 When I think of the things that the Linux world needs more of the last thing on my mind is we need more Arch Linux based Distributions, right? There's a million of them when we have a lot of good ones out there with Manjaro and Arco and Endeavor So we've kind of got that arch Linux based distribution problem solved, right? We don't need more of these there's hundreds of these arch based distributions out there right now But people have asked me to take a look at a new distribution called pay X OS. I'm assuming it's pay X OS I was looking around for information on the pronunciation of this unfortunate Branding here because the name is pretty terrible. I mean people would think it's possibly pew like pew pew pew Like the first person shooter pew pew pew Maybe you're supposed to pronounce pew with the X. Maybe it's pukes OS, right? That would be an unfortunate name if that's the actual pronunciation I'm gonna go with pay X OS though And we're gonna find out if this is another amazing arch based distribution or if it's just yeah yet another arch spin So I'm gonna briefly take a look at the pay X OS website Which they I guess because they know people really don't know how to pronounce the operating system They have shortened it to just POS. I guess they want you to refer to Their Linux distribution as POS now that as bad as pukes is POS, of course is English a standard English acronym for piece of you know, what Don't don't call your Linux distribution POS, please. It's just that's bad branding But you know what it we have bad branding everywhere with free and open source software very few projects Unfortunately that are free and open source software have appropriate names It looks like their default edition is the XFC edition It is butter FS by default is the file system. It uses poly bar with X FCE That is a little strange to use a third-party panel when X FCE is a desktop environment that has its own built-in panel So why swap it out? I don't know why you would do that But hey, I'm interested to check that out So I'm gonna download the X FCE edition since they say it's kind of their flagship edition They have a KDE editions as well GNOME editions LXQ'd editions So, you know the standard big desktop environments. There's also telling window manager editions If I click on this tab here and people have wanted me to really take a look at pay XOS because Apparently one of their tiling window manager editions is X Monad. So I'm gonna download the X FCE edition I'm also gonna download the X Monad edition as well Although I can say just looking at the screenshot for X Monad What bar is that? That is not XMO bar, and I don't think it's poly bar either Why we have big buttons for launchers? Nobody uses a mouse and a tiling window manager? I know I'm already critiquing the distro and just looking at the screenshot, but that's weird I also have to critique the screenshot as well because is that VS code in the screenshot? Anyway, let me download the ISOs and let's go ahead and fire up the X FCE edition I'm gonna run through a quick installation of it inside vert manager So let me switch over to my desktop here. Let's go ahead and boot into the live environment of pay XOS I'm still waiting for the live environment to pop up right now. I've got a black screen. There it goes Taking a second now. Obviously. This is inside of virtual machine So there may be some performance issues here. I will say it looks good The live environment, you know, I like the customized poly bar. I mean, it's attractive It's just strange to to swap out the panel that ships with X FCE So you can install an extra package, you know for a panel, but hey Different strokes for different folks. I like the is that a cocky on the desktop? I'm assuming that's cocky if I click on it I see cocky up here in the taskbar. So first things first let's go ahead and get this thing installed So looks like it's going to use the Calamari's installer. So let me click on launch anyway here The live environment is complaining about packages being available for update in the package manager I'm assuming that would be Pamac. Let's close that All right, so the Calamari's installer if you've ever seen the Calamari's installer. It's a very simple intuitive Linux installer. So by default, it's selected American English for the language You could change that of course, but for me, that's correct. So I'm going to click next Office software and I do I want LibreOffice or only office or WPS office, etc Typically, I do install LibreOffice on all my installations, but in this VM I'm not going to take a look at LibreOffice. So let's just click next Location Chicago the central time zone in the US has been selected for me. That's correct English US has been selected for the keyboard layout. That's correct as well What do I want to do as far as the partitioning? Do I want to do manual partitioning or do I want to erase the disk and give the whole disk to pay XOS? I'm going to give it the whole disk. Do we want no swap a swap with hibernate or swap to file for this VM? I'm going to do no swap typically though on a real machine. I probably would do swap to file and Let's click next here and now let's create our username and password My username is going to be DT His password is going to be a strong and complicated password But pay X at least that their version of the calamaris installer says I can't use my strong and complicated password My password is too short. Well, let me make it longer then and It accepts that password now I don't want to log in automatically without asking for a password I want to