 Today I'm going to be taking a quick look at Bluestar Linux. Bluestar Linux, this is not the first time I've actually taken a look at Bluestar Linux on this channel. I did a video about Bluestar probably six years ago. It's been a very, very long time. I did a quick installation and first look of Bluestar way back then, but I don't remember anything about it. I've never actually went and revisited Bluestar since that video so many years ago. So today what I'm doing is I've downloaded the latest release of Bluestar, which was put out really just a few days ago, like five or six days ago. They had a new ice. So I'm going to go ahead. I've already run through an installation of Bluestar in a virtual machine off camera. Now I didn't want to put the install on cameras because you guys probably have seen a million of these Arch Linux based distributions installed before most of them use the Calamaris installer. And that's exactly what Bluestar Linux uses to. They use Calamaris. If you've seen one Calamaris installer video, you've seen them all. The one thing I will say Bluestar's version of the Calamaris installer does have a section called look and feel, which is a little weird. I wasn't really sure what to do with this section. I could see that it provides like seven or eight different themes to choose from. You know, I guess it changes the wallpaper essentially, but I really can't tell if it does anything other than just simply changing the wallpaper because all you get with your little options is you can see a thumbnail of I guess what the desktop would look like if you choose that theme, but I can't really, the thumbnails are so small. It's hard to tell if it actually changes like the plasma theme or the icon set or anything like that or the fonts, whatever it happens to be. All I can see is that choosing a different theme essentially chooses a different wallpaper. I'm sure again, that's probably more to it than that, but I've already ran through the installer. The installation took about 10 to 15 minutes or so on my machine a little longer than what most arch based Linux distributions take. One minor thing I will say at the very end of the installation, there is a pop-up window that you need to close. It's like a dialogue box window that pops up. It's a little different than most Calamaris installations because most of the time you don't have this weird pop-up window. It's almost like a terminal window, but it's not a terminal. It's more like a yeah dialogue box or something like that. You actually have to close that box before you can proceed and finalize the installation. So be careful on that. If you're going to step away for a few minutes, just know that at some point you do need to confirm or close a window for the installation to complete. One of the things that made me want to check out Bluestar Linux again was I was taking a look at DistroWatch and I was saying what some of the latest distribution releases have been. And instead of getting a new release of something, what I noticed is I'm sitting here looking at the top 100 page hit rankings of DistroWatch. So this is essentially a list of the popular distros, although this is not a good metric as far as which distributions are popular on Linux because Bluestar Linux is number 44. And I forgot Bluestar Linux even existed, even though I did a video about it like six years ago. You're right. I don't know anything about Bluestar Linux. I'm taking a look at it. You know, it's based on Arch Linux and it did have a recent release. I was like, well, let me grab that ISO and take a look at it again because if it's ranked number 44 on DistroWatch is probably something that needs more attention. So, you know, I went ahead and grabbed the ISO from their source forage. So I guess they don't have a proper website. They just host everything on source forage. And there's really not much information really on this page. One really confusing thing about Bluestar is it mentions that it is offered in three editions. There's a desktop edition, a desk pro edition. So I guess it's a desktop professional edition includes some probably extra software, more advanced features, things like that. And a developer edition, which we wouldn't play around with. I'm sure that's probably for development, probably of Bluestar Linux itself. But if you go to files and go to distro, there's not three different versions of the ISO available. It's just Bluestar Linux 6.5.8 is the latest release. And that's what I grabbed. I grabbed that ISO. So I don't know if that is old information, if they're no longer doing three different editions. I did notice that they had a note here that this particular ISO would not support the desktop desk pro and developer option that the desk pro and developer options, even though they would be listed. The installation of these would result in an error. So I'm assuming that's probably what's going on with this latest release as it's just one edition, which I'm assuming is the standard desktop edition. That's what I'm going to claim that this is. I could be wrong for those of you that know better when I actually showed this on camera. Let me know in the comments down below what I am running. So let's go ahead and log in to Bluestar Linux and take a look around. The first thing you'll notice is the login manager here, which I'm assuming is SDDM, is not really themed in any way. It's very, very ugly. It's not a good theme. All it has, if I move my head, it does have the Bluestar Linux logo here on a plain black background. It's kind of strange that a distribution that really claims that it is a beautiful distribution. That's what the Sourceforge page says Bluestar is. It's an easy way to install large and it provides a beautiful desktop. This is not a beautiful desktop. The login manager needs some work. The Sessions, obviously KDE Plasma is the desktop environment for Bluestar Linux and they are only using