 there are a ton of Linux distributions out there and from time to time I discover Distributions that I've just never heard of and when I do I usually exclaim what the fuck is that distro? So that led me to creating a series where I install these distributions that I've never heard of before and either mock them for existing or applaud them for existing and Mostly it's mock, but we'll see maybe it's possible that we find a distribution. That's actually good Nobody's ever heard of before. You never know we're things have happened. So today. We're going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution called Zelfos now. I have no clue if I'm pronouncing that correctly It starts with his X. So I'm assuming it's Zelfos, but it could be something different. Who knows anyways What this is is an arch based distribution that has DWM as its default window manager and as you know I'm a big DWM guy and There aren't really that many Linux distros out there that ship with DWM as their default as their main window manager In fact, I don't think there is one now. I know like Arco offers a DWM install and Actually, I can't think of another Linux distro that has DWM as something that's installed on an ISO So Zelf is actually somewhat unique in that way now What we're going to do is install it and take a look at it today. So let's go ahead and get started So I've loaded up Zelfos in a Virtual machine using vert manager and this is what it looks like out of the box now We're going to go ahead and try to get this to be full screen So I'm going to open up a terminal which I can get to by super enter which is a good default and we're it's going to type in rex rander Dash s 1920 if I can type by 10 1080 again if I can type and that will get us full screen, which is good Now As you can see This is a DWM that has been highly customized And if you have heard of a of a rice Called chad wm this looks a lot like that So i'm wondering if They took chad wm and put it on an iso because this does come with its own iso you can just Install it just like I have so let's see how this is actually installed So in order to get to the installer we have to do Go into d menu and type in install sys And that's going to i'm not actually sure what's going to okay So it's going to bring up the calamari's installer. So this is the zelf linux installer I don't know whether or not that should come up by default It probably should but at least they do put that explicitly in their documentation that you have to run that command in order For you to get this so let's go ahead and run through the installer real quick Next okay, so we're gonna we got some options here of what we can install Let's see what it means by package managers It's a flat pack and on software pamac paru. Okay, so we're going to install paru I don't think we need anything else there. So the unicode stuff we can leave blank because we're in a virtual machine Optimists it's going to be for something for nvidia. These the rest of these are graphics drivers And I believe we should be okay here For graphics drivers, but we'll go ahead and install the open source ones just in case go. Let's go ahead and hit next And then we have some general packages that we can install so accessories kava flamshot speed test cli stow tldr zathura mo c and Zelf mock icon get i'm not sure what that is Okay, so we got icon candy here by default. So that's just going to give us pi com And then task managers h top and which we will go ahead and install Asian fonts, which we don't need right now System fetch applications, which we can go and install neofetch. I'll save us from how to do it later a development python 3 is always usually a good idea And the rest of these can we don't I mean usually I do get and neovim and Lately I've been playing around with emacs, obviously So we'll we could usually do that, but we don't need to do that in this machine here. Diskin usb tools That's just g-parted, which you don't need internet browsers So we'll go ahead and install firefox. I don't know what it would come with by default But we want at least one web browser. We don't need any email or social clients We can see what they got here claws evolution Geary k-mail thunderbird and trojita and I've never heard of that one before Let's see your discord element fractal mumble Neochat pigeon signal telegram and wire. Let's see LibreOffice, which I'd normally install password manager Oh, usually I install bit warden Our terminal emulators. We want a lacklity for sure video tools video players VLC so you got quite a bit of options here for stuff that you can install including katin live and obs and YouTube bl. All right, so let's go ahead and hit next We will select a time zone and hit next again The ua english us in default is correct And then we'll go ahead and erase disk. We don't need a swap And we'll go ahead next And we'll enter our credentials. So matt And matt is good again, and this is Zulf os The m and then we'll enter a very strong and complicated password And then we want to have that to be the same password for the administrator account so we can use sudo And then we'll go ahead hit next And install and install now Then we'll wait for this to install and I'll cut the video here And when it comes back, we'll