actually have to enter a password for privacy reasons on my computers use the same password for the administrator account I do want to tick that on that way the Sudu password and the user password or the same password. I don't have to you know Remember two different passwords and when I say the Sudu password, of course, I'm talking about the root password The root user password. I know people sometimes get confused. They're like the Sudu password is it's just your password. I Get that you guys know what I mean when I say these things But some of you guys want to be pedantic in the YouTube comments and finally in the calamaris installer We get a summary screen locations good keyboards good partition scheme looks good. I'm gonna click install and This portion of the installation typically takes about 10 minutes on my machine So I'm gonna pause the recording I'll be back once this portion of the installer has completed and the installer has completed in the calamaris Installer what you need to do is make sure the tick box here that says restart now is ticked on and then after that click done and Your machine should automatically reboot and that's what I'm gonna do right now And we have successfully rebooted our freshly installed pay XOS and We have a login screen here. I've got my username DT if I click on it Then it asks for a password. Let's give it my super strong and complicated password since I had to Double it up this time. All right, and once again, it takes a minute to actually get into the XFCE desktop and The XFCE desktop has loaded here now. I wonder if we have any kind of application menu. I don't know what this is Obviously, they are using a poly bar, which doesn't have any kind of menu system So this is a third-party menu system run launcher Probably Rofi is what I'm assuming I Do super would it bring up that menu? No, we don't have any normal kind of functionality Because we replaced the proper panel with an inferior panel I mean poly bar is really it's good for tiling window managers certain tiling window managers I mean poly bar is mainly used by i3 users and BSPWM users But let me search for a terminal here in what I'm assuming is Rofi here I'll open up the XFCE terminal and it looks like we are using the fish shell welcome to fish the friendly interactive shell First thing I'm gonna do before we do anything else is let's get a proper screen resolution So I'm gonna do the X render dash s 1920 by 1080 So now we've got a better screen resolution. Can I zoom in here in the terminal? Yes, I can the next thing I want to do is I'm gonna do a where is Rofi Because if Rofi is installed it's gonna tell us where the binary and the man page and everything is so we get output So Rofi is installed. So that is Rofi This this menu here this kind of grid menu, which isn't horrible But again, is it is that as good as the standard XFCE menu? Probably not, you know something like D menu or Rofi They're really designed for keyboard driven workflows, you know, window manager workflows tiling window manager workflows Especially where you hit a key binding to launch Rofi and you start typing something and hit enter You know for a fuzzy search on your applications, which you know, people might use it that way But a lot of people are gonna install this and think it's a normal XFCE kind of distribution And they're they're gonna be a little put off by this. I think I think they probably should have stuck with a Traditional panel and menu system the real problem with using something like this is discoverability Because in a proper menu you could navigate through the subcategories of your applications like office and accessories And system applications and things like that. I can't get a list of all the applications installed here I think this one screen that I'm looking at is all we can get. I mean, I can't really I if I hit the arrow key down will it yeah, okay, it will keep going Okay, I wonder if page up and page down would work page up and page down do work as well So I can actually see what is installed looks like Biddle fault Discord is installed so that's proprietary software. That's kind of strange that they go ahead and install that for people out of the box But hey, you know, not everybody cares about free software versus proprietary software I get that so I won't hold that against the the creator of pay XOS Firefox is our default browser Looks like we have a electron installed on the system discord is an electron out cocky is installed cocky was the well That's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to switch to a second workspace Control alt to maybe with it. No control alt and then like the left arrow key. Yeah, that would work or the right arrow key Excuse me. So this is cocky this little widget that tells us time and date It can also display other like system information like your top processes of RAM usage and memory and things like that Let me go back to the first workspace here and let me get back into the application menu and let's see what else is installed H top is installed out of the box termite Yeah, I guess is really the default terminal emulators at least I'm assuming since they Xfce terminal comes with the Xfce desktop they install termite Specifically so I'm assuming that's the the real default terminal. Let me open it and let's see how it looks Come on, let me open it. Yeah, I'm not crazy about that menu system termite. Wow the font size Incredibly small in that it is themed a little bit. It's got an interesting little color scheme And also uses the fish shill as well going back into This launcher