Plasma on X11. Xorg, right? So there is not Plasma on Wayland as an option. I'm assuming they've removed it or they just didn't install all the Wayland stuff to make Plasma on Wayland an option here, which is understandable. Plasma is still a bit experimental, so they've only provided the X11 session. So let me go ahead and log in here. And the desktop loads and the first thing you'll notice is it's kind of a retro kind of look. For those of you that were around on Linux as far as using desktop Linux 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, this is kind of what desktop Linux looked like. It's still held on to a lot of paradigms of Windows and Mac. For example, Windows, of course, is famous because it has all of those dang icons that you can add to your desktop, which a lot of Linux desktops these days really don't allow you to do or it's not enough fault. You can see we have added back some desktop icons. This is basically your file manager bookmarks here on the desktop. And then we have a please donate button. I'm assuming to donate to Bluestar Linux. We also have a weather widget here, which is 13 degrees. That's not my location. 13 degrees Celsius for one thing. So it's not set to Fahrenheit and the location is Bond. So this is obviously Bond Germany. And I believe Bluestar Linux is based out of Germany. And we have another little plasma widget here for some system monitoring information kind of like a cocky almost. I don't think this is a cocky. I think this is again one of the little plasmoid widget thingies which is exactly what this is this section of bookmarks here file manager bookmarks as well as the weather widget. I've got to be kind of honest with you guys. I don't like having all this stuff on my desktop. Like, you know, if you want to go ahead and provide the file manager bookmarks by default, that's fine. But the weather widget that you know, I mean, somebody would have to go in here and actually edit it to show the the correct city, you know, the correct location as well as, you know, Celsius or Fahrenheit depending on where you are in the world. And this widget here the system monitoring information that is probably should be on a far right hand side of the screen is kind of in the center. And this is actually set to 1920 by 1080 resolution. Now this is a virtual machine. So probably on physical hardware that might actually have drawn itself in a correct spot. But even if it hadn't drawn itself in a correct spot, this is a really ugly system monitor again, for a distribution that claims to be aesthetic, beautiful, you know, very eye catching, very pleasing. I don't like the little widgets on the desktop, they all kind of just need to go away. I do like the dock at the bottom. And I do like the icon set, you know, this very colorful kind of pastel icon set, you know, actually is quite appealing to me. And this dock, by the way, I'm assuming it's latte dog being that this is KDE plasma. Yeah, the latte spacer is the widget that I just clicked on. So this latte dog. And what do we have in the dock? Well, we have the dolphin file manager. Let's go ahead, launch that and take a look at the theming. The theming is a little weird to I don't like this weird grayish kind of hint to the theme. And then you got blue icons. Again, it's kind of a weird kind of contrast. I don't completely hate it. But I probably go with a different theme. By the way, the other widgets here in the front of the latte dock peek at the desktop, I'm assuming as a show and hide. So if I click it at hides all the windows that are on the screen, if I unclick it, it will show them again. And then we have the workspace switcher. So we have four desktops essentially by default. If I click on desktop to move around desktop to now. So if I launch a different program like VLC, you know, VLC is on workspace to but if I click back on desktop one where the file manager is, you know, we can quickly swap between them with the mouse with this particular widget. Let's go ahead and see what version of VLC we're on. I didn't mean to make that full screen. Help and about this is VLC 3.0 dot 19 VLC. One of the most popular pieces of free and open source software on the planet. It is a very nice feature field media player multimedia player plays audio plays video plays all your DVDs and blue rays and things like that. Let me go back to the first desktop. Let's go ahead and close out of the dolphin file manager. Everything else that's pinned to the dock here includes the console, which is Katie ease terminal emulator. And while we have the console look, let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit. And let's do a username dash R. Now they also came out about five or six days ago. The kernel that it shipped with was six dot five dot nine. And again, the login manager said we were obviously using plasma on X 11. So is there even any Wayland installed? Where is Wayland? Yeah, there is some stuff in user share Wayland. I did aware is pipe wire pipe wire is the default audio server these days on Arch Linux. So I'm assuming pipe wire would be here and it is usually we have the binary for pipe wire. Let's see if H top is installed out of the box. It is. Let's see what kind of system resource usage we're using using 1.1 gigs of the six gigs that I gave this virtual machine and that that's Ram, of course. So that's kind of high actually for plasma. Usually plasma be using about 600, maybe 700 megs of the six gigs of RAM that I would give this VM. So there's some stuff going on in this VM probably in the background. I'm not exactly sure what that is, though. Now I'm assuming some of what is sucking up some of the RAM or the widgets. Also, if I go to the top, we got a panel. This panel here you can see is the KDE panel, the menu system. We've got some transparency. I don't really have any blurring, which, you know, sometimes does use a little CPU, but this is just standard