I guess, on the kernel. There's some kernel options available for us. If we want to play with that stuff, they also talk about their web browser here. If I scroll up a little bit, get my head out of the way, they have their own web browser called the CacheBrowser. Now, that is a fork of Firefox. So essentially, you know, it's a rebranded Firefox. A lot of distributions do this because Firefox, of course, being free and open source self or anybody can fork it and, you know, make it their own, right? All you got to do is rename it and you can do something new with Firefox as a base. Another thing they talk about is the installation process. Apparently they offer two installers to fit your needs, right? They have a user-friendly GUI version based on the Calamari's installer, which is what I'm going to use today, and they also have a command line installer and that is really nice for the more power users. Not necessarily you want to do a command line install just to prove that you're a power user, but sometimes you want to, you know, do some scripting. Maybe you want to have an installation script and you can't really use scripting with a graphical installer like Calamari's, but you can do that if the command line installer is available for you. So I'm going to go ahead and download one of their versions. Here, if I go to the download page, KDE Plasma is the first one that comes up. So I'm assuming that's going to be their flagship edition. So that's the one I'm going to download, but you can see you have GNOME, XFCE, and just those three here on the download page. But apparently during the installation process, if I wanted to, I could install Qtfish, which I think is a dead project. I don't know much about Qtfish. I never tried it. People asked me to try Qtfish several months back, but by the time I got interested and maybe I'd take a look at it, it essentially I think is now dead. So I'm glad I didn't take a look at it because it wasn't around that long. I3 is available, Wayfire, LXQt, Openbox, Cinnamon, UKUI. I don't know anything about that. LXDE, Monte and Budgie are all available. So I'm going to go ahead and grab the Plasma ISO and install this. Inside of Virtual Machine. So I've created a Virtual Machine here. I'm going to go ahead and choose the first option in the boot menu here, cache os default. Interesting, I'm getting, what looked like some errors here as it's trying to boot, ZFS modules are not loaded. I'm assuming it's using ZFS as a default file system. It looks like it worked itself out there. It's like it's booting fine now. Looked like some system D start jobs were running there. It looked like it was trying to load some various kernel modules. So again, that's probably part of some of the optimized kernel stuff that they've added to cache os. And the live environment has booted up and we get a little welcome screen here. So this little hello program, it looks very reminiscent to the Manjaro hello program. I'm sure they probably just forked Manjaro's hello program and changed it to fit their needs. So let me go ahead and launch the installer. Calamaris install type. Do we want to do offline or online? Well, I'm connected to the internet. So online would make sense that way. It needs to update anything. I get the latest packages and we got a terminal doing something in the background there, but we do have the Calamaris installer here. If I move my head out of the way, what's interesting is we have these tabs at the bottom. So typically the Calamaris installer has these tabs on the side, on the left hand side as you progress through the installer, but they've changed it to where these are at the bottom. Just a minor little aesthetic change there. Let me go ahead and choose my language. American English is the default and that is correct for me. So I'm just going to click next. They have chosen the central time zone in the US for me. That is correct. Let me click next. English US is my keyboard. So let me just click next. And then what do I want to do as far as do I want to erase the disk and give cash EOS the entire 25 gig virtual drive of this virtual machine? That's what I'm going to do. But I could choose manual partitioning if I wanted to manually partition the drive myself, but I'm just going to give cash EOS the entire drive file system. It looks like it's going to default to XFS, which is fine. I typically go with the default file systems on these installations. So I'll leave that. But if you wanted to, you could use ButterFS Extend for F2FS or ZFS. I'll choose XFS. And then I'm just going to go ahead and click next. Now we have this interesting screen where we can actually, I guess, choose some desktop environments and window managers. So I downloaded the KDE Plasma ISO. So I'm just going to go ahead and choose KDE Plasma. But obviously, we have a variety of things we could choose here if we wanted to. I'm going to go ahead and click next. And then the additional packages. So we have BaseDevil and Common Packages. And it says recommended, don't change this unless you know what you're doing. So BaseDevil is common packages. That's probably standard like build essentials and things that are typically part of a base installation of every Linux distribution. We have cash EOS kernels. If I tick that on, I wonder what it would do. It says selection of different cash EOS kernels. I'm just going to go with their defaults, but that's interesting that that is there. NVIDIA drivers, I am in a virtual machine, so I don't need to play with this. But those of you that are on physical hardware, many of you guys will have NVIDIA cards. So make sure to tick that on if you are an NVIDIA user. And then the desktops, I'm just going to go with KDE for now. I'm going to click next. My username will be DT on this machine. Cash EOS x8664 is the host name that they default to. I'll just leave that. And then we need to create a password for the DT user. So let's create a strong and complicated password. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then log in automatically without asking for a password. No, leave that ticked off for privacy reasons. You should always enter a password to get into a computer and then use the same password for the administrator account. I will leave that ticked on. So my sudo password and DT's password will be the same password. So I'm going to click next. And I cannot click next because it says my password is too short. So unfortunately, I can't use my standard password. This is one of the problems with some of these distributions is they're very unfriendly, especially for virtual machine installs. I don't need to create some weird complicated password that I'm never going to remember for testing stuff out in a virtual machine. Just let me use the password I want to use. So I really hate when they do this. I wonder if it would let me do this password here. It will. And now, yeah, I can proceed. We get a summary, location and time zone. All look good. Keyboards good. Partition scheme looks good. I'm just going to click the install button and it says install now and away we go. One thing I briefly want to point out is during the installation, one of the slideshows here talks about the Cache OS kernels. And apparently there is a list of about six extra kernels to choose from that are available in the Cache OS repos. So can I get back to that screen? Let me click on the slideshow. There it is. You can see we have Cache OS board. So that's for the board scheduler Cache OS CFS. That is the default CFS scheduler Cache OS hardened Cache OS TT. That's the test type scheduler Cache OS BMQ for the BMQ scheduler and Cache OS PDS for the PDS scheduler kernel. So lots of kernel options for those that need it. For me, I'm just going to go with whatever kernel they default to. And the installation has completed. So in the Calamari's installer to complete installation, you need to tick on this box here that says restart now and then click done and it should automatically reboot the machine for you. If you're doing this on physical hardware, doing the reboot process, you need to unplug your USB stick that you're installing from. So let me go ahead and reboot. And we've come to our login manager. Since I installed Plasma, we're going to use the SDDM login manager, which is typically the default login manager for KDE Plasma. It looks like it's going to default to Plasma using Wayland. Since I'm in a virtual machine, Xorg is going to work a lot better. So I'm going to choose Plasma X11. I do notice SDDM is just using like a default fallback theme. So it's not really themed in any way, which is kind of shocking because their desktop environment looked like it was very heavily customized and themed. I'm surprised they didn't theme SDDM. Let me go ahead and log in with my super secure password if I can remember it. And we've logged into our KDE Plasma desktop environment. I will say on first impression, it is a really attractive desktop environment. I really appreciate the fact that they've tried to theme the panel in such a way it almost resembles Windows 11. We have your start button here, your menu essentially over here on the far left. But your taskbar is centered, kind of like the default centering of the taskbar on Windows 11. Then of course, we have the sys tray and the clock on the right hand side. By default, we get our welcome screen. When we first log in, we could actually toggle that to not launch on startup. And I probably will toggle that to never show again. But for right now, while it's open documentation, you have a read me. If you wanted to go ahead and read a little bit more about CacheUS release information about this version of CacheUS, a link to their wiki, a link to their forms, software. You can see how to get involved with the project, apps and tweaks. Let's click that. And you can see some of the tweaks include profile sync daemon enable. So we can enable that if we want Bluetooth enabled. It's on by default. We could toggle that off if we didn't want Bluetooth. AppArmor is disabled by default, but you could toggle it on if you wanted to. Of course, you would have to give it your sudo password. Anytime you make changes to the system, installing software, removing software, you always have to enter a sudo password. They also have a button for a system update. So just a quick way probably to do a Pacman SYU. Just a graphical way is to click that button and it opens a terminal. And assuming I can remember my super secure password. Yes, you're just going to run a Pacman SYU for you. There's nothing to do because we just installed. I have a button for reinstall all packages. That's interesting. They have a refresh key rings button as well. That's interesting. That's actually a nice touch to have on Arch Linux based distributions because sometimes you do need to refresh the Arch Linux key rings. And if you don't know the commands for it, because it's something you don't have to do that often. Typically, you got to go look for the command in a wiki, right? So I often have to go and look for a lot of these commands. Like the command to remove orphaned packages is something that's not something you'll enter very often. And it's not a obvious command. Like it's kind of a convoluted, lengthy command with a lot of flags. So having a graphical way to do some of this stuff, you got a button for ranking the mirrors. Yeah, this is nice. I like this. Going back to the main welcome page here, install apps. I'm assuming would give us, yeah, like