 Today I'm gonna be taking a quick first look at the recently released elementary OS 6.1 which is codenamed Yolnir. Now I took a look at the previous version, 6.0 codenamed Odin, when it was released about four months ago. And I gotta be honest, I was a little disappointed in the Odin release because I'm a big fan of elementary OS. Big proponent, I'm one of their Patreon supporters, and I've installed elementary OS on many machines, friends and family machines, you know, they bring me their computers, I put elementary on those machines, and they always love it, and I never hear any negatives about it. And I really think that elementary OS as a project is doing interesting things, they're doing different things, and they're really advancing Linux on the desktop. They're one of the projects that I think has a real opportunity to actually bring desktop Linux to the masses. And that's why I was a little disappointed in the 6.0 release because I thought it took a little bit of a step back, wasn't nearly as polished and well refined, and I'm hoping that the 6.1 release will address some of those issues I had with the previous version. So let me switch over to my desktop, where I've installed elementary OS inside of virtual machine. The installation process is very simple, you click OK three or four times, and you're done in about 10 minutes. If you've seen one Linux installation, you've seen them all Linux for the most part desktop Linux distributions are very quick and easy to install. Now my biggest complaint with the previous version of elementary OS, not just my biggest complaint, but I think most people's biggest complaint was the app center. So the app center didn't have any apps in it. Last time I took a look at it, you click on the home page, and the last time I took a look at this thing, it was like there was nothing here, there were no apps. And looking at this one, it's taking a minute for some of the images to load. You know, not necessarily the app center's fault, it's probably an internet situation. I wonder if I closed it and relaunched it, because I'm sure downloading all of this from the internet, right, is essentially probably like a web front end. Yeah, and now it looks just fine. Yeah, just a little glitch that first time I took a look at it. But now there's at least some applications here, not many. There's a curated list of a little over 90 applications. And the reason it's such a small curated list is just the way elementary does things. Elementary goes their own way. They have their own desktop environment, what we're looking at here, this Pantheon desktop environment. And, you know, because elementary is kind of almost Mac-like as far as it's a walled garden, they're very stingy. For example, on what goes in this app center, you know, they just won't list everything that's available in the Ubuntu repositories, the Debian repositories, elementary, by the way, is based off of Ubuntu. But they don't list everything that is available, for example, at the terminal, at the command line with a sudo apt install, right? They're just showing you what they want to show you. And one of the things is, if I search for really popular free and open source programs like GIMP, you know, no app found, right? Libre Office, again, won't be found. A lot of the standard stuff you expect to be available for installation is not here, at least in the app center, which because of the people that elementary OS is geared for probably new users. That's typically who I put on elementary OS. I install this on people that really are not technically savvy, right? I give them elementary OS because it's so darn easy to use. But if these kinds of people actually don't need to have an empty software because they're not going to go to the command line to find software, they're also not going to side load a flat pack, which is what it tells us to do. When I search for GIMP, it says, try changing the search terms, or you could also side load flat pack apps from FlatHub. Now, if you're putting this on elderly parents or grandparents machines, they're not going to know what any of that meant, right? They have side load, flat pack, FlatHub. What do those terms even mean? Well, at least they link to FlatHub. So if I clicked on it and this is good that they do this, it actually searches for GIMP on FlatHub for you. And then if you click on GIMP and there is a install button here. So I won't say this is impossible for a brand new user to figure out. You click install. Now, once you click install, this is where it gets a little weird. OK, now what? Because it doesn't actually install the program. It downloaded the flat pack ref file. But if I click on it, install untrusted app, then you get a dialog box that is actually telling us, hey, do you want to install this? It's going to tell you that there's some risk. I understand install anyway. And then it installs GIMP as a flatback. Now, the great thing about this is after you do this one time in the app center, then what it does is it actually adds the FlatHub repository to the app center. So now no longer you're only going to have 90 apps in the app center. Now, everything that's available on FlatHub will also be in the app center. My problem with this is why isn't FlatHub just linked to the app center out of the box? It just should be, because it looks like elementary OS is a big proponent of flatback. They think flatback is the future as far as Linux packaging formats, which is fine. But if that is your stance, then just have all the flatpacks in the app center out of the box. It's just, I find this tedious, not tedious for somebody like me, but for a newer to Linux user. And again, if we're actually trying to convert the masses to desktop Linux, they're going to find that was a little tedious. So let me close out the epiphany browser. Now, if I go to installed, let me see if I search for GIMP. Well, I can't search the installed list. Can I just search through the list? Yeah. So GIMP is here, clicked on the wrong thing. Yeah, yep. And we could uninstall it now. And you can see it's non curated, non curated means it's a