get started on looking at what the hell zulf o s actually is Okay, so as you can see We have an error here Now i'm assuming because they tried to install paru According to this from the community repose and paru is not in the community repose It's not in the a you might be in the a you are but it's It's definitely not in the community repose. You can't install it from there. You have to build it from scratch So i'm assuming it got to this point and just completely You know boinked so we're going to try this again One last time. So let's go ahead and get closed here. See what it does and it takes us back to this here So let's go ahead and go here into into d menu and do system Install system install s y s s y s. There we go. We'll try again It only gets one extra try other than we'll say that this is a complete failure Now I believe that this is a project by just one guy So i'm not going to lambast it too too hard and it's not Like the other wtf videos i've done where those distros were very high ranked on distro watch This one here is just something that I came across while doing the internet thing. So let's go ahead and do this again I think i'm going to leave everything default this time. I'm not going to select anything so we're just going to go ahead and hit next And uh next and then next and then next again Manual partitioning interestingly it's going to make us manual partition this time Um, okay. Well, we'll do that then Okay, so let's see. We'll delete this and then hit create And then all this looks fine So it's going to use butter butterfest by default, which is good and we want this to have mount point of root And then hit okay And then I believe we should be able to go ahead and hit next Okay And then we'll enter credentials again And then we'll enter our strong and complicated password As we say And hit next again, and then we're going to hit install and we'll see if this thing will go if No, that was a complete failure I'm guessing that we're going to have to go ahead and shut this down recreate the virtual machine And uh start over again. Okay, so what we're going to do is just do We'll go up here to uh view fullscreen And then okay, and we'll wait for this to start up again We'll see if this works. This will be the last try I'm only giving it this third try because I think I messed up the partitions I'm assuming that I didn't create a Uh like a boot manager or something. I don't know So something something went wrong with the partitioning when I did the manual partitioning So we'll we'll blame that second failure on me not the os A few moments later Okay, so here we are again We're going to go we're going to ignore the fact that it's not in full screen just don't install s s Okay And then we'll try again next. We're just going to leave everything default again And then you raise disc No swap is fine. Oh, I didn't even notice this here before Uh, you can choose butterfest x ex-t4 or Ex-t3 i'm going to choose ex-t4 because that usually works better in virtual machines So we'll just choose that just in case maybe that was the problem But anyways, let's go ahead and do this Okay Hit next and install and install and we're gonna I will cut the video here again And if we come back and it's installed hooray if we come back and there's another error we're just going to call this a complete and utter failure and uh Be sad about it for about five seconds and then we'll Wrap it up Okay After about three or four minutes, maybe closer to five We now are ready to restart this thing And go right into the os so we're going to hit done here and it will restart Or it should restart Is it going to restart? Why isn't it restarting? I'm being impatient I feel like I should do the jeopardy thing A few moments later Well, I have to say The start for zelf linux or zelf os or whatever the fuck they want to call it Not so promising. Oh, we have something coming up here. I've never seen it do that before. I mean, that's a weird xorg error Thing where the wallpaper still but we have text up here along the top Whatever the fuck is going on I have never seen that happen before usually when you get that text after you shut down from a Live environment and what you do in every single Uh like arch linux that I've ever seen Usually x is killed and x's will be displaying that wallpaper and we also have like I don't know if you can see this but down here There's like an a Like what is going on here? This has to be a virtual machine problem. Okay. Here we go All right, so the grub the grub part of this still set arch linux Let's go ahead and hit view There was an error there, but I didn't get to see it Okay Okay, and then we'll enter our password And we're back into the operating system, which is good Okay Interestingly enough the bar that we had in the live environment is nowhere to be seen here Uh, and I'm not sure why so let's go ahead and get this full screen So we did get pac-man which which is good. Um, okay why Why can't I type in the terminal? Okay, you want to know what? I don't know if I'm going to be able to get into a tty. I wonder if I Go up here It's a key combination to this one here. Oh Okay What the fuck? Okay, we'll try again. What what about this one here? Okay. What about the third one? Now none of these working