 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today We're going to be taking a look at a brand new flavor of Arco Linux now for those of you who don't know Arco is my by far Favorite distribution out there right now. I think it's the best distribution based on Arch I think it has the best community surrounding it. I'm just in love with Arco I mean I have been for over a year now. I tried to move away from it just because you know distro hopping. It's cool But I ended up coming back to it and I made a video about that if you want to check that out one of the things I love about Arco is that you have a huge selection of Pre-configured window managers and desktop environments. It's not something that you really see in every distribution out there now like Manjaro has three official flavors and we call them flavors because boond calls them flavors, but Manjaro has three official ones and they have several community ones Fedora has several spins. Obviously Ubuntu has several you know flavors that are available to you, but Arco tends to have Window managers and desktop environments and stuff that aren't regularly available Pre-configured in other distributions for example X monad is there. They have q-tile They have ice wm. There's just tons. I mean, I'm pretty sure they're like 20 Window managers and desktop environments available now something some crazy number I don't I don't know the exact number, but they just have way more than everybody else and I don't know how they go about supporting so many but they do a really good job. So The one I'm going to be taking a look at today is a window manager that I had never heard of before and I still don't know that much about so This is truly a first look. I mean I played around with it a little bit last night just to So it wasn't a complete idiot When I did this video, but Outside of a few things. I know very little about what's going on in this window manager other than It's kind of cool. So let's go ahead and jump in So we're gonna be Doing this in a virtual box virtual machine And I've got this here and I'm just going to go ahead and start it now. I am going to go through And install this in front of you Even though it's just a standard Arco linux install. There's nothing really all that special about it is As good as any other arco linux installer out there I believe this is arco linux be so This is the one that has a dedicated just regular window manager that you can choose from the download site Whereas the original the Usual arco linux just like the bog standard one has three Three window managers or window uh desktop environments on it And the deal I might have those letters mixed up. I don't know Sometimes arco linux as much as I love it can be a little confusing because they have so many things to offer but Despite all that This is f m w v 3. I believe is actually what it's called Yeah, f v w m 3 Now one thing I didn't notice is that on the live ISO it loads Pretty slow. I noticed this last night when I was looking at it for the first time This is this initial load up is pretty slow Now when I was in the installed version on a vm It loaded fine. It was quick as anything else So i'm not sure what's going on here. I will cut away and come back. Oh Not spoke too soon. It's here now. I'm not going to play too much with it But already you can see some things that are a little weird, right from different window managers There's this whole thing down here in the corner. We'll talk about that here when we after we install it This up here is poly bar. So we're just going to go ahead and install now By default. I believe it's by default the arco linux calamari's tool will install this with butterfs And i'm going to go ahead and choose ext4 this time now I installed it with butterfs last night and it worked just fine But i'm just because I want to go through and ensure that this works the first time through I'm going to go ahead and use the ext4 because i'm more comfortable with that So i'm going to go ahead and run calamari's here and this is just regular calamari's As you would see in any other arco linux installer. So american english is what we need. I will choose the lts kernel i've been choosing the lts kernel more often just because I don't feel like upgrading my kernel over and over again because now that i'm not distro hopping every two and three weeks It actually matters that I don't want to you know Have to keep reinstalling kernel. I don't need any of this other stuff for now I'm going to go ahead and do the open source drivers And then everything else normally when you're going through and installing this you'll go through and install any of the programs That you want to install now i'm not going to install anything i'm just going to take a look at what's installed by default Once we're done installing it. So i'm just going to fly through all of these things This is another reason why I love arco because no other distribution out there gives you This type of control over what's installed on your system before install none of them Uh the ones that the only one that I can think that comes close is May I had a candy thing of one that comes close to this round I was trying to think that There are a few others out there that give you like a choice over like what browser you're going to use but None of them have this type of you know choice This is awesome, right? This is the way I mean I can understand why you wouldn't want like the like a new user to have to I mean like a truly new linux user you wouldn't want to have to face this But chances are if you're a truly new linux user you're going to go use linux ment or you're going to use a boon too you're not going to Find arco and try to install fmw v3 as a window manager. It's just not gonna happen So stop talking man install it would you? Okay Time zone is correct Keyboard is correct. We'll erase the disk with no swap And we'll type in some credentials here and We use ffm wv3 wm Or vert. I don't care