 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel. Today I'm going to be taking a first look at a Linux distribution called NetRunner. Now I will be the first to admit to you that I've never heard of this distribution before so what we're going to do first is actually go find out what the hell this is. So if we go to the beloved distrawatch.com and note the sarcasm there because I know a lot of people hate distrawatch but it's a good resource. We'll see that NetRunner is a Linux distribution based on Debian Stable out of Germany. Its main desktop is KDPlasma. It's actually kind of rare these days to have a distribution that only has one you know desktop environment. Usually there's a few of them. It's distrawatch has the label for beginners. So it says NetRunner is a Debian based distribution featuring a highly customized KDE desktop with extra applications, multimedia codecs, flash and java plugins probably not flash anymore I'm just saying and a unique look and feel. The modifications are designed to enhance the user friendliness of the desktop environment while still preserving the freedom to tweak. A separate rolling edition based on Manjaro Linux was launched in 2014 was discontinued, relaunched in 2017 and discontinued in 2019. Those people need to make up their minds. Wow that's an interesting roller coaster. Launch in 2014, discontinued, relaunched in 2017 and then discontinued in 2019. It's a shame because I would have loved to have seen a rolling release on based on Manjaro. I believe I have one a first look at a distro based on Manjaro later on. I can't remember. It's on the list I think. But anyways let's go ahead and look at their website just for a minute. So very well designed website just off the bat. You can always tell when the developers know what they're doing because they can at least put together a website. I'm looking at you Linux Mint. Your website is terrible. So apparently they have some stuff here for the Pine book which would mean that they can run on ARM which is interesting. All right enough of this. Let's take a look at it shall we? Let's jump over to virtual box here. Now I have a virtual machine all ready and ready to go so we can just go ahead and hit start and go ahead and see if we can make this full screen. All right we'll see how long this takes to start up. Start up time is not impressive but we'll have to keep in mind that this is a virtual machine so it might be a little quicker on hardware. Interesting choice of red icon. Also really weird that it took so long to load the desktop. Well the icon or the cursor seemed to have loaded right quick. Okay so this is just KDE. They're using the application dashboard by default which is cool. We'll take a look at all that stuff here momentarily. Let's just go ahead and get us an install going. So as is basically usual these days unless you're running something like Fedora or OpenSUSA or I guess Ubuntu you're going to see the Calamari's installer. I think that's pretty much become the default for most Linux distributions. So American English next and New York is fine and let's see here default keyboard is fine. You're going to erase the disk. No option here for swap it just automatically says you're going to get a swap whether you like it or not. Interesting that is the first I've seen that in a long time almost universally now especially with the Calamari's installer it gives you an option. There's no option here it gives you a swap. Interesting okay let's create ourselves a user name and password here and also very oddly almost always there is an option here to enter a separate root password. There's not that option in this so they've taken that away. That's an interesting decision so let's go ahead and install and see how long this takes. 654. Okay I'm back. It took about four minutes so that's not too bad especially on a virtual machine where you're constrained by processors and stuff like that. So as is usually you'll want to make sure you hit the restart checkbox here and then hit done. Now normally this is where you'll want to remove the install medium. I'm actually going to end up having to go through and shut down the machine here so that I can do it manually. So close settings storage and remove okay. All right now let's start again and we can make this full screen again. All right let's look at load times here not bad at all. This looks this is probably SDDM I would guess fairly well designed so let's type in our password here. You can always tell like I said before you can always tell how good a distribution is especially a KDE distribution on how long it takes between the login screen and the actual desktop loading. This was very quick so that's very impressive. This is the second Debian distribution or base distribution that I've tried with KDE. The last one was MX Linux that had very impressive launch times. So let's take a look at what we get. So first of all not a welcome app here in anywhere to be found. Now they do have a readme up here that takes you to a web page and that gives you some tips and some stuff here I guess but even that's pretty limited that's like maybe 500 words maybe a thousand words of support for whatever. So definitely not something that you'd want to hand off to a brand new Linux user because there's no welcome app here. So again we have the application dashboard so we can just go through these this will actually make it easier for you to see because it's actually bigger it'll actually be a bit bigger. I can't talk so we have a app image launcher which is interesting so they're going to focus on app images instead of snap probably we have ARC which is a archive an archiver audacious burger space I'm guessing that's like is that a game. Yeah it's a game. Okay I've never heard of it before. All right of course it's a game it was in the games application games category. Let's see here cheese which is going to be the like the selfie camera thing that is like a rip off of what macOS used to have. Chess Discover which is the software center dolphin a firefox and this is the extended support release for a firefox which means that it's not the latest version so you gotta remember that this is debbie and stable so that they're going to be focusing very much on stability as much as possible frozen bubble is going to be another game. I believe GL Tron is also going to be another game. G Music Browser is not a music application I've ever heard of but it looks like it's developed in QT so I'm sure that's probably pretty good. Let's see Grubcustomizer which is nice to have installed one view for previewing images. Handbrake is pre-installed hook tube I believe it's like a YouTube client. No it's a lightweight YouTube so it's like a cover for YouTube so you don't get all the tracker and stuff probably not saying I'm very interested in trying that out. Let's see what's next we'll go back down here so we have Info Center which is just the standard KD Info Center we'll look at that here in a second. Inkscape, Kate, K Breakout was another game, K Calc, K Marble another game I believe KD Partition Manager, Kate and Live is