 Elementary OS just had a big release, version 7.0 codenamed Horace was released just a couple of days ago, and for those of you that have tried out elementary OS in the past, this version is not necessarily like some major groundbreaking release with a lot of new features. For the most part it's bug fixes and some minor tweaks along the way, but if you're a big fan of elementary OS, you've used it in the past, you're gonna love the new version 7.0. I'm a big fan of elementary OS, I really appreciate what the elementary team has done creating this very aesthetically pleasing look and feel, this really polished desktop environment that's very cohesive, everything kind of looks like it, everything belongs together, you know it all works as one, which is something not a lot of Linux desktop environments especially can say, most of our desktop environments own Linux, they look like they're kind of thrown together, they're this weird mish-mash, hodge-podge of various parts that sometimes don't quite look right together, but elementary OS is really something different. Now I've just installed elementary OS here inside a virtual machine just to take a look at this latest release, I've got the welcome screen here which I could go through and you know, take a look at the little slideshow, if I wanted to I could go ahead and set some settings here, for example the default theme is the slight mode, but I prefer dark mode so I can go ahead and set that accent color for your applications, right now the accent color for all my applications is gonna be blue, but if I wanted to change it to something like green or red or purple or you know, whatever it happens to be, assuming I can click the purple, the mouse here is blinking a little bit in the virtual machine, just know that's a virtual machine problem, this virtual machine I was struggling finding a good graphics driver here inside Vert Manager, I can tell you for those of you that are gonna try out elementary OS inside Vert Manager, the QXL driver doesn't work at all, you're just gonna get a black screen, the Vert IO driver does work except the mouse cursor never clicks in the right place, it's like the mouse cursor that you're seeing on the screen, it's not actually where it's actually at on the screen, it's really weird, so I'm using the VGA driver here and it actually works except it does have this annoying feature where the mouse cursor kind of blinks on and off every now and then, but going through the slide show here, we could go ahead and turn on and off the nightlight feature, if you wanted that kind of feature, I'm gonna leave it all for now, some housekeeping stuff, we could go ahead and turn on automatically deleting downloaded files, old temporary files and trashed files, by default the last two are ticked on, downloaded files is not ticked on by default, so I'm just gonna leave the default settings, we could connect our online accounts, if you had some social media accounts and things like that that you wanted to connect, I'm not gonna do that inside the VM, browse the app center, we're gonna take a look at that in just a second, free and paid apps and you of course you have your automatic updates, you may want to turn that on, it's very important that you keep up with your updates on your Linux machines, because so many of those updates are important security updates, so if you're one of those people that you're very forgetful, you know, you can go weeks or months without updating your machine, be sure to turn on the automatic updates, that way you just don't have to think about it. Let's go ahead and close out the welcome app, one of the features that really stands out with elementary OS is actually the suite of applications that it ships with and one of the applications, the app center is probably like their crowning achievement, it's what they often talk about the most in release notes, it's this app center where you can go and get all of your free as well as paid applications, which is really nice, they're offering developers a way to get paid through selling applications for money, because it's very hard especially on Linux sometimes for especially free and open source software developers to actually ask for payment and to get payment for pieces of software, so that is nice. I noticed in the release announcement, one of the things they've worked on is to make sure that the application scales correctly, you can see that if I scaled this down, it actually does respect that sizing, that's very important especially when you start snapping windows side by side where you're taking up only half the screen or if you're tolling windows, you know, sometimes you can get windows that compress down into a very small size and if it doesn't really resize correctly, you know, you can get some really wonky stuff going on inside the window. Now let me go ahead and click on one of these applications here to take a look at the description page, so this page is for the icon browser, which you can see is actually an elementary app, you can see that the developer is elementary incorporated, right, so this is their own custom application which we could go ahead and install, it is an icon browser, probably to browse the custom elementary icon set, so that's kind of neat, but you'll notice you've got these screenshots here on these pages, the screenshots sit on top of a background, a colored background, you see the colored background respects the accent color of your theme, so I set my accent color a minute ago to be purple, and you can see we get the purple background, so that's