here, which again, I'm assuming is Roefe. I'm not a hundred percent sure I'm assuming our file manager is probably going to be Thunar Thunar is here But we also have files, which is the GNOME file manager We also have something called file manager three different file managers at least to we know Thunar's here and files I'm assuming that is the GNOME. Yeah, that's the Nautilus, right? Yeah files 3.38 so that is GNOME's Nautilus file manager with a really strange kind of theme to it Why is it themed like this? The other thing I noticed is why do I have a I just noticed it I'd never actually looked at the bottom of the screen because I'm assuming poly bar is handling everything But we have a taskbar like another transparent panel down here That's a taskbar as well. Let me open something. Let me open up another terminal and Yeah, what are the second terminal go? Let me open up You open up Thunar again. That's the Thunar settings. Yeah, sometimes Applications like Roefe when you start searching for Thunar or PC man FM or you know other programs Sometimes though they also have a separate program for setting preferences and I opened up the Thunar preferences But what I wanted was actually the file manager itself. Okay. Now. I've got two different things down here in the taskbar So you can switch to it's a normal kind of panel and taskbar like you would get in windows for example Why why is that not? Why is all of this not one panel? Well, I've tell you why all of this is not one panel poly bar does not come with a taskbar because poly bar is meant for a tiling window manager where you you can't you don't use a taskbar, right? Because you know you never have to switch between your windows like this with a taskbar because with a tiling window manager All your applications are always shown on the screen for the most part And even if they're not you just navigate through them with key bindings keyboard shortcuts. So Again, I poly bar poly bar doesn't make any sense at all being used with a floating window manager And especially in a full desktop environment that already had a proper panel and a menu system and everything a taskbar And you know all of this would have been just squared away out of the box with the XFCE panel I know people want to do things a little differently than everybody else But I don't mind switching out the XFCE panel But you've got to use something more Appropriate because this is not working and this panel at the bottom of the screen I used to be an open box user. I still have open box installed. I sometimes log into it. Is that the tent 2 panel? Let me kill all tent 2 Yeah, that was the tent 2 panel if I relaunch it will actually relaunch it Of course, I'll have to kill it unless I launch it and keep it as a background process I'll just keep that terminal open. I'll just minimize it to the tent 2 Panel's taskbar there. Yeah, this is really Yeah, this is strange I gotta say first impressions are not great with this Um, and I don't want to be overly critical. I hate being overly critical free and open source projects but I think This was trying to be different for the sake of being different and it totally misses the mark Uh The people that use XFC XFCE, you know use that kind of traditional windows kind of workflow that traditional windows kind of paradigm They're they're not going to like this. They're probably not going to like this at all What i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and quit out of the XFCE edition Which was their flagship edition people wanted me to check out the x-mone ad edition So what i'm going to do is i'm going to quickly install that off-camera and let's log in to the x-mone ad edition of pay x os And i'm booting into my freshly installed pay x os the x-mone ad edition I get a different login screen with this one Uh, I think I like this setup better than the one with xfce But let me go ahead and enter my super strong and complicated password and we'll log into their x-mone ad edition and i'm getting a ac only no battery notification here And I get a window open And it's just a black window So this may be a little buggy. I had this problem in the live environment too. It was a little flaky I think what i'm going to have to do Uh, it's a vm problem probably a graphics driver problem, but i've tried every graphics driver Available invert manager. None of them seem to work correctly. So what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to log in To a tty prompt and i'm going to kill all pi com I'm assuming they're using the pi com uh compositor That's typically the compositor everybody uses with standalone window managers and then i'm going to do control alt f7 here invert manager to get back to the desktop and now It actually looks like it's working correctly Yeah, so it's a compositor problem. The compositor was really uh, boogering up some of the windows Although the compositor still didn't fix like i'm assuming these Slide away buttons are actually supposed to have text Probably a vm problem. I won't uh, really be critical of this here If i installed this on physical hardware, this would probably look good I do like the uh, the look of this quick guide here. It's just unfortunately in the vm. You can't read it So let's talk about default key bindings in xmonad now typically if you don't modify xmonad in any way Alt shift enter opens a terminal. So if i do alt shift enter That does nothing they probably changed the mod key from alt To super actually it says note in key bindings mod is the windows key the super key So super shift enter should get us a terminal