 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a very popular Debian based Linux distribution and that distribution is Sparky Linux. Let me switch over to my desktop and this is SparkyLinux.org and if I go to downloads, you will see the additions of Sparky Linux that are available. The very first thing you should do is pick which branch of Sparky Linux you want. You have stable and then you have the semi-rolling branch which is based on Debian testing. Of course, the stable is based on Debian stable. For me, I like something with a little more up-to-date packages. Debian stable can get a little old as far as it's typically much older packages. That's why it's stable. Not a lot gets updated. For me, I'm going to grab the semi-rolling version and you can see when you either choose stable or semi-rolling, then you get to pick your desktop additions and they have LXCute, Monte, XFCE and KDE. For me, I don't know which one is really their flagship addition, but since LXCute is the first in the list, I'm going to grab this one. So I grabbed the LXCute semi-rolling ISO and this, of course, is the boot screen. Let me go ahead and boot directly into our live environment. That is a very cool splash screen. I really liked it. I know aesthetics. There are a minor thing, but I think that is one of the cooler splash screens I've seen for Linux distribution. And we boot into the live environment. The live environment, of course, will be the LXCute desktop environment. And you can see we have a graphical welcome screen here. This is rather interesting. For me, what I want to do, I think I want to run through an installation before I start taking a look. For one thing, being a semi-rolling distribution, the ISO was about a month old, so there's going to be plenty of updated packages that are available. So I'm going to run through an installation and then I'm going to update the system before we actually start taking a look. I'm going to close the welcome screen and I'm going to click the Sparky installer. It says the file Sparky installer seems to be a desktop entry. What do you want to do with it? Well, of course, we want to execute it, meaning run the program. And that launches the Calamaris installer, the standard Calamaris installer that so many Linux distributions use. I'm going to go ahead and make this full screen here. And of course, at first, we have our welcome screen where we get to pick our language. By default, American English is the choice that is fine for me, so I'll click Next. Then the time zone. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm just going to click Next and then Keyboard. It has chosen an English US keyboard for me. That's correct. So I'm just going to click Next. And now the partition. Do we want to erase the disk and give the entire 25 gig virtual hard drive that I created for this virtual machine? Do you give the whole thing to Sparky? Or do we want to do some manual partitioning, which might be interesting if you're setting up custom partition schemes, especially if you're dual booting. You might want to do this. For me, Sparky Linux can have the entire drive. So I'm going to choose the first option, a race disk. And then we have the option, do we want to swap or not? By default, it looks like no swap is chosen, which would be fine for a virtual machine, but I'm going to choose Swap to file. And then I'm going to click Next. And now we need to create our username. I'm going to call my user DT. And then the host name of the computer, I'm going to call Sparky-vert, just to have a descriptive name in case I ever want to SSH into this virtual machine. So as long as all my virtual machines have a different host name, it's just easier to keep up with. Now let me create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. Do we want to log in automatically without asking for a password? No. Do we want to use the same password for the administrator account, the sudo password? Yes. Then I'm going to click Next. And we get our summary. Location, looks good, keyboard, looks good, partition scheme, looks good. I'm going to click Install. And away it goes. This portion of the installation on my machines, typically it takes about five to ten minutes. So I'm going to pause the video, I'll be back once the installation has completed. And the installation has completed. That installation actually took about five minutes. Very quick installation. I'm going to tick on Restart now. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to click Done and it should automatically detach the ISO from the virtual machine and reboot our freshly installed Sparky Linux. And we've come to our login manager. Let me go ahead and log in. Of course this is the LXQt desktop. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to change the screen resolution. So let me look for, is it monitor? Monitor settings. And then I'm going to go into the resolutions, change this to 1920 by 1080. I'm going to click Apply. And then from now on, anytime I come back to this virtual machine, it should remember that I always want a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. Now if I hide my head for a second. We have a notification. Updates are available. Run system upgrade tool, yes or no? Yeah. Why not? Let's actually try the upgrade tool. We have to give our sudo password and then we get a graphical update. So you don't have to do this in the terminal. Of course you could always just do a sudo apt update and an sudo apt upgrade in the terminal just like you would on Debian. But here we get this little window here. It's kind of hard because the background of that window is white and the foreground of this one is white. So when they're on top of each other, it's kind of hard to tell when one window stops and the other one begins. So I'm going to move that window and do we want to upgrade? Yes. Hit OK. And then we get some terminal output as it's running the upgrade. It looks like it has about 600 or so updates. Yeah. So this update may take a minute. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once this update finishes and I'll probably reboot the machine after this update because chances are there'll be some kernel upgrades and things like that as part of this update as well. And I went ahead and updated the system and rebooted. Now that update of 600 and some odd packages, that actually took longer than the installation. The installation took about five minutes. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes to actually run that massive update because almost every package on the system had had an update available because obviously when you're doing a rolling release, everything is constantly being updated. Now we get our welcome screen and one thing I will say about this welcome screen is it's a little strange because this is the LXQt desktop environment. I would assume this would be a Qt app using the Qt toolkit Qt or maybe even a GTK app but this does not appear to use any standard GTK or Qt widgets. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the menu and I'm going to search for our terminal which is the Qt terminal and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run a standard X command called xprop. If I run xprop, you see my cursor turns into an X and any window I click on it will give me some information on. Let me make the terminal full screen and you will see the information. Window manager class, so what kind of window is that? Well, that is YAD. That is the program YAD, yet another dialogue. That's exactly what that is. So it's not it's own like custom GTK app or Qt app. That's just a YAD dialogue box because it does come with some functionality where you can add little widgets and buttons and things. You can kind of make a graphical application out of just YAD. And that's nice because GTK and Qt you kind of have to be a programmer to use those things. You're just not going to get into GTK development without knowing any programming. There's a learning curve to it, right, where with YAD you really don't have to know any programming with YAD because the way it's built it's it's much more new user friendly for creating these simple kind of graphical applications. The welcome screen here has everything you would expect here in the left column. It looks like these are all web links, right, to the website, forums, wiki, their GitHub or GitLab donate button so we can go and donate to the project and give all their social media links down here and on this side, some of this stuff I will take a look at. For one thing, let's see what app center they're using. So give your sudo password and let's see what app store opens. This is the Aptis app center. I have never heard of this but looking at this, this looks like yet another dialogue window and this looks like another YAD app. If I do exprop again from the terminal and click on this, yeah, this is another instance of YAD running. So everything really is just YAD. That is really kind of cool. I've never seen a distribution do this before. It seems like all of their custom applications are just going to be these YAD dialogue boxes and that's kind of neat. So if I go into system, for example, click on system and I go into shells, looks like I have to double click on it, okay, so here are all the shells available. If I wanted to install, for example, fish, I could click on that. Let's see what happens. We get some information. Do we want to install or just exit out of this window? If I click install, it opens a terminal and basically that's just a graphical way of doing a sudo apt install fish. That's all that is. And then the package has been successfully installed. Exit and exit actually brings us back to the main screen of this Aptis app center. That is very, very cool. Let me close that out. Let me go back into the LXQt menu system here and search for welcome. Let's launch the welcome app. Let's see what else is available for us. There is upgrade, which we already took the upgrade because we had the notification window that immediately popped up. So I don't need to do an upgrade. We have an about tab here. We have system info. Would this be like a system monitor? Let's click on it. This is hardware system information. So it tells you a little bit about your machine, hardware, drivers, things like that, I'm assuming. Now is this another YAD box? Because this has this text view box that you can scroll. This looks more like a traditional GTK or Qt apt. But this, I don't know. Let me open a terminal. I'm going to search for term. The first thing that comes up is a drop down, which is not what I want. I wanted just a traditional terminal. And once again, I'm going to run exprop and hit this window here. And yes, that is YAD. So that is the system info. And you can swap between various tabs here to get more system information, such as your disk. And you can see I've only got the one virtual drive and the one partition on the virtual drive. Let's go ahead and exit out of that. And then we have a backup button here. Let's see what this launches. And this launches our Fox, which is not set as our default browser. I'll go ahead and set that as the default browser in this VM. And this actually just launches the wiki page for SparkyLinux.org. I guess they have a wiki page on how to back up the system. So it's not really a program that's going to back up anything. I thought maybe it'd be something like taking a snapshot with Timeshift or something like that. But it's just linking to information about how to back up your system. Now let me go through the menu system and see what is installed out of the box here on the LXQ version of SparkyLinux. So if I go into accessories. We have FeatherPad, which is the plain text editor for LXDE, the old LXDE desktop environment, and also for the new LXQ desktop environment. Though the LXDE desktop environment was GTK based and LXQ, of course, is Qt based. So this FeatherPad is a Qt application. And we also have our LXQ file archiver. So that's for zip, unzip, that sort of thing. And of course we have PCmanfm-qt as our file browser. If I go to help and about, you'll see PCmanfm-qt version 0.16.0. PCmanfm, really nice file manager. Also under accessories, we have Clipper, which is our clipboard, which I believe we also have running down here in the system tray. If I right click, yes, that's Clipper. Also under accessories, we have XF burn, which is a disburning utility. If you need it, most people are not burning CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays anymore. But if you need it, it's there for you. And then we have QCalculator, which I don't believe I'm familiar with this calculator. No, I don't think I've ever seen this because I want to remember these buttons here. So I kind of like that, though, especially if your eyes are bad, these big buttons that are colored, that's actually not a bad little calculator. Because especially for somebody like me, I don't need a