 Today I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of Sparky Linux. Sparky Linux just released a minor point release, version 7.2, and this is for their stable ISOs. Now Sparky Linux is based off of Debian, and Sparky Linux offers stable versions of their distribution as well as a semi-rolling version of their distribution. 7.2 is an update to the stable version, and Sparky Linux offers several different desktop editions. They offer XFCE, LXQ, which I'm pretty sure I've taken a look at LXQ in the past, and they also offer a KDE Plasma edition, which I'm kind of curious about. So today I'm going to go ahead and take a quick first look of Sparky Linux 7.2 KDE. So I've spun up a virtual machine here, and I've went ahead and ran through the installations for Sparky 7.2. It's a very simple installation, and it uses the Calamari's installer, so I didn't feel like I needed to capture that on camera. If you guys have seen a Linux installation with the Calamari's installer, if you've seen one, you've seen them all. The one thing I will say during the Calamari's installer for Sparky Linux, they do have log in without a password ticked on by default. I would suggest ticking that off by default just for privacy reasons. You guys know that I'm not a big fan of having a Linux distribution automatically log you in without a password. I think that can be kind of dangerous. So first impressions of Sparky 7.2 is it's a very clean look. It's a very nice wallpaper, very minimal, a little bit of abstract art, you know, some geometric shapes with the Sparky branding. So I really like that the plasma theme is a standard light theme. Now, because this is based off of Debian 12, you know, the addition of KDE Plasma they're running is not going to be the latest and greatest. So actually let me go into the menu system and I'm going to go into the system category. Let's go to the info center. Let's see what version of KDE Plasma this is actually running. So this is KDE Plasma 5.27.5 using frameworks 5.103, Qt version 5.15.8. And the kernel is 6.1. By the way, it is using X11 as the display server by default. That's just some of the specs here as far as the software. Let me go through the menu system and actually see what kind of programs they ship out of the box. So they do have a development category. They have the icon browser as well as the Kate text editor. Kate is a plain text editor. Actually Kate is not really a plain text editor these days. It's become a lot more full, fully featured. It's much more of an IDE these days. So actually let me open a document. So if I open, let's see, can I show hidden files? What is it? Control H to show hidden files in the file picker? Yes, it is. And I'll open the Bash RC. You can see you even get some syntax highlighting out of the box, which is something many just plain text editors of course will not do. You even get a little mini map here on the side. So again, Kate has really evolved over the years to really becoming something quite special. Kate is, you know, honestly, if you want an IDE and you don't need the kind of customization and the flexibility and the power that things like NeoVim and Emacs and things like that give you, if you just want something rather simple, but still with some really nice features out of the box, Kate is a good choice. I get back into the menu system. There is a graphics category. We have Gwynvue, which is the image viewer for KDE Plasma. Let me go in here and see if it will tell me what version we are on. If I go to help and about Gwynvue, this is Gwynvue version 22.12.3. Close that out and get back into the graphics category. We have LibreOfficeDraw installed. We have Ocular. Ocular is the PDF viewer. It's your document viewers, what they call it. But, you know, it's typically for viewing PDFs. This is, again, Ocular version 22.12.3 as well. And finally, in the graphics category, we have ScanLite, which is a scan utility. If you still have a printer scanner combo, ScanLite allows you to scan documents. Under the internet category, the web browser they have chosen to go with is Firefox ESR. So ESR means it's the extended support release of Firefox. If I go to help about Firefox, this is Firefox 115.5.0 ESR. Also under the internet category, we have our instant messenger contacts. We have KDE Connect. And this is for connecting your mobile devices and seeking them. We have KDE IM log viewer. So a lot of instant messaging stuff here. We also have KGet for a download manager. We have Conqueror. That's interesting. Conqueror with a K is a old school web browser. It was KDE Plasma's web browser. They had their own browser. Not too many people use Conqueror these days, but it is. I mean, they installed Firefox for a much more modern, fully featured browser. But Conqueror is here. This is version 22.12.3. I probably wouldn't use that myself, but it is there. Conversation with a K. That is your IRC chat client. And by default, it is going to try to connect to the Debian server. So that's interesting. So I don't know if Sparky Linux has its own IRC channel. But I guess if you're being based off of Debian, they I guess are connecting you to a Debian support channel out of the box. We have KTorrent for a BitTorrent client. We have quite RSS, which is a RSS reader. Let me go ahead and open it. Of course, I haven't added any feeds, but you'd add your RSS feeds and you get, you know, your previews here in the main windows. Pretty neat little RSS reader. They also have RiseUp VPN. That's interesting that they include a VPN service. I'm