flatback. So let's close that out. I'm going to hit the super key. The super key just brings up the shortcuts. If I hold the super key, I thought it would bring up the menu. I guess I'm sure there's a hot key to bring up the menu. I just don't remember it off the top of my head, but there is GIMP. Yep, 2.10 and the flatback looks like it's going to open just fine. Yeah, and close that out. I do like the animations, the opening and closing animations for things. So if I opened my task list here, so I created a couple of tasks here. You guys, can you see the animations now? The virtual machine animations are a little glitchy on actual hardware. The animations would be much, much smoother, but I do think they're very slick. I think they're really nice. By the way, the task manager, I added a few lists. For example, my shopping list later today, I need to go pick up beer, food, toilet paper, and then I made a note in order of importance. That is due tomorrow at 2,200 hours. If I wanted to save changes, if I click on that. Yeah, it basically sets that as done my Christmas list. What's on my Christmas list? Razor, socks, underwear, save changes. And that's due on December 25th at 1,200 hours. Close out the task manager and I go back to this app center one more time. Now that we've actually got the flat hub situation straight. Now, if I go into games, for example, where there actually be games here, yeah, we have the paid apps, which are curated apps. But these are asking for payment here. We have free apps. Again, these are the curated apps from elementary. So they only had four games here, but now because we have the flat hub we've got a million more games available for us. For example, if I wanted zero AD, we could install zero AD. I'm not going to install zero AD, though, on camera here because it's a rather large download is a rather big game. I do like what they've done now, though. There's a lot more information when you click on an app. Now you get more information as far as they give you information, whether it's a flat pack or not non curated, tells us the game has some violence in it, this multiplayer online interaction, yada, yada, yada. We even have a nice little screenshot, a description. We get the licensing information and the homepage for zero AD, et cetera. So that is actually a nice touch. One of my other complaints with the recent versions of elementary is the light mode and the dark mode is sometimes when you set them, you know, many applications just don't respect it. You'll have this weird mix of applications that are using a dark theme and some using a light theme and that's never a good look. I go to applications. You can see there's our default applications. Let me go to desktop here, go to appearance. And let's go ahead and enable the dark mode. And we could also adjust the accent color. Right now the accent color is blueberry, but we could, you know, adjust the accent color to whatever we wanted. I'll just pick one of these other colors here, the green color. And now when I click on the applications menu, you can see we got the green highlighting with the dark theme. Let me go ahead and open up the file manager and the file manager. Let me go ahead and change the view. I like the list view better. I do notice in their release announcements, they mentioned that they did some work on the file manager. Now, one of the things they added were your bookmarks here and your file manager. So bookmarks are basically just bookmarks to specific directories, directories you use all the time. Now, when you hover over a bookmark such as this downloads directory here and I do control click with the mouse, it opens the downloads directory in a new tab. You see, there's the home directory. There's the downloads directory that is really, really neat. Control click on videos opens the videos directory in a new tab. Yeah, I like that. I could see myself using that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think that's such a neat feature. I wish it was available like in the file manager itself, you know, the listing of the directories and files and the actual main pane of the file manager. Now, that's not available because control click actually does something else in file managers. Control click actually selects, you know, something control click again, you know, selects this one here, you know, now I've selected three items. That's typically what control click does. But yeah, I would love, you know, a quick hotkey that just automatically you hit a hotkey and it opens that in a new tab. Yeah, that really is nice because it's kind of tedious because I'm constantly opening up directories in new tabs. And when you have to right click on it and then open in new tab, you know, it takes a minute, right? That's just quicker if you could just do it all in one motion. One other cool thing they did here. Let me go ahead and do the control click. I'm just going to, once again, pick three directories here. And now when I right click on these, we now have an invert selection, meaning I selected three files, but really I wanted everything, but the three files I selected. So we do an invert select, selects the opposite. That is a really nice feature too, because sometimes, especially in large directories, you know, you want to select everything, but you know, just a couple of files and it's would be much quicker to do an inverse selection rather than your standard selection. Let me go ahead and close the file manager. Actually, before I close it, I'm going to right click on files down here in the doc, keeping doc. It's kind of strange because there's so few applications installed by default on elementary and one of the most important applications is going to be the file manager, but oddly enough, they don't include the file manager as one of the default applications in the doc. I'm going to go ahead and put it down there in the center of the panel. I click on it. Of course, we get our calendar. And of course, you can see December 25th has a dot under it. So this is our task list. If I click on it, you can see there's my Christmas list from the task