Okay, so this is an utter failure so far. This is not a good experience So whoever's working on this. I don't mean to be down on your project, but obviously you have some work to do I'm guessing that what I'm experiencing here is a A compositor problem because when you install a compositor in a vm a lot of times you get errors and That's what we're experiencing now So let's go ahead and force this off And we will Start it again Okay, so we didn't get an error that time. Let's go ahead and get into full screen. I really need to learn the full screen key binding I'm sure there is one What the fuck No, seriously, what the what the flying fuck is going on? What is going on here? Seriously? What is going on here? I mean these there are so many problems Ah Okay, um, we got a gigantic cursor and a A blue screen Okay, what's going on? Why must you hate me? Why Why why okay? Let's go ahead and see if we can get into a tty now The answer to that question is no we cannot Okay All right Here's what we're going to do Because i'm extraordinarily patient. We're quitting vert manager We're going to start virtual box And we're going to open up a new one here and we're going to call this zelfos We're going this is literally the fourth time of installing this on this video. You cannot doubt my dedication Okay, and this is linux and this is arch linux 64 bit next Again, we'll give it we'll give it eight gigabytes this time just because you know reasons And then virtual hard disk and then okay, and then we'll give it like That's good enough. I don't care. It doesn't matter. We'll give it all of the video RAM that we can We'll go ahead and select the disc here And all the way down here here and open And choose and we'll go into One thing about virtual box that I don't I've never understood is why you can change all the settings from this one page except for the number of cpu cores That you have to go to the settings for That just always has driven me absolutely bunkers and Even more weird is if you go into the the settings and choose the video memory You can only go up to 128 megabytes, but if you change it out here, you can go to 256 The inconsistency bothers me, but anyways, let's go ahead and do this again Fourth time is the charm as they say Sometimes Vert manager just doesn't work well with certain distros So we're again giving this a benefit of a doubt the benefit of the doubt of a doubt. I don't know. It doesn't matter It's really late at night But we're just gonna Say that it's of the vert manager problem And we'll try again in vert virtual box and this time we won't install python We'll just keep that part out so d install sys Okay We're just going to go ahead and leave this in not in full screen because we're just going to go through this really quick This i'm i'm wondering You want to we'll go ahead install the open source drivers Just in case but we will uninstall this icanny because we don't need pycom on a virtual machine There's disk We're going to again go to ext4 just in case because butterfests sometimes doesn't play well In virtual machines. You sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't so let's go ahead and hit next What's interesting is that when you usually the current after we'll see What the name of the distro is here right here? It says generic. That's really weird. I've never seen that before so we're going to go ahead and Into our credentials one last time Okay, and then next Install install now. I'm going to go ahead and cut the video one last time so that you don't have to set through this again And uh, I'll come back when it's done. You know if it gets done Okay We're here again And because virtual box sometimes doesn't remove the iso we're going to just go ahead and shut this down the regular way So we're going to go into a terminal and do sudo shut down now And we'll shut this down that way A few moments later I will have to say so far not impressed We're still waiting for this to shut down. I could just force it to shut down But I'm trying to be a patient person It's a new experience for me I don't think i'm succeeding what the stop job is running. So that means it's trying to unmount something A few moments later Become a linux youtuber. They said it would be easy. They said A few moments later Literally only 25 seconds is more than it will give We can wait that long. We really can I've now been recording this for 32 minutes. Now you won't see the whole 32 minutes because I'm gonna cut quite a bit of that out the parts that were you'd actually right waiting for things to install or you know not install But still you can you know kind of Empathize with how long This video has been going so far and it's still I mean, we haven't even I haven't even got into The operating system yet Okay, so as I suspect I expect it's a suspected They did not Remove the the ISO now. I understand you can go through and reorder the boot order for in virtual box. I just never do it because I'm you know Not smart enough to do it or something. I don't know something like that So we're we're here again Again, we noticed that they did not change the grab menu to their their linux or their Distro name, which is fine, but it definitely is something that you notice So we're going to and we're not seeing