quite nice as well. If I go back to the home, I can go into settings here, you can see it's going to check for updates, automatic updates are turned on because I turned it on in the welcome out, and it looks like I've got a notification here as well, let me click on that, and you can see there's already a couple of updates I could go ahead and take, all I need to do is click the button here, update all, and away it goes, and as you can see I didn't have to enter a sudo password actually to take these updates, that is a really neat feature. Another one of their custom elementary applications that has seen some work is the text editor code, let me search for code because it is not pinned to the dock here, so code, let's go ahead and open a file, and let's go into the home directory, if I do control F, or say control H for hidden, control H, and I'll do the dot bash RC, you can see this code editor here, this is very nice, I love the syntax highlighting for plain text editor, this is really cool, and the standard key bindings for zooming in and out work as well, and one of the cool things with the code text editor is because I chose a dark GTK theme, system theme for my applications, the code also uses a dark theme here for syntax coloring, you know, for the text color scheme as well, and that is kind of neat because I believe if I had to change the color scheme to a light theme, it could automatically change that in code, let's try that, if I go into the system settings here, and I go to desktop, and let's go to appearance, let's change back to the default light theme, and now close system settings, and let's go back into the code text editor, so again, it's not pinned to the dock, so let me search for it here in the menu system, and you can see now, instead of that dark theme, we now have a light theme for our text editor. I also noticed in the release announcements that some work has been done on their terminal emulator as well, for it to also respect light and dark themes, so right now, this is the default theme, but I believe I can play around with the themes here, it says follow system style, let's turn that on, so if I'm doing a light theme, you can see it's really the same kind of light color scheme that the text editor was using, now that I'm, you know, using a light GTK theme, but if I go back into, well, I'm not the app center, I wanted the system settings, which is this icon, and I go back into the desktop, into appearance, set to dark mode, and now, let me hit the super key, and as you can see, just tapping the super key actually gives you this key binding shortcut menu that comes up, which is a really nice feature, it lets you know some standard key bindings here in the Pantheon desktop environment that elementary OS uses, this is very similar, those of you that use the awesome window manager, awesome, has had this feature for years, where you just hold the super key and a menu comes up with all of your key bindings, also the old Unity desktop environment on Ubuntu had the same feature where you could tap the super key, and you would get a quick little help guide for your keyboard shortcuts, so the super key, just tap the super key, and I was looking for a key binding to actually open the menu system, and you can see applications menu is super plus space, so let's try that, super space, and does actually open the menu, let's open our terminal, and now let's see if our color scheme is a dark color scheme, once again, if I go to system settings, you can see we've set it to follow the system style, so it changed that light terminal color scheme to a dark one based on what we're doing for our application color scheme, that is very cool, the elementary team has also spent some time working on their music player, which I believe they have decided to rewrite from scratch, and just opening it, it does look quite a bit different from the last version of this music player, you can see the queue is empty, I don't have any music in this VM to play, but I do love the design, it's very simple in design, I like simple tools, I like things that it's obvious where everything is, what everything does, now the most important application on any computer these days, of course, is the web browser, and they are using web, and the browser is actually called web, it's a GNOME web, essentially, and if I do distro.tube, which is my personal website, let's just see how things load here, and render, yeah, and my website looks like my website, everything looks like it's A-OK here, and let me close that out, GNOME web also has the ability for those of you that are used to using Mozilla Firefox on other Linux distributions, and you want to import your bookmarks, you can do that, you can import all of your Firefox bookmarks into web. They also have a desktop email client, which is simply called mail, and online accounts, we could go ahead and click it, and go ahead and enter our information as far as your Gmail account, or whatever kind of email you want to set up here for the desktop email client, and once it's set up, it kind of resembles Outlook, or Geary, or MailSpring, any of those particular email clients that typically have like a three column kind of layout, which is a lot of modern email clients these days, kind of mimic the look and feel of Outlook, and that's kind of what the mail application inside elementary OS mimics as well, and can't show you that unless of course I connect some email accounts, I'm not going to do that for privacy reasons here on this video. As far as the desktop environment with the panel and the dock and everything, it's the same look and feel. You've got the simple dock here at the bottom with most of the applications already pinned to it. You get the applications menu, which you can click on, or once again, super space to enter this thing, or you can break this down by category, you can search by category, or you can toggle that button on, and you can get all the applications in one big list, and of course it's got a pager here, because it's two pages worth of applications. Let's go ahead and check out the file manager here, because the file manager is quite attractive. Once again, I'll do control H to make sure I can view all of my hidden files. That's very important for me to turn on. I typically have that turned on in my file managers permanently. Typically there's a setting somewhere where you can always have your hidden files and folders shown, because for me, as much as I play with config files, I'm constantly needing to see these dot files. The file manager is a standard file manager. It's got everything you could possibly want, as far as you get your bookmarks on the side, you get the file system bookmark, which also shows you how much disk space you've currently used up as well. If I right click on a file, of course you get a standard right click menu that allows you to do things like cut copy and things like that, you can change the properties. So if you needed to do like a CH mod or something to give this thing executable permissions, well, you have a permissions tab here and you can say read, write, execute. So you can either just type the number in manually if you know exactly the number code for the permissions or you can just click the button. So if you need, you know, write permission for the group or execute permissions for the owner or whatever it happens to be, you can do that right there from the file manager. So that is very cool. Let me close the file manager out. In the center of the panel, of course you have your time and date, clicking on it, you get your standard event calendar that pops down, you have your system tray and your log out menu here on the right. Now if I hit super T to break up a terminal, that's a standard key binding here in elementary OS, super T opens your terminal. If I did a U name dash R, they are on kernel version 5.15, which is a older kernel, LTS kernel. But again, that elementary OS is not a rolling release distribution, it is designed for stability. So that is why that is the case. And if I do a apt list dash dash installed, let's get a list of all the packages that are installed on elementary line by line. And if I take that output and run that command again and pipe it into WC, the word count program space dash L for a line count rather than a word count, 1,599 lines of output or in that apt list installed command, which means there's 1,599 packages installed out of the box on elementary OS 7.0. I wonder if H top is installed out of the box, it is. Let's go ahead and check a CPU and memory usage. So CPU usage is very low. We're using about 3, 4, 5% of the CPU right now. We're not really doing anything right now so you wouldn't expect CPU usage to be very high. RAM usage, we're using about 1.1 gig of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. So one gig, that's probably standard for most desktop environments, most GTK based desktop environments these days, such as GNOME and Cinnamon and Budgie. They typically all run on about one gig of RAM. If I right click on the desktop and I go to change wallpaper, let's check out the wallpapers. The wallpapers, most of them look like wallpapers I've seen before. I really like the default wallpaper by the way. I probably wouldn't change it, probably run that for a while, but most of this other stuff, yeah, I think I have seen all of these wallpapers before so that one there would probably look good with a light theme. This lighter version of the wallpaper would look better since I'm using a dark theme. Here's one, which is a satellite. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's a pretty cool photograph. Here's one that would really probably pop, especially with a light theme since it's a dark wallpaper. And that one there as well. Yeah, beautiful wallpapers. I think I'm just gonna go back to the default for now. Yeah, that's really nice. Overall, elementary 7.0 is really not that different than elementary 6. Again, it's just some minor tweaks that are improving, especially some of the theming and accent colors and how things respect, especially the change from going from a light mode to a dark mode. That was always an issue in past versions of elementary, but they're really getting that stuff ironed out. But for the most part, again, small little tweaks and bug fixes here and there, really, they already had a nice product, right? They were already doing things really well. And this is, again, just kind of pushing a little bit forward in that same direction. Now, before I go, I wanna thank a few special people. I wanna thank the producers of this video. And of course, I'm talking about James Maxim, Matt, Mehmet, Mitchell, Paul, Royal, Wes, Armored, Dragon, Bash, Potato, Chuck, Commander, Angry, George, Lee, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archive, Adore, Polytech, Realities for Lust, Red Prophet, Roland, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at elementary 7.0 would not have been possible. The show is 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. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Elementary is kinda like macOS, if macOS was good.