 Ubuntu has for a long time been one of the most popular, if not the most popular, Linux distributions on the desktop. But the problem with Ubuntu for some people is that Ubuntu is a stable distribution, a long-term support distribution, right? It's one of those distributions that you install it and you run it for two years, four years, five years, and you just set it and forget it and you don't really get updates, right? You get a few security updates, but for the most part, you install the system and it's rock solid stable, nothing ever really changes. And that's great for some people, but some people prefer to have a more rolling release model distribution. Well, you're in luck because now we have this Ubuntu spin here called Rhino Linux. It's a Ubuntu-based rolling release, you can see right here in the blurb, community maintained and open source. And they just released their very first ISO a couple of days ago. So I've downloaded their ISO and I'm going to take this for a spin. It looks like it's going to be really nice. You can see it's just a gorgeous desktop and gorgeous theming and wallpaper. It uses the XFCE desktop environment and it uses the Pekstall package manager script as you can think of Pekstall. It's basically like a AUR for Debian and Ubuntu-based distros. And scrolling here about halfway down the page, you can see some of the stuff that they're promoting here is their own little setup wizard, which I might cover then your system, some system settings stuff. And then Rhino package, so Rhino-PKG, which I'm assuming is like a wrapper around apt or maybe around Pekstall. It looks like this will be their flagship package management wrapper. Makes life easy, allows you to install and remove and update applications across all package managers. Okay, so that should probably cover both apt and Pekstall. And maybe Snap as well, I'm not sure. Then we have a Rhino drop program and this is allowing you to effortlessly send files across devices connected to your local network. I may not play with that since I won't actually be connected to other devices in a virtual machine. I'm going to take a look at this inside of VM. So I'm going to download the ISO and I'm going to spin up a quick virtual machine invert manager. I created the VM. Now, because this is their very first ISO, they didn't mention that it was alpha or beta. So it's a finished product. This is like a 1.0 release, right? So, but still, who knows, there could be bugs in this. But I did like that really fancy Rhino splash screen that looked very nice. And it boots us directly into a live environment. And what's really cool about the way it did this live environment here in this virtual machine is it automatically assigned a resolution of 1920 by 1080, right? Because so many times I have to manually change that myself. But this, it just detected that I was in a VM. So it knew, you know, VMs typically set a really small resolution. It just, it automatically did the 1920 by 1080 thing for me. So that's kind of cool. I do love this customized XFCE desktop environment. It's interesting that they have the dock on the side. I'm assuming that's plank. If I hit control and right click on the mouse, go to about plank 0.11.89. But I mean, if you had the panel at the top, why couldn't you just put these quick launchers in the panel? Or you're not going to do that when I just get rid of the panel all together and just use plank? Because I think you could even have like assist tray applets and things. And it's just kind of strange to have two different panels where really they could almost be combined into one. But you know, a lot of this is probably just for aesthetics. It's just to look good, not necessarily because, you know, functionality wise, it's the best. For me, it would bother me having two docks or two panels where really one would do the job. But that's just me personally. That's just my preferences. But let me go ahead and click the install Rhino Linux icon here. Let's see what installer pops up. This is the Calamari's installer. So that's interesting. So they're not using the ubiquity installer that Ubuntu has used in the past. And then they're also not using that new Flutter-based installer that Ubuntu has recently switched to. So they're using Calamari's. So on the welcome screen, we need to set our language as far as the language for this installer. It's American English as the default. That's fine for me. So I'm just going to click next. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm just going to click next. As far as the keyboard layout, English US is what I need. And then a race disk or manual partition. So this is your partition scheme. If you're only installing Rhino Linux by itself on a drive, then a race disk, just give the whole drive to Rhino Linux. If you need to, you can manually partition the drive. Now, do you want to do a swap to file or no swap? That's interesting. So they don't have an option for a swap partition. But honestly, these days, I think most people probably prefer just using a swap file, which is what I'm going to select there. Do I want to encrypt the system? I'm not going to bother with encryption for this VM. But if you wanted to, you could tick that on. Now I'm just going to click next. Now let's go ahead and create our user name. So my user is going to be DT. Let's create the host name for this computer. I'll call it Rhino-vert. And then let's create a super secure, strong, and complicated password for this VM. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then log in automatically without asking for a password. It's ticked off by default, so I will have to enter a password to get into this computer, which is exactly what you want. It's very important for privacy reasons not to have your computer ever just automatically log you in. So I'm going to click next. And we get our summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. Partition scheme looks good. I'm just going to go ahead and click the install button. It's going to warn me it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click install. And away we go. This portion of the installation on my machine typically takes about five to 10 minutes. I'm going to step away, grab myself a cup of coffee. I'll be back once the installation has completed. The installation has completed. That took just a few minutes now to complete the installation when you're running through a Calamari installer. You always want to make sure that this checkbox is ticked on. It's ticked on by default here. Restart now. And then click done. And it should automatically reboot the machine for you. All right. And it booted up very fast. It got us to this login manager. This looks like it's using LightDM for a login manager. So let me enter my super secure password. And we get a welcome screen that appears here in the bottom right corner. Let me drag that to the center of the screen here. And let's go ahead and run through the, I guess, the little welcome screen here where, yeah, we can pick. Do we want a light theme or a dark theme? I prefer dark themes, which is the default. So I'm going to click next. Here is the package manager. So do we want these package manager package formats enabled? They have Flatpak already enabled. They don't have snaps enabled. I'm going to go ahead and enable that. And they don't have app images enabled. I'm going to go ahead and enable all three, because why not? And then extra settings. So Nala, this is an alternative to the app package manager, is basically a reskin of the app package manager that's already set up for us. We also have GitHub CLI, which I don't use GitHub, so I won't need that. AppPort, which is the crash manager, you know, when you get your little crash dialogue boxes that appear in some Ubuntu-based distributions, that's AppPort. That's turned off by default. I'll leave that turned off. I'm going to click next. And then we need to give our sudo password and authenticate. And it looks like it's going to go ahead and install those programs that we did tell it to install. So it's going to install SNAP and app image dependencies. And then it finished that. And then it needs a sudo password once again. And then it says Reboot. Now, of course, you need to reboot, especially once you enable Flatpak, SNAP, app images for the first time. That's a good idea to reboot the machine just to make sure you can actually then install Flatpaks and SNAPs. So let's reboot. So I logged back in after the reboot. And the welcome screen that we had the first time doesn't appear again. So that's a nice touch. And once again, it automatically gave us the 1920 by 1080 screen resolution that I would have wanted anyway. So that is really cool. As far as the panel, it's interesting that they got the clock, the date, and time on the left-hand side of the panel rather than the right. I'm sure you can change that if you wanted. You also have the logout button. It is logout of the unicorn desktop. So I guess they're calling their customized XFCE desktop. They're calling it the unicorn desktop. That's interesting. If I hit the logout button, you just get the standard little dialogue window where you can select reboot or shutdown or whatever it is you're trying to do. And of course, you got your system tray over here as well. There is no menu system at all in the XFCE panel because they are using, I guess they're using the U Launcher, which I'm assuming that's U Launcher because it has a U. So this is a standard run launcher that's available on Linux, the U Launcher. So if I was looking for Firefox, for example, you see, I could just type a few letters like FIR. However many letters it takes for Firefox to appear in that search, right? And then you just hit Enter. So you really don't even have to type that many letters. If I just hit F, for example, File Manager and Firefox. F-I, same thing, FIR. That's as far as I'd have to go. I just hit Enter at that point. So those of you that are familiar with things like D-Menu or Rofi for run launchers, U Launcher would be just fine. By the way, since I opened Firefox, what version are we on here? So this is Firefox 116.0.1. Now one thing I've got to say, if you're gonna have the run launcher, U Launcher here, as the primary way to actually search for your programs, which I don't mind, I need to know the key binding for it. So I go into the little settings for this. Maybe it will tell me Super S. That's kind of a weird key binding. Super S for a run launcher. Most run launchers are gonna do something like Super P for prompt or Super R for run prompt. The things I love to use from a lot of my Tiling Window Manager days is Super Shift Enter. That's just something that I've been using for 15 years or whatever. So I'm gonna change this to something a little easier to hit because Super and S are so close on the keyboard, I want something that's on two different hands. Super P, for example, makes a lot more sense. So let's do Super P. Oh, Super P is already set to something. That's not good. Yeah, Super P is already how to launch the display program. What about Super R? Super R is already set to the XFCE run launcher. So Super Shift Enter. Super Shift Enter does work. There we go. All right, then that was a little strange because I had the Enter key as part of the key binding, but I think I got it now. Super Shift Enter, now, yeah, now