 I'm a big tiling window manager guy. I spend all my day in a tiling window manager and I do tend to float around between several of the tiling window managers, but DWM and I3 seem to be my favorites. Right now I'm in I3, but that's really beside the point. The reason why I bring up tiling window managers is because today we're going to be taking a look at a distribution that is catered towards people who use tiling window managers. And that distribution is called Axl. Now JDog, one of my patrons, has sent this in to me and asked me to take a look at it and I took a gander and thought I would make a video about it. So that's what we're going to do today. So Axl is an arch-based distribution that is catered towards people who are interested in tiling window managers. They have several tiling window managers that you can choose from. As far as I know, you install those yet during install, but I'm not actually sure yet. And other than that, there's not a lot on their website. We can actually take a look at their website right now. We just have a picture here and the download button. Good job in putting the download button right there up front. And then we have a list of their window managers that they have here, along with the themes that the window managers have. Other than that, there's not much here. Now they do have a GitHub page that has more information on it if you want it. I've perused a little bit, but most of this stuff looks to be just pictures of the window managers themselves, along with some installation instructions and the default key bindings. As far as I know, every single one of the window managers that they use use these key bindings. They do have some specific key bindings to specific window managers as well. You can click on the link just below this in order to find those key bindings. So that's the website. Let's go ahead and jump into a virtual machine here and make this full screen. Now there's several things that I'm going to point out right off the start. For whatever reason, there's this conky right behind my face here. I'll move that. And that is actually over a terminal. So if we close the terminal here, I believe Super C closes the window. And if we open up another terminal, which is Super Enter, Super Shift Enter, and then actually open up Floating and I don't know why. Super Enter. There we go. We'll close this one. Oh, that's annoying. Okay. Because apparently they have the meta key bound to what I'm guessing is Rofi or some kind of launch script. So it's kind of pulling double duty. The point I was trying to make was, as you can see that for whatever reason, the conky is actually over the window. And that kind of goes for everything. As far as I can tell, the brief time I spent with this, every full screen window I've had has had this conky over top of it, which is really weird. But anyways, let's go ahead and just install this thing and see how it goes. So they use the Calamari's installer and we're actually getting a full screen, which is not usually what that is. We can. So this is i3. So this is actually not. We can make that floating with that key binding. Luckily, I'm using i3. So right now, so I can remember the default key binding, otherwise I'd forget. So let's go ahead and hit next. And on our first screen, that's asking what video driver you want. We'll just go ahead and leave that blank for now, although we probably can install the open source one. And as you can see, I clicked on that, but it doesn't actually look like I selected it does. There is. If you deselect that, so it's not highlighted, you can see there's a little very faint checkbox in there. So that's that theming kind of makes it kind of hard to see what's actually been checked, but it's not a deal breaker. So by default, i3 is checked here and you could go through and install all these, which is exactly what I'm going to do. Now I probably won't look at every single one of these in the video, but I just want to see what happens if you install all of them, because if I was personally going to use this, I'd install all of them. So let's see here by default, it chooses Chicago. I'll just choose Detroit because that's the right time zone. It's a reasonable keyboard will erase disk. We don't need a swap. He does give you the choice, which is now, I believe, a default in Calamari's. You can go through and choose between the XT4, XT3 and butterfs. We'll just leave it at XT4 and we'll go ahead and hit next and enter our credentials. And we'll hit next again. And then it will confirm all the stuff that we just shows and we'll hit install. Now I will go ahead and pause the video here and we'll come back and take a look at some of these window managers. Okay, that is now installed. Let's go ahead and do a reboot here. So this appears to use LightDM as the display manager. I'm assuming that's what this is, but it is definitely themed. No matter what it is, we're going to go ahead and enter our password. And this is I3. Okay, so we're going to try to change the display resolution. Okay. Now that we have a display resolution that is not, you know, horrible, we can see that that conky moved to the center, but I believe we can change at least so it's off to the side by reloading I3, which is control shift, control shift and R, which is by the way, the way a very, very odd restart, because usually it's super shift and R, but it changes to control shift and R. It's definitely a choice. Now they use the color, DT's color scripts in the terminal, which is cool. But also you'll see that the conky has stayed on top. So let's go ahead and open up another