 So a while back I started a series that I endearingly called WTF is this distro, right? It's a very clever, but clunky name But I liked it and those videos were very popular. So we're gonna reboot them we're gonna do some more and The way I decided to do it this time is instead of looking at the newly released or newly announced update page of distro watch I went and hit the random button now. I had some rules It couldn't be a popular distro obviously so one of the first Distros that came up the first time I hit the random button was populace that went make an interesting video so I hit the button again and I was given a distribution that I had never heard of before which is Kind of the point of the series So today we're gonna be asking the question WTF is snail Linux now. I Had never heard of this obviously and I had no clue what it was So I read the distro watch page and even after reading the distro watch page I still really had no clue what it is other than I know that it is based on Arch Linux It comes with the i3 window manager. So that's an interesting Plus in my opinion and that there is apparently no way to install it now There are a ton of live ISO live DVD type Distributions out there that are not meant to be installed So that's not really all that impressive or unique so it's definitely something that you know has been done many times before but what I haven't been able to find is a Mention anywhere where it says that snail Linux if I'm pronouncing it, right is Persistent now if you don't know what that means. Let me explain Persistent simply means that you have a live ISO where you can do your work in and When you shut it down it saves everything to the USB drive that you're using instead of to the hard drive That means when you come back to the live session all of your stuff is still there That's what persistent means now many distributions have persistent modes MX Linux is one of them, you know There's slacks. I think is another version of Linux distribution that has persistence Snail Linux doesn't seem to have persistence, which doesn't make much sense to me given that it's a live ISO So what's the purpose of it right problem is is like a lot of the distros that I've covered in this series before Well, it doesn't have you know a very good website and their website is on source forge and if you Have followed my channel at all You'll know that I absolutely despise distributions that don't have their own website and only use source forge I can't stand it like I understand the idea that domains can be expensive They're like $10 a year right and not everybody has $10 a year that they can put on a domain and you know websites are expensive So I understand that but you know the github and get lab have free pages you could make one of those You know, so it's not as if you have to use money, but I'm not gonna You know just I'm gonna calm down about that and we're gonna look at the quote-unquote website for snail innings And this is the biggest problem. I have with this entire distribution. There's hardly any Information here now they do have a wiki the fact that source forge even offers this feature is just so really weird and There is not a ton of Information on the wiki. There's exactly one page. That's it now. There are other quote-unquote pages Right, but it just shows you the build process and you know a little blurb about wireless networking If you don't know how to connect to the to the Wi-Fi other than that everything is on the wiki home and this does come included on the ISO itself, so if you need to References you can it does have some important information outside of how to use it it does have some of the default key bindings and some of the Information you need on the things that it includes which we'll go over here in a minute But other than that, there's no information here other than the brief summary Live distro with i3 and Firefox lots of network and file system utilities That's what snail Linux is now it does seem to be an acronym for Simple networked and live that seems to be the acronym of what this actually stands for but again I'm not sure what good it is without persistence, but again, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at it So let's go ahead and jump in now I have tried this on hardware It's on my ventoi stick and I played around with it on my laptop for about an hour or so But we're going to take a look at this now so that I can actually show you it in a virtual machine So out of the box. We'll just go and close this here for now. This is what you're presented with it has a standard very standard i3 when the manager layout except for they've moved the bar from the bottom to the top and they've I'm I'm pretty sure there are some Modules missing from i3 blocks up here if that's what they're using it's i3 blocks It might be possible that they're just using i3 status I can never tell to a part really if they are just standard and not customized in any way So I'm assuming that this is either ice there's i3 status or i3 blocks But I think they've removed some modules, but other than that this is standard i3 window manager for the most part now They have done some things so first when you do super enter to get it to a terminal. It's going to every single time Show you this now when I first saw this I was like you gotta remember I hadn't read the read me because I never read the read me beforehand. I Don't know why I just don't but the point is is that you know I had no clue what screen was I thought they were talking about like a screen fetch application like you know neofetch or Screen fetch or p-fetch or something like that, but no screen is actually a new multiplexer of some sort now I had no clue that That was the case so I just hit yes why and then you're not going to get the neofetch I actually installed that so ignore that part But basically what screen is is if you've ever used Tmux before Screen if that's what it's called I'm not sure if that's the full name or not screen is actually kind of like Tmux now I don't know in terms of features or anything like that with the comparison between screen and Tmux So don't I can't comment on any of that stuff But from the brief amount that I've read screen is similar to Tmux in that it remembers your sessions So my last session I had neofetch open so when I hit yes it remembered that that was the session that I was in and It came back to that session and everything here was here as it was when I left it behind now I've talked about Tmux before and some of the awesome features that Tmux has and Screen seems to have at least some of those features what I don't understand