 So I have a series on this channel that I have cleverly called WTF is that distro? And I asked that question quite often because there are a literal crap ton of Linux distros out there and A lot of them make absolutely no sense to me And I have no clue why they exist or what they do that are that is special And I want to know like I'm very deeply curious as to why people create these distributions So today we're going to be taking a look at a distribution called spiral Linux now spiral Linux is a distribution based on Debian and it is one of many distributions based on Debian, so I Have to ask the question WTF is this distro, but also why is this thing exists? So let me show you what spiral Linux looks like so this right here is spiral Linux And we are recording live from the isa or the live Environment now you might be asking Matt didn't you promise that you're going to do all your Reviews from hardware from now on well Yes, I did do that and see I've spent the last two hours trying to get this to Install on hardware and I have been completely unsuccessful now. I don't blame spiral Linux for that I blame calamaries because when I go up here to click on spiral Linux and I get this thing here this Spinny waiting sign and it just goes on and on and on and on and so much So that I will actually show you a screenshot from the last time I tried this if I can open up a Terminal or a file manager on the appropriate screen appropriate screen here. So if you probably good Lord I hate that plasma. Good Lord. Just open up on the right Monitor anyways, you can see here 2613 seconds it was spinning around and it went for another thousand seconds after that before it finally moved me past to the next section of the installer and Normal that's actually fairly normal for calamaries What it's doing here is it's scanning all of my external hard drives and I have two extra hard drives One of them is a 14 terabyte one of them is a 20 terabyte and it has to scan both of them I don't know why it has to do that. It doesn't have to do that It seriously does not have to do that like it's really dumb that it does that but that's not a spiral Linux problem That's a calamari's issue. It just that's what it does. I had no problem with that like okay So I do have a problem with that. I don't want to wait that long to install Linux But whatever okay if I really cared that much I would just unplug The external hard drives and then install my Linux and then plug them back in the problem came is when I went into the partition manager part of the calamari's installer and Switched to the appropriate job drive where I would be installing this it started scanning all the damn hard drives again and I'm an impatient person so I really did not want to do that so I stopped it and It did not want me to continue because they obviously wanted to scan all the hard drives again for absolutely No freaking reason. So Yeah, the bottom line here is that yet. It's not getting installed on my hard drive So we're we're gonna do this video from the live environment That's as good as it's gonna get so anyways So what is spiral Linux? Like I said, it's based on Debian And if you do manage to get through the install Which I'll probably show you a little bit of the install on a VM because I did take some b-roll of that It's basically just a standard calamari's installer You're probably gonna get about five seconds of that b-roll because you really don't need to watch the rest of it It's just a standard calamari's installer. So there's nothing truly unique about the installer itself now So it's spiral Linux does come with several different desktop environments for you to choose from you can choose from cinnamon Xfce You know I'm plasma mate budgie LX cute and you can also use their builder Which I assume would allow you to basically build Debian from the ground up. I Downloaded the plasma version as you can tell it's just kind of the one that I usually download the I always usually go for the plasma one So those are the options you have upon downloading. So what actually is spiral and what is their goals? So when someone takes Debian and tries to make it easier to install There are several distributions out there that try to do that. Usually they end up making their own Repositories and stuff like that. So for example MX Linux has their own repos and stuff like that If the developers behind MX Linux decided to stop developing it those repositories would be abandoned And the distribution would be basically broken. I mean you could still use the Debian stuff But it wouldn't be the same right the goal behind spiral Linux is to completely rely on everything that Debian provides While simultaneously creating an experience for new users that is slightly easier to install So you get the calamari's installer you get a pre designed and pre set up environment for you to work with once you install and That is its primary goal You also don't have to search for the ISO that hard Which is also a great thing compared to Debian Another great thing if you were to actually be able to install spiral which most people probably will they won't have my problem By default spiral includes a butter of a sub volume layout with a ZSTD transparent compression So basically all what that means for you is that it uses butter of s as the file system And that means that you're going to have access to Snapshots either through zipper or time shift and it means that you're going to be able to Easily reverse changes to your system using those snapshots. So that's something that you're not going to get at least easily With something like EXT for which is still kind of the default for Linux one thing I will talk about before we leave and that's just kind of to reiterate what I talked about before is that they Actually answered the question why created another Debian based distros so a lot of times when I do these videos I asked this exact same question. Why did you create another arch based distro? Why is there another Debian based distro? Why are you doing this? Why why why right? This is the question because Debian is Debian You're not going to find anything special on any of these distros really unless they've created a set of tools or something like MX Linux Has or they have their own special Repos they include newer software choices those things can make a distribution special But they have to put that effort in and a lot of Debian based distributions don't make that kind of effort So with spiral Linux, they are trying to avoid The pitfall of relying too much on their own repose and instead have relied solely on the Debian stuff Which is stuff that you can read right here in this paragraph here So let's talk a little bit about the pre-installed applications. We'll just run through these real quick You get Gwen view color paint LibreOffice and ocular all that stuff here Most of this stuff is going to be just the case suite of applications. So for Internet we have Firefox ESR, which is which you get if you install Debian that distribution pretty much primarily relies on the ESR version of Firefox Pigeon is here Thunderbird for email transmission for BitTorrent Multimedia audacity and OBS were things that I installed both of those are flat packs I should mention that flat hub is enabled by default So you don't have to do that which is really nice Clementine and VLC So you have a media music player in a video player office LibreOffice is here settings They do have a few things that they've installed so grub customizers here The synaptic package manager is here if you are into Installing dead packages and things like that and you don't want to mess around with discover the Wacom tablet finder is also here That's very specific. I'm not sure why they've installed that but again, it's not anything. It's bad other than that They have a few KDE specific applications those things like K K cal K fine things like that are installed So this is not a bloated distro by any means. It just has the basics. I Think the isa was around 2.2 gigabytes or something like that. Don't quote me on that. I don't really I just vaguely remember seeing that number So I know it wasn't extraordinarily high in terms of theming. They have I believe been they're using the new mix Theme here, although they're calling this breeze, but I'm gonna tell you right now that this is not breeze Okay, it's just it is not breeze breeze is like a bluish color This is very much a like a grub box brown color So I was right. This is the new mix plasma style. They did not include the new mix Global theme for whatever reason. So they're actually they actually are using the breeze icon pack So none of the extra stuff that would come with a global theme. So that is for the theming I can show you the resource usage if you want, but I don't think that it's going to Do much for you because I am recording this on this hardware right now So you're you're gonna see that we're using about 3600 megs of ram and that includes obs audacity And the terminal at this point. I'm pretty sure I also have opened up firefox in this section So take this for how you will another thing that they've done that's slightly interesting I suppose is that they've Made it so that there's this weird view inside of dolphin By default. I'm not sure why they've changed the default view in dolphin, but they have it's just something that I noticed They also have linked to the expose option for kde here in the panel, which is nice If you have multiple windows open It will do the whole macOS style expose thing, which is very nice I know that that was included in the kde Several versions back, but I don't think I've ever actually used it before So if we look at some of the versions that are installed this includes the kernel 5.10, which is Basically what you get if you install debian includes bash 5.1. This is plasma 5.20.5 And that's going to be the place where this would seriously bug me because that is quite old at this point Like I'm pretty sure they're on like version 5.25 at this point So we're quite a few versions away from all the cool plasma stuff that they have included in the last few versions So that is definitely something that you're going to want to kind of keep in mind if you're going to install this And really that's the bottom line if you're going to install this know that you're getting debian Like it says debian right there. It doesn't even say spiral linux or anything like that This is As close to debian as you're going to get and that's really the point of this distribution. They were aiming to actually ship you debian, that's what they're aiming to do and that is what they have done this is debian stable and There is going to be an expectation that you're perfectly fine with using Software that is a little bit behind where you you would get Something a little bit more fresh on something like fedora or obviously arch is going to be much further ahead than this So if you are interested in debian, but you're not interested in learning how to install debian like from a One of there are many different installers This is a possibility for you because this does use the calamaris installer and it is very easy to install also using butterfs on actual debian is kind of a Rigma roll if you're especially if you use their standard iso So by using spiral linux, you can get the benefits of butterfs without having to jump through those hoops Which is really nice Probably my favorite part of this whole thing is that flat hub was enabled by default that's not something that you see very often on distributions these days And I really like that now a lot of distributions will include flat pack But you usually have to either install flat hub or you have to enable it or something That means you have a broad selection of today's software things like the brand new version of obs is here The things like the brand new version of audacity is here Those are nice things to have when you know That the versions that you would find in the debian reposer probably pretty old And definitely don't have the new shiny features that you might enjoy in newer versions So basically this is debian With flat hub installed and flat pack installed obviously So we can take a brief look at some of the Wallpapers that they've included so we can take a look at this And as you can see there's not a lot of wallpapers here So they have two different versions of this green background and they have the standard kde 5.20 Wallpaper that came with the With this version of kde that's literally it in terms of wallpapers That's a bit disappointing doesn't show much effort there, but whatever I mean, you can't really judge people on wallpapers, right? I mean, I suppose I can because they do but Uh, I won't judge them too hard So as is usual with a kde plasma setup, this does include discover as the primary software store And discover has gotten way better over the last few years I've had many problems with discover over the last couple years, but it has gotten better So if you click on an application, you do get access to screenshots, which you didn't use to get There's a nice description of the application. There are reviews You can choose from different sources So you can choose between the deb package and the flat pack, which is really nice And obviously you can also do all of your updates from discover So this is definitely an improvement over how discover used to be So that is also really nice now Obviously that has very little to do with spiral Linux itself because this is still using an older version of discover And then what you get in Something that is a more up-to-date distribution But again, you go in to debbie and knowing that so I should stop poo pooing it because it's just kind of obvious at this point So that is a very very brief look at spiral Linux I probably could have gone a little bit more in depth, but it's like four o'clock in the morning I've been working on this video for three hours and I just seriously want to kind of phone it in for the rest of the night So, uh, there are Some final thoughts that I have about this. So there is nothing about this distribution I would say that it makes it really all that special in my opinion Yes, it is more reliant on debbie and then most other debbie and base distros So if the developer decides they're not going to develop it anymore, you're still going to be perfectly okay because you're on debbie All you have to do is update your system All of your updates are being pulled from the debbie and repose And you don't have to be reliant on anybody else to maintain their repositories, which is a nice sentiment And maybe it shows a little bit of fatalism that they expect someday to stop Developing their distribution and forcing people just to rely on debbie and repositories But whether or not that ends up happening or not Who can say but other than that, there's not a lot here that differentiates itself from any other Debian based distribution. There are no really special tools that are here They've not done all that much in terms of customization of look and feel of the desktop I mean, it just looks like a standard kitty desktop with a new mix theme. So it's not anything bad. Now all this stuff said It doesn't mean that spiral Linux is bad, right? I don't want to go and end this video saying that This distribution is bad and that you shouldn't use it. That's not the case I'm sure it's perfectly fine if you install it on hardware. You're going to be happy because you're just using debbie So debbie is great. It's stable. It's going to have access to a lot of software So most people will probably be very very happy with debbie and or with spiral linux in this case, right? But It's going to have the typical pitfalls that debbie. It has so it's going to have older Software it's going to have less hardware support than you would expect on something that uses a newer kernel So it's going to have some of those things that kind of debbie and also has right It's going to have the same issues and that's going to be something that's going to Play into your decision over whether or not you can use this thing So if you have brand new speaking hardware, you're going to want something that has a newer kernel and has better hardware support but if you have older hardware or You aren't quite worried about that kind of stuff debbie is a fantastic distribution And spiral linux does improve on the install process So that is a good thing So If you're interested in spiral linux and you have comments on it You can leave those comments in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at linux cast You can follow me on mastedowner odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube You guys are all amazing people the channel would just not be Anywhere near where it is right now without your support. So thank you so very much We just reached 20 000 which is an amazing accomplishment for just two years in the youtube bit business So thanks everybody for watching all of my videos and this video. I'll see you next time