I can enter whatever, so it's just the file manager, well, that's the file manager settings. But that's how I would probably do that from now on. You also do have a menu system like a standard traditional kind of menu system. They're using the application grid, which is kind of like your overview and something like GNOME or KDE Plasma also has a very similar kind of layout. XFCE follows the same kind of grid format as well, where it just gives you these big, gigantic icons in front of you and takes up the full screen, which is fine. Of course, you do have search capabilities in this as well. But let's see what is installed out of the box. It looks like it is very XFCE-focused, right? It's a lot of the XFCE programs. For example, we have the file manager, which I'm gonna assume is Thunar, it is. This is Thunar 4.18.6. Really cool file manager, I don't mind Thunar. As far as the icons in the dock, we had Firefox and Thunar. We also had VS Codeium for our, I guess, text editor. So I guess this may be a distribution geared primarily toward developers, which if that's the case, that's cool. VS Codeium is essentially a frame open source VS code with all the Microsoft telemetry bits stripped out of it. Let's go to about VS Codeium. This is version 1.80.1. Then we have our terminal emulator, which is the XFCE terminal, which we should actually do some things in the terminal now that I've got it open. Let's zoom in a little bit. First things first, let's do a unnamed dash or the kernel version is 6.4. So that is a very recent kernel. Remember, rolling release. Another thing they mentioned is they were using a package manager. It's really a wrapper around several different package managers, depending on, I guess, what we have enabled. Rhino-PKG, so Rhino package. Let's do an update. Are you sure you wanna update all packages? Sure, why not? I don't know how many packages need an update. This ISO just came out just like two days ago. Doesn't look like there's many updates. So sure, let's take it. And it looks like it is using the Nala package manager. The Nala package manager is a front end to apt that kind of has this DNF style output, right? It's kinda cool, right? It looks really good, I've gotta say. And then packstall, I guess they had some, essentially packstall packages are almost like AUR package build type packages, they're community packages. That is interesting as well. I wonder what are all the commands with Rhino package? I just took a guess on the update command but I really have no idea how to use it. If I did Rhino package without any arguments, would it give me any help information? Well, it did, but it spit out a lot of help information. Maybe I should have just opened it as the man page. So Rhino-PKG install, so kinda like apt install, apt remove, Rhino package remove, Rhino package search. Yeah, so it's a lot of the apt commands that you already know, so there's nothing really new to learn there. I wonder if the Rhino package command can install things from packstall. It looks like it can, and snaps and flat packs because I have them enabled as well. So let's actually try to install something from the packstall repositories. So if I did, if I spilled correctly, Rhino-PKG, and then I'm assuming install, and then how about dmenu-distro-tube because I have a AUR package build for dmenu-distro-tube, which I use for the DTOS Cort repo. Well, the packstall guys took some of my personal suckless configs, and they've actually got those things as package builds in packstall. I've never actually tried to install them and use them on any Debian or Ubuntu-based systems, but let's see if this works. It's searching packstall, and it found the packstall-dmenu-distro-tube package. So let's go ahead and hit Enter. I had to specify a number. I thought I could just hit Enter since there was only one program available, but I have to specify a zero in the list, right? Are you sure you want to install it? Yes. Do I want to view and edit the pack script? Sure. What do I want to use as the editor of Vim is available? Well, Vim.tiny is available, so I'll choose two. I could take a look at the package script, right? The package build basically, everything looks good. Then I could just hit, I'm assuming, colon-q to get out of that. Do I really want to install this after reading the package build? Yes. And it looks like that installation failed because it says, could not build dmenu-distro-tube properly. That's interesting. I wonder what the problem was, says, that it was trying to download the source code from the GitLab, my GitLab, my dmenu-distro-tube repository there. It was able to download the source code. It should have just been able to run a sudo make install, right? It's not a complicated program to compile. So there are some dependencies, which I'm assuming these dependencies, actually on Ubuntu-based systems, these dependencies are not installed by default, but it says it requires those to install. Do you want to remove them after installing? See, it removes these dependencies after installing, but if they're dependencies, they actually need to be kept on the system. So I'm actually going to rerun through this installation. And once again, choose zero. And then do you want to install it from packstall? Yes. Do you want to view and edit the pack script? I'll decline that this time. And then do you want to remove those dependencies after installing dmenu-distro-tube? No, is the default. And then it still didn't build properly, but at least it found the package over on packstall. It's just that package is broken. It's very similar to the ArchAUR, how some packages on the AUR, for whatever reason, don't build correctly. Again, it's