and then our password And we'll use the same for the administrator account next Install and we're going to install now. I will go ahead and cut the video here And we'll notice the time is 1945. So we'll see how long this takes Okay, that took about four minutes or so. It's 1949 now. So All we're going to do now is just go ahead and Normally what you do is just leave that restart button there checked And then let the system restart after removing your installation media because I'm on virtual box I'm going to go remove the installation media from virtual box And the best way to do that is just to shut down instead of restart. So I'm going to do that now. So All right, we'll check out some startup times here I don't think we'll have a problem. He's like I said before it was pretty fast Like yeah, that was lightning quick even on virtual box. So we'll type in our password here And this is fm wv3 Now This is the standard arco linux welcome app It allows you to update the mirrors and then just gives you some easy buttons here for finding out information about the distro and Getting support and stuff like that. So I'm just going to go ahead and bypass this because pretty much if you chances are if you're looking at fm wv3, you've probably used arco before so This is just the standard arco welcome app. It's just as good as any other. So I'm just going to close that now Let's talk about the elephant in the room. What the hell is this stuff down here I when I first saw it was like that is the weirdest thing I've ever seen So basically what this is is these are your workspaces. So I will say this up front is that I'm not 100 sure how this works or more I should say that my Knowledge of what This does and what it works is very limited. So if I explain something inappropriately or Unsuccessfully, I apologize for that up up front. Just know that this is a first look I've only looked at it for maybe a grand total of an hour total so Just keep that in mind. So basically the way I understand it is that you actually have three Like categories of workspaces and I believe you can have more from what I saw in the configuration file But I'm not sure I haven't played around with it But by default at least in this version of it you have three categories and each category has nine Total workspaces. So you have a total Of 27 workspaces if my math is correct We'll just you know, we can count them, I suppose but so each one has nine You have total of nine in each in three of different categories So you have main code and play now you like said You can customize the names of those things and you can I believe add more if you wanted to Now anyone who knows me and or has been following the channel for all knows that I love having 18 or 20 workspaces And when I first saw this I was like this thing has 27 workspaces I'm like this is my heaven Or you're like this this this is right up my alley like I don't It feels like this is like something that I'd really really like now One thing you also notice Is that FMWV is a floating window manager. This is not a tyler So that's one knock against it in my opinion, but I'm not a big floating window manager person But if you like something like open box or if you liked that flux box that we took a look at, you know Like a maybe a month ago that was an mx linux if you like those kind of things This is like really kind of cool. So the other thing I've noticed and I'm going to talk about this a little bit more When we talk about the configuration file is that you're very much reliant on the mouse here to change your workspaces now There are you can use super two and three to go to different categories And supposedly you can use super like f2 or something to go to go up. Oops. Yeah, I changed the scene and Yeah Thank you Thank you obs for actually working for once and I didn't want you to work at time. Um, anyway, uh As you can tell I have a feeling that the reason why my f2 and f1s and stuff doesn't work is because I'm having conflicting Problems with you know obs and probably the window managers I have on underneath this and stuff. It's all I have so many key behindings I'm I'm sure there's some kind of conflict there. So that's probably the reason why that doesn't work But supposedly you can use your keyboard to navigate between the Workspaces not only the categories one two three, but also the specific categories How you do that? I still haven't figured that out So And the reason why is because the configuration file is Very, uh, complicated. Let me show you this now. Let's go ahead and make this full screen And zoom in here. Now. This is termite because so this is an old friend And termite as we know is awesome and everybody should use termite Even though i'm still using or i'm still cheating on it with a lackity Yeah, anyway, so the configuration file is in dot f Vwm in your home directory And if we do an ls here, we'll see that we have a configuration file some themes and the xdg menu now the xdg menu if we Make this smaller and I think we can do it that way him You get your xdg menu by with the Right click button. Yep, and that just gives you access to some programs and All of your stuff that's installed here and we'll take a look at this here in a few minutes If you left click you get some Other menu that allows you to restart send to Resize the iconify. I don't I'm pretty sure that means like When you minimize this because you can minimize this to here and it just goes away So I think if you do this now that didn't work. I think I you know, you can reset reset or Restart ffm wv so That terminal we had is now apparently close because it actually shows the thing normally if we do Like alt tab, I believe. Yeah There we go So alt tabs will bring the things that you've minimized back up for you It's not the prettiest alt tab you'll ever see. It's just a list And but that's okay. I mean it works. I mean it's very it's meant to be minimal So let's go ahead and take a look at that configuration file