 Today, I wanted to take a quick look at Nitrix, which is a Linux distribution that is based on Debian slash Ubuntu. It's based, I believe, on Debian CID, Debian's unstable branch, but they do pull some stuff from the Ubuntu LTS repositories as well. One of the really interesting things that kind of differentiates Nitrix from the thousands of other Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions out there is that Nitrix actually ships with app images by default, like many of the programs actually on the system out of the box or actually app images rather than native packages installed through the app package manager. Another thing that really separates Nitrix from the crowd is the fact that they have their own desktop environment that they call NX desktop, which is essentially a enhanced KDE Plasma desktop. They also ship a lot of applications out of the box that are not like standard KDE versions. Many of them are MAUI kit applications. So it's a really different kind of desktop Linux distribution. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go ahead and we're just going to fire up a live environment here. We're just going to boot directly off the ISO in AVM. So this is the very latest Nitrix. I believe they are on version 1.4 and this is running inside VIRT manager. Now, because we're basically running this essentially kind of like a live USB, there may be some performance issues. Let's hope not though. But when you first log into Nitrix, the first thing you notice is the workflow, the paradigm seems to be quite Mac OS like you've got the top panel, you've got the bottom centered dock. It kind of is reminiscent of the Mac OS 10 workflow. If I click on the start menu, if you will, if we're going to use maybe some window terminology, when you click on the start menu, all your applications are in this one pane. They're not really separated by category or anything. There's not a ton of stuff installed out of the box with Nitrix either. It's certainly, I wouldn't call it a bloated distribution. You have, I don't know, 25, 30 applications here and then they're all just lumped together into this one pane. Now you do have these two buttons at the bottom where you can swap between two different panes. Now, what is this? Well, this allows you to, instead of having everything lumped into one pane here, you actually have a favorites pane here. So for example, you probably want your browser to be listed in the favorites. And for me, I probably want my file manager as well listed in the favorites. I'm going to click add to favorites. And now when I click on this first button and go to this pane, Firefox and index, which is their default file manager are listed. So let me go back into this pane, though, to show you everything that is installed out of the box. The first thing you'll notice is that you do have some of the standard KDE applications here like ARC, the archive manager, KCal, KSysGuard, KadenLive, KVantum. You've got some of that stuff here, but a lot of the stuff here are these kind of weird applications that honestly, I've never actually used any of these. I've never used Booho or Clip or Noda or Picks or Wave. And what are all of these? These are these MauiKit applications. So MauiKit's kind of like a easy way to make cross-platform applications. You can kind of almost think of it kind of like as electron. It's not like electron, but you can kind of think of it as that way where electron is trying to get people the ability to create an application that can work across different operating systems. MauiKit's kind of doing the same thing. And what they're doing is they're creating these applications that should work on multiple devices. So for example, things like Noda and Picks and Wave, they should work here in this customized KDE Plasma desktop. They should also work, in theory, on Android. They should also work on Plasma Mobile. So that's kind of the idea behind MauiKit and these kinds of applications. Let's open up one of these applications. Let's open up Index because this is really strange, right? On KDE Plasma, you just expect Dolphin to always be the file manager on any Plasma distribution. Dolphin, one of the best file managers available. And certainly if you're running Plasma, you would never swap it out for something else. But here we have Index, which is I believe one of these MauiKit applications. If I click on about, this is Index 1.2.1. Index allows you to navigate your computer and preview multimedia files. So it's just your standard file manager, really, not much to see. All file managers are practically the same. They all pretty much do the same thing. If I get into settings, I can display hidden files. I could turn on or off single click. I can preview files. Let's try that. Let's show the hidden files and let's also preview files. So if I clicked on some of this stuff, so you get a, it previews it right here in the file manager. Instead of opening it in the text editor, you actually basically get the, almost like the text editor inside Index here. And then you can quickly go back. Yeah, I kind of like that. And that is actually a pretty cool feature. Looking at some of the other applications, we have Booho, which is a note-taking app. And let's go to the about. And this is Booho 1.2.1. One of the other applications that just jumps out at me is Station, which I believe is our terminal, yeah. And the terminal, let me make it full screen here. And you notice when I full screen applications, we have the top panel here and you get that kind of integrated Mac-like effect where you get the buttons here. It's kind of similar to the old Unity effect. I really like that. So it really saves on space because why do you need the top bar here and