 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a rather new Linux distribution that I've never looked at before. This distribution is called Crystal Linux, and looking at their website, this is going to be a pretty neat little distribution. You can see the blurb here. It's an arch-based distribution. It's a brand new, arch-linux-based distribution, friendly, powerful, easy to use. It doesn't tell you much there at the top of the blurb, but you can see Onyx built in. So Onyx is their customized GNOME-based desktop environment. You can see they have automatic backups using TimeShift, so I'm assuming they're going to use ButterFS for their file system, because TimeShift and ButterFS work well together. And then Amethyst. Now, Amethyst is their own AUR helper. So it's similar to something like Yay, or Paru, or Aura. So Amethyst, you can see you can use it at the command line with AME for, I guess that's a shorthand alias for Amethyst. And you can see, they're giving you an example, AME install, neo-vm-yet. So instead of using some of the cryptic Pac-Man flags, like when you do a sudo pac-man-capital-s neo-vm, for example, to install neo-vm, why capital S? Well, capital S for sync and install, but really, most people that use command line package managers, if you're used to using things like apt, and Debian, and Ubuntu, or DNF, and Fedor, and Zipper, and SUSE, and things like that, you're used to just using the command line installer to say command line installer install package, right? So that's kind of cool that they've added these really easy to remember aliases. Now, one other feature about Crystal Linux that they don't mention here on the front page of the site is they have their own custom installer called the Jade installer. And here's a link to their GitLab, if you want to go check out the source code for all of their custom applications, I'm sure under software here, you can find the Jade installer. So that's kind of cool that they're not using Calamaris, like every other hard space distribution, which Calamaris, you know, since I've been building my own ISOs for DTOS and trying to wrap my head around Calamaris, Calamaris is a really strange and unusual beast that you really fight with a lot, you know, trying to build a distribution around Calamaris. So the Crystal Linux guys, they just scrap that whole idea and it makes a lot more sense instead of using a distro agnostic installer like Calamaris, just build your own that's actually designed for your particular distribution. So that's rather neat. So I'm going to click the download button, I'm going to go ahead and grab an ISO and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. All right. And I booted into the ISO, it boots us straight into a desktop environment. There's no login manager or anything like that. So let me click on the desktop. And, you know, before I do anything else here in this live environment, I will change the display resolution. Go ahead and make this a proper 1920 by 1080 resolution, even though it's not going to remember it as it's just for this live environment session here. And welcome to Crystal Linux. Press start to start installing Crystal Linux. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and country of origin. It's already correctly assessed that I'm in the US keyboard. It's set to US normal, which is correct. I could test that, you know, if I wanted to type something. We'll just click next region and zone. It is already correctly guessed, probably based on geolocation that I am in the central time zone in the US because it's chosen America and Chicago, even though not in Chicago, but Chicago at least is in the central time zone here in the US. I'm probably a good 12 hour drive from Chicago, a long way away from actually being in Chicago. And then moving on locale, English US is correct. Additional locales. I don't need to add any additional ones for me. Date and time, date and time is UTC time. I really need UTC. I guess it doesn't matter. Numbers and currencies look all right. It's using dollars, for example, and it's using commas and decimals in the right place. Username. Let me go ahead and create my strong and complicated username and password. It's already set to have the administrator account turned on. So my DT user will also have sudo privileges and you can see enable super user account that's turned on. So we have a root user that we could also switch over to. I'm assuming if I turn this off, we just wouldn't have a root user. All we would have is sudo available for us. I'm going to go ahead and click next and then select our desktop by default. Their onyx desktop, which is their unique GNOME based desktop here. That is the default. So that's what I'm going to go with for purposes of this video. But it's again, it's based on Arch Linux. You know, you could install GNOME, Plasma, XFCE, Sway or I3. They're all in the Arch repos or, you know, you could install one of these and then install some other desktop environments and window managers that aren't even in this list. Right. But I'm just going to go with their default onyx desktop environment. Under miscellaneous, we can set a custom host name. I'm going to call this computer Crystal Dash Vert. In case I ever SSH into it, that's the name, right? The host name, you use it typically for computers on a network. SSHing into different machines. If you give each machine its own unique host name, it's easy to know which machine you're actually logged into. Then timeshift is turned