 Today, I wanted to take a look at the recently released Archcraft OS. They had a release just a few days ago, and the reason I want to take a look at Archcraft again is when it first came out, when people really were interested in Archcraft, I had a ton of viewers contact me, hey man, you got to take a look at Archcraft, you got to take a look at Archcraft. So I did a video about nine or 10 months ago where I took a look at Archcraft for the first time, my first impression of Archcraft OS. And it's a 19 minute video, and it is very negative. And it was very negative, not in an unfair way, it was very fair. I literally couldn't do anything in this operating system. The font, the system fonts and everything were so small, I actually could not read anything. I couldn't read the panel, couldn't read anything in the terminal, couldn't read the fonts in the open box, right click menu, I couldn't do anything. And people were like, man, all you needed to do was just change the font size and everything, you'd be all right. Well, how can you go through that menu and find the program to change the font size in a menu where you can't even read the font? And it was very frustrating and it was just painful. You know, my eyes, my eyes aren't 2020 vision, but my eyes aren't terrible. And that font was so small, it was literally hurting me looking at the screen. So, you know, that was not a positive review of Archcraft. And I don't like doing negative videos about free and open source software because the people that work on these things, I mean, if you're creating free and open source software, in my opinion, you know, you're doing the Lord's work, right? And I never want to shine a negative light on people that are working on free and open source software. But unfortunately, so many people were interested in my thoughts on that and I couldn't just not make a video on it because then I got to respond to comments like, well, I would do a video on Archcraft, but I tried, you know, I took a look at it on my own time and it was horrible. And then people are going to like, well, you mean it's horrible? Why is it horrible? They won't believe you until you actually show it to him on camera. So I made the video knowing that probably the main dev would eventually address some of those issues. And he has. He contacted me about the recent release of Archcraft just a few days ago, and he's asked me specifically, hey, would you take another look at the operating system? Your video a few months ago, you know, it's very popular. A lot of people still think that video is relevant. And it would be great if you had a more recent video about Archcraft, because I don't want people to think that Archcraft still has those problems that you had nine or 10 months ago. Very fair, right? He's absolutely right. And I don't want people to think that these kinds of open source projects don't change over time. So I'm going to take another look at Archcraft. So I grabbed the latest ISO. I'm going to run through a quick installation here on camera. And we're going to go ahead and take a look at Archcraft OS once again. But before I run through the installation, let me show you guys the website for Archcraft. It's at archcraft dash o s dot github.io. I will link to their website in the show description. But when you go to their website, you get this release announcement that pops up. So this was just released on May 26 today. I'm recording. It's May 29. So about three days ago, they had this new release. They updated the the installer. There's two installers in Archcraft. There's the graphical Calamari installer, which probably most people would prefer to use. There's also what they call the ABIF installer, which they say is for expert users. I don't know if it's for expert users. It's a rather easy installation to go through to. It's very reminiscent of the old Debian incurses kind of installer. I can actually show you some screenshots of the ABIF installer that is what they call it is, you know, it's just this incurses installer. Probably if you've run through a Debian installation or like an Ubuntu server installation or something you've ever gone through one of these kinds of incurses installs, you'd be fine with that. For me, I'm just going to choose the Calamari installer today. I think that's what most people would prefer to use. Now, one interesting thing is this note at the bottom that says important. Those of you that are already on Archcraft, you've got an installation of Archcraft that you've been on for a while. It says that you need to update your Archcraft installation with this new ISO. So you probably just need to do a fresh install if you've done one of the older versions of Archcraft. I guess there's been enough changes that it's a pretty significant change from one version of the operating system to the next. So even though it's based on Arch or rolling release, they suggest doing a fresh installation. So I'm going to run through an installation here inside a virtual machine. I'm going to install Archcraft inside Vert Manager. And I gave this virtual machine four gigs of RAM and two threads of my 24 thread AMD threadripper. So plenty of system resources for pretty much any Linux operating system. Now, when you first boot up, you get, I guess, this live environment, which I believe is open box because there are title bars and close buttons and everything by default. You have two window managers installed. You have open box and BSPWM. And I