and that gets us, uh, the fish prompt again What terminal is this? This is alacrity in this edition. So I do like the alacrity terminal They probably should replace termite in the xfce edition with alacrity as well because now termite, of course Is uh, no longer actively developed So the default key binding to close a window with focus is alt shift c or in this case It's going to be super shift c. I'm assuming so we close that quick guide now This is well, let me do the xrander command one more time because honestly We need a better screen resolution here Uh, this is strange. So this panel here This is not poly bar and it's definitely not xmo bar, which is the panel that almost all xmonad users use I don't know why They're using such weird panels that don't make any sense in these editions So in xfce, which was a floating window manager slash desktop environment They were using poly bar which poly bar was really designed for tiling window managers That's what it's designed for now. We installed a tiling window manager edition of payux And instead of using something like poly bar or xmo bar I believe this is the tent tube panel, which is really for traditional kind of floating window managers It's going to have a task bar and everything if I open a second terminal, you know, you'll see we have two task bars We can switch between them with the mouse This is but nobody does this on a tiling window manager because there's nothing to switch to you see both Yeah, it it's pointless Also tent tube is not going to display multi monitor stuff at all as far as you know xmo nad Traditionally you'll have nine workspaces nine or ten workspaces zero through nine on the keyboard You would see those zero through nine displayed and you would also see coloring information depending on Was the workspace visible on one of your monitors? Is there something open on that workspace? Is there something open on that workspace but that monitor or that workspace is currently not visible? You know it xmo bar handles all of that stuff and poly bar doesn't really handle all that stuff But if you wanted to hack it and script it it's a lot of work You can kind of make poly bar work with xmo nad But this is the tent tube panel is completely inappropriate if I switch to the second workspace You know, it tells me I'm on the second workspace But it doesn't tell me About the other workspaces available. It doesn't tell me what if there's windows or programs open on those workspaces So yeah, this is nobody's going to like this this I would say this is going to give especially new users to xmo nad because the people that are going to install A distribution preconfigured with a tiling window manager or people that are not comfortable configuring it themselves And those kinds of people are going to have a bad experience If you present this to them with a panel that really is Kind of it's not going to work right. It's a half-assed approach really do it to This kind of situation you need You really need somebody that knows about xmo nad to actually come up with a proper config What I'm going to say is I bet the person behind the pay x project The flagship edition he claims is xfce. I bet that's probably the desktop environment He uses probably doesn't use tiling window managers And he's probably the one that came up with you know the design and and the suite of applications to create this particular desktop environment But it's really just all wrong and that's not just me, you know Having personal preferences. I nobody uses the tint 2 panel with a tiling window manager It's just it's just not the right thing. You have these quick launchers You know these big buttons with icons that you'd have to go to the mouse and click Nobody uses a mouse and a tiling window manager to launch anything. You know, it's it's again It's just the wrong panel for this now Let me do super shift c to close these windows again. And if I click on the haskell logo Uh, we get another menu, which I'm assuming is another Rofi menu here. And if I just quickly look at what's installed on the xmo nad edition Similarly, we've got firefox as our browser electron is here. So I'm assuming discord is also here It is pc man fm. It's the file manager on this edition. So pc man fm And we've got two different pc man fms We got pc man fm dash cute and pc man fm Which is actually a gtk based and you probably want to do the gtk based by default the cute one Mainly it's it's around for the lx cute desktop environment Uh, well, it's not been themed in any way. It's using like those plain brown icons that are just hideous Let me do a super shift enter one more time to get a terminal I'm assuming nitrogen is probably setting the wallpaper. Uh, let me see if I do nitrogen. No nitrogen is not here So what is setting the wallpaper? Because the fish shield, you know, the word was read as I typed it That means the command is not found. So I know nitrogen's not installed. So let me do wall paper And the rophy no Probably just setting it with feh There's probably in the xmone ad config itself Feh is setting the wallpaper I just wanted to refresh the screen to fix this This weird bug when I did the xrander command to resize the screen the wall papers a little wonky But we'll just have to deal with it for now Back in the menu system Firefox was the browser blue mill is our email client. I don't know blue mill the strange, uh But I mean nobody really uses desktop mail And our editor is code. So we're we're going to do vs code, right? Code os s Let's do the about Version 1 dot 55 dot 2. All right. Um, is that the only text editor