transparency. What we do have a SysTray and the SysTray has Octopi running. Octopi may be checking on updates that will use a lot of CPU and RAM. So that's probably why H top was a little high as far as what it was reporting. We also have a bunch of stuff, you know, in the dropdown, this little icon here, the arrow pointing down when you click it, you get more status and notifications stuff. It's kind of hard to read the transparency too in this panel. It's very strong transparency, like it's practically almost fully transparent, right? And so it makes it very difficult to read the text because it's just too transparent. You know, they need to add slight transparency when you put transparency into effect on anything, whether it be with your window managers, desktop environments, the panels, the docs, terminal emulators, adding transparency to things like Emacs and, you know, never make these things too transparent because it makes them practically unreadable. Like I can't read all of this because it's the text from the panel here or from the menu is bleeding into the desktop, which has text on it because of this little plasmoid thingy that's on it. So, yeah, I would have to get rid of that transparency if I were actually going to install this on physical hardware and, you know, actually live in it, see what else is pinned to the dot. So I'm assuming these are applications they think are rather important. We've already seen the file manager, the terminal. We've seen VLC. Gimp is also installed. Let's go ahead and launch Gimp. This is Gimp 2.10, obviously from the splash screen. And if I go to help and let's go to about this is Gimp 2.10.34. Let's close that out. Also, pinned to the dock. We have LibreOffice Writer. So that is the word processor for LibreOffice. We have FileZilla, which is interesting because that's not a program most desktop Linux users will need. FileZilla is a FTP client. So File Transfer Protocol. This is sending files on your local machine to a remote machine, a remote server, for example. So if you wanted to do something with SSH or SFTP or secure copy or, you know, things like that, this is kind of like a gooey way of accomplishing that. So FileZilla is a program I've been using for probably 20 years or more. I used FileZilla even when I was a Windows user, like, you know, 15, 16 years ago before I switched to Linux. So FileZilla, another really popular piece of free and open source software, but it's not something that, again, most computer users will need. You got to be kind of a nerd and like to play with remote servers, you know, web hosting, things like that to use FileZilla. We have the little email icon. So that is Thunderbird. So this is Mozilla Thunderbird for our desktop email client. Most people these days probably don't have much use for a desktop email client. Now I do. I actually still use desktop email primarily. I hate webmail. I've never been a webmail user, Gmail user, things like that. I've always just registered my own domains, you know, and set up my own email addresses for desktop client. For the web browser, it looks like we're using Mozilla Firefox. Let's go ahead and launch Firefox. We go to Help and About Firefox. This is Firefox119.0. Close that out. And the only other program we have in the doc is Pigeon, which is an internet messaging client, which is a program that very, very few Linux distributions ship these days. Most people don't do instant messaging anymore. Now, when I first switched to Linux, you know, back in 2008, right, to desktop Linux Pigeon was a standard program that almost every Linux distribution did ship with, but it was specifically a desktop Linux distribution because instant messaging was still kind of popular way back then. These days, nobody uses things like IRQ and, you know, AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger and all of that stuff that, you know, we used way back then. We do have the KDE Plasma System settings as a quick launcher in the doc as well, which I may go ahead and play with some of this. For one thing, what is the theme? It doesn't look like either Breeze or Breeze Dark is set. It's hard to tell, though. If I actually click on them, does it change anything? We're obviously using a dark theme, but if I click on a light theme, does it really do anything? Hit Apply. Yeah, it does apply. Okay. Breeze Dark, hit Apply. Yeah, and I actually like the standard Breeze Dark theme. You see that kind of weird, almost sickly, greenish hue that the previous theme had went away. I also now can actually read the little plasmoid widget thingies because they have a background instead of solid transparency. It also fixes the panel at the top. It's got slight transparency, but now I can actually read it. So I'd probably just go with the default Breeze Dark theme. Even the dock here now has that black border at the bottom that also makes it rather nice. The only thing I don't like is I lost that really cool pastel, squarish icon set. Now, the icon set is not nearly as attractive, unfortunately. If I go back to system settings, I wonder if I can go and change that back. There's workspace behavior. How do I get? Ah, I'm an idiot. If I click Appearance, this is the Blue Star theme. These are the same options that I had in the installer, by the way, in the Calamari's installer. So I think I've had this problem with the system settings before is if you just go to the home, you have Breeze and Breeze Dark, but then if you have this separate appearance thingy, right, you've got something else. So but Breeze and Breeze Dark are also in here as well. But what I am using, I'm using this, this one here, which is Antelope Canyon. But if I wanted to switch to something else, for example, big splash here, let's click apply. And let's see, probably it's going to go back to a very transparent panel and desktop. But I mean, really did anything change? Oh, not much difference. I