 Every once in a while I come across a distro that just begs the question WTF. Now, I've done several videos in this series and I've been asked not to swear. So I'm going to turn over a new leaf. I'm not going to say the word f**k, damn it. Yeah, I knew I wasn't going to make it very long. Anyways, every once in a while I come across a distro that just boggles the mind as to why it exists. So today I'm going to be taking a look at a distro called Linux FX. Now this is an Ubuntu-based distro that is really weird. From what I've seen of it, now I haven't actually installed it yet. I wanted to kind of have a first impression on camera. But from what I've read about it on their website, this is a distribution that is aimed towards replicating Windows. Now when I saw that, I laughed out loud because of course it does. I mean, seriously, you use Linux to want to use Windows? I mean, I make fun. Of course, there's a reason why you'd want to go through and use a distribution that is very familiar if you're a Windows user. So seriously, I could understand why they've done this. But it did make me laugh out loud because Linux is not Windows, right? I've talked about this before. So let's go ahead and take a look at the website for Linux FX. Now normally in this series, we find distros that either don't have websites at all, they're using like SourceForge for their website, or it's very not well put together. Let's just be very generous there. But this is not like that. It has tons of stuff on their websites. Very well designed, it's pretty. There's our first look at Linux FX. And if you were confused, it does exactly look like Windows. I don't know how true to life these screenshots are. But we're going to find out. Now this is based on Plasma and they have two different versions. They have a Windows 10 version and a Windows 11 version. They also have a professional version that you can pay for $35. I did not go through and actually do this. The things you get if you pay for it, you get Android app support and games, WX desktop system settings. I don't know what that is, an assistant by voice command. Apparently you don't get that at all in the free version. You get Microsoft Active Directory support. You get OneDrive and the file manager, which is going to be like a, probably a dolphin plugin. And you get use of all WX desktop resources. Again, I don't know what that means. So here's the thing. In the free version, at least from what I've seen here, you get access to none of the things that make Linux FX special, other than like the look and feel, I guess. I don't know if that's true. We're going to find out here in a few minutes. But it's interesting to see that a lot of the features that they build here on their website are all just professional. So all the stuff here, like Android support, the personal assistance, I'm assuming probably the .exe.msi application. They're probably part of the professional thing. I'm assuming they do this through Wine, Microsoft applications. So they're going to have things like Edge browser, Team Skype. They really want the whole way in trying to replicate Windows. So this is a WX desktop interface. Brings all the main tools of Windows, Microsoft Windows 10. This includes control panel configuration screens and log in, log out. That's weird, right? This is a little weird. Okay, anyways, this is their website. They have some release notes here for the most recent release. This update releases several new features for the operating system. The system kernel has been updated to 5.13, bringing better support for modern hardware. System tools gain new translations. French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish. American? American's not a language, all right? Like I know that we don't say the words right for our bridge friends. We don't, we have, but it's still English here, right? I mean, we have managed to mangle it up a little bit here in the US, but it's still English. American's not a language. Okay, anyways, it's now supported in WX desktop, which I'm assuming is their settings panel from what I read. Android support has been improved. Now in addition to supporting OpenGL, we also really support for Vulkan. Finally, all system packages have been updated, including WX desktop, only Office, and many others. The image has been scaled down to fit on a DVDs. And I suppose that's true, but the ISO was still over four gigabytes. So just prepared, if you're gonna download this, have yourself a good sized USB key in order to fit it on there. Yeah, four gigabytes once, not gonna do it. Users of older versions will receive this update over the internet, as opposed to through the mail, I suppose. New users can download the image from our portal. Okay, so let's go ahead and get away from this. And let's just go ahead and install this thing. So we're gonna install this in virtual box. I've gone through and set it up. And we're gonna go ahead and insert die. And that's right here. I've downloaded the Windows 11 version, because, I mean, you might as well choose the latest. And we will go ahead and choose that and hit start. And we'll see if we can get this full screen. Here we go. F2 to select language. Okay, so you can see this has the traditional Ubuntu-style startup screen, but with the Windows logo, by the way. Oh, wow, that really, really does look like Windows. Okay, so this is actually Plasma, but they've done a good job of replicating what Windows looks like. It has the Windows screen. Those don't look like Windows notifications. Those look like Plasma