and again I'm it's 100% possible that I'm missing something if Snail Linux does not have persistence What's the what's good about having a multiplexer that remembers your session? If your computer, you know is shut down at any period of time all that data is going to be lost now It's possible again that I'm just missing something because there's no Documentation here like I said there is a read me here So if we them into to the read me like so it basically tells you everything that we just saw there on the website So I actually didn't show you this on camera, but when you first boot into the live ISO There's no display manager It just asks you would you like to start X basically so if you've never used start X before You might be a little bit lost basically start X just means that it's going to start X server and whatever Script that is set for X server to launch a window manager or whatever in this case It's going to be starting I3 now it does have some options Which I never played around with but why we'll just start X with an I3 window manager and We'll run as a bash Shell so it'll just keep you into tty s will touch an existing screen session or start a new one and X will join an Existing screen testing now what I'm wondering now is if this S and X part is going to be the persistent thing that I'm missing So I'm gonna go check that right now because I missed that earlier. Give me a second now I'm not gonna be able to test. I don't think I'll be able to test it in the VM So I'm gonna go back to the laptop so to answer my own question SNX do not seem to do anything in terms of start X what they actually do is start a bash session of Screen which is that GNU multiplexer that I mentioned before so when it says screen session It's not talking about a X org screen session It's talking about a screen session as in the multiplexer as from what I can tell now again I might be missing something completely. It's 100% possible again. There's not a lot of documentation here I haven't spent a lot of time with it So I could be making a you know a mistake here, but from what I've seen so far Persistence has nothing to do with those things so Back to this little bit of documentation Everything else here is about standard key bindings that you'll see in I3 what they've set up now You would have you'd never actually have to have these because most of the key bindings are on the wallpaper Now I'm I'm pretty sure that that's actually just on the wallpaper, and it's not actually a conchie of any kind I'm pretty sure it's just you know like on the wallpaper if we open up this and then go into Config and go into I3 so they are using I3 status So that's good to know and we do an LS here and them into Config so this is the I3 configuration file so it does set a background It sets the screen blanking which is for like turning the screen blank after a certain amount of time That's the starts the screen locker Which for whatever reason they went with X auto lock instead of I3 lock which is an interesting choice And then we get the fonts and some the key bindings here in the rules and stuff just a very standard I3 configuration file. There's not much more here to go over So in terms of the I3 configuration file, it's very very very standard So the last thing we probably should take a look at are going to be the pre-installed Applications and here's where I have another bone to pick they use Rofi for their program launcher, which is fantastic I love Rofi Rofi is what I use, but they don't use D run now if you've ever used Rofi before You'll know that Rofi has many different modes The two probably most prominent ones are D run and run now the difference between D run and run is that D run only shows Your installed applications, whereas run literally shows everything and by everything I mean everything every single package that you have installed on your machine is shown by the run mode of Rofi terminal applications dependencies Everything and you can see that because there are 319 entries here now that doesn't mean there are 319 packages on Snail Linux, there's not actually that Instead you can see if we go to Neofetch here There are actually 153 or so which is still pretty high for a bog standard Arch Linux installation Usually it's around 600 or so even with a window manager installed That's usually 600 maybe 700 or so. So it's a little high not a ton high I mean obviously there's there are distros out there that have way more packages But that does seem high but my bone here is that by showing the run version of Rofi and Showing all of the packages and all of the scripts and everything that comes on the system inside here It makes it astonishingly hard to see what's actually installed in terms of in you know applications So I'm gonna get out of that. I'm going to do Rofi that show D run and we'll show you the install applications this way because it's just way way easier So it comes with Avahi the server browser for VNC. It comes with Dillo, which is a web browser I had no clue what that was I opened it up and if you open this up That's what Dillo looks like if you go to an actual website, which is if you want to laugh Cast.org You can it does go there eventually, but man doesn't not render things properly I'm not sure why this is installed to be honest with you It's really really weird. It doesn't seem useful whatsoever, but then I don't know. Maybe there's some kind of weird Web dev use case for a browser like Dillo before you know, maybe I don't know it doesn't really matter But still it's it's a weird inclusion. It has DOS box elinks, which is another web browser Which I believe this is a terminal based browser So if we go to the linuxcast.org on here We'll see that it does in fact show you the linuxcast.org In a web browser in the terminal. I've never heard of elinks before I've heard of links ly and x before So that's another one that it's I've never heard of which is interesting. You're gonna see a pattern here There are at least four browsers installed So there is Dillo and then there's the one that we just looked at elinks And then there's firefox just normal firefox H top is installed lx terminal, which is the terminal they use by default micros installed them is installed I'll show you that you've already seen that Midori is another web browser. So this is what Midori looks like I believe Midori is a off-shoot slash some kind of fork of firefox Not sure if that's true or not it the only reason I say that is because it looks kind of like an old version of firefox That doesn't necessarily mean that it is but it looks like a more modern browser than Dillo. So there's that We'll