 One of the most common questions I get from viewers of the channel is, what is my favorite Linux distribution? I typically answer this in one of two ways. I either tell you that I don't have a favorite Linux distribution, or I tell you my favorite Linux distribution is the one I'm currently running. Well, if that's the case, here in the last couple of years, my favorite Linux distribution has been ArcoLinux, because that is what's running on my main production machine for about two years now, and I love it. I recommend it, of course, to you guys all the time, because I just think it's fantastic. It has a fantastic installation process. It's got a graphical installer that's very easy to use. It uses the Calamari installer, but it's been tweaked in such a way it allows you to pick and choose software during the installation process, so you get to pick your desktop environment and window managers, multiple window managers, or you get to pick and choose what you want for terminal emulators and file managers. You get to pick your office suite, even if you want one, and it's really, really great. I love the installation process, and of course, you guys know I'm a big proponent of tiling window managers, and a lot of you guys, I hear from you, hey, I want to try out a tiling window manager, but it looks hard, because especially when you have to configure it from scratch, you start with a blank canvas, it can take you a few days, sometimes even a few weeks to really configure a tiling window manager to make it usable. You don't have to worry about that, though, with ArcoLinux. ArcoLinux has pretty much every tiling window manager known to man built into it, and if you want to use these tiling window managers, they come already preconfigured, so you already have a panel that's been configured for you, and you have all your programs, your software with it, and you know, so you're not starting from a completely blank slate, and that's really cool. It allows you to use these tiling window managers, and you know, start using them a little bit, and eventually, you'll tweak them to your needs. So ArcoLinux has a number of different ISOs. You've got like 18 or 20 different ISOs, different editions of ArcoLinux, depending on what desktop environment or window manager you want to install, but they have a really special edition called the extended edition. The extended edition lets you choose from all of the desktop environments and window manager editions of Arco, so if you want, you know, 10 different window managers installed on Arco, you can choose those 10 window managers in the installation process. I've actually never looked at the extended edition of Arco, so let me go ahead and grab the ISO from ArcoLinux.com. I'm going to download that, and let's go ahead and run through an installation. So I went ahead and grabbed ArcoLinux B, the extended edition, and they had a recent release just earlier this month, about two weeks ago. Now, when you first boot up ArcoLinux, you have the choice of booting using the open source drivers, and that's great for those of you that are using Intel or AMD graphics, because those are open source drivers. But those of you that are NVIDIA users, you want to choose the NVIDIA option here. You also have no mode set as an option, and of course you have boot existing OS if there was already something installed on the drive, but this is a completely empty drive here inside this virtual machine. I'm going to go ahead and boot using the open source drivers, because I'm in a virtual machine, and the drivers for this, of course, are open sourced. All right, and it loads us into a live environment. It looks like the live environment is using some sort of window manager. It might be open box, because it is a floating window manager, I believe, because I can grab and drag the window around a little bit. But anyway, you get this welcome greeter here when you first boot into Arco, and what you'd want to do if you want to actually install Arco is you want to run the Calamari installer. That's the name of the installer. So I'm going to click Run, and the installer launches. Let's see if I can make that full screen. Yes, I can. And you can see that the Calamari installer in Arco Linux has a lot more steps to it than the Calamari installer in other Linux distributions. You have, of course, the welcome screen here where you choose your language. American English is the default, and that's correct for me. Then we can choose our kernel. Now, when you choose a kernel, you have various editions of the kernel. The two main types of the kernel are the standard Linux kernel, and that's the default if you don't choose anything. You also have the LTS kernel. That's typically the one I go with on machines that don't have really, really bleeding edge new hardware, because the standard Linux kernel is always getting new hardware support added to it. But unless you have a really bleeding edge graphics card that just came out yesterday, the LTS kernel I found is probably the best option. You also have the Zen kernel, and that is like a high performance kernel. It's really good for those of you that do gaming. I'm just going to go with the LTS kernel for purposes of this video. Then you have your video drivers. Now, the video drivers, you want to make sure that you actually install the right driver for your machine. Obviously, if you're an Intel user, you want the Intel driver. If you are an AMD user, you want probably ATI or AMD GPU. If you want the proprietary AMD driver, I don't