on, ZRAMD. That's a compression, a compressed area of swap in RAM. That's also turned on. So I'm just going to leave the defaults and click next. And then let's partition the drive. We can do manual partitioning or you can just give the entire disk over to Crystal Linux. That's what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine over to Crystal Linux. Just let it do its own automatic partitioning and installation. Then we have a summary screen. So let's double check, make sure locale, timezone, keyboard layout, username, sudo is enabled, roots enabled, desktop environment of choice. The right drive with there's only one drive in this VM. But if you were doing this on physical hardware, make sure you're actually installing to the correct drive. Yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and click next. And let it install this portion of the installation. I'll probably take about five to 10 minutes on my machine. I do like the fact that it's actually going to give us a little embedded terminal here in the installer. That way you can actually see what the installer is doing rather than just a progress bar, what's really didn't tell you much. You know, you can actually watch the terminal commands that it's executing in the background right here in the terminal. I'm going to step away for a few minutes. I'm going to go grab a cup of coffee and I'll be back once the installation has completed and the installation completed. That really didn't take very long at all. Maybe five or six minutes once it got to this portion here. One thing I would say that it's kind of hard to tell when it finishes because, you know, it's just running in the terminal. And then at the end, you get installation finished. You may reboot now. It'd be nice if they had like a pop up dialogue here in this application. You know, I'm assuming it's a GTK application since they're basing everything on GNOME. That would be nice if they had that dialogue pop up that, hey, the installation has finished so it's obvious in case you're not really following along because it's easy for you to get to this point and then not realize, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes after the fact. Oh, yeah, that installer finished a long time ago. So I'm going to go ahead and click next and then reboot and it rebooted just fine and we get our login manager. It looks like they're using GNOME's login manager, GDM. Now let me move my head here. We don't have any kind of cogwheel or settings. I click on my name. Okay, there it is. I click on the cogwheel. I just want to make sure are we running X11 or are we running Waylon because GNOME typically defaults to Waylon these days and they do have GNOME, GNOME on Xorg. So GNOME is just GNOME on Waylon. GNOME on Xorg is the X11 GNOME. Onyx on Xorg is their default. So they're defaulting to Xorg, but we do have an Onyx on Waylon option. I'm assuming I'm just going to use Xorg here in this VM. Although Waylon should also work in a VM on physical hardware, depending on your equipment, your mileage may vary. And it boots us into the desktop environment here. One thing I'll do before I go through their little welcome application is once again, change the display resolution. This should be the last time I need to do it. Now that it's actually installed, it will remember this setting here forever more and hit apply, tell it to keep the changes. And now I'll never have to do that. So let's go ahead and run through their welcome screen. So make your choices. This wizard will take care of everything. So let's start color scheme. Do we want a light theme or a dark theme? I like dark themes. So I'll choose the dark and then package manager. Do we want to enable flat hub? That's the default flat hub beta. That's not the default. So I'll leave that turned off. We could also enable Nix. I'll leave that turned off. I'm just going to go with the defaults here. And then we have to give our sudo password, I guess, to enable flat hub. And then automatic butterfs snapshots. OK, amethyst read more. So there's nothing to do here. This is a slide show, I guess, while it's setting some stuff up. Although if you wanted to, assuming if I clicked on it, probably open a browser maybe and we get to read the Wikipedia page about butterfs. OK, that's interesting. I mean, I guess Wikipedia is as good a resource as any. I'm being an arch based Linux distribution. Kind of would have expected them just to open the arch wiki page on butterfs. It'd probably been a much more appropriate page, but I don't know. And then it says set up finish. So there really wasn't much to set up, right? You just choose. Did you want to enable flat hub or not? And did you want to enable Nix or not? So in the dark mode, of course. So really simple welcome application here and then reboot now. So one more time we have to reboot because we enable flat hub and all of that it needs to reboot after doing that. So all right, and we're back into the onyx desktop environment. So it looks like good know with some extensions such as the dash to panel here. I will say the panel is a little big for me. I wonder I'm assuming if we could get into extensions. Yeah, so and I'm assuming if I hit super, I could have also searched for extensions kind of like you would in, you know, GNOME's search bar, you have dash or whatever they call it in GNOME. And let me go ahead and search through the extension list for dash to panel, which is set to 56, which is kind of big. Let me click on the settings button and actually