then the top title bar to the window as well? You just integrate them into the one top panel. Now the font here in the terminal is really small. Can I zoom in? The standard key bindings for zooming in and out don't appear to be working here in Station, at least in the standard key bindings that would typically work in things like console with a K. I wonder if I can change the font size. I don't know how to change the font size. Right-click, no, no. I'm sure there is a way to do this. Oh, we can actually split the terminal. I like that. I do like that effect. I just need a bigger font. You know what? Regardless of the font, let's check some stuff. H-top is installed. We're using 1.1 gigs of the 4 gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. Now that's a little high, but again, we're running this off a live ISO, right? This is essentially like running it off a live USB stick. So don't take performance into account here. I was just checking to see if H-top was actually installed. Is Vim actually installed? I'm assuming they have a bash RC here, but they don't have Vim installed. So that is a downside. If I run a uname-r, the latest kernel, 5.10.33, so very recent kernel. And being a Debian-based distribution, I could do apt-list-installed and get account of all the packages installed through apt. So let's pipe that through wc-l and get an accurate count of how many packages are installed through the apt package manager. 1,565. I know that font is incredibly small there. I'm actually going to close station and see if they have another terminal. Do they have anything other than station? No, it's the only terminal installed. Well, that is unfortunate. Now you guys did see that there was a little over 1,500 packages installed from your standard Debian repositories through the apt package manager. But many of these applications are actually installed as app images. I'm pretty sure Firefox is an app image. Let's see what version of Firefox they are on. If I go to help and about Firefox, this is Firefox 88.0, so the latest Firefox as well. And an easy way to figure out which packages are app images. Typically, you install app images in a directory called Applications with a capital A. Typically, you'll put that in your user's home directory, but there's not applications directory here in my home directory. But it could also be in the root file system, so I'm going to go to the root file system and look for applications with a capital A. And there you go. Those are the applications that were installed as an app image. We have LMMS, that's the Linux multimedia system. It's a music creation kind of piece of software. Inkscape and GIMP are both installed as an app image. LibreOffice was installed as the app image. KadenLive, Wine, the app image tool, which is a command line utility that allows you to create app images. And then app, I'm not sure what app is. And now that we know which ones are app images, let's open up some of them just to see. Sometimes people complain about these formats like snaps and flatbacks and app images. The applications sometimes don't respect the theming, the GTK theming or the cute theming. And KadenLive, well, I mean, that looks perfect. I mean, there's nothing out of place here in KadenLive. So that looks good. Of course, that is a KDE application. Let's try a GTK application. So let's try the GIMP, and this is GIMP 2.10. Everything seems to look just fine with it as well. So, yeah, I've never had an issue with the theming in these kind of package formats like app image. Yes, sometimes things will be a little out of place as far as, yeah, maybe the theme is not quite right or, you know, there's a few pixels out of place, but if you have this kind of OCD where you're just, you know, one little pixel out of place really bothers you, then you probably should just stick to trying to install as much stuff through the standard app to package manager as possible. For me, it's not an issue. As long as the app runs, I really don't care if there's some minor errors as far as the aesthetics and the theming. Now, looking at the desktop environment itself, this kind of customized enhanced Plasma desktop that they're using, you have this top panel. And if you right click on the top panel, they have a wide variety of layouts here. So you have NX bottom panel two, NX bottom panel, NX top panel two and NX top panel. So NX top panel two is the one that is, it's using out of the box. If I did bottom panel two, let's click on that. I'm assuming the panel will now be, yeah. So we went from that kind of Mac kind of workflow to your traditional, you know, Windows seven, Windows 10 kind of workflow where you have a bottom panel and your start menu, you know, is at the bottom left-hand corner. For me, though, I'm just gonna go ahead and go back to the default. And if we wanted to add stuff to the dock, I'm assuming that it would just be as easy as dragging stuff to the dock. Can I actually drag anything to the dock? That's kind of a neat effect, but I guess you can't actually grab anything and drag it to the dock. You would probably have to open the application and then pin it to the dock. So if I wanted Caden live, which was what I was trying to drag there, open it first and then once it appears, right-click and pin launcher. It's probably what I need to do there. And now, yeah, it's permanently in the dock. Here on the far right, you have your SysTray where, you know, a lot of your applications will be sitting that when they close, they get minimized over here to the SysTray. We have the Discover package manager and Discover is gonna have your standard, you know, apt stuff here, you know, the stuff in the core repositories. Do you want app images with the Nitrix