think, yeah, right, click menu. That's open box. You get a welcome screen, really a nice attractive welcome screen. I got to say, aesthetically, this looks great. Right. I love the color scheme, very minimal, not a lot of busy colors and everything. So I prefer like minimal backgrounds. I love the wallpaper of the poly bar at the top is themed rather nicely. Maybe, you know, a little busy for my taste. Like you got some kind of almost like gradient things going on here. But not bad. Not bad. I mean, I wouldn't have to change that bar. I could run it as is. Now, looking at the welcome screen, is there a link to the installer here? It doesn't look like it. And there's about OS get start. I'm assuming that's supposed to be get started. Maybe it is get started and they just ran out of room to display the rest of the word. I'm not sure. But I wanted to mention that on camera in case the diff in case it actually does say get start instead of get started. They should probably correct that gallery of thumbnails. Yeah, it doesn't look like there's a link to the installer here in the live environment. So what I'm assuming is we'll find the installer in the open box right click menu. So I'm going to right click and typically an installer probably would be under a like a system category. Let's see. Applications system. There we go. Install Archcraft and install Archcraft expert. Experts going to be the incurses installer and just the regular link to install Archcraft should be the Calamari installers. I'm going to click on that. Yep. And this is the very familiar Calamari installer. If you've seen one installation with this installer, you've seen seen everything. Right. I've done a million of these installs, but I'll do this very quick on camera. So we got the welcome screen where you choose your language. It's already selected American English for me. I'll click next. And then the location. It's already chosen the central time zone in the US for me. That's correct. I'll click next. English US is my keyboard layout. It's already chosen that for me. I'll click next. What do we want to do with the disk? I want to erase the entire disk and give Archcraft the entire 20 gig disk in this virtual machine that I created. Now, do I want to swap? I'm going to choose no swap since this is a VM. But if you wanted to, you could create a swap or you could create a swap file for me. No swap for the VM. I'm going to click next and then we need to create our username and password. My username is going to be DT. His name is going to be DT, his password. I need to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. So let's create a strong and complicated password and log in automatically without using a password is ticked on by default. I want to take that off by default. I mean, the reason you create a password is for privacy, right? You don't want anybody to just be able to log into your computer. You want to have to enter a password to enter your computer and then use the same password for the administrator account is also ticked on by default. That one, I do want to be on by default. So what this does is it sets my DT users password and the sudo password to be the same password. And that's nice because otherwise you'd have to remember two different passwords. And then I'm going to click next and then we get a review here, a summary of everything we've done so far. Everything looks correct. Location, keyboard, partition scheme. Yes, I'm going to click install. And this portion of the installation on my machine typically takes five to 10 minutes. I'm going to pause the recording. I'll be back once the installation has completed. So the installation completed and we successfully rebooted entire freshly installed ArchCraft and we get our login screen. And the login screen, we have three different options. We have default for a desktop. And we also have BSPWM and open box. I believe default, which is what's ticked on at first is going to be open box. So let's go ahead and select our user. We have our user DT already selected here. And then let's enter our strong and complicated password for the DT user. And we log into open box. The wallpaper didn't display correctly. That's just a VM problem. I'm going to open a terminal and do nitrogen space dash, dash restore. And what was really interesting about that, and I didn't expect it, is just my mind is so ingrained with super enter to open a terminal from running tiling window managers forever. I just instinctually hit super enter and started typing nitrogen space dash, dash restore. And that actually worked. I didn't even recognize it. That's kind of cool that super enter here in open box does open a terminal. What closes it? Super shift C maybe, super X, super C. Now what did we, we opened up something here. So super C. So super enter opens a terminal. Super C closes the window that has focus. That's very nice. So open box is a very lightweight, very minimal window manager that when you first install it, if you do a vanilla installation of open box, it's a black screen. It doesn't set wallpaper, doesn't have a panel, doesn't have a dock. It's one of those window managers when you log in for the first time, you think you broke something because you just get a black screen. You know, open box is very minimal. You have to build everything around it. You have to build a proper desktop environment around it by adding a panel and sys tray and various applications and daemons running in the background and