manager. If I go back into the task manager, you see my Christmas list, my wish list, I guess, for Santa looking at some of the elementary apps web, which is the epiphany web browser. We have a new version of epiphany. This is epiphany 41, which corresponds with, of course, the GNOME applications. They went from version 3.38 now to version 41. And my goodness is this empty tab distracting. Let me find a dark website to go to. Let's go to distro.tube because I know that that has a dark theme. It's a little easier on the eyes. Now, epiphany is interesting because it's not a normal web browser, right? It's not your standard Chromium browser. It's not your standard Firefox or Brave or anything. And epiphany is nobody really uses it other than the elementary guys. And I would venture to say probably most people that install elementary OS are going to install another web browser, probably Firefox or Chromium. So it's kind of weird they ship with epiphany. I'm not going to say it's horrible or that it's unusable, but it's definitely not the greatest web browser out there. Now, one application I do love is the mail client, which is Geary. Geary, I think, is one of the best free and open source email clients out there as far as desktop email has a very clean, modern look. I can't connect to an email account here. Just for privacy reasons, I wouldn't want to show you any of my email accounts. But it has like a three columned layout, very modern looking. It's almost outlook like as far as the layout. You know, you guys have seen the like the three column look of outlook or those of you that use the mail spring email client. Geary has that same kind of look. It's very polished, very clean looking, very easy to configure. And Geary is just a fantastic email client. And that's the task list, which we've already seen a couple of times. The calendar is just instead of the pop-up calendar, this is the actual application. If I click on December 25th, and you know, I don't have the task in this. If I go to manage calendars here on this computer, personal, personal. So I've got personal ticked on. I would assume that would include my task list, but it doesn't look like it does. You know, this really strange that the calendar up here in the panel has that information, but the main calendar application. At least I don't think there's any way it says your upcoming events will be displayed here when you select a date with events. Well, I know the 25th has an event scheduled. Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that. Moving on to the music application. This is just your standard audio player. It's very iTunes like, you know, as far as the look. Let's get that iTunes kind of look and feel. I don't have any music here to play. I really couldn't play any music on video anyway, unless it was a Creative Commons track just for YouTube is very picky. As far as any time you play audio that you don't own. The video app, I just clicked on it. You see the wheel is spinning. Why is the video application not launching? And then the wheel quit spinning videos never launched. I'm going to open a terminal. Now, this is again, most new users, you know, the kind of people that would typically install elementary, they're not going to have any idea of what to do here. Like this video application, I don't even know what the proper name of it is. I'm assuming because mostly elementary apps are installed as a flat pack that it's going to be a flat pack. So if I do flat pack list, there is videos. And the program name is io.elementary.videos and it's installed. I try to run that tab complete work. Tab complete worked until I got to the videos part. That's weird. It's almost like it's it's installed, but it's not installed. Right. Yeah. Command not found. Yeah, that is maybe I could do a flat pack install. Maybe it just needs to be reinstalled. And what I'll do is I'm going to select io.elementary.videos. I'm going to do a control shift C to copy control shift V to paste. And now hit enter. And then it remotes with refs similar to io.elementary.videos. So it's going to add app center system or app center user. I would assume app center user. And which one do you want the daily or stable? Yeah, we'll go with stable. Let's install videos. And now let me up arrow to get io.elementary.videos. It's still still not installed. Command not found. Yeah, that's really weird. So the video player, I mean, I could jump through some hoops and gets that thing working. Of course, probably what I would suggest doing is just go get another video player, go get VLC. VLC is probably available as a flat pack. So flat pack, install VLC. And yeah, so what you want to do is number 11 app slash org dot video land dot VLC. And again, you know, if this was your mother's computer, your grandmother's computer, you know, they're not going to jump through these kinds of hoops to get basic applications installed. So I'm really hoping that these last couple of versions of elementary, the problems with, you know, the application availability, especially in the app center, I'm hoping a lot of this stuff gets sorted out soon. VLC wouldn't launch just by typing VLC is because it's a flat pack. So the actual name for it is going to be. Org dot video land dot VLC command not found. Let's go to the applications menu as VLC actually here. Yeah, there it is. There's VLC. Yeah, that worked. And maybe if I launched the actual videos program. No, that's still not working, but VLC at least works. And of course, we've get the little Christmas time logo. That's really nice. How VLC does that every year around the holidays. Some of the other custom applications include the photos application. So it's just your standard photos manager, very similar to the audio players for the look and feel. One of the great things about elementary as far as their suite of applications is their uniformity, right? They all do look and function very similar. Some of the applications that are not in the dock of the code editor. So this is just your plain text editor, and it does not respect the dark theme. And the reason it doesn't is because it actually