scientific calculator with a bunch of functions. Most of the time when I use a calculator, I just need something rather simple. So I'm kind of glad I found QCalculator. I may actually use that more in the future. Under graphics, we don't have much here. We have LX image, an image viewer, a library office draw. We have our screenshot utility and scan light if you have a printer scanner. These days, printer scanners are not as common as they used to be. Most people probably won't have a need for a scanning utility. Under internet, we have, of course, Firefox was our browser. Conversation with a K is KDE's IRC client, but LXQ being a Qt-based desktop, and then KDE Plasma being a Qt-based desktop. You'll see a lot of KDE applications typically within LXQt distributions. If I click on Conversation with a K, will it actually automatically connect to a Sparky Linux support channel? No, it doesn't. It tries to connect to a Debian support channel. So that's kind of interesting because I don't know how the Debian guys would feel about somebody joining their channel and asking questions about a derivative distribution like Sparky Linux. Also, under internet, we have Persepolis download manager. We have Pigeon, which is an instant messaging client these days. Most people don't do instant messaging. So there's a lot of kind of old kinds of applications that typically, these are applications I would have seen on distributions 15 years ago, right? Things like Pigeon and XF Burn and Scanlight. I'm a little surprised to see so many of these applications on a modern distribution because, again, most people are not going to have the need for instant messaging and things like that. We have Quiet RSS, which is, I'm assuming, an RSS feed reader. Yeah, looks very simple to use. Also under internet, we have Riseup VPN. We have Thunderbird for our email client. Makes sense. You're using Mozilla Firefox for the browser. You might as well use Mozilla Thunderbird for the email client. And you have Q-BitTorrent for a BitTorrent client. Under Office, we have the entire LibreOffice suite. So we have BaseCalc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. And then we have QPDFView, which is a PDF viewer. I go to Elp and about QPDFView0.4.18. I'm not really familiar with that particular PDF viewer. Typically on my systems, I either use Events, which I believe is the one that typically ships with Genomes. Really nice PDF viewer. Or Zathura. We have a Programming category. Nothing is there. And then Sound and Video. We have Hypnotix, which is a way to watch TV. Interesting application to include. Also under Sound and Video, we have Post Audio Volume Control, of course, Radio Station, so you can stream radio. We have Strawberry, which is a music player. Strawberry is a fork of the old Clementine music player. Clementine was a cute audio player that, I guess, eventually died, no longer sees development. Now we have Strawberry instead of Clementine. Very nice audio player, though. Also under Sound and Video, we have VLC. VLC typically you would use for viewing movies, but you can also use it to play audio as well. This is VLC3.0.17.4. Also under Sound and Video, we have a webcam application, XF Burn again, and Voco Screen, which is a way to record your desktop. And we have a System Tools category, and we have our Aptis App Center about Sparky Linux. GDebby. GDebby is a way to, if you go and grab third-party .deb files and you need to install those, if you didn't know the command line way to install them, you could use the graphical program GDebby to install those. It looks like GDebby actually throws an error when I try to launch it. GDebby Package Installer. Downloading the package failed. Yeah, I'm not sure what is going on there, though. That is clearly a bug that probably needs to be reported to the Sparky team. We do have TimeShift available on the system, so that would take our snapshots of the system. Let me right-click on the desktop. I'm going to go into Desktop Preferences. Let's see what kind of wallpapers are available. I go into Brows. Looks like their artwork is in Slashopt slash artwork, and we have some standard Sparky Linux themed wallpapers. And other than that, we have some really nice nature wallpapers as well. Let me try some of these. Let me click Apply. Yeah, that's not bad. It is Sparky Linux. We've got the logo. If I move my head, it does have some branding to it as well. Because we're using a light theme, a light cute theme, the light panel theme, we probably need a dark wallpaper to make that light theme stand out. They really don't have a lot of dark wallpapers. There's one. Let me hit Apply. Yeah, that's not too bad. There, it's maybe a little too dark. Maybe something like this one here. Yeah, that's not bad either. You know what? I think actually we'll just go back to the standard wallpaper because that blue actually stands out really nicely. So yeah, that's Sparky Linux, their LXQt version on the semi-rolling branch. I've taken a look at Sparky Linux a few times in the past on the channel. It's again, one of the more popular desktop Debian-based Linux distributions out there. You'll see a lot of love for Sparky Linux in the community and rightfully so because it does allow you, especially those of you that want to be on Debian testing, for example. You can't just go and, with the Debian ISOs, mainline Debian, you go and grab the ISO. It's always Debian stable with the GNOME desktop, right? Well, Sparky allows you to be either on the stable branch or the testing branch and they offer four main desktop additions, LXQt, XFCE, Mate and KDE Plasma. So Sparky really, to me, like if I'm recommending Sparky to a user, I would say anybody that wants to be as close to Debian as possible without actually installing Debian, you want an easier Debian to get up and running, maybe give Sparky a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Dustin K. James-Mant, Maxim, Mimit, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Wes. Why you won't haul me? Alan, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander, Rangary, Diokai, Dylan, Greg, Maherstrom, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Argentine, Fedora, Polytech, Realities for Less, Red Prophet, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is 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 because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Instead of fooling with GTK, I should create all my apps using YAD.