notifications, but we're not picking here. Virtual desktop widgets. Okay, so that is weird. That's a little weird, because Windows 11 has this widget pane that comes up that has actual widgets in it. So they kinda tried to replicate that, but so by giving you an icon, but that just brings up the ad widgets panel from Plasma. I don't know why I'd need that in the panel. We have a chat, which is, I'm assuming this is going to be Teams here. Yep, that's going to be Microsoft Teams. We have Dolphin, and we have Linux FX Store, which we'll take a look at later. That's actually just Discover, by the way. Okay, let's go ahead and close these and install this thing. So let's go ahead and install system. And this is the Calamari's installer. The thing that is jumping out to me right away is that they've used the Windows logo and they charge for it. That's going to get them into some problems that Microsoft never finds out. I'm just gonna put that out there. You can't use the Microsoft logo without actually licensing it from them, and they don't license it to anybody. So if I were to speak to this developer, just without even using their distro at all, I'd tell them to change the logo because this is the Windows logo, and you can't use that. Anyways, let's go ahead and hit Next. New York is fine. That keyboard is fine. We'll go ahead and erase the disk. It doesn't offer us an opportunity to add Swap, which is an interesting choice. It also doesn't appear that we have an opportunity here to encrypt the drive. Oh, where do we do it? It's right there. I almost missed it. So you can go ahead and encrypt the whole system, but it doesn't look like you can just encrypt the home directory. If you want to encrypt, you'll have to encrypt the entire partition. We'll hit Next, and then we'll enter our credentials, and then that's fine. We'll call this Windows, and we'll enter a very strong and complicated password, and then we'll hit Install. So we'll go ahead and pause the video here and see how long this takes. Okay, that took about five minutes or so, so let's go ahead and restart this. We'll see if the virtual box will remove the ISO. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Again, the Windows logo. Get your own logo. I understand the reason why you wanted to make this as much as Windows as possible, but I'm very worried for your bank account if you get sued. Probably just a cease and desist order would probably be what they'd send, but still it worries me a bit. Okay, so we don't get a grub menu, which is, I mean, it's supposed to be Windows, right? So while that does look quite a bit like a Windows start screen, it has the time down here at the bottom, but this is just SDDM. We have the desktop switcher up here, which we get with Wayland and a Codi session, which is interesting. Down here at the bottom underneath my face, we've got a suspend restart and a shutdown, which is just standard stuff that you'd see in SDDM, which is Plasma's display manager. So let's go ahead and enter our password and log in. I don't know if you caught that, but the password was not centered in the password field. So that's interesting that they didn't get that fixed. So here we go. So we have a startup screen of some kind, like a welcome screen, where you can choose between light and dark themes, highlight colors and stuff like that. Not that first thought, I thought that this was just the Plasma settings panel, but it is not. There's, this is all customized. So this is definitely interesting. Linux FX is not activated, so that's probably where they're gonna want you to do the pro thing. And I'm gonna move my camera over to the other side so that you can see the notifications, because that notification does not go away. Well, it doesn't go away until you dismiss it. Like it will go away there, but interestingly, they've managed to make Linux just as pushy as Windows is. Interesting. So let's see through the rest of this. So we get the local account system, which gives you this information here, notifications. That's just gonna be the standard KDE notification stuff, I believe. Smart status, I don't know any of that stuff is. Multitasking, just Windows. This is a little weird because a lot of this stuff is straight from Plasma, but they've like pulled it out of the Plasma settings. Right? Like that multitasking, that came from Plasma settings. The sound, this is going to be, this is just, if we make it interestingly enough, they've made it so you can't make it bigger, right here. Where's the touch target? There we go. If it looks more like this, does it look more familiar? Because that's just PAV control, which is usually baked into Plasma settings. Configure, yeah, that's basically what that is, but it seems to have less options and stuff like that, because normally with the Plasma settings, you also have stuff for output, input, input devices and stuff like that along the top. Interesting there. Okay, so activation, they're really pushing that recovery. See what that is. Backups, I don't know if this is a custom tool or if it's something that they've used from somewhere else. Remote desktop, any desk, remote desktop, and then about. So we have a clone of the Windows about screen. Interestingly enough, you can't go back to stuff. All right, and the end desk took a long time to start up. Okay. Games, control at game control, game controller, calibrate, game controller, Xbox control, generic control, time and language. All right, let's go ahead. Well, I'm gonna minimize that because we might come back to that. I just wanna take a look at the rest of the system. By default, we have Microsoft Edge, as they said, this is going to be, they call this the Linux FX Store, but this is Discover. Don't let them fool you, that's Discover. It even says Discover right there, but that's fine. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. It's interesting that they've changed the name. They took that effort. We have Teams, we have Dolphin here. I'm surprised they didn't call Dolphin something different, a virtual desktop there. Okay, and then we have the menu. All right, so let's see here. What if it happens if we type in settings? I'm very curious because I wanna see if we have just the standard KD Plasma settings. The answer to that, the answer is no. Let's see if maybe I missed something here. So the only system settings you get is their custom one here. Themes and icons. This is weird, right? Because what they seem to have done is rewritten and created a brand new application for settings. But all of the things that you click on here, if you click on like this here and open up something like that, this is just the KDE settings stuff in a custom like sized window. At least some of the stuff, not all of the stuff. So let's see, accessibility, let's just see what that looks like. See, a lot of this stuff here is straight from the KDE settings panels. But they've like pulled it out of the KDE settings panel, if that makes sense. It's weird. Also, let's look at the fonts. This is the font selection panel for the KDE selection, but it's been pulled out of it. The lock screen, so this changes SDDM. But you can't change the, like with the KDE settings panel, you can actually change the SDDM theme and stuff. You think this doesn't appear to be the case here at least. Let's go to themes and icons. So you can go through and get new global themes if you want. So the KDE stuff is still here. It's just been redirected somewhere else and you just kind of have to find it. It's weird, right? It's just, it's weird. So we're gonna go ahead and switch to the dark theme. That's weird, right? That's a virtual machine problem, I'm guessing. So this is the standard KDE color panel selector thing. But again, it's been pulled out of the settings panel. That's, I mean, it's an awful lot of work to make something like Windows. Let me just put it that way. It seems like they've done an awful lot of work to make this settings panel as Windows-like as possible while maintaining at least some of the customizability of Plasma. I'm happy that they haven't taken out all the customizability. Either there's a lot of stuff here you can do and the same kind of stuff you can do in Plasma. It just feels like it's in different places because it is in different places. Kind of, it's weird, right? All the customization stuff here is, I mean, this is all the customization stuff you can do right here. We have Bluetooth and devices, accounts, time and date, games, which we looked at here a minute ago, accessibility, privacy and security, a Linux FX security, what is that? So that's gonna be like the, probably a front end for UFW, I'd assume. But it doesn't say. System key ring and searching in Linux FX. Linux FX update, you can pause updates, which makes it seem like they check automatically. That's very Windows-like when WX desktop updates. You click on that, what does that bring up? Your system is up-to-date, so that's just an updater. Let's just see, something else that they supposedly have changed is the logout option. So this supposedly looks like Windows 11, I don't actually know. It definitely doesn't look like Plasma's normal thing. So we can cancel that. Does it have, it has Google Chrome installed by default. That's very on Windows-like. I'm gonna point that out. Cause Windows does not come with Chrome installed by default, but I guess it's glad that it did. All right, so let's go ahead and look at all applications to see what we got installed. Any desk, anti-micro, Android file transfer. So a lot of stuff here for like Android. I thought that the Android stuff warning, apparently CPU virtualization is disabled and you're just, this could run a virtual machine. So that's probably why this is not working. Linux did not find any Android image or disk and so on. So it looks like at least some of the stuff for Android stuff will work in the free version, which is good. This is going to be Teams with cheese installed, CID Discover, which it's weird that it's listed as Discover here, but listed as a Linux FX store here, right? A little inconsistent. Emoji selector find Gambas 3. I don't know what that is. Gambas 3. Gambas is a graphical development environment based on advanced basic interpreter. So it's like a game development thing, okay? I've never seen that installed before. We have GIMP installed, Google Chrome, Gwynvue, Hello, which is going to be, we'll check out here in a minute. That's their Cortana clone. Hugen Calibrate Lens. What is that? I don't know what that is. Hugen Lens Calibration GUI. Don't know what that is. That's interesting, okay. So there's a lot of stuff here that is interesting choices because I don't know what hardly any of it is. So we got K3B, CATE, K-Calc, a lot of KDE stuff. KDE Connect is here, which is probably part of the Android offerings. KDE partition manager, K-Manage, K-Mail. Kodi is installed by default, which we saw earlier. Consoles here for terminal, K-Organizer. A lot of the, surprisingly, they kept a lot of the K stuff. K-Thief, K-Torn, K-WalletManager, K-Write. Okay, so we have also Linux