 ArchBase distros are kind of a dime a dozen. There are literal tons of these Distributions out there and for the most part we all have the question why they even exist because they really are again for the most part Kind of clones of each other. They all use the calamaries installer. They all have Maybe some form of customization and they all claim to be the easy way to install arch Linux So when it comes to a new ArchBase distro that I've never heard of before I'm really not that interested in it because like I said, there's just so many of them and Very few of them bring anything Excellent to the table. So I usually just bypassed them But one distribution that has gotten a lot of attention recently is called zero Linux So when I saw other youtubers taking a look at this and they all seemed to like it I was like well, obviously something has to be pretty special about it So I might as well look at it too. So that's what we're gonna do today We're gonna take a look at zero Linux the KDE version now Apparently they used to have an XFC version, but they don't anymore So it's just the KDE version, but the thing is still called the KDE version. It's a little confusing, but anyways That's what we're gonna do today. Let's go ahead and jump right in Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is take a look at their website Now their website is fairly well-designed and anyone who has watched the channel for any amount of time knows that I very often judge a Distribution by the website because if the developer can't be bothered to Design a fairly good website at least in terms of Information and all this stuff then chances are they didn't do a very good job on their distribution either because I mean that's doesn't always hold true Obviously, sometimes they do they're just really crap at creating documentation or doing a website at all And they just use source forage and that's fine and they still have a good distribution sometimes But I found that over the years that if the distribution has a crap website or no website at all Usually corresponds into lack of effort in their Distribution as well, but in this case we have a very nice website with some certain sections So we have a reason why it was created so this developer has created it basically for themselves in Which case I have to say at least what I've seen so far in terms of going through this before I started recording They've done a really good job of making this very User-agnostic because a lot of times when you see a distribution that has been created for the developer for themselves You'll see a distribution that just had just comes with a ton of different stuff on there that most people aren't ever going to use and while there's some of that stuff that's pre-installed on Zero Linux for the most part you don't get the sense that this just has a ton of crux that that that person really likes and Really wouldn't be applicable to anybody else Now this is what the developer says about their KDE version The this is zero Linux KDE offers a wide variety of packages to choose from during install Not to mention the level customization that KDE brings with it. It offers freedom of choice It also has some cool standalone rices that you will be able to install with minimal effort as well as the zero Linux tool Would end much more so here are the rest of the rices that they're talking about so They've done a lot of customization for both KDE and grub itself So it's actually kind of cool now one thing that I probably won't be able to show you is The alternate grub themes because I could not get that to work in a virtual machine I'm assuming it has something to do with the KVM stuff sometimes that doesn't play well with grub But for whatever reason I couldn't get to work It's possible that it works this time, but it didn't work the last time But anyways, so this is the first rest they have this is the default one as we'll see it uses two Latte docks one at the bottom one at the top This one here is the Dracula themed rice some conches and some more latte docks This one here is Nord Basically the same thing just the Nord color scheme and this one has the candy icons. They call the sweet icons Kind of like what Gruda has. All right. Anyways, this is the grub themes. We have Nord. I believe that's the default one This is the Star Wars one pretty cool Daft Punk Tron and Zero compromise So anyways, that's basically what the website has in terms of everything else They have a forum that you can you can visit which is great for and the fact that this person has created the Distribution for themselves, but has still put in some effort into creating some support system. It's actually really good So let's go ahead and install this thing Let's go to our virtual machine here and see if we can install this thing So the first thing you'll notice is that you get this zero Linux welcome screen So I actually really like this welcome screen because it's not overly complicated a lot of times when you see welcome screens They're trying to be dual purpose They're trying to be very informative prior to your installation and they're supposed to be Informative after your installation. So they try to try to meld both of those situations And they don't always do a good job with this you can tell this is meant for pretty installation and there's not a lot to it There's four buttons if you're having problems you can do this debug mode I'm assuming this will probably open up a terminal so you can while it's installing so you can see any errors that pop up This is the regular installer button if you're running VM where you can click this button It will try to fix the resolution and then you can also launch the partition manager, which is going to be Good known discs, which is actually a really good selection because it's not as complicated as Either g-party or the KDE partition manager or whatever it's called. So we're not gonna deal with any of those We're just gonna go ahead and hit start zero Linux installer But we'll see here is the calamari's installer and we'll make this full screen so that the dot goes away And then we'll go ahead and next American English is fine. So here are the two places where This installer does things a little bit