know why you would want a proprietary driver though, because the open source drivers for AMD cards are just as good, if not better. You also need the proprietary drivers if you are an Nvidia user. So if I was an Nvidia user, and I had the LTS kernel installed, I would choose Nvidia LTS. That would be the driver I would tick on. But for purposes of this virtual machine here, I actually don't need any of these video drivers. So I'm just going to bypass that for now. And then our login manager. What login manager do you want to use? I like LightDM. And if I do the dropdown menu here, you can see it's going to also install the LightDM GTK grader. That's very important. You're also going to get some Arco Linux wallpapers, probably because it's going to use one of those wallpapers as the background for LightDM. So that's really neat. So I'm going to click Next, and then we get to pick and choose our desktop environment slash window managers. Now, I don't want to just install everything, but I do want to check out some of them. One of my favorites is awesome window managers. And one I recommend to new tiling window manager users, especially awesome is rather easy to get up and running. And it's kind of easy to understand. It's very full featured. It comes with a panel. It comes with a menu system. So it's not as a jarring experience as, you know, some of the more hardcore tiling window managers like DWM, which I might install. And Xmonad, especially, which is probably my favorite, but Xmonad is definitely not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't recommend trying Xmonad as your very first tiling window manager, but in Arco Linux, you can try it out because they're already going to have it configured for you. I'm also going to check out Qtile. Again, I love the Qtile window manager is one of my favorites. I'm just going to go with those four for now. And then we have some communication software. I really don't need any of this in this VM. On a real machine, I'd probably install, you know, I have been using Mail Spring as my email client, but I don't need that for this VM. I sometimes also use Remina. And that's a remote desktop application. But again, I won't be using that in this VM. Some of you guys may need Zoom, especially now that so many things are done via Zoom calls. You may want to install that. I'm just going to click next. And then we have the development category and we have various IDEs and text editors. Typically I would install Emacs. Sometimes I like a simpler plain text editor. So I might install something like Notepad QQ to go along with it. That's what I would do on a real installation. But this would just be wasted time installing these programs in this VM. I'm not going to do anything with them. So I'm just going to skip that for now. Then we have our office programs here. Typically you want an office suite. So you may want to do something like LibreOffice. You also have other options here, such as open office, only office. I don't know anything about those. I don't know what kind of licensing they are. WPS office, people tell me good things about that. That is not free and open source software, though that is proprietary software. I'm just going to go without installing an office suite for now. The multimedia category, this is something personally, I would probably install a bunch of these on my main production machine because this is the kind of software I use to make these kinds of videos. So I probably would want an audio editor, Audacity. Now that Audacity is turned into basically proprietary spyware, I probably wouldn't install Audacity anymore. I'd probably try Harddoor. Then I need a music player. Audacious is pretty cool. I also like Deadbeef. Deadbeef is here. GUVCView is what I would need for a webcam application. I edit all of my videos using KadenLive, so I would install that. Of course, I record all my videos using OBS Studio, so I would install that. I need a video player. I'd install MPV. I would probably also install VLC for a video player. I really like VLC. But I'm going to go ahead and tick off all of these boxes. The only thing I'm going to install is MPV. That'll serve as my video slash audio player in case I need one in this VM. Then we have the internet category. We need to install a browser. I'm going to install the Brave browser. Those of you that prefer Chromium or Firefox or Opera is also here. It's proprietary. Vivaldi is a proprietary web browser. But hey, if you want to install those, you're free to do that. The great thing about Arch Linux is, it's not free software only. Those of us that care about trying to run free software, of course, we're not going to install things like that. But those of you that don't care, you want to install your proprietary software, you are more than welcome to do so. And of course, they have this proprietary software actually in the repository. So it's not like you have to go get it through a third party source and hope that it's not actually malware or anything. I'm just going to install the Brave browser from the internet category. Then we have some theming. I'm just going to click on some theme options. I'm really not sure what I want for theming. We'll get some of the new mixed themes. These are pretty cool. I like the Papyrus icon set, anything else. I think we clicked a few things. Here are them graphics. Now, typically I would install the GIMP on everything. I may actually install the GIMP here in this VM. In case it's a VM I actually use going forward because I