that I was talking about. So let's vim into config Okay, so this is the configuration file. So I believe that this is written in a like user friendly syntax kind of It might be written in pearl It might be written in c. It might be written in some kind of combination of things I haven't been able to actually find out. I'm pretty sure it's kind of like uh i3 and Maybe specter wm in that it's Written in a way that is user configurable And it's not really an actual language, but Reason why I say that it's something different than that is because it has different things that Like the i3 thing really doesn't have like it has set end here I'm not actually sure what language is this now if you go to github It will tell you It will tell you that this is written in c 98 percent And pearl 3.8 percent and then there's some other stuff here, but this is going to be mostly for making it as well. So Which of those things have to do with the configuration file? I'm not actually sure But that's beside the point. So the reason why it's a little confusing is because if we go down here to the bottom And then we scroll up to the the Key bindings It doesn't do a good job of telling you what Key it's actually using so These are the key bindings here. So it says As far as I can tell the word key in this case means alt So your alt key Is the thing that you use to page between windows apparently the Silent key Which we actually see up here. I believe somewhere. Maybe I'm Yeah, right here the silent key. I believe is the the the mod key the the super key But there's no place where it actually says that So I could be completely wrong where up here where it explains thing. It has like a little graph or whatever Is even more confusing. I don't know what this is supposed to mean It has something to do with where the mouse is positioned On the screen and that where your mouse is positioned has some kind of effect on what the key bindings themselves do It's very very confusing so In the hour that I was able to use this last night and the little bit of time I've been using it now I've still not have a clue What any of this means now if you look If we go to the The website if I can find the the website actually Okay, so After a little while hunting hunting and searching I did manage to find the documentation on the bindings and I saw this last night But it has this documentation which is supposed to be a correlation of What this is supposed to be representing. I think um, like I don't Numbers are buttons. I don't know what that means Uh, because of course numbers are buttons But I'm like, are you talking about like the keyboard? I don't understand. I don't know and it's not well Explained I should just say that this documentation. So it says whenever a key is pressed or a mouse is clicked Fvwm takes note of the current location of the mouse. This is important because fvwm Needs to know where the mouse was clicked such as on the tidal bar or A particular window button to understand how these work Let's first look at how a typical screen with one window and two iconified windows is set up As shown in the figure below fvwm divides the screen up into the following regions root window icon Which is the eye Which is up here I'm assuming those are like Minimized windows. I'm not actually sure. I'm assuming it defines iconify somewhere else Uh frame borders frame slides tidal bar application window window buttons and anywhere I'm confused right? I'm like, I don't understand. I'm assuming that after a little while I'd be able to figure this out But it just feels a little weird, right? And I think that the reason why it's gotten so complicated is because there's so many workspaces And they have to Not only add an effect that this is not a tiling window manager So they have to deal a lot more with the mouse than what you'd have to if you're in like dwm or Herbsloft wm or whatever But you also have to deal with the fact that you have so many workspaces. So that's a thing that's one of that's In my very brief time of playing around with it. That was my number one I'm not even gonna call it a complaint because there's probably absolutely nothing confusing about it. It's just again My little brain, you know, not being able to Figure it out and that's a common theme. I mean it just is I'm being completely honest. It just always is outside of this it had the configuration file itself It starts up several applications down here somewhere, I believe so yeah right here So you can go through and do autostart right from this file Uh, and it looks like it's fairly comprehensive in terms of the stuff that it does. It's just The syntax of it is a little weird Because again, I believe this is some kind of I'm not sure what languages I'm gonna stop trying to guess. I don't know I'm I'm sure learn Linux is out there somewhere and he probably knows so The rest of this configuration file has to do with how things Interact with the mouse how things interact with the screen and stuff It's looks like it's if you're going to get into it. There's a lot of stuff that you can do It's just gonna be a matter of like I said Figuring out the syntax and stuff it looks it also looks like I mean I complain about this, you know documentation and it confusing me, but Everything here. I mean there's a ton Of documentation here pretty much on everything It pretty much explains everything that you would expect it to be you know have explained in a fairly reasonable way It's just gonna be a matter of time getting into the documentation and actually figuring it out, right? So Let's Figure out how to go through and get that smaller. So that just takes it smaller So let's take a look at the install applications. I'm just curious to see what Arco Linux will install Out of the box without actually going through and installing anything from calamaris. So first We have The better lockscreen which will help you Change the stwm theme tweak tool discs, which is probably going on discs the keyboard layout viewer software token variety and vim x arc drivers for unzipping things compton and pycom It's weird that both compton and pycom are installed. Are those I thought compton was depreciated completely It's weird that they're both here Get ahead which is forget meld for comparing things a blunt text for your text editor flamishot and gcolor 2 There's not a lot here pulse audio control Simple screen recorder is installed by default, which is an interesting choice The volume icon, which is just this thing up here Let's see here Chromium and firefox are both installed by default. So is discord and telegram desktop For office, you have wps, which is again an interesting choice He's usually his livery office and I didn't check either though So by just default it's going to give you an office suite whether you want it or not apparently A randers here, which is the graphical version for x rander and we have the welcome string bluetooth Light dm gtk greeter. So just in case you switch to light dm It's auto automatically installed for the changing the theme power manager, which is going to probably be the xfc power manager xfc e terminal settings because the xfc terminal is here I believe no urx vt. Yep is is one terminal xfc e terminal ftunar termite g parted is here Uh bulk rename and that's pretty much as this is going to be pemac So that's what you get if you don't install anything from The arco linux calmar is installed. So this is fvwm and it's a Floating window manager with a ton of workspaces that you pretty much have to use your mouse to navigate and That's an interesting thing. They're supposedly a way to switch your Windows to different Workspaces by dragging them I'm not exactly sure how that goes about doing that. I haven't actually figured out so Oh, wait a minute. Hold on a second. It's it's if he goes down It goes to if you can see this I was up here And now i'm on this one here and if I drag up Yeah, now i'm on the second one and back up and now i'm on the first one now if I drag over here Yeah, i'm on this one. Okay, that's cool. So if you want to go through and drag your windows to different workspaces even in different Okay, so it only works it only appears to work within In The category of workspaces you're in so I can't take it from play to code by dragging it That's that's I mean that's I mean if you're Using it as it probably should be used which is with your mouse I mean usually when you're using a floating window manager You're not going to be reliant so much on the key bindings as you are if you were using a tiling window manager. So You know if you're using it with the mouse, that's cool functionality. So that's I'm wondering if there's like a way you can reposition this I'm assuming like maybe in your configuration file. You can go through and reconfigure this so it's in a different position because like if it's like say you want it on the other side of the screen or Even better, let's just say you didn't want it on the screen at all But you just press a key binding and it shows up like in the center of the screen. That'd be really cool I don't know if that's possible or not But that'd be like so that'd be cool because then you want this that way if you have this full screen And as you see that disappears Or it did disappear. I'm apparently if you go to a corner screen It actually goes through and moves you to a different desktop. But uh because it's disappeared You have no way of moving to different desktops without actually going through and using your key binding, which is you know Super ship one or super super one or or going through and making this small and going back here So I'm wondering if there it might even exist having a key binding that just pops it up That might exist. Uh, so I didn't actually find it but then I said I haven't used it for all that long So I think that this window manager has quite a lot of potential So if I were a floating window manager guy of the floating window managers that I've used so far So I've used open box. I've used flux box and now I've used f vwm Of those three I like this and the most maybe that's just because I love tons of workspaces But I also kind of like the challenge so as much as it confused me that like the little diagram confused me And the whole key binding thing and calling the keys something different than what I'm used to confuses me I like that challenge and like the idea of being Confused for a little while and actually trying to figure that out. So I'm going to leave this installed in a virtual box And I'm going to play with it from time to time and see if I can't You know learn to configure it a little bit because it's kind of cool Whether or not I would actually ever install it on my main system. I don't know maybe If if I got it a little bit more familiar with it It's possible because I have open box installed on my miss system right now But it can't pre-install so that doesn't really count. So anyways Let me know in the comments below if you're interested in trying fmw v3 And or if you have tried it and what if you you know have some thoughts on it So I because I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've tried it before and maybe you know what the what that diagram means You know more than I do. Um, thank you for watching Make sure you follow us on twitter at the next cast you can follow us on facebook at the next cast You can also support us on patreon at patreon.com Slash linux cast and just to let everybody know if you support us on patreon, you'll get at early access to quite a few of our videos so Sometimes it's only about 12 hours early access. Sometimes it's a full day, but like this one here will be almost a full day so Make sure you subscribe to us or support us on patreon if you're interested in something like that And I'd like to thank our current patrons Devon marcus maiglin donnie merrick camp and michael. Thanks everybody for your support. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time