mean, it didn't set the background either. Let's hit apply. Okay, now it looks like I may have crashed the desktop trying to set it a second time. Let's try a different one. It looks like it keeps going back to the default wallpaper and everything. So I don't think any of this is actually working. Yeah, none of that is actually working. So for me, you know, can I just go back to Breeze Dark from here? Yeah, Breeze Dark works. I'm just going to go with that. I did want to check out some of the wallpapers, though, but I can do that by right clicking on the desktop configure desktop and wallpaper. And let's go ahead and make this window a little bigger. And let's go ahead and check out some of these wallpapers I wanted to check out like big splash here. Yeah, that's a nice wallpaper. I don't know if that's like a default KDE wallpaper or if any of these are specific to Blue Star. Let's see if there's any Blue Star branded wallpapers. I am not seeing any. I think these are just generic KDE plasma wallpapers. I don't think there's anything necessarily unique to Blue Star regarding these particular wallpapers. Let's do something that's kind of fall colors since it's, you know, late October as I'm recording this video. Now let me go back to the KDE plasma at the top. So you got to hover toward the top to get this to unhide itself and just seeing what's in the panel. We have our date and time. Well, we also have a lock screen shutdown button. I wonder why you need those there because you also have them here in the panel. That's kind of weird having them in both spots. It's not like those are things you ever want to hit by accident either. So I probably wouldn't have quick launchers for those just sitting on the panel. That's just me though. We have a quick launcher for the calculator, but if you really needed the calculator, thought it was important why not have it as a quick launcher in the dock. I have quick launchers in both places. We also have this little system load widget. So it's kind of like a graph letting me know I guess CPU usage. We've already seen the system tray here, which got a lot of the usual suspects as far as volume manager, network manager, and things like that. But Octopi is here. Let's go ahead and click on Octopi. And just clicking on Octopi doesn't actually launch it because you have to run Octopi by typing user-bent Octopi. Is that a permission problem? No, no. Again, I am in a VM, but I don't think this is a VM problem. I think that's a proper bug there. I actually launched the terminal and type Octopi. Would it actually launch? You must run as user-bent Octopi. Okay, let's do the full path. User-bent Octopi. And that does run. So yeah, there's a problem with it just calling it Octopi. Even though it is in user-bent, and user-bent should be in the shell's path, that is weird. But that is a bit of a bug. But Octopi, for those that have not familiar with it, is a graphical package manager. It's not, you know, fancy. It doesn't have screenshots and things like that. It's a very old-school graphical package manager, very similar to Synaptic. If anybody's ever used the Synaptic package manager in Debian or Ubuntu or any Debian-based distributions, Octopi is very similar to Synaptic. It's just for Arch Linux instead of Debian-based distros. Let's see how many packages are installed out of the box on Bluestar Linux. So if I do a Pac-Man-Capital-Q lowercase-q, it should give me a list of all the packages installed line by line, right? So if I up arrow and pipe that into WC space-l, it'll tell me all the packages that are installed via Pac-Man. 1,588 packages are installed. Not exactly lightweight, but I wouldn't say it's terribly bloated either. Let's go ahead and clear the screen. What about any of the third-party distroagnostic package managers like Snap or like Flatpak? Let's do a where is Flatpak to see if it's installed. It is not. The Flatpak binary is not here. Where is SnapD? SnapD is also not installed. Now, of course, you could always install Flatpaks and Snaps. And of course, you can install that images as well if you need them. But I just wanted to go ahead and verify that those are not enabled and installed out of the box. So there you have it. That's a very quick and cursory look at the latest release of Blue Star Linux. It's essentially Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. It's got some theming choices and not necessarily theming choices that I would have went with. But again, it's all subjective. That's all personal. I do think it is a pretty sharp looking and interesting distribution. If I go to the panel here, you can actually see it's got a full suite of software installed. It wasn't just the programs here installed on the dot. We have a development category that has a ton of stuff in it. The graphics categories got plenty of stuff in it. Image viewers, PDF viewers, paint tools, things like that. The internet category has a few things in it, including a bit torrent client under office. We have the full Libre office suite as well as our address book and organizer and things like that. So definitely not light on packages. It's pretty much got everything installed ready to go out of the box that a desktop Linux user will need. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about these guys right here. Gabe James, Matt Paul, Wes, Armoredragon, Commander, Angry George, Lee Mathos, Nate Erion, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Fidore Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Solastry, Tools, Devler, Ward, Gentoo, and Ubuntu and Willy. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Bluestar Linux would not have been possible. Shows 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. All my supporters over on Patreon. That's this list right here. Each and every one of these, ladies and gentlemen, they help support my work. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.