not familiar with this particular VPN RiseUp VPN. Let me click on it. Might take a minute to load. Of course, I'm not going to sign up for anything. And obviously, it's going to ask you to sign up and everything. We're going to skip all of that. And the only other thing under the internet category is Mozilla Thunderbird for the email client. Under multimedia, we have Alisa for our audio player. Go ahead and click on Alisa. This is one of the standard KDE applications as well. I click the menu here and go to About Alisa. This is Alisa 22.12.3, a simple music player made with love by the KDE community. I like the little blurb there in the About screen. Under multimedia, we also have K3B, which is a disc burning utility. Now, kind of like I mentioned, you know, not too many people have scanners, not too many people burn discs these days. I actually still occasionally burn discs. And the best disc burning programs for free and open source software available on Linux, K3B is the best disc burning program. It can burn your CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. So this is a fantastic program if you still burn discs for whatever reason, maybe you still burn audio CDs or movie DVDs, or maybe you're just backing up. Maybe you use Blu-ray storage as archiving discs. And sometimes I do that. I will actually make backups to Blu-ray because they will last a little longer and, you know, they have a little more shelf life. Also under multimedia, we have Komoso, which is your webcam program. VLC is your video player. Of course, VLC can also play audio. So you can use it for both. If you want VLC 3.0.20, VLC is one of the most popular pieces of free and open source software on the planet. Probably hundreds of millions of people use VLC every day on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is a cross-platform program. We also have VocoScreenNG. I'm assuming that is a screen recorder office. We have our LibreOffice Suite. The entire suite is here. Let me go ahead and open LibreOffice Writer, which is the word processing program. If I go to help and about LibreOffice, they are on version 7.4.7.2. So not the latest release of LibreOffice, but again, it's a stable distribution based off of the latest version of Debian Stable, again, based off of Debian Bookworm. We have a science and math category. The only thing in here is LibreOffice math. And then the settings categories, your standard stuff that you would see. So you have printer settings and system settings. You have the Synaptic Package Manager, which is a GUI package manager. But it's really nice because it's not all gaudy with a bunch of graphics and things. It's actually probably the best graphical package manager available on Linux. Now Synaptic Package Manager is for Debian-based distributions, Debian and Debian-based distributions. So if you're running Debian or a Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I strongly suggest giving Synaptic Package Manager a try. Now I'm going to search for a package. I'm going to click the search here. I'm going to search for Htop, which Htop might be installed out of the box on Sparky. I'm not sure, but I'm going to do a search for it just in case. And here is Htop. And it is not highlighted a different color. So Htop is actually not installed. Well, I want to install Htop. So I will click it, mark for installation. Now there's a checkbox. And then what I'm going to go ahead and do is go up here and hit the apply button. And all the changes that I've made will be applied. So if I've had multiple programs ticked on to install and maybe some other programs ticked off to remove or whatever it happens to be, it will go ahead and apply all of those changes. And of course, you could always open a terminal and just do a sudo apt install Htop, right? Which is typically what I do. But if you want a graphical package manager, maybe you're not sure of the name of the program you want to install. You know, sometimes when you're searching for new programs, something like Synaptic Package Manager, it's a little easier to navigate than searching for programs at the command line. So now that we have Htop installed, let me see. Can I do a control alt T to bring up a terminal? Yeah, not every distribution of Linux uses that key binding, but most of them do. Now I'm going to zoom in and let me do it Htop. And let's see what kind of system resource usage we are using. I'm using about one gig of the six gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's a little high for KDE Plasma, but I have opened a ton of things on camera here in the last few minutes. And some of them are probably still running. Yeah, rise up VPN. Let's quit that. And but I'm not going to sit here and try to kill a bunch of services. KDE Plasma is usually a pretty lightweight desktop environment. Typically it's going to use about 600 or maybe 700 megs of six gigs of RAM that I give these VMs. This again is a little high, but again, I've probably got a lot of things running in the background. Let me go ahead and close that window. Now let's talk about some of the Sparky Linux specific programs. If I go into their system category, one of the programs that you will immediately be welcomed with as soon as you log in for the first time is the welcome application. So this is a YAD program yet another dialogue. It's a very simple way to create these graphical programs. But again, it's got various links to some of the documentation for Sparky Linux. You can get a link to their Git repo, their Wiki, you get a link for how