like to keep a few arch-based virtual machines around to do work in sometimes. Then we have a games category. Typically you probably would want to install Steam. If it's not already installed, we have Steam Buddy and Steam Tweaks. I'm not sure what these are. I love Xenotic, a great open source first person shooter, but it's a very large game and it would take up a ton of space in the small virtual machine. So I'm actually not going to install any games. Terminals, I need a terminal emulator. I like Alacrity. That's the only one I'm going to install. File manager, by default, Arco always ships with the Thunar file manager, which is the standard file manager that XFCE ships with. I like PCMAN FM though. It's the one I've used for a few years now. It's the one I prefer. And we have a utilities category. Utilities for Timeshift and ButterFS. I won't be using ButterFS and I won't be using Timeshift to do any kind of snapshots and any kind of backups. We also have a very large list of other utilities. Some of these I might install. I know for sure, Htop. I'm going to be needing it. Calculator, if you need a calculator, Flatpak. Eventually you're probably going to want to install snaps and or Flatpaks and or Appimages. So I would definitely tick on Flatpak. I would go ahead and tick on Snap if it's in here. Yeah, there's SnapD. Just to make sure that if the need arises and you need to actually install a Snap or Flatpak that you actually can. Under accessories, we have Cheese, which is a webcam viewer. I don't need that. Nitrogen for setting wallpapers. I do use that program often. And most of this other stuff I think I can skip. And then we have ArcoLinux development. I don't need any of this stuff either. And then you get to the main part of the installer where you choose your time zone. It's correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. Then English US for the keyboard layout is correct. I'm going to choose a race disk and give the entire 25 gig virtual hard drive in this virtual machine to ArcoLinux. You could also choose manual partitioning and set up the partitioning yourself. And then for swap, I'm going to swap to file. I like using a swap file rather than a standard swap partition. Then I'm going to click next and then we need to create our name and our password. So my name is going to be DT, the host name of this computer I'm going to call this Arco Extended. And then we need to choose a strong and complicated password and then repeat the password. And then use the same password as the administrator account. I'm going to tick that on that way. The sudo password and DT's password are the same. Then I'm going to click next and we get a summary of everything we've chosen so far. I'm going to click install. Now this installation process typically takes around 10 minutes on my hardware. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once this finishes. And the installation has completed and we've rebooted our freshly installed ArcoLinux, the extended edition. Now during the installation process, I specified that I wanted light DM installed for our login manager, but this doesn't appear to be light DM. I'm pretty sure this is SDDM, which is the standard login manager, I think for KDE Plasma. I don't mind using SDDM, but since I specified light DM, I think I would rather go ahead and try to get light DM working. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and switch to a TTY here. What this is on a real computer, you would hit control alt and F3 through F6 or something, one of the function keys to get to a TTY, basically a command prompt. I'm going to log in. My username remember was DT. I need to enter his password. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a, well, first of all, let me make sure that was in fact SDDM. So I'm going to go ahead and launch Htop. And yeah, I already see instances of SDDM actually running here in Htop. So I'm going to queue to quit out of Htop. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to run this command sudo system CTL. So we're going to do something with system D here. And I'm going to tell it to disable SDDM. I don't want SDDM to ever run again on boot. And then I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to run this command sudo system CTL enable light DM. And then I'm going to reboot. And if all of that worked correctly, instead of seeing SDDM when we log in, we should now see light DM. And that is light DM, although it's not configured in any way. We don't actually get a pretty background picture like we had with SDDM. I could fix that. I'll fix that off camera though. But that's weird that it installed light DM force, but it really didn't set it up as the default login manager. You still had SDDM installed. So just know that's the case just saying, you know, if you guys have this problem as well. So let's go ahead and check out some of the window managers that I had installed. So we installed DWM. Well, it actually installed, I only installed DWM, Qtile, Xmonad and awesome. It looks like by default, it also installs some other stuff. Kind of like it also installed SDDM force. It also installed Openbox, BSBWM, HerbsliftWM, I3 and SpectreWM. All fine window managers. I don't mind having them installed. It's just I didn't necessarily want them installed. I could remove them though. It's not like these programs are that hard to remove. And of course, this is ARCO Linux. It's already a pre-configured, pre-themed DWM. It comes with a cocky here on the side. And if I move my head