on the system Is vm here vm is not of course vi'll always be around no vi is actually I've never found a unix based operating system that didn't have vi I'm assuming emacs is not going to be here. I just start typing text Yeah, code is yet editor Oh, yeah vs code is the only thing installed that we can edit a text file with one more thing I should try is nano. Okay nano is so you either have your choice of Code or nano So you've got you do have two text editors really not much else cocky again flame shot for you know taking your your screenshots Joplin is installed. That's interesting and note-taking application. It's also an electron app h top again If I click on h top, would it actually launch it inside a terminal? Let's check out system resource usage 361 megs of the 4 gigs of ram. I gave this vm That's pretty standard for you know any standalone window manager Typically three to 400 megs is what you're going to use If you have stuff running if you really wanted to strip it down way down you could get it under 200 megs Looking at the quick launchers here. That's obviously the terminal quick launcher there. Yeah That's weird clicking on something to open it with the mouse and then I got to go to the keyboard to close it Yeah, these don't make any sense I wonder how configured this thing is what I'm going to do is I wish vm was installed I could install it really quick, but what I'll do is will nano dot xmonad xmonad dot hs This is the xmonad config file and if I page down I'm just want to see what the config file looks like Doesn't look like it's a very lengthy config file. It looks very vanilla as far as Not much to it. How do I exit out of nano? I don't use nano. I find it very confusing Anytime I find myself trapped in nano. It's weird. It's like the people that complain about they can't exit You know, I seriously can't exit nano Luckily, it tells you how to at the bottom of the screen But yeah, it looked like it was a very vanilla xmonad config So if I open a few more terminals here, you know, we got the master and stack layout here And I believe the default key binding in xmonad to change the layouts is super tab No, it's not super tab tab actually changes focus of the window super space Is the default key binding to change the layout? So we have the master and stack layout Then we have a horizontal master and stack layout And then I guess we have just the uh, monocle layout where all four windows are actually stacked on top of each other If I launch htop, you can see Super j you know moves through the stack until I finally, you know get back All right, and then super space would get us back into the master and stack layout I think that's all I wanted to to do with this here Just a very brief look at pay xos their xfce edition and their xmonad edition Now I don't like being critical of these distros that you guys have me take a look at But I do wonder about you guys that asked me to take a look at pay x and especially those of you that were asking me to Take a look at the xmonad edition because I'm assuming you guys have actually used it and if you had used it I mean, you know that it's kind of it's kind of weird, right? It's kind of not put together well at all And what I would suggest is I'm not going to be overly critical here because it's early days for this linux distribution But I think the developer needs some help with this stuff And you guys if you use tiling window managers like i3 bspwm xmonad he's got additions for all of those Maybe go contribute to the project those of you that were enthusiastic about this project go help out Go contribute some of your configs and you know if You know you have problems like he shouldn't be using the tent 2 panel and a tiling window manager Go go let him know about that maybe also tell him poly bar is not appropriate for xfce You know try to steer the guy in in the right direction and help out a little bit for me You know, this was an interesting distribution. I'm glad I took a look at it. Hey, obviously it's different And that's one of the things I'm probably why you guys were excited about it It's definitely doing things differently than most other linux distributions. I'm going to keep Taking a look at pay x in the future if they have, you know, some big releases six months from now a year from now You know, I'll give it another shot right now for me though I think if you guys are looking for a really good arch linux based distribution Especially an arch linux based distribution that uses xfce Manjaro is kind of like the gold standard of xfce arch based linux distributions If you guys are looking for a good arch based distro that uses tiling window managers like xmone Arco linux is kind of the gold standard for those kinds of Tiling window manager edition So I would take a look at manjaro or arco endeavor os also makes really good Stuff they they have a really nice xfce edition as well Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode absy delis gave lou michel sand or ellen economy arch Featured 30 joke david the other david dylan greg rellis orion paul polytech scott steven smith and wesson willy these guys they're the producers of this episode They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well I can't read this very lengthy list of names I would run out of breath But I do want to thank each and every one of these people because I don't have any corporate sponsors I am sponsored by you guys the community and I ask for your support look for distro tube over on patreon. All right, guys peace Never thought I'd see a distro with vs code as the default