things like that. Something to set the wallpaper. And this is a really attractive open box desktop here. I like the panel, the panel looks good. We have five workspaces by default. If I do a mouse click, we go to workspace two, back to workspace one. I'm assuming super two would take us, yeah, to the second workspace, super three would take us to the third workspace. Super one takes us back to the first workspace. One of the things I really like already is that I can actually read the panel. The font is actually not that small. This is about the size font I would use on my 1920 by 1080, you know, 24 inch monitors. Where before the font size was very, very tiny. Like I don't know what kind of monitor the main div uses, but he was using such a small font size that I'm sure I'm not the only one that had serious problems getting the previous versions to work for me. We have a cartoon on and on. Is this media controls? If I click on it, something is probably playing, but I don't have, it is playing. Let me pause that. I don't know how that sounded here on the recording. I'm not monitoring what you guys just heard. It's not coming through the speakers thankfully because it would, you know, bleed through the mic. I'm actually going to pause this section of the recording. I'm going to go back and listen to that and see how that sounded. And I took about 30 seconds to go back and listen to the previous clip that I recorded. And yeah, I could hear the music playing on the recording. I just wanted to make sure it didn't mess up my speaking through the microphone as well. So that's very cool. By the way, the volume here is set to 46%. I'm not sure why, but if I click on it, it mutes it just a mouse scroll wheel. Yeah, mouse scroll wheel goes up and down the volume. So that's a really nice little widget here in the poly bar. And then we have time and date clicking on time and date. I say it switches between the time and the date. Kind of cool. And then of course, when we have a power button here, I'm assuming that would give us like a power session menu for restart shutdown and all of that, which it does. If I right click on the desktop, of course we get our right click menu here in open box. And you have a bunch of applications installed by default. I'm not really, I'm gonna show all the applications here. I'm just gonna quickly highlight some of what is installed. PCManFM is the file manager. Nitrogen is what sets our wallpaper. Our terminal emulator, we should take a look at because it says choose preferred application. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what it's trying to do there. Terminal emulator, if I click on that link, we actually do get a terminal emulator. And is this a Lackardy? I think it is. I think it was termite before. Termite is no longer on the system though because termite's a dead project and this is a Lackardy. So my preferred terminal, I really like a Lackardy. I did notice the shell prompt. It's a little slow loading in this VM. Now it could be a VM problem, but I don't know. I'm also got a warning here about lib egl warning when I tried to launch a Lackardy here from another instance of a Lackardy. That's kind of weird. What shell are we in? So I'm gonna do a echo, dollar sign, shell, all caps, and slash bin slash zsh. So zsh is the shell. That could be part of what's slowing the prompt down. If they're using ohmyzsh, which I'm sure they are, you got a lot of plugins and doing fancy stuff with the prompt. Sometimes these prompts can be a little slow. So it could be ohmyzsh problem. I don't know. It could also just be that I'm taking a look at this in a VM on real hardware. It might be fine. We should actually do a uname, a dash R. Let's see what kernel version we're on. Being ArchBased, you would expect to be the latest. It's 5.12.6. And then let me launch htop. Assuming htop is installed, it is. And how much RAM are we using? I gave this VM four gigs of RAM. We're using 341 megs of RAM. That's pretty normal for open box, open box, lightweight, not much going on. I mean, there's htop and the terminals running and poly bars got some stuff going on. But 341 megs of RAM, that is pretty minimal. Let me just quickly highlight some of the other default programs we saw that Alacrity was the default terminal. Let's see what our default web browser is. Is this Midori? I think this is the Midori web browser. I don't know why they would choose this. Midori 9.0, a lightweight web browser. I don't think anybody, anybody would use this browser. I think every single person that installs ArchCraft is probably going to install, you know, a Firefox or Chromium based browser. They're not going to run Midori. So that's a strange choice. Because you're installing a lot of applications anyway. I mean, you're installing a little bit of stuff here. You might as well install a proper web browser that most people are probably going to use. So, you know, if you stick to free and open source, obviously, you know, go ahead and install Firefox out of the box. Because, you know, it's kind of the default on most Linux distributions anyway. If you wanted to, you could go with Chromium or one of the Chromium based browsers as well. But nobody's going to use Midori. I think that that's just wasted space on the ISO. The file manager we've already mentioned is PCManFM. I really like that icon set to very colorful. Text editor, our GUI text editor is going to be Genie. Genie's really nice. I like Genie. I'm getting back in the right click menu. One cool thing is they have this category here, apps as root. Because many times you want sudo privileges when you open a terminal or a file manager and they've got, you know, links to that already here. So you can open Alacrity or your Thunar file manager, which I'm wondering why they got Thunar here. Is it actually Thunar? Let's see, let me give it my root password. And that's weird. You've got both PCMan, FMM and Thunar installed. If that's the case, let me do it about you. That is actually Thunar. So two different file managers. That's weird. I don't know why you wouldn't want PCManFM open as root. You got one file manager, not root privileges and another one with root privileges. Then you got a leaf pad here with root privileges. So that's your text editor, Genie. Also another text editor. And one thing I haven't thought about to look for yet is a run launcher. It's something like DeepMenu or Rofi installed. So, well, that's actually easy to figure out. The super key by itself. So super with no other key bindings behind it, opens Rofi. This I'm assuming this is the Rofi launcher. It looks like it. And from here, you know, I could search for something. I don't know, just Alacrity because we know it's here and then super C to close and then super by itself to get the run launcher again. I do like the animation. So the animations are a little slow for me. I don't like, I like things opening up instantly but I know a lot of people like a little visual feedback. They like opening and closing animations and drop shadowing and stuff. And I will say, you know, it's not bad. Like it's not over the top. So let me do the animations again. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's not horribly slow. I can get down with that. And of course you can always adjust that. So that would be, you know, like your PyCom settings. I'm assuming and if I go in here and there is a preference category, we have open box settings and this is where you could edit your open box config. So your key bindings or the entries and the right click menu here, you could do all of that in this. And then the compositor settings, we could enable blur effect, which is kind of taxing on the CPU. So I'm not gonna do that, especially in a VM. We could also just disable compositing all together. We could edit our Compton config. It's actually PyCom these days. It's been renamed to PyCom and Fort because Compton is no longer developed. We could change style. This could be interesting. I actually didn't know this was here. So if I did beach, what does that do? We get new wallpaper and a new panel, new theme, new open box theme. That is very nice. Now that was pretty smooth. I gotta admit, I kind of like what they did there. If I did forest, we get forest wallpaper, new poly bar, new open box theme. And let's do one more change style and let's do Nordic. Everybody loves the Nordic theme. Actually, I don't quite. I don't like the Nordic theme really. I find it not, it's not contrasty enough, right? For me, so I'm actually gonna go back and change it one more time. And let's go ahead and change to spark. Wow, that's blinding white. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna go back and change it one more time because what was the default? The default was kind of nice. Let's go back to this one. There we go. Yeah, that's a little easier on the eyes. I'm gonna right click one more time and go back into preferences. One thing other than changing the style, I do notice the entry right below it changed the font. I like that. So now people that have severe problems with the fonts, you know, if it's just way too small, you can't even read it way too big or whatever. Now you have the change font. What do you wanna change the font for? Polybar, Rofi, Alacrity, Openbox, Dense, which is your notification system, or the GTK fonts, that's your application fonts. So globally as well, I guess that would change, you know, set the font size for everything. So that is really nice. Change launcher, what does this do? So I'm just gonna pick one because I really don't know what this does. I'm gonna do column. Is that for, yeah. That is for Rofi. I like that. I mean, I don't actually like that right-hand panel, but I like the fact that you can change the theme for Rofi. Let's do app drawer, let's see what that does. Now I don't mind it being on the left-hand side with a bigger column and the theme little search thing. You know what, I'm just gonna leave that for now. I can deal with that. One thing we haven't taken a look at is wallpapers. I'm assuming I can probably click change wallpaper and that would launch nitrogen, which it does. And let's make nitrogen full screen. Actually, I did need it full screen because it's not that many wallpapers here. So we've got the default and then some of the other wallpapers which we saw when we changed the theme. Other than that, we have some archcraft branded wallpapers here, such as this one here. Nice and minimal. I don't mind these wallpapers either. I could just go with one of these branded minimal wallpapers as well. Yeah, some of the other wallpapers here which I probably are part of some of the theme packs that we didn't enable. Very nice, very nice. Since we have a dark theme, I actually liked this light wallpaper. I didn't like the white theme that went with it. One of the things is, you know, typically when you have dark themes, you want light wallpapers. And when you have light themes, you want dark wallpapers. And the theme that went with this wallpaper earlier was a white theme and it didn't make any sense because it's kind of like white on white, no real contrast. But having a dark theme with a light wallpaper really makes a lot of sense. Now, before I get out of here, I do want to check out the BSPWM window manager that's also on the system. So I'm going to log out of Openbox. So asking me, are you sure? I'm assuming typing yes and hitting enter would allow me to exit. Yes, it does. And then back at the login menu, we have BSPWM as an option. I'm just going to quickly log in BSPWM just to make sure, just to verify that it works. And it does. We have a different poly bar theme and a different wallpaper when we log into BSPWM. So very easy to figure out, you know, which window manager you're in. Super enter, I'm assuming would still get us the alacrity terminal. It does. It's a bigger font size in BSPWM in the terminal. Then it was maybe it's part of the theme. Maybe this particular theme has bigger font size for some reason, but it's just something visually I noticed immediately is the prompt is a little bigger. Let me close that. I do notice it does seem to load the shell prompt and everything quicker in BSPWM here. Then it did in Openbox. That doesn't make any sense because this is the same terminal. I'm assuming it's still ZSH as our default shell. Yeah, so it's kind of weird. So BSPWM is a manual tiling window manager, meaning it's not a dynamic like Xmonad and awesome in Qtiles. So there's no master and stack layout. I don't know what the default layout is unless they've set a master and stack as default. It's typically, yeah, it's this weird dwindle kind of layout where things start getting divided more and more toward the bottom right hand corner, which is okay. I mean, most people are never gonna go beyond probably three or four windows anyway. So nobody's ever gonna get all of those really tiny windows in the corner. Where Openbox, we had five workspaces on BSPWM. We have eight workspaces. I'm assuming if I did super eight, yeah, we'd go to the eighth workspace. Super one goes to the first workspace. Let me open up a terminal and super eight would, well, actually I accidentally launched something with Rofi there, but that's fine. This is Ranger, the Ranger file manager. What I'll do is super shift to, sends Ranger to the second workspace. And now you see the second workspace is a different color, letting me know, hey, something's on that workspace. If I do super two, I'll go to that workspace. Super C closes that. Super one goes back to the first workspace. Super C closes that window. Super by itself, once again, gets us Rofi. And I think that's all I'm gonna do on this very cursory overview of Archcraft OS, the latest release that was just released about three days ago. I've gotta say, very impressed. This is so much better than it was nine or 10 months ago. For one thing, I could actually get around, because I could see the fonts weren't so incredibly small. It was completely unusable the last time I used it. Now, that is one of the best Openbox desktops I think I've ever reviewed on a Linux distribution. Not even kidding. And I've reviewed some really good Openbox Linux distributions. Bunsen Labs, Crunch Bang Plus Plus, Arch Bang, Arch Labs, Arco Linux makes a great Openbox edition. Manjaro has a community Openbox edition that's really good Maybox. I don't know if they're still under development. They do a really good Arch-based Openbox distribution, but this was really good. Their Openbox, I was very impressed with. And it had everything already set up for you. You could very easily change themes and change the layout of Polybar and change the layout of Rofi and change font sizes and everything. That was really, really cool. They've done so much work for you. Setting up that menu with all those options because again, Openbox out of the box is very minimal. There's a ton of work that goes in to properly theming a nice Openbox desktop. So I myself, being a former Openbox user, used Openbox for many, many years. I can appreciate the kind of work that went into creating that desktop. And even though I only spent just a few minutes in the BSPWM desktop, that was really nice too. Everything worked as expected. All the key bindings and everything, just I had no problems. I felt very comfortable just the few minutes I spent in BSPWM. So job well done. I'm really glad that the dev for Archcraft reached out to me and asked me to take another look at this. It was something I needed to do. And I'd been putting it off for a little while. He's got so many other things going on in my mind. I'm glad he reached out and kind of reminded me, hey man, you really should take a look at Archcraft again. Your first time looking at it. I know it was bad, but give it another shot. Yeah, and he was absolutely right. Job well done. Now before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Ebsi Dallas, Gabe Lew, Mitchell, Alan and Cami Archfee to our 30. Chuck David Diller, David Dillon, Gregory Lewis Paul, Polytech Scott, Steven Smith, Wes and Willie. These guys, they are the producers of this episode. Without these guys, this quick look at the recently released Archcraft, it wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these 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 just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, thanks guys. Peace. Now he just has to add Qtile as a desktop.