installed by default which is interesting Majong, Mines, Consul, Krita, K Snake Duel which is another game, Casus Guard, Covantum is pre-installed K Wallet Manager so those are all the KD applications. LibreOffice is here, Ocular is here, the open desktop.org is pre-installed so you can go through and install themes directly from store.kde.com. Let's see here Pigeon Internet which is a chat client, Pulse Audio, Q Transmission is a BitTorrent client, Skype is pre-installed for some reason, two versions of Skype is pre-installed for some reason. Very interesting Steam is here by automatically Spectacles, a screenshot tool, Suza Studio I think that's going to be for like burning CDs, Synaptic Package Manager is here, Telegram and Thunderbird, Update Manager, VocalScreen, I think VocalScreen is like a screenshot recorder. WhatsApp is pre-installed, I'm guessing that's going to be a web application, a VNC server, Yorak is going to be another, this is going to be for like videos I believe, oh no this is another one, this is one for music and stuff too, okay interesting. Alright so first impressions on the application section is very very minimal but with some weird selection so Skype and WhatsApp are interesting things to have pre-installed because not everybody needs them. Also KDN Live is a very heavy application to have pre-installed so interesting selections there. So what I'm going to do actually here is reboot so that I can get a fresh idea of how much memory the system uses. Okay we're back at the login screen, again the reboot time was very impressive, I'm typing the wrong password, I forgot that I don't use my regular password. Okay so if we open up the terminal here which is going to be console and we zoom in a bit and we do free dash M, we'll try this again, we're seeing that it's using about 638 megs of RAM which is not bad especially 4k to e-install and if we do we'll see that this is using the kernel 5.9 which is interesting. Now you can correct me in the comments below if I'm wrong but doesn't Debian Stable use the latest LTS or at least NLTS because 5.9 was not an LTS release, 5.4 was the last LTS release. I might be wrong about that but I'm pretty sure that 5.4 than 5.10 with the latest LTS releases that this is using 5.9 so that's interesting because this is Debian Stable, this is based on Debian Stable so let's see if NeoFetch is installed, nope, sudo apt install NeoFetch, see how long this takes, not very long, clear NeoFetch. So let's see, let's make this a little bit bigger so again kernel 5.9 which is again very interesting. I just installed MX Linux on a laptop yesterday and I was surprised there too that there are a ton of packages involved when you're installing Debian. 2662 packages is an enormous number of packages, Arch Linux and Arch-based distros usually have around 1200 out of the box. Now even Arch Linux, so if you use Arch Linux you know you get a ton of extra stuff in Arch Linux, you have three desktop environments or window managers, XFCE, Openbox and i3 they're all installed all the dependencies that go along with them and they had 1300 out of the box. This has double that, that's very especially giving the fact that there's hardly any applications installed that I mean that so which you're seeing there is twofold first of all KDE has a ton of dependencies I mean just an absolute little ton of dependencies second of all apparently Debian has a ton of stuff that they install as well in the background. All right so let's see here so we've taken a look at memory and the kernel I will say this that responsiveness is very very impressive especially for a virtual machine let's take a look at the settings and see what we're using for themes here so plasma tweaks we wanted to look at the info center and see where we're at in terms of so we're using KDE plasma version 5.14 which is as you would expect pretty far behind that's why that kernel is so weird they're using a much newer kernel than I expected to be I expected to be 5.4 like every other just Debian stable that I've been using uh so you're running if you're running a stable version Debian or something based on it you're going to find that the KDE version is behind so let's see here they're using something called netrunner indigo so let's look at netrunner black that's going to be like a dark theme that's kind of yucky why is that blue weird let's look at the desktop version that's going to be blue that's the raised minus blue that's their color okay let's look and see if they have any alternatives here installed they do application launch launcher application menu and simple menus are pre-installed except for the simple menu does not actually work and you can't actually change it after that error comes up interesting fascinating okay well that's broken just interesting now now I don't remember in KDE plasma 5.14 that plasma tweaks was all in one place I thought it was all out here you know in the main settings area but I could be remembering that wrong things seems to be grouped together better at least in this version I'm going to go to bleed restart because I like breeze much better yeah that's so much better all right so that's netrunner very very brief first look I just remind you that I don't do gaming in these first looks because this is a virtual machine and doing a game doing gaming in a virtual machine is just not a good idea you only get 128 megabytes of video RAM for a reason it's not meant for running grant that thought of five so that is netrunner overall thoughts I enjoy distributions that are based on Debian instead of just basing themselves on Ubuntu the question I have about this one is does it provide enough of a reason to exist over like MX Linux because MX has a wonderful KDE version and it's much more popular so I will say that this is very fast and it's very minimal it does have some weird application choices sometimes like to like correct me if I'm wrong but I did not see a video player in there which is interesting that last one that we opened might have been a video player like a combined like library or something but there's no sign of I mean I had all these other weird choices but there was no VLC or either even MPV or something like that so because it had like three music players and audacious it had let me look at the I can't open up a menu now because that is completely broken all right anyways I guess it doesn't matter all right so if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down you can support the channel by subscribing and hitting the notification icon bell thing and you can also support us by going to patreon at patreon.com slash the next cast I just posted a blog post there about some of the new things that are coming to tier two and tier three patrons in mid-march or so and I would like to thank our patrons now and that's right patrons within s thank you to Devon C and Marcus B for being our patrons we really do appreciate the support and I really wanted to make the joke of now that I have two patrons I've doubled the number so it sounded funnier in my head anyway thanks for watching I'll see you next time