doesn't use the standard light and dark theme. It actually comes with solarized light or solarized dark. I'm going to choose solarized dark and let's open a file. So let's go and show hidden files. And let's go into home and I'll pick the bash our C file just so we can see something in action with solarize. So it does respect the light and dark theme. It's just solarized light and solarized dark affect the actual code area itself. But the outside column here and the top bar here do actually respect the dark theme. Well, at least when I chose solarized dark, when I choose solarized light, yeah, it goes back to a light theme. Yeah, it's a little weird. But not horrible. I could get used to that. Let me close out the code text editor. We didn't talk about the calculator app when the calculator app actually was in the release announcement because now when you bring up the calculator, your input prompt is actually in the text field. I guess it wasn't by default before. So now when you actually launch the calculator, you can actually begin typing now and actually make calculations right away were before it wasn't focused on that text field by default. Let me right click on the desktop. Let's go ahead and change the wallpapers. The wallpaper pack is the same wallpaper pack from the previous version. I really like the default dark wallpaper. But if you wanted something else, actually really like this mountain scene as well. And so nice wintry scene. There's a couple of time appropriate wallpapers there. Yeah, that one's nice, especially against a dark theme, you know, your dark windows would look great against that, that light wallpaper in the top panel, the translucent bar here. One neat thing is your sys tray. You have the volume control, which now respects when you do a scroll wheel, because I guess that was not the case before. And also the music application also respects the scroll wheel. So some some new stuff there. And then we have our notifications here is letting us know there is an update available for us. One last thing I want to do, let me go ahead and open a terminal and let's dive a little deeper under the hood just very briefly. Let's do a U name dash R for the kernel version. We're on five dot 11. If I did an apt list space dash, dash installed, let's see how many Debian packages are actually installed. So not the flat packs. So that lists out everything line by line. Let's do apt list dash, dash installed. And then let's pipe that into WC dash L. So we have one thousand five hundred and fifty four div packages installed. So those were packages installed through the apt package manager. Of course, the flat pack list is available for you with flat pack space list. And if you wanted to count on those once again, pipe that through WC, which is the word count program space dash L for the line count, 19 flat packs are installed. If I run H top, let's see what we're doing with system resources here, a very low CPU usage, which is what you would expect. I'm not doing anything really right now. As far as RAM usage, we're using about one point two gigabytes of RAM of the six gigabytes of RAM I gave this VM. Now that is probably a little high because we've opened a lot of programs here in the last couple of minutes, but that's kind of standard as far as one gigabyte of RAM is kind of the norm for some of the heavier desktop environments out there. So things like, you know, GNOME and Cinnamon and Budgie. And in this case, the Pantheon desktop, it's not unusual for them to to be about a one gig of RAM usage on a cold boot. So that was just a very cursory first look at elementary OS six point one codenamed Yolnir. And I will say that it's definitely improved here in the last four months. You know, from the previous version, I will say the theming looks a lot better, the dark theming, it looks like most of the applications respected it with the exception of maybe the text editor code, which is a little weird the way it switches from a light GTK theme to a dark GTK theme, depending on whether you choose solarized light or solarized dark for the actual code syntax highlighting. That's again, that's a minor gripe, but I will say the app center, I like the fact that it now has some apps in it. I still think that you're asking new users way too much if they have to go to FlatHub and install one flat pack to have FlatHub actually be a part of the app center. FlatHub should just be built into the app center. I I don't know why they haven't done that yet. It has been two releases now that we've had this problem with that app center. And if if you don't have apps in your app center, you know, new users are not going to know that they can go and install stuff with the app package manager at the command line or go to FlatHub and grab some flat packs or, you know, go grab some app images or some snaps or build it from source, right? You know, power users know that. I know I can get anything I want installed on elementary with a little effort. A new user, all they're going to know is this is the software center. There's nothing in it, right? And then they're going to be put off immediately, not just put off from elementary. They may just be put off from Linux in general. If this is their first experience. So the elementary guys, again, I think it's a great release. I just they got to get that app center straight. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Akami, Alan, Lance, Ninja, Chuck, Commander, angry, Kurt, Diokai, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Kaska, Lee, Max, and Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Bees, Arjun, Fodor, Polytech, Red Profit, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steer patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick first look at elementary 6.1 wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these 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 just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and you want to see more great videos on free and open source software, support DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace and Merry Christmas.