to donate to the project. You can also go ahead and install software upgrade software from this welcome screen because you click on app center and you will get some kind of graphical software center. I'm assuming it's going to take a minute to load. So it is using the Aptis app center, which is another YAD dialogue kind of graphical program. It's very similar to the welcome screen. And so if you prefer this rather than synaptic, now I prefer synaptic because this is a little clunky. But I mean, if you wanted to use this, for example, let's go ahead and install something small. Maybe I want to search for, let me search for something like VIM. VIM may already be installed, but I'm going to search for it. And it says search result for the word VIM is more than one. Okay, well, we have a search result in games, text media others and office text. I'm going to assume office text is probably the VIM that I wanted. So let's go there and see if VIM is here. There it is. If I click on it, and I'm going to have to wait a second. All of this seems a little slower too than just using the synaptic package manager. But let's go ahead and click the install button. It opens a terminal where you have to confirm that you actually do want to install. Now that's interesting that it asks for a confirmation when you had to kind of click on a button that said install anyway. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about having to confirm that. And then it says the package has been successfully installed exit. And if I exit it just goes back to the main screen. So yeah, so that is their app center. Some of the other things in the system category include the dolphin file manager, of course, being KDE Plasma. But you also have things like a G parted, which is a partition editor partition manager. This is probably if you were using Sparky as a live USB stick, you might want to have a partition manager actually available to you. You also have timeshift for those wanting to make backups of snapshots of your system with timeshift. There is a utilities category, which is all of the standard KDE utilities, such as Arc, which is their archive manager, KCalc, which of course is KDE's calculator. Go to about KCalc. This is KCalc version 22.12.3. All the KDE programs it looks like are synced to the same version numbers 22.12.3. So let me go ahead and do control Alt T to bring up the terminal once again. Of course, this is KDE's console, console with a K. And let me do an apt list dash dash installed. Let's get a list of all the packages that were installed via the apt package manager. And it spits this out line by line, right? Each package on its own separate line, which means if I up arrow, I can pipe all of that into WC space dash L. WC is the word count program dash L means give me a line count rather than a word count. 2,232 lines. That's how many lines of output we're in that output from the apt list dash dash installed command, which means there are 2,232 packages installed on Sparky Linux. And if I do a uname dash R, we've already taken a look at it in the settings manager, but the version of the kernel is 6.1.0. If I do a where is pipe wire. Let's talk about the audio server is pipe wire here. It is not. So they are not installing pipe wires. I'm assuming pulse audio, of course, is going to be the audio server. Let me go ahead and close out of the terminal there. Let me right click on the desktop. Let's check out the wallpapers. If I configure desktop and wallpaper, and let's see if we have any cool wallpapers, probably most of them are going to be like your standard Plasma wallpaper pack. This one here says created with GIMP. So this is the default wallpaper, the Sparky Linux branded wallpaper. Other than that, the rest of the wallpapers look like they were probably either default Debian wallpapers, which some of the Debian wallpapers are actually quite nice. Just here's one from several versions of Debian back that I really loved. And it's all Debian branded wallpapers. So nothing else to see here. Let's do space fun, a little space themed Debian branded wallpaper. Yeah, so really nothing exciting about that wallpaper pack. Unfortunately, let's go ahead and apply. Overall, a very minor point release for the Sparky seven series. I really I just wanted to take a look at Sparky Linux again, even though it wasn't a major release. I don't get Sparky Linux as much coverage on this channel as it probably deserves to Sparky Linux has been around a number of years. And to be honest, they do Debian better than most Debian based distributions. Like if you're looking for a really easy way to get into Debian, an easy installer with the Calamari installer, especially if you're going to run one of the four or five desktop environments that they offer out of the box on their ISOs because they do XFCE, LXQ, KDE Plasma, which I just took a look at and I think they do mate actually as one of the other additions as well. So if you're running those desktop environments, you know, Sparky actually gives you a pretty comfortable way to get into Debian if you don't want to run mainline Debian. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Arkotic, Armor Dragon, Commander, Angry, George Lee, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realities for Lust, Red Prophet, Roland, Soulastry, Tools of Death, Reward, Jintu, Nibbuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Sparky 7.2 would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you guys like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.