any of that weird Stuff on the display manager that we saw invert manager, which is a good thing Here we go now And we do get the bar the bar showed up here and we get we have a terminal so we can do x rander dash s 19 20 29 by 1080 Again matt seriously learn how to type there we go And wow it's here. So let's go ahead and do an update pacman dash syu And then do yes Okay Correct me if i'm wrong, but there was no error that there that asked me for a password That's interesting. Okay While it's doing that that shouldn't take too long here. No, it's almost done so we can just watch that for just a second I've learned to always do an update because then I can go through and install things if I want to Especially and I learned more to do that in Debian-based issues because a lot of times app doesn't work correctly if you don't do an update first But anyways, we can clear that and now we can do sudo If I can type good lord sudo. Let's zoom in here pacman dash s neo fetch H top those are the two things we need again Not a sign there that it actually asked me for a password. So it doesn't matter. We're fine Uh We gotta we have neo fetch now No special ascii are here. It still says we're just using arch linux. So this is just really all it does is install arch linux There's nothing wrong with that. It's just this is just another graphical way of installing arch linux This is st for the terminal. So the default terminal is a suckless terminal Uses zsh by default, which is an interesting choice and not a lot of distributions choose to change the shell I'm all for that. I use zsh as my default shell as well This is dwm uses jetbrains mono nerd font, which is also happy for me because that's my font as well okay, so that is neo fetch we'll go ahead now in cd into dot config And ls here and see what we have in term where our Configuration files are because also I don't see any configuration files here in the configuration file So we'll cd up a level and do an ls here ls dash a is what we're going to have to do here Okay, so we have that cache dot m of c dot config dot ben and that's literally it okay, so let's go ahead and go to another workspace here and Open up firefox, which is not installed Um, so firefox is not installed brave is installed Okay So brave comes as the default browser instead of firefox, which is Again an interesting choice. It's not I believe it's a choice that a lot more distros are going to end up making in the future um, but We'll we'll search for linux and we will uh See if it can tell us Where the configuration files are Source code for all suckless software goes into opt. Okay, that's a little worrying because if you make any changes to that every time he updates his Stuff you'll you're likely to get your stuff overwritten. That's not a great thing So maybe that's the reason why more distros don't use dwm because they can't really update it and then have people keep their configs But we'll go ahead and search for this. So cd Slash opt And we'll do an ls here And here we go. So cd zelf dwm dash git And we'll do an ls here That's the weirdest dwm folder. I've ever seen in my life. So so Source is probably gonna be where all of our stuff here. Okay. So vm config Def.h. Okay, of course Matt vm. Let's see if vm is is installed by default It is good, okay, so What we're trying to find out here is multiple things We want to look at the key bindings and we want to see if we can figure out what patches he's using or they're using So we we know they're using some kind of gaps patch here, which is good. We have a system tray patch Okay We have So these are your colors here Okay, we have the tagging so we have the the or the patch that will allow you to use Icons in the bar. So that will allow you to change the tag names Let's see here. So there's a couple of them that we know for sure So we also have a couple different layouts here, but not all the layouts we have Uh tile monocle and floating which are all default dwm ones, but we also have one called centered master. So that's going to be another patch Mod four, which is the windows key is the default mod key So we have mod beef to toggle the bar, which is default in dwm We have my control w to go into tab mode We have mod j k and the regular default bindings to move windows around looks like Um, we also have some Bindings here to change the gaps Which are also default when you install that particular patch Okay, and then we have Toggle gaps these look this looks like almost precisely like my configuration file Even the spacing looks similar Funny they probably are all like that. So mod q is to quit mod t's will toggle layouts Uh mod f will go to floating Let's see here We have the regular key bindings to toggle between monitors and we have the regular key bindings to toggle between tags And then we also have mod shift e restore win Hide win some mod So that must be that must be a patch that i've never heard of before some mod e hides the window mod shift e Restores the window. So you there's like a hide window Thing that has to be another patch because that's not default Okay, so that is The configuration file Again, I don't care for the configuration files being where they are. I would prefer them to be in the In your config files that you don't Because