 Today, I'm pretty excited to take a look at a Linux distribution that I've never taken a look at before on the channel, and that distribution is Elive. Elive is a very interesting Linux distribution because, for one thing, it claims that it may be the best Linux distribution ever made. They actually put that right there on the home page. Elive may be the best Linux OS ever made, and probably the only distro you'll stay with. So apparently, they're saying, hey, once you install Elive and check it out, you know, it's so nice, and it's so fast, and intuitive, and powerful, you'll never distro hop again. And that may be the case, so I'm kind of interested in this. Now Elive is a Debian-based Linux distribution, and it uses the Enlightenment desktop. It actually uses E16, Enlightenment 16, which is a really old version of Enlightenment because Enlightenment has been on E17 for many years now. And then, of course, Bode Linux has forked Enlightenment to create the more modern Moxia desktop environment, and I really like Moxia. But E16 is really going to be kind of a blast from the past. It also uses compias, or I don't know if it uses compias out of the box, but you could use compias with it. It also uses KyroDoc, which is one of my favorite docs. If I had to use a doc on Linux, KyroDoc is really nice. It's going to have khaki. It's going to be an old school kind of flashy Linux desktop. The kind of Linux desktop maybe you would have seen 10 to 15 years ago. For those of you who remember all those desktop environments and window managers with nice transparency and nice effects and all of that stuff, where today, of course, everything is a little more flat and I guess less inspiring. Now I won't bother running through the installation of Elive on camera. It's a pretty straightforward installation process. It's not the Calamari installer or the Ubiquiti installer or anything like that. You boot into the live environment and its own kind of custom installation comes up and it just asks you a few basic questions like do you want to do automatic partitioning or manual partitioning? If you want to do manual partitioning, then you probably need to open up something like G-Parted and partition your drive. Other than that, you create a username, a password, and then it asks you about some programs to install or not to install. Like it asks you do you want Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, you know, things like that. And you can either check them if you want them installed or uncheck them if you don't want them installed. It has two different versions as far as 32-bit and 64-bit. And today I'm going to take a look at version 3.8.16 beta. So this is a just released beta version and again 32-bit or 64-bit. So that's great because there are a lot of old machines out there that are still perfectly capable of running Linux as an operating system. But so few Linux distributions these days offer a 32-bit ISO. I'm really glad the Elive guys maintain a 32-bit version. And if you click download here, one of the things you'll notice is the 32-bit download, you can just download the 32-bit version for free. If you want the 64-bit download, they ask for you to make a donation. So you click the drop down and you know, choosing them out to donate. And I don't mind donating money for Linux distributions. Like if they ask for money, I understand, you know, they put in a lot of work, time is money and these guys should be rewarded for the hard work. And especially when I see people doing unique stuff. And I think Elive, even just reading about it before trying it out, I think they're doing a really unique thing here with this distribution. So I gave them a few bucks. I went ahead and made a donation. I downloaded the 64-bit ISO and I've already ran through the installation in a virtual machine. I'm using Vert Manager. And let's go ahead and boot into it and check it out. All right. So I have launched Elive 3.8.16. And the first thing you notice as far as a first impression is it actually is a quite attractive desktop. And it really does have that retro look. Those of you that have been in Linux for a number of years, this is old school Linux, right? Back in the day, everybody had cocky on their desktop. This was just a really nice way to add a little bling, a little sexiness to your desktop. You had the conky system monitor here on the desktop to give you some information about memory usage, disk space, swap, you know, your top processes as far as CPU and RAM and, you know, other things, network information is also here. And then Cairo Dock was probably the sexiest, most popular Dock available on Linux, especially about 10, 12 years ago. Really nice wallpaper here. And this widget over here, I'm assuming is part of Enlightenment. Oh, when you click on the edges, it collapses. Ah, so there's two of them. And what these are, I believe, are our desktops. So we have two different desktops here with it looks like six different workspaces. Yeah, I've got six different workspaces. And that has this wallpaper here. But the other desktop with its six workspaces has a different wallpaper. That is really, really neat. And again, this was very bleeding edge kind of stuff, 10, 15 years ago, because this looked so much better than some of the alternative operating systems out there, you know, 15 years ago, like Windows XP Windows XP compared to the Enlightenment desktop was really kind of hideous in comparison. I'm not going to lie, Enlightenment is pretty sexy. If I click on the desktop, by the way, if you do a left click, you get your program menu here and this very open box like or flux box like if you right click on the desktop, then you get your settings and theming stuff, maintenance things, your session things like restarting and logging out. So that's the right click and the left click. Again, that is your programs menu. One thing I notice is we have this icon on the desktop. It's a picture of a CD. And then let me click on that. I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to be. It says it's connecting to the psychic radio station. Now, I don't think you guys are going to be able to hear that because I'm not hearing anything. I did not set up this VM to actually use any audio drivers or anything, but it is connected to a radio station and playing right now. By the way, this very old school music player here is kind of like a win out kind of clone and win out skin. This is audacious. The audacious audio player. Really fantastic minimal audio player for Linux up here in the top left. This is our Sys tray. That is our clipboard manager, which is clipman. I specifically asked it to install a clipboard manager during the installation process. I had the choice to install clipman or not install it. If I had other stuff in a system tray, like the volume icon or any kind of battery information or anything on a laptop, you know, all of that would also be appearing in a little Sys tray here on the left hand side of the screen. One thing I'm not really crazy about on the desktop, these workspace widgets here, they are rather big. I wonder, can you resize them? You see if you can move them, but I wonder, can I actually physically resize them? Yes, you can. OK. And try to get them a little bit smaller size because I didn't need that widget. I mean, they were about four times this size a minute ago. And that was a little bit too big just for a workspace switching widget. Honestly, I don't even know if you need that widget. I would think there would be keybindings to change workspaces as well. Let me see if I can actually find a keybinding that would work for this. OK, Control Alt and the arrow keys would move between the workspaces. Now, it looks like if I do Super and F2, it takes me to that second desktop with those six workspaces. And then once I'm there, I do Control Alt and the arrow keys. You know, I can move through those workspaces. And then if I go back and do Super F1, I go back to that first desktop with its six workspaces. So it is all keyboard driven. So I don't necessarily need the widget here for this visual representation of what's going on, unless I really need it. But for now, I'm going to leave it on the desktop because I do think it adds a little bit of aesthetics to this desktop. Now, instead of Super F2, if I do Alt F2, I get a run prompt here. This is Kupfer. I have never really used this program, but it's a graphical way of getting a run prompt here. Similar to Dmenu or Rofi, it's just got a little more polish to it as far as it comes with icons and stuff. So if I started typing something like, I know there's a terminal somewhere on the system. So terminology is the terminal, the default terminal with enlightenment. Usually on most enlightenment distributions I've ever used anyway. And this is a really nice prompt. Is that a fish or maybe ZSH? It could be bash. I mean, you never know, but I will say that's a sexy shell prompt there. Let me, well, let me just launch bash. Okay, the bash prompt is something completely different. So that was not bash. So let me exit. And then let me do fish. Was it fish? Fish is not installed. Okay, well, let's go ahead and do ZSH, which I'm assuming would be the only other option they would use. Yes. So they're using ZSH for the default user shell. Again, terminology is the terminal. If I run a H top right now, we have a bit of stuff running because we have the clipboard manager, we have the Kupfer run launcher also running. We have Cairo doc. We have a compositor running to get all this nice transparency. We have Khaki, of course, running even with all that running, though, 385 megs of the four gigs of RAM I gave this VM. I'm sure I could cut that in half very easily if I just killed Khaki and killed the stuff in the clipboard manager. Matter of fact, I could try that right now. Let me quit out of H top. I'm going to run a kill all khaki and then let me kill everything in the clipboard manager or the Sys tray here. They kill all of that. And now if I run H top, let's see. Yeah, that definitely lightened it up. We were at what, 380 something megs? That got us down to 304 megs just by doing that. And I'm sure I could lighten that up even more to shave off some RAM. So I will say, even in this VM, everything is very peppy. Everything like these menus just instantly load and really not bad. And I kind of like the look and feel of it. But you guys know I'm a big fan of standalone window managers. And especially I'm a really huge fan of open box. And E16 kind of reminds me of open box a little bit. Now other than the enlightenment menus here that you can click on the desktop. And these menus here are part of the enlightenment window manager. You do have a applications menu of course in the Cairo dock at the bottom as well. It's a rather traditional kind of menu. I do think it looks really nice with this transparent black background. It's really a gorgeous looking menu system. And you even have the little search bar at the top where you could search for something. Again, if I wanted to search for terminal, for example, it would give me all the terminal options available in the menu. Let me go through the menu system just very briefly. And let's point out some of the programs that are installed. Now you do have some options on what gets installed and what doesn't. But for the most part, much of this was automatically installed. For example, Thunar is the file manager with Elive. You do have a calculator installed. I'm assuming that's probably calculator. No, this is calculator with a Q. So that's one of the QT apps. Really nice calculator. I'm just a little surprised that they're kind of mixing GTK apps and QDAPs in this distribution, which is fine. A lot of distributions try to stick to one toolkit over the other. But I don't think that's really necessary. At least nowadays, I've noticed that GTK apps and QDAPs typically look the same on most distributions these days. Years ago, sometimes you would get weird things happening if you try to install QT apps on a GTK desktop. If I go to the internet category, probably one of the most interesting things is the web browser. Now I purposely told it to install Firefox. Now it did give you the option of installing Chrome, Opera, Firefox. And by default though, the one that was ticked on was Pell Moon, which Pell Moon is a fork of Firefox, an old fork of Firefox, that I'm not sure I can really recommend people to run for one thing because it's old, there could be security issues. I would just install the standard Firefox if I were you. The other thing, if you use a lot of Firefox plugins, Pell Moon, there's gonna have some compatibility issues with newer Firefox plugins, again, because it was forked a few years back. The ISO I downloaded was about two and a half gigs in size. So not a small ISO, so there is actually quite a bit of stuff installed out of the box with Elive, which is fine. Web applications, under Sound, they have things like Music, YouTube, and Spotify. I'm not sure if they're already pre-installed and ready to go, or those are just links to an installer. Yeah, it looks like it's gonna open up Mozilla Firefox and probably the Spotify website. Okay, and if I go back to the menu system here and go back to Sound, we also have Audacious, again, what's the audio player. But we have Audacity, which is an audio editor. Really great audio editor, but I'm surprised that's installed out of the box. Sound Juicer is another one, I'm a little surprised that's a CD ripper. Some of these audio programs are not programs most Linux users are going to need on their system. So some may say that the ISO is a little bloated, but I won't be harsh on Elive for having a few more programs installed out of the box than maybe most other Linux distributions. Because especially people that are installing on machines that maybe have slow internet connections, that could be a positive. It depends, everybody's got a different situation here. Under Graphics, again, you have a ton of stuff installed. Darktable, a Nebook reader, GIMP, I think I ticked on GIMP and Inkscape. Or they were ticked on by default. I had the options of also ticking on things like Blender. I didn't want to bloat up this VM too much, so I told it not to install Blender. But a lot of this stuff was here by default. I didn't choose most of this stuff here. Under Video, we have a Vitamux. I'm not sure what that is. Is it a video player? It's a video decoder. Okay, never actually used that program. Also under Video, we have Cheese, which is our webcam program. Flowblade, which is a video editor. That's really interesting. So they include an audio editor and a video editor. This was really good for those of you that do any kind of content creation. I think Elive would be a fantastic distribution to install, especially since it's based on Debian Stable. You don't have to worry about stability. SM Player is our video player, or VLC, if you prefer VLC. Both of them are installed. Do we have any games installed? We have an emulator. It looks like a Super Nintendo emulator. That's really interesting. And other than that, we just have some Elive stuff, customization stuff, preferences, and administration. Now what I want to do is I want to get back to the desktop. And when I right click on the desktop, I'm going to go to Themes. It looks like Elive Dark, Elive Dark with big fonts, and Winter. Let's choose the Winter theme, because I'm assuming that's not one that was already enabled. So, wow. Now look at the menu system. It's more of a silvery color instead of that dark black color. That could be interesting against a dark background. Let me find some wallpapers. I'm going to keep this theme for right now. But where are the wallpapers? Let me go to Desktop, Backgrounds. There's a menu for backgrounds, but it does nothing. OK, let me go to Settings then. See, various settings, background. Oh, OK. So that looks like what we need to do. We need to go to Settings and then choose the Background tab. And then we have this little slider. And yeah, some pretty neat backgrounds. So we'll check these out. You know what, since we have that light theme, that background, which is very dark, is probably one to go with. We have a forest there. I have that. That's another one that would look really good against a light theme. Typically with light themes, you want a dark background. If you got a dark theme, you want a light background. So that, of course, is too light for the theme we chose. I'm going to go back to that second one, because I think that is the way to go there. And let's see how our windows look with this theme. This is Thunar here with this light theme. Again, the winter theme. Yeah, not bad. And let me left-click on the desktop again. I'm going to go to Enlightenment, to Settings. And what else could we play around with? We had the backgrounds. We had the themes. I wonder how I changed the icon set. Let me close that. I'm going to go to this menu since I can search. Can I search for icons? Customize, look, and feel. I'm assuming that's going to be LX Appearance. And it is. All right. And of course, it looks like the GTK theme. So the Enlightenment theme, of course, is going to be the bar. The GTK theme is going to be what's inside the bar. For example, we could change to Add Weight to Dark, but that wouldn't make sense for what we're doing. Azure Light looks pretty good. Clear Looks actually would probably fit this pretty good as well. Actually, this one here, which is Koger Light. Yeah, I would go with that. Icon Sets that are available. The Elive icon set, I guess, is what they're calling this. We have the Add Weight to icon set, which looks pretty hideous. I wouldn't want to use that. Actually, I like the Enlightenment X icon set. That looks even better. And we have Flat Woken, which looks kind of like the old Fayenza icon set. And this icon set called Love. OK, let's do Enlightenment X. By the way, when I changed the background earlier and I was on the first desktop, did you guys notice the wallpaper only changed for this first desktop? Not the second. We still have this wallpaper on the second desktop. But if I go to it and then, again, go to Enlightenment, go to Settings, go to Background, I could change the background on this desktop. So I could change it to something. How about this one? I'm going to hit Apply, close it. Now we have a different wallpaper on the first desktop and the second desktop. Let's see what we can do with the Cairo dock configuration. So I'm going to right-click on Cairo dock, and then I'm going to go to Cairo dock, Configure. Position on the screen, it's already at the bottom. That's probably where I would want it. But those of you that would prefer it at the top or on the left-hand side of the screen, which I know most people these days like putting their docks on the left, of course, you could change that. To get all of the configuration options, what you need to do is go down here to Advanced Mode. Click on that. And then you get this window with even more options that you could play with. For example, a lot of the stuff in Cairo dock are actually widgets that have been ticked on. You could tick them on, tick them off. And of course, many of them have configuration options within the widgets themselves that you can play with. I'm not sure if I want to play with any of this stuff or not. Oh, animated icons. Let's play with this. By default, when you hover over something, the effect you get is really just this kind of zoom effect. But when you're hovering over an icon, it has this pulse effect. You see how it kind of pulses? You get the little pulse effect going on, but we could change that. Let's change that to a bounce effect. And let me hit Apply. Let's see. Yeah, now the icons bounce up and down when you hover over them. Of course, you can enable pulse and bounce if you wanted both the pulsing and the bouncing. I didn't click Apply. Ah, that's pretty cool. One of the ones I always liked, there was one that they basically rotated or they circled. Let me see. That's the one. I really like that one, the rotating one. That's the one I used to use all the time back in the day. I'm gonna leave that on. Then you can have different effects for when you hover over them and when you actually click on them. So typically what I would do is I would want it to rotate when I hover over them, because it's such a nice effect. But when I click on them, I want them to bounce. So I'm gonna do a bounce and rotate when I click on them. So let me click Apply. I'm just hovering. And then when I find one and click on it, no, it'll bounce when I click on it. Really cool. ChiroDoc is just fantastic. There's so many options available for you in ChiroDoc. It can be overwhelming when you first start playing with it because so many options can be paralyzing to some users. I think that's all I'm gonna do here for this very quick first impression look at Elive. I gotta say, I'm really impressed with it and I kind of assumed I would like this distribution, even just reading about it because I like standalone window managers. I love things like Fluxbox and Openbox and JWM. And Elive is kind of a window manager, very similar to those particular window managers. So I'm sure I could use E16 as my window manager of choice. That's really what I needed to use. And I love things like ChiroDoc and these desktops, these kind of retro desktops. Really sexy. Now is Elive maybe the best Linux OS ever made? I don't know about that. Of course, this is just a bit of marketing, but I will say it is clean, it looks good and it is fast. Enlightenment 16 is very fast for a window manager. So I will say that they're not lying when they say it's fast, intuitive, powerful. I agree. I think this is a well put together Linux distribution and I do love the fact that they do charge for the 64-bit version. I know some people may have a problem with that, but one of the real problems is I see people doing good work on free and open source software, especially people that maintain Linux distributions and eventually they get burnt out or they just can't afford to spend as much time on the project that they're working on anymore because it's just not worth it. They're spending hours and hours and hours a day and they're not making any money. They see no return on investment, which many of these people are not doing it for money. They're doing it for just the love of working on that distribution or that piece of software. But I love the fact that they're very straight up, hey, you want the 64-bit ISO, donate something. And I think that's a model that more Linux distributions need to start going to because if we want these distributions to survive, we need to be able to fund them properly. And I also think it's important that we start training the public to get used to the idea of paying for free and open source software. I think right now too many people have it in their head that free and open source software should always be free as in cost. And I definitely don't agree with that. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. I need to think Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Arch 5530, Akami Channel, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Caleb, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott and Willie, these guys. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This first impression look at Elive, wouldn't have been possible. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you would like to support my work, please consider doing so. You'll find DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.