application here like Firefox and see if Firefox is also underneath the conky, which it is, it's underneath the conky. Why on earth would you want the conky over all of your applications? Like that makes no sense to me at all. That has to be a bug, like it has to be a bug. But anyways, we'll go back to the first workspace here and we're going to kill all conky. There's no process called conky, so we can't even kill it. Okay, I guess we're just going to have to put up with it. That's fine. All right, super seed close. So this is the I3. Let's go ahead and log out here. What's the super control shift in Q again, very odd. We're going to choose one of the different. We're going to choose BSPWM this time, enter password, go into BSPWM and see if they have the same problem here, we'll open up a terminal works fine and BSPWM the conkeys underneath it just where it's supposed to be. So that's an I3 thing weird because it doesn't do with like I've had conky on I3 before and that doesn't never done it before. Now I believe that this up here is going to be poly bar, but I believe in I3 it was EWW. I might be wrong about that. Let's go ahead and close that and actually log out. We'll go back to I3 and find that out because I'm very curious because I've never used EWW before. I read on the GitHub pages they use EWW somewhere prop again and we'll type that and now that's poly bar. That's a very nice looking poly bar. I've never, it's beyond me. I'd never be able to do all those rounded corners. That's beyond my skill set. But so we've seen BSPWM and I3 I guess we are going anointingly they've pulled double duty the reason why they've gone through and made all of their binding start with control instead of super is because super if you just press super Rofi comes up I'm pretty sure this is Rofi but usually I'm so used to the super at being for things like killing the menu which it is if you open up a terminal and do super C if you just accidentally tap it the Rofi comes up I'd have to change that that annoy the hell out of me. So control shift and Q log out. This time we're going to try Q tile we can go to Q tile so this is what Q tile looks like now is that the Q tile bar X prop or is this something different this is going to be the Q tile bar okay I have to say that is a very good looking Q tile I'm kind of very happy with that. This is probably the one that I would use at least so far control shift and Q to log out no control C control shift Q Q X okay kill it should be super C so why super C not working super C is not working super C is not working okay why I'm not sure it says the same to log out is still control shift in Q that's not working either so that's awesome yeah I'm having some virtual box or virtual manager problems so I'm going to go ahead and hit the power off button because that was frozen at least the cursor was frozen wasn't typing anything so maybe it didn't grab the key the keyboard so let's go ahead and start back up again and get back into full screen and that was Q tile we'll go to DWM next and we'll open up terminal X rander dash S there we go and control shift R I wonder if to reload control shift and R actually works in DWM it does okay and once again we have the above everything which is annoying like really super annoying I'm wondering if that's not a virtual machine thing simply because I don't I just can't see anybody actually configuring it that way so I'm just going to assume that that's you know the case that it's just a VM thing now in terms of what this looks like this looks amazing I wonder I'm wondering what this is this is the DWM bar that's the DWM bar that is a sexy DWM bar I wonder how they did that all right so we're gonna actually I might try to go look at the other window managers but I'm curious so we're gonna go we're gonna zoom in here zoom in page up nope wonder all right so let's go ahead and install NeoFetch so we can actually see some stuff here all right so this is DWM using the fish shell as the default shell this is a Lackardy so this should be super plus to zoom in there we go so this is a Lackardy that's easy okay now if we CD into .config this is where we should find all of our configuration files for everything so we have I3 here we have left WM we have Qtile BS PWM I don't see DWM though so I wonder if we CD up a level and do an LS here do we see LS dash a so I don't see a dot suck list so we see our dot X mode add there that's for X mode add so supposedly all evil oops all evil oh interesting the DWM one is an opt that is weird okay so we can close that and we'll zoom in on here so these are the this is the DWM config it does the include trick for doing different themes so I wonder if they actually have different themes installed let the go see CD slash OPT do an LS here we got CD into XL DWM I don't like this is that this is an OPT because I'm what is it does that mean when you do an update all of the stuff is going to get overwritten I'm not sure actually sure how that works you an LS here so if you seeding to themes the only thing man there is one dark so but you can still create your if you wanted to zoom in here getting always forget to do that LS here what I'm looking for is the bar like I'm trying to figure out what bar they're using or the bar script if they're using DWM blocks or SL status okay so they're using DWM blocks which is what they're using to get this cool stuff up here where the DWM blocks configuration file is I don't actually know and I'm not gonna go looking for it but I had to say this looks really cool now it reminds me of a forker DWM called NV Chad so they're basing that heavily