I don't believe we can even edit this you'd have to change the permissions or use sudo And also if these things are updated through an update You'd have a huge problem now. Something interesting is that he's Importing a theme so theoretically there could be other themes that he could use other than nord. That's cool That's not something that i've ever seen before and I didn't even know you could do that I wonder what nord.h actually looks like Let's actually see if we can find out here ls ls nord.h is that in here no cd themes nord Oops, and then do ls if there's anything else in here them nord dot h So all that does is import the the colors, but that's cool. I did not know you could do that in a separate file I've learned something that makes this whole thing worthwhile. I think Okay, so we've looked at the key bindings We've discovered some of the patches that he the this developer has used Probably not all of them. I'm guessing This is cd up a level and cd up a level and up another level back into the out folder And then They're using dwm blocks in order to do this bar up here Now at the beginning of this video way back at the beginning of this video when this video started like three days ago Uh, I mentioned that this looks very much like chad wm, which is another forker dwm But that developer uses just an x at root script. So this is a little bit different at least Okay, let's go ahead Just lastly things how we spend so much time getting installed See if we can figure out what programs are installed so Okay, so I installed rofi. This will be easier. So we have htop, which I installed Cavantum nitrogen to set wallpapers And that looks in the thorough for that and them. So that's literally it and oh, we have ranger here So this is a very very minimal and brave is the what we have I really shouldn't skip over things pacman Uh pc manfm is your file manager. We have brave for the the a browser Vantum to change themes nitrogen here to change wallpaper Qt5 settings, which will change the theme for cute cute, uh applications them The volume icon and zithura. That's literally all of those to install programs that you get And so if you're Okay, so that is zithura. So there's not much more we can go through and and and look through on this This is just a dwm install With some patches. I wish they would go through and list all the patches that they've done I would love to know more because it's really actually kind of hard to know what patches are in dwm or have been applied to dwm unless somebody lists them I found some of them obviously, but I'm pretty sure I didn't find all of them now another thing that I I noticed when I was going through and installing rofi Is that the st here has been patched because it has scrolling by default Or has scrolling and that's not there by default so st has some patches now I'm not as familiar with patches for st because I don't use st as my daily driver So if you're going to use this you'll have to know that st has been patched as well I'm assuming it also has things like colors And icon support and stuff patched in because we do have icon support here So that does exist Anywho that is zelf os or zelf linux To answer the question wtf is it's basically arch linux with dwm installed by default And it's pretty it definitely does have a certain aesthetic to it. So it's not just you know stock dwm Which is good. I think that if you're I mean at least this person has put some effort into it and that's good I will say That it does not install well invert manager because it worked fine in virtual box I'm assuming that all the problems I had in the first three quarters of this video were all because of vert manager so Learn from my mistakes and don't install this invert manager install in virtual box or install it on hardware I don't know how this would install on hardware. It's an arch linux install So it probably installed just fine and you do have those those options in the installer to install certain drivers and stuffs Which is good so If you are looking for a way to install arch linux and prefer dwm by default, maybe this is an option for you personally I would say install something like Just install arch linux install the vanilla arch linux if you don't want to go through the setup You can always use something like endeavor os or you could go through And use one of the many many arch install scripts that are out there That's probably going to be better for you because then you kind of know what's going on inside dwm Because you're building it yourself. So Bottom line is it's pretty but I probably want to use it. So anyways, that is it for us this video The final record time is just close to 50 minutes, which is um I don't know what to say about that. I mean Thank you vert manager. I guess anyways Thank you everybody for watching if you enjoy this kind of stuff Make sure you leave a like make sure you subscribe make sure you do all that stuff with the notification bell All of that I really do appreciate it You can follow me on twitter at the next cast. You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patrick l marcus mcglenn jackson knife tools steve a michael art center americ camp josh willy j dog and the bsd's rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time