differently So some similar to what you'd expect in something like Arco You have some choices here that you'll need to make prior to installation on what you're going to do Install so on this first page. This is the system level core stuff So we're talking what kernel you want the processor you code Which login manager you want if you want certain graphics drivers? Certain audio drivers power management stuff for laptops printing support and the fingerprint drivers So all that stuff is right here on the first page for the most part. It's fairly easy to parse So if you have an Intel GPU, you'd select the Intel one if you have an AMD GPU You would select that one and so on and so forth. I'm going to leave this just Exactly the way it is. There's none of this other stuff that I actually need so I'm gonna go ahead hit next Now this one here is a little bit more in depth So unlike Arco where you just have page after page of categories of Applications that you can install this one here puts it all in one page now I'm not sure which way is better because on one hand if you open up several of these trees You can see that this can get messy Quite fast and then you have to start scrolling and scrolling scrollings If you don't close this stuff after you're done with it You're gonna by the time you get to the last category You're gonna have to scroll quite far on the other hand You don't have to go page after page of categories. So because chances are you're not gonna open up every single one of these categories So it's perhaps it's not that big of a deal that it's all in one page. Like I said, I'm not sure which way I prefer They both have their merits So the one thing that I will say here is that if there's something that you want installed that you don't want to have to Install afterwards you should install here because one of the things that you'll notice and one of the things that We'll talk about once we've get this installed is that by default if you don't select anything here The application base that you get is quite small. So you do get a browser, but it's Falcon You do get obviously most of the KDE stuff, but outside of that you're not gonna have a lot of stuff there So you're gonna end up having to download some of the stuff Anyway, so I highly recommend going through each of these categories finding the stuff that you want and then going Go ahead and install that for me personally I'm going to go ahead and leave all this stuff blank because I want to show you exactly what's installed by default without making any Changes, but that's not the expected behavior. The expected behavior here is for you to select the Applications that you want and they'll install them prior to installation or during installation. So again, I'm gonna go ahead and hit next That's a proper time zone. That's proper keyboard layout and here's another place where it's a little bit different So most ArchBase distributions tend to default TXT for most Linux distributions tend to default TXT for too But this one defaults to ButterFest I like that choice because ButterFest is amazing and It's one of those things like if you choose ButterFest and you never even use the features You can still just be perfectly happy with your system It's not gonna be a big deal at all But if you have it installed let that way and you happen to install an update that goes wonky You can use the snapshot system to roll back a little bit So that's a nice feature and it's one that I prefer I personally think that ButterFest should be default for everything nowadays, but I know I'm basically in the minority for that I know a lot of people still like EXT4, but anyways no swap We're not gonna do that this time you do have the option to encrypt the system some of the distributions I've seen recently have removed that for whatever reason, but that's here. We'll hit next We'll enter our credentials and enter a very complicated password We'll use it for the administrator account to hit next and hit install and then install now Now I will cut the video here when it's done installing. We'll come back Okay, now that we're done there. We'll go ahead and restart the system that installation took maybe seven minutes or so Well, let's go ahead and restart here Get the usual wall of text. This is the boot screen by default And we'll go ahead and enter there and then we're going to see what I believe is SDDM for display manager and You'll see that it doesn't really like this resolution on that much you got some design issues here, but that's a VM issue So we're not gonna hold anything against the developer there for whatever reason vert manager just defaults to this resolution It has something to do with the video driver. I'm not sure how to fix it I usually just go in afterwards and fix that display. So when that's actually what I'm going to do here I'm going to open up the display settings right here and then Choose 1920 by 1080, which is right there apply and then keep And then we can close that so this right here is the zero Linux configuration tool now Just like the welcome screen during the installation. This is very simple There's not a lot of stuff here and I like that they haven't made it overly complicated. They've just put in things that they Think that people will find useful So for example the if you need NVIDIA graphics card drivers This is where you would install them because if you notice during the installation there wasn't actually an option for the NVIDIA card drivers There was optimist stuff there, but for NVIDIA stuff there wasn't anything there So this is where you do that you can also change the default shell from here So you can switch to ZSH which they will install OM ZSH and power level 10,000 If you do that you can also revert back to bash if you've switched to ZSH in the previous step here But we won't do that you can configure Samba from here You can install KVM and QEMU for virtualization. I'm not sure what this coming soon button is I'm very curious as to what's coming next You can disable auto start which is going to be I believe to keep this thing from auto starting and then you can See what extra packages so the extra packages include The surface kernel for I'm what I'm assuming the Microsoft surface you can install the Katie window time I'm assuming again that this is bismuth. So we're actually gonna go ahead and do that that Went away way too quick. So I'm actually sure what they installed there. So We'll have to see later on if we have the tiling stuff installed You can also install Do me max here and the AIO and gave me AIO installers So interesting that they put do me max here as an option. Definitely. I know now why this has caught DT's attention because anyone who prior prioritizes do me max is gonna get some attention there So that is the configuration tool in terms of what it does and like I said, I like that. It is simple There's not a lot of stuff here now I would say I would love it if they put the Grub configuration and the ricing tool here as well. I'm not actually sure why they're not here Like the rice the grub tool is here at the bottom It's in the dock, but it's not here, but again, it's not that big of a deal. It's just something that I noticed So we'll get out of that Okay, now that we've taken a look at the zero Linux system tool Let's take a look at the rest of the system So the first thing we'll notice is that there's a dock along the bottom So these are both latte docks and they're very simple interestingly They don't have a lot of standard applications that are, you know, usually docked on here We do have console and dolphin docked We also have an icon here for Firefox, but Firefox isn't installed unless you choose it during installation You have covantum you have the system settings You have GNOME disks, which is the default permission manager that they install and they have the grub customizer And then they have a present windows button Which it will if you have multiple windows open will do this thing here kind of like expose or whatever it's called And you'll see here that this is the theme that they have installed by default And they do have animations here and the animations do work in a virtual machine, which is actually kind of cool The other thing that you'll notice is that there is no browser actually docked on here So by default the browser that they have installed is Falcon. So this is the KDE browser I'm actually not sure of anyone who actually uses Falcon I'm sure that I'll get someone in the comments below who says, oh, I use Falcon if you do use Falcon I'd love to hear from you because I'd love to know why you've chosen Falcon But anyways, let's take a look at the what's installed by default so we have some development tools here both mostly stuff for cute and KDE itself for graphics. We have Gwen view and K color chooser We have some internet stuff, which is Falcon and the KDE connect tools. We have for multimedia We have some more cute stuff again. No media player whatsoever for office We have calendar and localized for and then we have system settings System tools and utilities all that stuff is for the most part standard KDE fare So the only things that I see that are non KDE stuff are is basically latte, which they've installed Obviously because we were using that we have the emoji selector, which I actually think is not default in KDE I'm not sure. I don't remember that covantum, which isn't usually installed by default in like stock KDE But is very common. Interestingly, they have Thunar here installed by default I'm not sure why they have Thunar installed be default default because we also have dolphin here So as much as I like file managers, you don't really need two of them But again, they do have two of them here by default. I'm not sure why it's not that is a big deal It's just something that I notice it's the only application I saw that they have like two versions of like application category of they have a GR sink That's that they've installed. So this is a front end for our sink They have LSHW, which I believe is like a hardware manager. So you can manage some of your hardware They have you Kwake or Kwake, Quakey, however the hell you pronounce that thing for the drop-down terminal Which again, isn't usually installed by default But it is in this case the only custom thing other than the zero-linux system tool that I've found is this grub customizers So we'll actually go into this and I will say one thing about this is that this is not a Intuitive application from what I can see so this first pane here will let you choose what entries you have in grub So if you have multiple partitions with different distros or windows or whatever you can Manage that from here from general settings This will allow you to change the delay between grub showing up and it automatically choosing an option for you Which is kind of cool something that I've always wanted to kind of change But never really looked into how to do and then we have the appearance setting And this is where it gets a little more complicated because each part of the grub stuff is it seems to be a Part of this list here. So this grub Theme here is the default one and then it has all of these components as far as I'm aware Zero-linux does have one other grub option here and it actually looks like it's going to Be okay this time if we hit save. Yeah, it worked this time the last time it didn't work I got an error. I wish I'd taken a picture of it, but yeah, it worked that time So one thing you'll notice that is mission missing at least so far is If we go back to the website, you'll see that they have all these options for different grub themes They're not installed by default. So if you want the daff punk one, you'd go to this installation guide it would take you to a github page and it would tell you how to install that particular grub theme and Same for all the other grub themes that they've created now The other thing that iPhone was missing because I spent a good ten minutes looking for options to change to those racing Because the whole purpose of the zero Linux thing this whole distro Was to be eye candy and have multiple prices available for you So if you again go back to the website You'll see that if you shoot like this one here is the default But if you say you wanted the Dracula one again you have this installation guide that you click on and you would then clone the repo or get from The AUR and you install it that way. So again not included by default