go we'll scroll back down here. It does have some of the Xfce based applications so Preferred applications this thing here is a Xfce Dependency so that'll allow you to set your default applications another one of those is the desktop preferences which Doesn't seem to actually work Maybe that's for PC man fm from what I'm seeing the warning as per for PC man fm PC man fm is installed That's the file manager. That's an okay selection I personally don't like PC man fm, but a lot of people really really do so I'm a crusader guy if you didn't know that So there are some VNC stuff here. There's There's Rofi obviously Romina is a remote desktop client. There's a couple of those so there's multiple different VNC things here Probably great for system administrators because system administrators use VNC stuff all time So that'd be good that they have all that stuff installed a VLC and MPV both installed so we're coming up on some duplication of effort here We got two different video app, you know applications But you know, I have VLC and MPV both installed on my system as well So it's not that big of a deal. They have X screensaver here Vim is obviously installed X term is here L FTP Not sure what that is actually never heard of it and NNN Granger are installed and another browser cute browser installed So there are multiple browsers now usually in this situation where there are multiple browsers It's for the purposes of web development, right? So you'll see a lot of distributions that have the vaulting chrome and brave and Firefox and opera all Installed because they're for web developers who need to test websites in multiple different browsers I don't think that that's the case here simply because all these browsers are either Very very rare. So either or very very rare like cute browser or very very out of date like Dillow or E-links or whatever both of those Projects I'm pretty sure really really old just from the way they look so I'm assuming that they're either no longer maintained or Sparsely maintained or maybe even they're actively maintained, but they're still very old code bases from what I can see So it's weird that those are included. I'm not sure why like the VNC stuff makes sense If this is for system administrators, all that stuff makes sense to me I'm not sure what really old browsers would do have to do with system and administration though I'm not a system administration guy So if you are maybe you can tell me why this distribution has all these really old-ass browsers Maybe there is a good reason and I just don't know so that's all the install applications that come with snail Linux There's not a lot of stuff here. It's very lightweight. The ISO weighs in at a 1.5 gigabytes. So it's not the least You know, it's not the smallest ISO I've ever seen but it's also not guide, you know giant or anything So if that matters to you 1.5 gigabytes the big thing that I have here And that really that's all there is to snail Linux as far as I can tell if you're going to use this just a couple of Notes the user password is SNAL just like the distros name and the root password is root So if you need the passwords for any situation, which you probably will if you want to install things That's what the passwords are and you can obviously change those passwords if you want the problem comes back to and we're just going to Go ahead and wrap up here without persistence. This doesn't really make sense to me as a regular user distro Right if you're you wouldn't as a regular user without persistence This doesn't feel useful for me now as a system administrator when you just might need to carry a Linux distribution with you And it doesn't really matter, you know, what's on it It just needs to be able to boot into an accession so you can do things this could be useful It's not going to save anything You're not going to have anything being able to save to the disk as far as I can tell But if you're in a situation where you just need a workable environment that has the standard things on a browser Access to the internet a terminal if that's all you need this could be useful for that type of situation outside of that situation though Not quite sure why this distribution would be useful for very many people now all that being said that doesn't mean that it's bad I love i3 win a manager. I think more distributions should have i3 as the thing and this has i3 as the thing Which makes me happy about it and they haven't cocked it up You know they have kept the standards for the most part So if you are used to the default i3 configuration file for the most part all the standard stuff is here And obviously it's very very easy to configure if you wanted to use that It's a very good distro that I don't really understand and that's kind of where I'm going to leave it There's definitely some Things here that I feel like I'm missing so if there is persistence if you guys if anybody in the comments has Used snail Linux before and there's persistence and I just missed it Let me know because I'd love to actually go back and use it properly if that's the case other than that that was snail Linux Who is for I would say it's for people who just need a disc Linux distro in their pocket without any of the Necessitation of persistence so if you don't need persistence, but you need a Linux distribution in your pocket on a nice on a USB key somewhere It's a good option it has arch Linux You know I didn't show you any of the arch Linux stuff because you know It's arch Linux if you've seen them one you've seen them all but because that's the case you can install things like yay Or paru and have access to the a you are if you needed specific applications just for that one time of running the ice So you could you can install whatever you want on there You just can't have it remember that those things are installed as far as I'm aware So that's snail Linux if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast links for liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description as well Thanks everybody for your support and for watching and all that stuff Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast if I mentioned that you guys are all absolutely Amazing I totally messed this ending up. I don't know where I went wrong. It's okay. Anyways, thanks for your support Thanks everybody for everything. Just thanks so much. I've lost my bloody mind. I don't know what's going on anymore I might as well retire good Lord, but the problem here is it's like 9,000 degrees in this room because 80 degrees outdoors and Goodness me. It's like April. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time