out of the way, this cocky gives you some of the shortcuts, some of the key bindings, just in case you didn't know the key bindings. And you're actually gonna need this because especially if you're used to like the default key bindings for things like DWM and Xmonad, they have changed the default key bindings. So you do need to have that cocky up and running at first. Once you've learned the key bindings, you can actually just get rid of this little cocky window. Of course, you have your greeter here as well. I believe SuperQ kills a window. Yeah, SuperEnter brings up a terminal. What terminal is this? This is URXVT, even though I asked for a Lackrity, but I could probably get a run prompt. Yeah, SuperP gets me D-Menu and I could launch a Lackrity and this is a Lackrity. So they actually look exactly the same. They did a good job on the theming on both of those terminals, but I don't need URXVT installed. But so some of this, you know, now there's downsides to everything, right? I didn't have to pre-configure DWM or Awesome or Qtile or any of these other tiling window managers when I log in. But the downside is not having to configure it myself. There's a lot of extra stuff to them that I don't necessarily need. So instead of spending a whole lot of time installing software, you know, doing it this way, typically you're gonna spend a whole lot of time uninstalling software you don't need, you know, having something pre-configured. It's basically a pre-configured desktop environment using tiling window managers. Getting back into the VM here. So DWM works, you know, you guys have seen DWM. It's a standard dynamic tiling window manager that uses the master and stack. SuperEnter opens a terminal, SuperP gets you the D-Menu run prompt escape. If you don't wanna do anything in D-Menu. SuperQ quits out of a program. SuperX exits out of the window manager or at least it gets you this exit program where you could choose to log out, reboot, shut down, suspend, et cetera. I'm gonna choose log out. So that was DWM. And let's go ahead and check out the Qtile version really quickly. And it's a really nice panel that they've got going. That's the standard Qtile panel has a panel built into it. But it looks very similar. Let me get rid of the greeter. So SuperQ to kill the window with focus. SuperEnter again gets us terminals. And again, it's a master and stack dynamic tiler very similar to DWM. That's part of the reason why I installed those four tiling window managers as they're all very similar. And I quite like dynamic tilers rather than manual tilers. Let me go ahead and SuperX to log out. I just wanna verify that all these window managers that I wanted actually were installed correctly. Let's try out Xmonead. And once again, we get the greeter. SuperQ will kill that window Xmonead. This is Polybar they're using instead of Xmobar. I've never really cared for Polybar with Xmonead, especially on multi monitor systems because it just doesn't display all the information, especially regarding workspaces with Xmobar. It'll actually tell you which windows have focus as far as which monitor has stuff open, whether it has stuff open on it and the monitor has focus or if it's an unseen workspace, things like our hidden workspace. Anyway, SuperX will kill or get us to the log out menu where I choose log out. And the other one that I specifically wanted to install was the awesome window manager. The awesome window manager is one of those window managers I often tell you guys is a fantastic first tiling window manager. It's really easy to configure and it just looks good. It's got a panel built into it. It's also got a right click menu similar to like an open box right click menu. So it's especially for new to tiling window manager users. The awesome window manager is very easy to get into and the default layout, just like the other three tiling window managers I've shown you is the standard master and stack layout SuperQ. And Arco has done a great job as far as standardizing the key bindings between all the various additions. So you don't have one set of key bindings in one tiling window manager in a completely different set in another, right? And that's really cool. It's one of the things I've spent a lot of time in my own personal configs doing the same thing. Cause I know so many of you guys use my tiling window manager configs and I've really tried to make them as close as possible. So that's just a very, very quick look at Arco Linux. And really I just wanted to show you guys the installation process, showing you guys the window managers themselves. I mean, if you're going to use a window manager, typically you're going to use your own configurations. That's what I typically do. I install Arco Linux, but I never really see this, right? Cause I have my own awesome config and Qtile config and DWM config, right? I just install my own configs which overwrites all of this stuff. So I rarely ever see the default Arco stuff. But for those of you that don't have your own configs, this is a really great way to start. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Absi Gabe, James Mitchell, Paul West, Akami Allen, Chuck Kurt, David Dillon, Gregory Heiko, Irjan Alexander, Peace Arch and Fedor, Polytech Raver, Scott Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of 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. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna support me, consider subscribing to Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. I run Arco, by the way.