set to 48, set it to 32. Yeah, it makes it quite a bit smaller. I don't know, of course, I could play with some of the other settings as well. But yeah, I just like a little smaller panel. There's no reason for it to take up so much of the screen at the bottom. If I hit the show apps button here, let's see what is installed out of the box. I will say that that installation was kind of quick. So there's not going to be much here, which there isn't. So they really don't have very many apps at all installed, whether, which I'm assuming is GNOME, whether GNOME clocks, the extensions application, which we were just in a second ago, Firefox is the browser being arch based and rolling release. I'm assuming it'll be the latest Firefox, although I'm not sure if I need to do an update on the system. I don't know if they're Jade installer. Does it fresh update on some of this stuff or not? Let's do a help about Firefox. 116.0.3, and they are installing that as a flat pack back into the show apps menu here. We have our calculator. We have G edit, which is GNOME's plain text editor, system monitor, time shift for backups under the utility subcategory. GNOME, just image viewer, archive manager, document viewer for viewing PDFs. Really not much here. The console, of course, is the GNOME's terminal. Calling it console now, or I don't know if it's a completely new application. Or, yeah, I don't know. The GNOME's naming scheme is a little weird. I'm going to put that down here because I may come back to the terminal a lot. So I just want to make sure I've got that pinned. So let's talk about some of what they were talking about on their website as far as what makes Crystal Linux unique. Well, time shift. So I'm assuming the file system is butter FS. We can actually verify that, by the way. If I open the console, for those of you that are wondering how you would figure out whether a system or file system is, you know, extend for butter FS or whatever it happens to be, there's various ways you can do it. But one command you can use is the DF command and give it dash capital T H. And you get a list of your partitions and you also get a the type. So what file system is on it? You can see butter FS is the main partition there, the home partition. Butter FS is also the root partition. We got some other partitions, some smaller partitions that are also extend for. I'm assuming they're using extend for for the boot and they are. So they're using butter FS. So let's create a snapshot, a snapshot device, not selected. So we have to select a device. Let's run through the wizard and butter FS is already selected. So select the only device that can be selected. Let's schedule it monthly and we'll keep actually, let's schedule it weekly. Monthly is too long. We'll keep three of them and go ahead and click next. And do we want to include the home sub volume in backup? Sure. Why not? I'm not going to keep this VM. So this is just for demonstration purposes and then click finished. And now timeshift is active. It should take our automatic snapshots every week. But it's only going to keep three of them. So if you take a weekly snapshot for the next year, you're going to have 52 snapshots, which is taking up a lot of space on your drive. Now just delete all of them except the last three. The other big thing they touted on their website was their Amethyst package manager. So that was kind of a Pac-Man wrapper and also a UR helper. So if I did AME dash capital S, lowercase y, U, let's see if it knows that command. You know, it's essentially Pac-Man, S-Y-U. So you could just use it in place of Pac-Man. And you can see everything is up to date. So it already updated the system, I guess, during our installation. So that's nicer. It may have done it during the welcome screen when we rebooted after the installation. Let me do a AME install instead of dash S. You know, use the install alias for dash capital S. I'm going to install something I know does not exist in the standard arch repositories. It's only in the UR. And that is shell dash color dash scripts, my shell color scripts package. I have that over in the UR and it is smart enough to actually find it. And it's downloading and extracting the files, select a package. I guess I didn't select it. I'm not sure how to have selected it. It was only one package, but just hitting enter a couple of times. Got me to this. All right, and now that I got shell color scripts installed, let's see if it actually works. So let's do this command color script is the name of the binary and give it this option random. So let's get a random color script. I'll up arrow. We get another random color script, another one and another one. And if I wanted to be super cool, I could VIM into our dot bash RC, the bash config file. And I'm assuming they're using bash as the default shell. It could be wrong. But if they are using bash, I'm going to add this command color script random, exactly what I entered in the terminal a minute ago. Now, just having that in the bash config. Now, every time I open a terminal that runs the bash cell, see, I get the color script. That one was a little too big. I need the terminal to open full screen for some of them to look right. No, that one's a pretty big one. I could set actually a default size for the terminal if this is the GNOME terminal or console as they're calling it. Let's go into, I say I could do some settings. I'm not sure where the settings for this thing are. Keyboard shortcuts. And that's the shortcuts. I not have