a community repo. Anybody can put anything there. And in this case, it looks like that particular package build is not formatted correctly. I can tell you, as somebody that was a long time a Ubuntu user for many, many years, I know a lot of the suckless programs do have dependencies that are not installed by default on Ubuntu. It looks like it knew about these two, but I bet there's probably another dependency, or maybe more than one dependency, that dmenu requires that for whatever reason is not specified in the script. Because I didn't write the package build for packstall. I wrote the package build for Arch, which some of these dependencies are different on Ubuntu versus Arch. But it does look like Rhino package install does search various repositories. If I did Rhino package install discord, for example, probably gonna find the flat pack and the snap, and there is a packstall entry as well. There's also some apt packages, not for discord itself. These are like dependencies or potential dependencies for discord, but the actual discord program could be installed as a packstall program or a snap. I don't see the flat pack. I thought discord had a flat pack as well, but I'm gonna decline installing any of those. So I'm just gonna hit control C to cancel that. So that is very cool. I really like the Rhino package wrapper that they have going on with so many different package managers that really simplifies that. And it's something that most distributions these days are trying to make it a lot easier to use all these various package formats like snaps and flatbacks and app images and whatever it happens to be. AUR packages on Arch or packstall packages here on Ubuntu slash Debian. But the problem is most of those attempts are usually kinda clunky, they're buggy as hell, but actually just in a few minutes of testing this, this works pretty nicely. We have the desktop switcher here. Not sure what that is. Oh, we get this whole sidebar, almost like GNOME, right? That is interesting. Even though this is, again, based on XFCE, now they did mention their settings manager on their website that they were proud of that. Is that your system? Let's see if this is it. Yeah, so this just gives us a little overview of our system, board, chip, memory, a system upgrade. Let's do that. Ah, so if I just hit my sudo password here, it basically runs that Rhino PKG update right here in this little window. But it's not as scary because it's not quite a terminal window, right? But it is kind of a terminal inside like a GTK application. But I guess for new users, it could be a little less scary. Although it is actually finding more updates. When I did the Rhino PKG update, I did not get a new kernel version, but when I hit the button here, it's actually giving me a new kernel. That's interesting. I wonder if I did not do the update command properly. Kind of like you have apt update and you have apt upgrade. So apt update kind of refreshes the repositories, the mirrors, and then the actual command is apt upgrade to then upgrade to those new packages. I wonder if I didn't enter the correct Rhino PKG command and the update has finished. That was very quick. Let's exit the application. One last thing I wanna do before I leave this is right click on the desktop, go to desktop settings. Let's see if they have any cool wallpapers to look at other than this really, I love this wallpaper, the Rhino wallpaper, love of the colors. It's kind of cool, kind of abstract, but not terribly busy. I don't like anything super busy for these abstract or wallpapers, but they have some other options here. That's a really cool Rhino picture as well. And we'll just cycle through some of these. That one's okay. Yeah, and that one's quite nice. It's very nice. Especially, it's kind of dark. That'd probably be good against a light theme. This one here would definitely be good against a white or a light color panel, like a silver or gray panel. So if you're one of those people that prefer light things, you probably want a dark wallpaper. If you're like me, you prefer dark themes, then you probably want a light colored wallpaper such as some of the default XFCE wallpapers, such as the blue with the mouse, you know. But for me, I'm just gonna stick with the default. I think the default is definitely the best of the bunch. So that's just a very quick and cursory look at the very first ISO published by the new Rhino Linux. And I'm quite excited about this particular distribution. I think it will attract a lot of users because a lot of users want Ubuntu, but they also want rolling release. And a lot of users want to be able to install from multiple different package repositories in package formats, but they want that to be like a unified experience that makes sense. And that Rhino PKG tool is probably the best tool I've seen that actually accomplishes what it set out to do as far as being able to actually install things as snaps, flat packs, and app images, or pack stall packages, whatever it happens to be. So that in itself, I think, is going to make this a very popular Linux distribution. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Matt, Paul Royal West, Armor Dragon, Commander Ingrid, George Lee, Mythos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realiteats for less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastrian, Tools, Devler, Wargentu, and Ubuntu, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons. Over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Rhino Linux, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is 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. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.