FX, Android Linux FX Device Manager. We have, which is basically a clone of the Windows Device Manager. That looks almost exactly like the Windows Device Manager. We have the Linux FX Power Off Linux, which we just saw, the Linux FX Register. Oh, this is going to be for if you buy the key. Linux FX Store, so we actually have the Discover Store. I wonder if we click on Discover up here, if it's actually a different Discover. No, it looks exactly the same. If we click on Linux FX Store, can we have them both open at the same time? No. It's weird that it's in the menu twice under two different names. I'm just going to put that out there. All Linux FX Winix, the updater there is still there. See, we have Microsoft Calendar. These are going to be all basically web apps, I'm guessing. We'll just go ahead and open that up. I'm assuming there's more to that website, it's just still loading. Okay, yeah, you have to sign in to use that. Because of course you do. It's Microsoft Prada. It's a Microsoft Prada. You can't just use this stuff without signing in. How dare you even think of wanting to do that? So that's just a web, you know, does that just open up Microsoft Edge? The next one is, so we have OBS installed by default, Ocular OneDrive installed by default. I wonder if that's just going to take you to, so there's a tool here called Microsoft OneDrive Sync. That's actually like a native application. Yeah, all right. Well, that's interesting because I know a lot of people use OneDrive. So we also have OnlyOffice Center. So OnlyOffice is here as well. So OnlyOffice is basically a Microsoft Office clone because it looks exactly like Microsoft Excel. So if you're familiar with, I mean, there's a reason why they chose that because they wanted to continue to look exactly like what you'd experience if you use Windows. Let's see here. We have Java here. We have PEM Data Explorer. We have QTVKBD. What is that? Oh, that's going to be a virtual keyboard. Okay. And we have, let's see here. Remote Desktop Client, Save, Sieve Editor, Scanlight for Scanning, Spectacle for Screenshot, Steam is installed by default. Synaptic is here. System Monitor, System Settings, U Launcher is here for like a, which is like a spotlight style launcher. A VLC is here, Virtual Desktop. So we have a couple of Virtual Desktop here. Ycom, Tabless Finder, Webcam, Droid and Widgets. And Wine Tricks is here because we have Wine by default. Okay. So those are the applications. Let's go ahead and see what we get when we type in Terminal. So we have a console here. This is just a regular standard console. Now, supposedly they have installed PowerShell as well. I'm going to look at that. So this is PowerShell. If you wanted to use PowerShell. I don't know anything about it. So we'll stay out of that. So let's just go ahead and do an update here. Okay. So there were no updates there to actually be installed. We did have some errors here, which is I find interesting. Flatpak error specifically. So let's go ahead and clear out of that. And let's see if Neo Fetch is installed by default. It is. So we have Linux FX. It doesn't use the Windows local here, which is weird enough. I thought that it would. It's using Plasma, K-Win is all the normal stuff here. It's using bash 5.0.17. This is the kernel 5.13. And then if we do free dash M, we're using 945 megs of RAM, but we have opened stuff up. So it's possible that there's stuff running in the background. I'm going to go ahead and do a reboot and see what that number is before we've launched anything. And that will give us an opportunity to use this. And we'll also see. You see how the text in the box isn't centered? That would drive me absolutely bonkers. But it's okay. This is just something that I noticed. SDDM by default isn't like that, by the way. Okay, let's go ahead and open up a terminal. Control Alt T does work for that. So let's do free dash M now. We're using 673. So there was something running in the background. And that's about normal for Plasma install. And as you see, I mean, you normally get some notifications when you start up Plasma, but you get this notify send thing saying you're, you were using the free version of Linux FX. WX desktop tools are running in trial mode, support a project by donating an amount and earn a license to continue using WX desktop and all its features. And that won't go away unless you dismiss it, by the way. Which is, or at least the timer on it has set so long that I haven't seen it time out yet. So that's an interesting thing. That's kind of annoying. All right. So we have a search, which is this is you launcher. And then the last thing we wanted to take a look at was the Cortana clone. Talk to Heloa. Heloa can execute voice commands. To be able to do internet searches by voice commands, you need to connect Heloa to your Google account. Now your Microsoft account is your Google account. You can do this by clicking connect with Heloa, which I'm not going to do. List all commands. Okay, Google. That's not, it says, okay, Google. I'm so confused. Does this actually work? Show commands. I did absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. All right. That seems to be a complete failure, but I'm sure I was doing something wrong. All right. Let's just call that quits for now. I'm sure there's more we could take a look at, but I've had enough of looking at Windows for now. I just, I just, all right. So the idea behind this distro is an interesting one because one of the things that new users, I think want when they're switching to Linux is