So the main purpose of this existing at least from what the website says outside of I mean the Developers as they created it for themselves. So if this is the way they want it, that's perfectly fine But if you're using this and you see those themes My expectation would be that they'd be installed by default, but they're not So that's one thing that you'll have to keep in mind if you decide to use this If you want those other things you'll have to install them yourself taking a look at the Neofetch so we'll go ahead and make this bigger. It does have its own custom ASCII art This is using bash 5.1.6. Now, they're gonna remember this is arch Linux So we're going to expect the most advanced most recent versions of everything So we have Linux kernel 5.17.4 plasma 5.2 4.4 And we have about twelve hundred and seventy three packages by default now I've noticed when you click on stuff things get a little wonky I'm pretty sure that's a console thing, but it just happens and we also have the I use arch by the way up here Which is kind of a neat addition. So we can do this Although we have opened up other stuff. Okay, so they have free free aliased So just type free using about a gigabyte of RAM, but again, I've opened up other stuff So it's possible that there's stuff running. I'm not sure what it would be at idle And we can do a you name. We don't really need to do that again And now it's time to answer the question. Why does this exist? So I'm actually going to change that question just a little bit. Why is it getting so much attention because every YouTuber that does Linux content like this has covered zero Linux and the thing is is I don't get it Like it's not bad. Like it's actually really good I enjoyed the installer a lot like like I said during the install I'm not sure which way of doing the multiple like application selector is better either one page or multiple pages But it's definitely cleaner this way at least in some ways and I enjoyed that and I like how Minimal it is like you you have the option to basically build up your entire system From that install process you can choose all the applications that you want to install right there And that's kind of cool, but it's not unique, right? It's not something that is unique to zero Linux Many different distributions do this especially on the arch side So for example Gruda by default is fairly minimal and you install most of the stuff that you want installed afterwards Now they do have Gruda does have a lot more base applications installed So you get Firefox you get the media players and stuff like that So this is more minimal than that But you kind of get the point is that almost every ArchBase distro gives you those options So I'm not sure why that that would be something that caught a lot of people's eye The welcome screens were nice again. I liked it. They're more minimal and they're not convoluted and complicated But again, not anything special the one thing that supposedly makes the special is those races and again They're not included by default. So taking a look at them would require, you know Actually installing them and giving them a try that way Okay, so I actually Pause the video there and went and installed the Dracula rice. So I'm gonna go back to that's and you see it installed a different grub theme and we'll see how the Display manager changed it did not so we'll change into this now all it entailed was copying one line off from the GitHub page. So this is I'm not complaining that The process is hard. I'm not complaining that that it like that at all Like it's not hard at all anyone can run a git command off from GitHub and get to this exact point my point what earlier was that the point of It existing or at least the thing that they advertise on their website Isn't included by default, which is I found a little bit weird, but outside of that This is what the Dracula theme looks like It's nice, right? It has multiple latte docks. It has a dock down here at the bottom Uses the same menu system. It has the application Menu up there at the top. So it's nice. I don't know why the conchies disappeared I'm assuming there's like maybe a key binding to bring them back. I'm not sure they were there for like a second But they're not there anymore. But anyways, that's the Dracula license. Like I said, it wasn't hard It was just a matter of running this one command Here get clone then this URL and then it CD didn't directory and then it ran the install script Personally, I would say it would be better just to include some kind of tool to change the rice. There's not oh, I mean Honestly, just include it in covantum because most of the stuff I mean it's using the same icons from what I can tell It just looks like they've applied a covantum theme to me They changed the git theme as well or the grub theme as well So maybe that is what they're doing but other than that there has to be more I looked at the script and they do do more stuff in the script But most of the stuff that it installed was already installed in the default system So it was little like I said, it's a little weird and that was my point is that I'm not sure why it's gotten so much Like enthusiasm in the community. Like it's not bad or anything. It's just yet another Archbase distribution So I'm gonna stop being so negative because it's not like I said, it's not it's not bad I don't know why I was so negative today. It's good. You should try it out Anyways, if you have comments on zero links, you can leave those in the comments section below Chances are maybe there's something that I missed that it makes this more special than what I what I see in front of my face It's always always possible. I I only spend about 20 minutes with it. So It's it's possible that I just missed something So leave those comments in the comment section below. You can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast I'd like to thank my current patrons robert said devon patrick fred kramer michael injection dual steve sebrega linux garrick samuel kb tgb keith andy Mitchell jadug carpet dated jeremy shon odin marni roth edwardo art center merit camp judge release peter a crucible dark benefits Time isn't him. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time