some extra, probably especially a lot of proprietary software, maybe that's not easily available in the repos. But they do have some free and open source stuff here. Brave, un-Google Chromium, Chromium. Actually, these are all open source, except Opera is a proprietary browser. So you got some extra browsers, email clients as well, office suites, got LibreOffice, WPS-only office, and Microsoft 365. Yeah, everyone wants 365 on their Linux system now. Then text editors, what do we have? G-Edit, Micro, and Zed. Micro is already installed. That's nice. I love the Micro text editors. Probably my favorite terminal-based text editor that's not Vim. All right, Vim is definitely superior, but Micro is a really nice touch. It's kind of like Nano on steroids. I really like Micro. For a graphical text editor, G-Edit and Zed both are pretty good. I scrolled down a little bit. Let's get into video and movies. So you've got Kodi, Parole, SM Player, Totem, VLC, X Player for audio, some of the options, Audacious, Clementine, Dead Beef, which is my favorite. Lollipop and Rhythm Box are all here as well. I'm going to go ahead and close out the welcome screen. So let me go ahead and get into the menu system. And if I go into development, we have several things here. Most of it is Qt-related, Kodi Plasma being a Qt-based desktop environment. It makes sense why all of this stuff is here. But some other programs that, you know, a typical desktop computer user might have a use for Micro, the text editor, Kate is also here, a text editor, and that's one of Kodi's default applications. Mild is also here. That's for viewing diffs. Under the graphics category, we have Gwynvue, which is Kodi's image viewer. Under Internet, I want to take a look at the Cache browser. Let's see what this is all about. And it's taking a minute to load, but Firefox typically takes a little bit of time to load, and this is in a virtual machine. I only gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM. I gave it two threads of my 24 thread CPU. It's interesting that one of the default tabs that open is darkreader.org. So this is like a darkreader plugin. I don't know too much about it, but that's interesting that they're pushing that canvas blocker is also here. I'm assuming these are plugins that are already enabled in Cache browser and having those default tabs open up. Just let you know, hey, those are there. Matter of fact, let me go into the menu system here. If I go to add-ons and themes, yeah, you can see they've already got canvas blocker and darkreader both installed and enabled. They also have Ublock Origin installed and enabled. That is the Cache browser. I do like the theme. I do like the colors. I like the cute theme. And I really like everything about their desktop. I like the wallpaper as well, very sexy. And let's get back into the menu under Internet. Other than the Cache browser, nothing else here really to mention. The Avahi server, KDE Connect. KDE Connect is a nice piece of software that allows you to sync your mobile device with your desktop as well. So that's nice. We have a multimedia category, not much here. Post audio volume control under settings. We have our firewall configuration, which if I click on it, trying to connect to firewall D, we have to enter a sudo password. I'm not going to play with any of this. But that is your firewall there. Under settings, we also have post audio volume control. Again, Qt 5 settings. So that is configuring Qt. I'm assuming, yeah, changing theme, fonts, icon themes, yada, yada, yada. Let me go ahead and close out of that. And really, not much else. The system stuff. Alacrity is the default terminal. That is very nice. I'm glad they shipped a nice terminal. Although KDE's Dolphin is not bad, I do think Alacrity is kind of like the standard these days. Like, it is such a good terminal. There's really nothing bad to say about the Alacrity terminal. We have Btop, which is a system monitor. That's interesting. Just kind of a fancy graphical system monitor. But a lot of times, I mean, Htop does the trick. I mean, it gives you all the information. It's just, I guess, a sexier way to display that information. We have our Hello program, the kernel manager as well. If we want to play around with some of those extra kernels that are available in the repo. Dolphin is our file manager, of course, being a Plasma desktop. I do love the icon setting. I do love the Qt theme because it has this translucent bookmark sidebar here. That is really cool. Yeah, I kind of dig that. That's not bad. Also under system, we have the fish shell, which is probably just the default shell. Yeah, so this is console and fish shell launches. I'm assuming Alacrity was also defaulting to the fish shell, but I don't know. Let's see. Let's see if it tells me here in the NeoFish. Yeah, fish, 3.6.0. So it does default your user's shell to fish. I'm assuming the default system shell would probably be bash. I do echo shell. You can see right now, of course, where the DT user is default shell is slash bin slash fish. Now, if I wanted to see what the default system shell is, there is actually a file on every Linux system. Let me make this full screen. Let's see, can I zoom in? Let me find the default keybinding to zoom in. The file is slash etsy slash pass wd. Of course, let's go ahead and just view that with Vim. Assuming Vim is installed. And let's go ahead and look for the root user. The root user is the very first user. You can see his default shell slash bin slash bash. So that's the default system shell is bash. The default user shell is going to be fish. Let me go ahead and exit out of Alacrity. Getting back into the system category. Let's see if there's anything else to note. No, standard stuff. Octopi is here for a graphical of Software Center. Octopi is really nice. It's kind of like the old Debian Synaptic package manager that Debian and Debian-based distributions typically install. It's very, very similar. Octopi is, it's kind of like a version of Synaptic and self-designed for, you know, being a front end to Pac-Man instead of apt. So really cool program, Octopi. We have a utilities category and not much here. We have Arc, which is our archiving tool for zip, unzip and things like that. An emoji selector in case you need it, right? Kate and Kay Wright, so both text editors, part of the KDE suite of applications. Spectacle is our screenshot utility. And Vim is a text editor. Vim is installed out of the box, which is a nice touch. In the taskbar at the center, we do have some pinned applications. We have system settings. We have discover, the cachey browser and the dolphin file manager. And that's it, just four items pinned. I probably would go ahead and pin some other important things like obviously, I'm in a terminal all the time. I probably want a Lackardy pinned down here. I wonder how easy that would be if I search for a Lackardy. Could I just drag it down here? I really need a Lackardy. Yep, that does work. Let me escape out of the menu. Now, let me right click on the desktop and let me configure desktop and wallpaper. Let's see what kind of wallpapers they are using out of the box. See if they have their own custom wallpaper pack here. Got some abstract wallpapers. Most of these are really nice because they're minimal, not a lot of colors. Not terribly busy. Yeah, not bad. I kind of like the wallpapers. This mostly abstract art, although here's one that's more of an anime kind of thing. I don't know what's going on with this. It's called Pink Lady, that's interesting. Splash, yeah, that's the splash screen when it first booted up. Yeah, that's kind of cool too. Yeah, the wallpapers, they're okay. I wouldn't say this is my favorite group of wallpapers ever, but they're not bad. Let me get back to one of the more blue wallpapers. Actually, let me try the more purpleish color. Yeah, that's probably a nicer contrast there. That way everything isn't all the same kind of bluish neon greenish color. Now, let me open a terminal again. Let me just click on my alacrity terminal down here and zoom way in again, clear the screen here. Let's do a U name dash R. Let's see what kernel we're using. We're using kernel 6.1.12-cashyOS. So that's a generic kernel. That's not one of the custom kernels. They've got six different custom kernels with different schedulers enabled. Now let's see how many packages are installed out of the box. I didn't really install any extra packages. So just a base install with KDE Plasma, do a pacman dash, capital Q, lowercase q, and all the packages installed will spit out on their own line, right? The output is each package on its own line. So if I up arrow and pipe that into the WC program, the word count program, WC space dash L for a line count rather than a word count, 955 lines were in that output. That means there's 955 packages installed out of the box with cashyOS KDE Plasma. That's not a lot of programs. And you could kinda tell when I went through the menu system, there wasn't much there, especially in some places where I assumed there would be some stuff. There's nothing installed for multimedia, right? There's no music player, there's no video player installed, right? So you need to go install those, what I would consider very important packages under internet. I mean, we had the browser. We didn't really have email client, which most people don't need a desktop email client. There's no IRC client either, which might be important if you need support for your Linux distribution. There's really nothing else to speak of in that menu system. It's a really bare-bones system, which I kinda like. I like picking my own programs rather than having a full suite of applications serve to me. So there you have it. That's cashyOS. That's a very quick and cursory look. My very first time actually taking a look at cashyOS was right here on camera with you. And I quite like it. It's a standard Arch Linux based distribution, but it does come with a bunch of different desktop environments and window managers to choose from. Some of them have their own ISOs. You had three different ISOs. Katie Plasma, Genome, and XFCE. I thought it was themed rather well. I love some of the default applications. The Alacrity terminal, the FishShield, and then it's got all these optimized kernels, which may be good for some of you that need better speed and performance out of your kernel for various tasks, maybe like gaming. I find this Linux distribution rather appealing. I think it's a nice addition to a very crowded space because there's so many Linux distributions out there and there's so many Arch Linux based distributions out there. People often ask, do we really need another one? Well, I think we do need another one if they do it right and cashyOS seems to be doing it right. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim met Mement Mitchell, Paul Royal West, Armor Dragon, Bash Potato Chuck, Commander Angry, George Lee, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace Arch from Fort Or, Polytech Realities, Riverless Red Prophet, Roland Touls Devlin, Willie. I almost messed that up, but I probably should rerecord that. I'm not gonna do it. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at cashyOS would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. 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. They like my work. If you wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace. Alacrity, Fish, and VM all installed out of the box. It's perfect.