familiarity. They can go through and use a distro that is very familiar. But I think that there's a, there's making something familiar, but still Linux like, and then trying way too hard to actually be Windows right down to using the logo, right? Now there's nothing wrong with emulating Windows looks. I've talked before about how people like to go through and rice their KD Plasma desktops to look like Mac. People like doing that. People like doing the whole Windows thing. I did it not too long ago. I have like a screenshot to prove it. It didn't stay around for very long. I just did it to troll people, but it did, you know, it does exist. Like it does, people do do that. So there's nothing wrong with making something that looks like Windows, but they've gone through and done a lot of work. Like a seriously impressive amount of work to make this as Windows-like as possible. Now, I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing. Simply because the, it feels like they've gone a little bit too far in that direction, you know, including the whole you needing to activate things. Cause eventually some of the stuff that I showed you today, I don't know if it just goes away or maybe there's more features that I just don't see because it's behind a paywall. I'm not sure which of those two things are straight cause it calls it a trial mode or it's in trial mode. So does that mean that some of those desktop effects that change things around go away after a while, which would be weird because a lot of that stuff is just KDE Plasma stuff, but pulled out. So like I said, they've gone through and done just an impressive amount of work to make it look like Windows, including creating a settings panel slash control panel that actually is completely like original for them. And then they've kind of like pasted a lot of the KDE settings stuff like on top of it, which by pulling the settings panels out of the system settings for Plasma and putting them there, it's very weird, right? It feels like they've done more work than maybe would be necessarily because I mean, the idea behind making something simpler is a good idea. So if they wanted to go through and make a system settings panel for KDE Plasma that was kind of like an easy mode, that would make sense to me. But this doesn't feel like that was the reasoning behind it. It feels more like what they were doing was going through and just trying to be as much like Windows as possible, which doesn't necessarily equate to easier. Granted, it gets it would be easier if you're coming from Windows and you know that kind of stuff. So maybe that's the reason why they've gone through and done it. For me personally, it feels like they've pulled a lot of stuff out of Plasma that just isn't there anymore, but maybe it's still hidden and I just didn't see it. It's interesting that you can't get to the KDE Plasma settings like at all. KDE Plasma settings don't seem to exist here at all. I'm gonna look here. If you search for Plasma, you don't get anything. So it's a weird like conglomeration of Windows restyled stuff and Plasma stuff, but it feels like they've taken some of the Plasma stuff out, you know? And I guess that's okay. That's what you want to do, but it feels like if you use this, would you still feel like you were using Linux? Because I mean, you're still going to be installing stuff. I mean, actually you may not. If you, let's put ourselves in the mindset of a new user. You've switched to Linux, but you wanted a Windows-like experience and this is the most Windows-like experience I've ever seen on Linux. So you want a Windows experience, so you've switched to this. And while there are some things that are still Linux-y, it's possible that you could go through and use this and never, ever have to use the command line because you may not even know it's there. You just open up the software center and install stuff. You open up Microsoft Edge and just use Edge like you would on Windows. You navigate through the menu just like you would on Windows. So the only thing that kind of reminds you that this is a different operating system is all the Plasma applications or the KDE applications that were included, which it's weird that they included those things. I'm a surprising that they haven't gone through and created their own stuff for that to make it more Windows-like. I guess the only thing that you'd go into this and find that is not very Windows-like is the fact that the Microsoft Office applications aren't actually there. You're using web apps or you have to use the only Office stuff which is not the same because it's called only Office. People are going to look at it and see what's only Office. Or maybe they'll assume that it's the same. I don't know because it does look the same. It's an interesting distro. It's definitely not for me. I'm sure there's way more features that I could have looked at. And it would be interesting to try the Pro version but I'm not gonna give them $35 to try a Pro version of Windows. It would feel too much like giving Microsoft money. I'm just gonna put that out there. It's not the case but it's just the way it feels. So that is it for this video. If you have comments about Linux FX you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Today, Devon East Coast web, Patrick O'Prymas, Marcus Maglin, Jack Tentul, Steve Vai, Sabregate Linux, Garrick, Mitchell Archer Center, Carmen Dade, Sean, Jeremy Oden, Merrick Kamp, Joshua Lee, J-Dog, Peter A, Christopher Dark Bandit 6. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.