guys? I think our pushing is the app image hub. App image hub, I talked about it on camera before, but it is kind of like snapcraft.io is for snaps. So it's this one place you can go to find all the snaps. App image hub is trying to be something similar for app images. So all the app images that they know about, all the app images that are out there available publicly, they're trying to collect them in this one site. So app image hub is a great place to go find app images. In the top right, we have our clock and a little bit of a strange font. I don't hate it though, but the font for the time is a little strange. I do like the fact that this pop-out for the calendar is actually full screen at least top to bottom. You get your calendar and it says no events for today. So I'm assuming that if you had any kind of like to do stuff or appointments or anything that you've said in your calendar, they would appear here. That's kind of cool. I actually like that. And then that's our status and notifications. And this is audio controls. So this is all your input and output devices. And then finally, that is the clipboard. Let's get into the system settings. One other cool thing is if I go into window management and I go into K-Win scripts, they have Cronkite available here for you. Now Cronkite, people have asked me to take a look at it. It is essentially a tiling plugin for KDE. If I turned it on, you can actually see it in action. So click apply and you notice the window that had focus is now full screen. And now when I open new windows, they should actually tile in a normal kind of tiling format. So let's open up a terminal and that should tile. So it's kind of got the master and stack. I don't know if it's a true master and stack. Let's open up one more thing. I've run out of programs to open here. Let me go over here. Let's open up Arc, the archive manager. Yeah, and it actually is doing a master and stack where you have the one big pane and all the other windows get stacked. So that is kind of cool. And if I wanted to treat this kind of like a tiling window manager, of course I would want to close them with a key binding. Now, unfortunately, I don't think they have something simple like a mod Q or mod C or super shift C, which standard tiling window manager key bindings to close a window. I think you would have to use the kind of like traditional windows key binding, which is Alt F4. I hate common key bindings that include the function keys because if you were doing this as a tiling window manager, you would probably hit that key binding dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day. Alt F4 is such an awkward key binding on some keyboards like my keyboard. I don't have a function keys. My function keys are actually on a separate layer. I can do it. It's just not the most convenient key binding. So there's Alt F4 four times. So I kill all of those windows. Let me get back into system settings, window management, K-win scripts. I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the tiling window manager stuff because it will be a little awkward since I don't have like a proper run launcher setup. Although I think by default in KDE Plasma, Alt F2 gets us K-Runner. So I mean, I could probably get by with Alt F2 launches K-Runner and then knowing Alt F4 closes windows. Once you know those two key bindings, you're probably good with Cronkite as a tiling, tiling window manager, quasi tiling window manager. I'd probably try to change those key bindings to something more appropriate though. The last thing I wanna take a look at is I'm gonna right click on the desktop. I'm gonna configure desktop and wallpaper. Let's see what kind of wallpapers they ship with out of the box. Actually have some really nice wallpapers here. Now I really like that light colored wallpaper against a dark theme, a dark panel theme. Let's try this one here. That is not bad as well. And this one here that they call birds. That is really cool. Somebody just scribbled some birds. So that's not a bad work of art there. Blue hour is. Yeah, I'm really impressed with the wallpaper pack. These are actually some pretty cool wallpapers. I think I've seen this one before. I think this was the default wallpaper in one of the previous versions of Nitrix. Yeah, I really like the colors. Yeah, that really pops there. Anyway, this was just a very quick cursory overview of Nitrix 1.4. I really like what they're doing. Nitrix, because they're doing their own kind of unique spin on the Linux desktop with this customized Plasma desktop with these MaliKit applications and everything, it almost has that elementary OS kind of feel to it. To me, you know, where elementary OS is kind of doing its own thing, its own operating system where you got all your own apps tightly integrated to work together. Nitrix doesn't have quite the spit and polish of elementary OS, but it's really close. We also have to give these guys credit for pushing app images. They're really out there promoting the app image format, and that's not something that any other Linux distribution out there is doing. I don't mind installing snaps and flat packs. I have several of them installed on my system, but I do think app image is vastly underrated. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode, Absi Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Allen, and Kami, Archvictron 30, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Polytech, Scott, Stephensman, Wes, and Willie. These guys, without these guys, this quick look at Nitrix, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I just have you guys, the community, if you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Emacs wasn't installed, it's available as an app image.