off message and actually may be the exact code I'm not sure but it's definitely a and took inspiration from that because they look quite similar so let's go ahead and close this out and we'll go look at some of the other window manager so control shift Q to log out and that was DWM now let's go ahead and look at left WM got only a two more left to go and left WM did not want to log in okay TL took us right back to the display manager interesting so we're not gonna get to look at the left WM let's see if X-monad will log in and will so that is X-monad now we open up a terminal the congee is on the bottom so I'm again virtual machine problem okay so this is again going to be a lack or they're gonna use a lack or to cross the board I'm not quite sure what theme they're calling this is are they calling this like a Nord theme not Nord grub box seems a little bright for grub box but it's kind of cool let's see here they have a drop-down menu they don't it's not drop-down it just brings up Rofi so let's open up Rofi and take a brief look at the applications that they have installed by default so looks like they're using a lot of the XFCE stuff as a back-end so you can actually have GUIs for settings so that's what most of the stuff here is XFC stuff the file manager is going to be that's Thunar I believe that's Thunar and let's see here that's the file manager settings a Firefox genie a GPIC for color picker have some stuff there for audio and stuff a H top is installed by default keyboard the covantain manager which will help you with a theme cute applications mail reader mail reader oh let's just go for the default okay yeah that's gonna be an XFCE thing and video so whether or not even if you choose the open source video drivers and video still seems to be installed whether you want them or not now I don't remember it's possible that I left the Nvidia stuff checked when we did the install that checkbox was so faint that it's possible that it was checked and I just didn't uncheck it or they just installed by default whether you want it or not which would be weird power manager which is gonna be XFC stuff I'm not seeing a lot of extra applications here terminal emulator which will just link be a like a similar to LACRITY of them web browser which is gonna be a similar to Firefox and Rangers installed that's all you got it's very very minimal so that is axle now I didn't spend a lot of time going through the configuration files that's something that I could do if anybody's interested I suppose the thing is with window managers I'm very picky with how things work and I think that every window manager user is that we all have our own key bindings that we use and are almost reliant on like for example I can never use super C for closing stuff that's just not what I want I want super Q it's just how I've been hardwired to use I I know DT uses super shift and C to close stuff and I know a lot of people use that I know people who use super X so everybody has their own way of doing things and that's one of the hardest things to do when you're trying to promote a distribution that is for other people you know because everyone has their own wants and needs in terms of key binding and stuff but so you can't you're never gonna be able to please everybody on that so that's the reason why I didn't really go through the configuration files because that'd be the first thing that I'd go in there and change now in terms of looking appearance it's kind of amazing honestly the bars themselves throughout the window managers that we looked at they're all really cool you can tell they've put a lot of effort into making those bars look really good and as someone who does a lot of racing I can tell you right now that takes some effort so I'm kind of impressed with the look and view now I wish that the window managers had alternate themes that you go through and do so like I know like at left WM allows you to change things and stuff like that through their configuration file and there are ways of doing that in other window managers as well so it'd be cool if like say deed the DWM has had all the things that you could switch to using that include line I'm assuming that that's something that they could do in the future that'd be neat the only other thing that I would really complain about is that you get your configuration files for every window manager except for DWM in your home directory the DWM stuff has is hidden away in OPT and I don't like that I want that in my home directory where I can actually see it where I'm not going to be worried that if I pull down an update to whatever I all my configuration is going to get overwritten that I'd be very worried about that so that is actual if you're interested in this type of distribution leave a comment in the comment section below thank you again J-Dog for sending this in it's possible that I'm going to still their configs for couple of these window managers because I kind of want to play around with them some more as for if I'd ever actually installed the distro on hardware I don't know I've done a lot of art space distros lately so maybe sometime in the future you can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast you can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash Linuxcast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons today Devon Patrick on Marcus Megalyn Jackson and tool Steve a separate Linux Eric Mitchell art center carbon Dave Jeremy Sean Odin Martin E. Andy Merrick camp Joshua J. Peter a crucible dark benefit glad ain't primus thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time