any options for like the default size for the terminal window. Yeah, I don't know about that terminal because the GNOME terminal, at least the GNOME terminal I'm familiar with, had a lot more options for settings. Let me open the terminal one more time. One thing we should check with the MS, this package manager is let's do a AME install something that I know is only available as a flat pack or at least it's available in other package formats. But I know Discord is that in the main arch repositories. I don't think it is. So let's see. We try to install it here. What it actually will try to install it as packages discord. So discord is in the main repository. So I'll click no on that. What is something that wouldn't be in the main arch repositories? Spotify, maybe? Yeah, we get something a little different, right? Like the coloring. We get an icon this time. So I think this is going to pull down Spotify from the AUR. OK. I wonder if AME probably it probably doesn't work with Flatback. My guess, I wonder if their graphical package manager, their GUI package manager works with Flatback. I'm going to decline taking that install of Spotify. Let's open the graphical package manager. You get out of the terminal here. Oh, updates. There's just one update. I'll decline taking that. Let's go ahead and explore. Let's do the search button and let's search for Spotify. I actually have never used Spotify. I don't know anything about it, but I do know Spotify. It's probably not in the main arch repositories. It's not. They have it from FlatHub. If I click install, let's just go ahead and make sure one of the Flatbacks installs correctly, but let's just try one. Looks like it's installing just fine. And it looked like it finished the installation. And then it's loading app details. I don't know what's going on there. Oh, but now we could open Spotify. So click the open button just to make sure the application runs. And is it running? Where did it go? It looked like it tried to open the window. Then it went away. Hmm. Again, I don't know anything about Spotify. That could be normal behavior for the application. I don't know. I don't think that's normal behavior for it, though. I think I think that's kind of broken. Let me open up another terminal. Let's do flat pack list. Spotify is installed. I do flat pack run com dot Spotify. If I can type dot client. Looks like some GTK era failed to load and bear a GTK module. I don't know. Could be a problem with the flat pack. Yeah, the actual flat pack on Flat Hub. I don't know. I've got some quick launchers down here. Of course, I added the console. The only other quick launchers they have is the calendar. It's kind of odd to have a calendar as a quick launcher. How many people actually use a calendar on their computer? The ones that do, how many of them use it often enough and you need a quick launcher for it? Can you just click over here or something and get a quick calendar? I don't know. That's just strange. Of all the things they have a quick launcher for, we do have files, the file manager. Now that makes sense. Let's see what file manager are they using? Is this GNOME's file manager? Of course, this is the old Nautilus file manager. And then we have our software center, which I've already opened here. And there's really not much else to look at. What makes this distribution unique, of course, was the Jade installer, which I loved. I liked their Amethyst package manager, the wrapper around Pac-Man and the AUR helper that's built into it. And really, their unique GNOME desktop environment onyx here is rather nice as well. Not a lot of programs installed, so really not much to look at there. One thing, one last thing I should check. Let's go ahead and change backgrounds. Let's see if they have any unique wallpapers installed. Looks like it's just a lot of abstract art. I don't know if these are default GNOME wallpapers or if this is something they created themselves. Either way, I like the wallpaper pack. There's some really nice stuff in here. As I'm using a dark theme, a light wallpaper like this one. Probably look really good. Here's some light wallpapers as well. Yeah, I mean, I could go with something like that. So this has just been a quick and cursory first look at Crystal Linux. I love it, right? But for a brand new Linux distribution, they've got a lot going on here. Their own installer, that Jade installer, was fantastic. I really liked that. Their desktop environment, their own custom version of GNOME that they call onyx with the extensions to make it look kind of like Windows. I like that too. Really everything about it. There's a lot to look forward to in the future. So with Crystal Linux, I think I'm gonna keep up to date with it as far as, you know, as they go forward, as they especially improve on the installer and on their onyx desktop environment. I may take a look at future releases. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Daniel Gabe James, Matt Paul, Roy West, Armor Dragon commander, Ingrid George Lee, Methos, Nate Arion, Paul, Pete Sartre, and Fedora Riala, Teets for Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solzastri, Tools Devler, Wardgento, and Ubuntu, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons. Over on Patreon, without these guys. This quick look at Crystal Linux would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these dangers seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Crystal Linux, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys.