 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the most recent release of Gecko Linux. Gecko Linux is based on OpenSusa and OpenSusa has two main branches. They have a static release branch called Leap and they have a rolling release branch called Tumbleweed. And Gecko Linux, being based on OpenSusa, also has those two branches, the Leap branch and the Tumbleweed branch. Today, I'm going to be taking a look at Gecko Linux, Tumbleweed, the rolling branch, with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Gecko Linux offers about a half dozen different desktop environments for their ISOs, but it seems like Cinnamon is their flagship desktop environment. So that's the one I'm going to take a look at today. So before I get to install this inside a virtual machine, I'm going to take a quick look at the release announcement. So the initial release announcement that I found was when this was released about a week ago on distrowwatch.com, you see the release of Gecko Linux 153.2204.0. Now that is the Leap version of Gecko Linux. That's a horrible version number. Who the hell is going to remember such an incredibly long version number? That they really should correct that the Tumbleweed version is just as bad. It's version 999.2205.0. Anyway, Gecko Linux is a member of the OpenSusa family of distributions. It has a special focus on making the operating system desktop ready out of the box. They focus on spit and polish, trying to make this a professional operating system. The release announcement for Gecko Linux rolling, which is 999.2205.0. It looks like they've made some improvements to the Calamari installer. They've made a pipe wire, the default. It looks like they've done some stuff with ButterFS. They've done some stuff with Grubb. They specifically mentioned that Grubb in previous versions was having problems with dual booting. That's a problem just on Linux in general with the Grubb bootloader. I will say just a pro tip from a longtime Linux user. If you're going to dual boot, I don't like dual booting. But if I'm going to dual boot, I'm going to make sure that every operating system that I install on my machines is installed to its own disk. That solves a lot of problems when you start partitioning a single drive into multiple partitions for multiple operating systems. That's typically where you run into problems. And you can see that Gecko Linux rolling has a variety of different desktop additions. I'm going to take a look at the sentiment addition, but they also have Plasma, Ganon, Monte, XFCE, Budgie, LXQ and Pantheon. And that's the Pantheon from the current version of elementary OS 6.1. In the release announcement, they mentioned how Gecko Linux was built. It was built using unmodified OpenSusa, Tumbleweed and Pacman packages. And that's Pacman with a K, P-A-C-K man Pacman. And Pacman is an extra, like a third party repository for OpenSusa. And that's going to contain, I think it contains a lot of multimedia codecs, you know, those third party packages that you need a mostly proprietary packages for a proper desktop experience. So let me switch over to the VM that I've spun up here. And let's go ahead and boot into Gecko Linux rolling sentiment. All right. And we get a warning about check your video drivers. There's nothing wrong with the video drivers of the VM. This is a sentiment. The sentiment desktop just it never likes being run inside a VM. I'm going to go to the menu system before I run the installer. And I'm going to search for display. And let's go ahead and change the screen resolution, make it a little bigger. I'll do 1920 by 1080 for screen resolution. And then once I have that set, I'm going to go ahead and install the system. And the Calamari installer launches. You get a welcome screen on the welcome screen. You can change your language if you need to. By default, it's set to American English, which is correct for me. So I'll just click next location. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I don't need to change that. So I'll click next for keyboard. English US is the correct keyboard for me. So I will just click next and then the partition scheme. I'm going to erase the disk and give Gecko Linux the entire disk, the entire virtual hard drive I created in this virtual machine. If you're need to, you can manually partition. That's very important. If you want a dual boot, you need to manually partition a drive. But for me, there's only going to be one operating system on this. It's going to be Gecko Linux. I'm just going to give it the entire disk. And we have an option swap to file or swap with hibernate swap, no hibernate or no swap. Now, typically in a VM, I don't really need a swap, but I'll do swap to file since it's the default. Also, we have an option for our file system. We have butterfs. That's the default. So I would probably go with that unless you have a need to change to something else. But you do have the options of XFS, F2FS and extend for. I'm going to go with the defaults. And I'm just going to click next. Now we need to create our username and password. My username, I'm going to call my user DT. And now we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And now do we want to log in automatically without asking for a password? No, that's dangerous for privacy reasons. You want to have to enter your super secure password to get into your computer. Otherwise, again, for privacy reasons, you know, anybody could just get into your machine and steal your information. Do you want to use the same password for the administrator account? That's ticked on by default. I will leave that ticked on by default. So what this will do is my DT password will also be the sudo password. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. Then I'm going to click next and then we get a summary screen. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. So I'm going to go ahead and click the install button. It's going to warn me. Hey, it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. Do you really want to do this? Yes, I do install. Now, and then the installation begins. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my hardware. And the installer has completed. That was a very fast installation under five minutes, probably. Now in the Calamaris installer to complete the installation, what you want to do, click on restart now and then click done. And then if you're doing this on physical hardware, unplug the USB stick from the computer that you were installing it from. And let me go ahead and get the VM rebooted here. And we have our screen here. And let's see if we log into a newly installed Gecko Linux sentiment. And we come to our login manager. This looks like it's the light DM login manager. So let's enter our super secure password. And once again, we log into sentiment. It complains about the video driver. We'll ignore that for now. Once again, I will go into the display program and set the 1920 by 1080 screen resolution and then tell it to keep this configuration. It should remember this from now on. The reason it didn't remember it before is because we weren't actually doing this in an installed version of Gecko Linux. We were running it in a live environment off the ISO. Now that this is properly installed, this VM will forever remember every time we log into sentiment that we want 1920 by 1080 for screen resolution. So let's take a look at what is installed out of the box here on the tumbleweed version with the sentiment desktop environment. I've got to say my initial impression of their sentiment desktop environment. It looks very old for sentiment, right? It's got a kind of a retro kind of look with the weird, like it's a dark theme for the panel and the menu, but it has a white border with rounded corners and it just, I don't know, it's got kind of a dated kind of look to it. But let's go ahead and take a look at the packages that are installed out of the box. So under the accessories category, we have our archive manager. So this is for zip, unzip and tar GZ and things like that. You know, all of your compressed archived formats. This is the standard archive manager for the GNOME desktop environment. This is archive manager 3.40.0 and sentiment being a GTK desktop does use a lot of the standard GNOME utilities. Let's get back into accessories. We also have calculator, which is one of my favorite calculators available on Linux. Now on Linux, we have like a hundred different calculators, but calculator is pretty good. It's a GTK based calculator, which is why they're installing it. But it's very simple to go from basic mode to scientific mode. It's got all the functions that you expect to be there in a scientific calculator. And it's just a neat little, little program. Like we've got that calculator problem solved on Linux. I know a couple of years ago, Microsoft released the Windows calculator. They open source the Microsoft Windows calculator. And people are like, man, the Windows calculator looks so good. When are we going to get this on Linux? We don't need that calculator. We have a million really good calculators on Linux. Microsoft can keep their calculator. Also under accessories, we have the mate search tool. We have Parcelite. That is a lightweight GTK based clipboard manager. If I launch it, nothing happens. What you have is a clipboard manager down here in the SysTrail. If I click on it, we can edit the clipboard or we can clear the clipboard. There's going to be nothing in the clipboard because I haven't done anything yet. Back to the accessories category. We have our screenshot utility. We have our text editor. Let's see what plain text editor they're using here in the sentiment desktop environment if I go to help and to about. This is Zed. Zed. That's XED. Zed is a fork of G edit. So when they created the sentiment desktop environment, the folks over at Linux Mint, they created the sentiment desktop environment and they were trying to create their own suite of applications. Many of them are forked from older versions of the GNOME suite of applications. And Zed is G edit, essentially. A matter of fact, Zed, if you install G edit plugins, Zed can actually take those plugins just fine. Also under accessories, we have our virtual keyboard. So this is going to be your on-screen keyboard for those that need an on-screen keyboard for accessibility reasons. So let me get rid of the on-screen keyboard. I believe the keyboard logo here. Yeah, we'll make that go away. Let's get back into the menu system under graphics. We have a document scanner for those of you that still need to scan documents. I actually do have a printer that is a printer scanner all in one. But I can't remember the last time I scanned a document, but I do know some people do have the need for it. And so I don't mind them including that out of the box. We have the document viewer, which is our essentially it's going to be the PDF viewer. I'm not exactly sure which one that is. It looked like the standard GNOME application for viewing PDFs. Then we have our drawing application. I believe, let me see what this is. Is this the first time you're using drawing zero dot eight? I'm going to say no, but I really don't know anything about this program other than drawing is a standard GNOME application. You can see it's a drawing application for the GNOME desktop. And, you know, it's got some simple drawing tools. Also under graphics, we have our image viewer. We have LibreOfficeDraw and we have PIX, which is a photo organizer, photo manager. Under internet, we have Firefox. Firefox is usually the default web browser on most Linux distributions being that Firefox is free and open source software. And it's always been like a champion of free and open source software. If I go to about Firefox, you can see this is Firefox 95.0.2. So a very recent version of this web browser. Let me close that out. Also under internet, we have Mozilla Thunderbird for their desktop email client. We have Pigeon, which is an instant messaging client. And we have Transmission, which is the standard BitTorrent client for the GNOME desktop environment. Under Office, we have the document viewer, the PDF viewer, once again. And then we have the LibreOffice suite. We have Calc, Draw, Impress, and Rider. Calc is the spreadsheet program. Impress is your presentation program. And of course, Rider is going to be the word processing program. Let me open up LibreOfficeCalc. And let's take a look at what version of LibreOffice we were on. Let's close out the tips and go to help about LibreOffice. And this is LibreOffice version 7.2.5.1. May close that out. Under the sound and video category, we have Clementine for our default audio player. Clementine is a fantastic audio player. It is cute based, though, which is kind of weird. And I don't think Clementine sees much active development these days, because you don't see a lot of people ship Clementine anymore. It used to be a very common program that was shipped by default on many Linux distributions. If I go to about Clementine, this is version 1.4 or C2. It's kind of strange that they ship with a cute based audio player rather than a GTK based audio player, because Rhythmbox, the standard GNOME audio player, Rhythmbox is fantastic. I don't know why you wouldn't just ship with that. We have the pulse audio volume control. And then we also have VLC for our video player, essentially, although VLC can play audio too. And let's see what version of VLC we're on. We're on 3.0.16. That is codenamed veterinary. And let me close out VLC there under the administration category. We have our network configuration. We have the decomp editor. We have GNOME disk. We have files. Now that's going to be the file manager, of course, for the Cinnamon desktop environment, the default file manager is typically Nemo. And that's what they're using here. Nemo 5.2.0. Nemo is an older fork of the Nautilus file manager in one of the GNOME applications. Because remember, the Cinnamon suite of applications, most of these programs were forks of the older GNOME applications, because Cinnamon really came to be when GNOME switched from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and everybody hated GNOME 3. And then Cinnamon decided basically to fork GNOME, essentially under the administration category. We also have G-Parted, which is a partition editor. Now, this is something you would typically run when you are installing a Linux distribution. After a Linux distribution is installed, you probably don't want to play with G-Parted. It's an application that many Linux distributions actually ship with by default on their live ISOs to help you in case you want to use G-Parted to actually partition your disk, you know, during the installation process. But most of them, when the distribution is actually finished installing, they remove G-Parted because it can't be dangerous. It's not something you want to play with unless you really know what you're doing. Under administration, we have an HP device manager for your HP printers. We have a language installer. We have the SUSE Studio Image Writer, and that is for writing your ISOs to your USB sticks. And then also under administration, we have a ton of YAST tools. So let's actually launch YAST, because this is one of the defining features of OpenSUSA and of course, Gecko Linux being based on OpenSUSA. Now, YAST has been a part of OpenSUSA for more than two decades. It's kind of, again, it's like a defining feature of it. It is basically it was the way you installed OpenSUSA. It's the way you configured OpenSUSA. Let me pull up a web page about the YAST tool from the OpenSUSA website. So this is at YAST.OpenSUSA.org. And you can see the headline here, Linux's predominant tool since 1996. You see, he asked, as an installer, it offers acute based graphical interface and terminal based interface that is perfect for remote administration. You can tweak all of your hardware. So it's like your control center or your control center and windows, for example, or many Linux distributions have a system settings manager like GNOME. You have the settings manager that pops up and you can change everything. You know, YAST was doing that 25 years ago. And then you have installation stuff. Auto YAST enables you to export system configuration settings and then installed them on thousands of systems automatically. So you're talking about reproducible builds there with YAST. So it's kind of a jack of all trades, right? It's like it's almost Emacs like in its quality and the fact that it can do a whole bunch of stuff. So in the YAST control center, you see, you have software management, you have software repositories. Let me click on the software repositories to see what is enabled. So we have some of the standard SUSA repositories, the tumbleweed repositories, but we do have some third party repositories that Pac-Man repository there. That is a third party repository. That's not an official repository. We have the Google Chrome repository. Of course, that's going to be to get the Chrome browser is still the most popular browser on the planet's proprietary software. So it's got its repository. We also have an NVIDIA repository because NVIDIA, the driver's proprietary software. And we have a Skype repository because Skype, of course, is also a proprietary software. So let me get out of that. And we have a hardware section where we can play with the bootloader, date and time, language settings, network settings, partitioning, etc. Most of this stuff is not stuff that you would ever really get into. Maybe you would get into security and users because there are firewall settings, some security settings that you can set. You can configure sudo if it's not already configured on your system. And of course, you have user and group management. And this is where you can add and remove users to the system. For me, I normally don't have to do that because on all of my computers, they are single user systems. I'm the only one on my machine. So I'm going to go ahead and close out the YAS Control Center. Now, let me right click on the desktop. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to change desktop background. Let's go ahead and take a look at the wallpapers that are available. And there is nothing here. Maybe I need to go open SUSE. OK, so there is the default open SUSE. Wallpaper available to us. Let's see if I go into pictures. That's just the pictures directory in my home directory. There is nothing there. So all right. So there's no real wallpapers in the change wallpaper. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit the plus symbol. I'm going to go find some wallpapers. I bet there's wallpapers installed somewhere. So let me go into home. Actually, let me go up into the root file system on Linux systems. Typically, you'll find wallpapers in slash user slash share slash backgrounds that directory does not exist. Sometimes they'll put it in slash user slash share slash wallpapers. So let me see if there's a wallpapers directory. There is. So user share wallpapers. And now if I open that, it will show me all the wallpapers in that directory, including that was the default Gecko Linux wallpaper. And then we have the only other wallpapers are the same open Sousa wallpaper in a variety of different resolutions. I'm kind of disappointed in the wallpapers. So I think what I'm going to do is let's install some wallpapers. So I'm going to go to the menu system. Let's see if there's any kind of like software graphical software center. Of course, there's going to be the yes software here. Let's see what it's going to do. It's going to automatically sync the repositories for us being a rolling release distro, and this was released about seven days ago. It may actually need to update the system. So I may have to pause the video for a minute and let the system update. And it looks like it finished syncing the repositories. Let me move my head out of the way. And I've got a list of packages. I guess these are the packages that are available for an update. You can see that's the installation summary. If I click accept, yeah, it's going to go ahead and download those and install those. So again, I'll pause the video for a minute until it finishes this installation and it finished installing all of that just fine. That took, I don't know, 30, 40 seconds. And I click continue to get back into the yes software tool here. And let me actually do a search for a package. I'm going to do a search for backgrounds. And you see we have the elementary wallpapers. We have the GNOME backgrounds. We have my backgrounds. I'm going to install all three of those packages just so we have more wallpapers available to us. And these are standard packages that you will find in most Linux repositories. Look for GNOME dash backgrounds. That's the standard GNOME wallpaper pack. Look for my dash backgrounds. That's the standard my wallpaper pack. And in this case, they also had elementary dash wallpapers and it finished installing those wallpaper packs. So I'm going to close that out. And once again, I'm going to right click on the desktop. Let's change desktop background. And now because we told it to look for wallpapers and user share wallpapers by default, all of those wallpaper packs we installed, it looks like it put those in that directory. So we don't have to go searching for anything here. So there is somebody's wallpaper pack. I'm not sure that may be elementary or that may be the mate wallpaper pack. I'm not sure, but you can see now we have some much nicer wallpapers, really nice wallpapers. So that is just standard free and open source wallpaper packs that are available in most Linux distros. Although I'm only seeing the GNOME wallpapers and one other. And we told it to install several wallpaper packs, we didn't three, I believe. Now, I think because we have this backgrounds directory here, by default, we installed two packages that had backgrounds as part of the name GNOME dash backgrounds and mate dash backgrounds. I bet what we're looking here is a collection of both the GNOME and the mate wallpapers here because it installed them all in that one directory. I'm going to go back to the standard wallpaper, the default wallpaper. Oh, there is another backgrounds directory with even more. Now, I've seen these. I believe these are the elementary wallpapers. I don't know. It's kind of confusing. How do I have backgrounds with capital B and backgrounds with a lowercase b? But anyway, I got some cool wallpapers rather quickly just by installing them directly from the repos. Now, let's open up a terminal. If I do control alt T, does that open a terminal? It does. I do love when Linux distributions actually include that key binding out of the box because really it's kind of a standard, like if you're ever confused about how to get a terminal, control alt T really should bring up a terminal. I do not like the black text on the white background. Let me zoom in here so we can see what I'm doing. And I've got to change that that hideous white background because that is blinding white. So if I go to edit and to preferences, let's go into colors. Use colors from system theme. Let's tick that off and now choose one of these preset color schemes, Solarized Dark. I know it's going to be very easy on the eyes. Yeah, that's much better. I'm not sure what terminal emulator they're using. It looks like the GNOME terminal. Let me go to help and about. Yeah, this is the GNOME terminal 3.42.2. Let's do a uname dash R to get the kernel version. This is a very recent kernel 5.15.12. Again, it's a rolling release distribution. Let's talk about package manager on Gecko Linux and on OpenSusa because Gecko uses the OpenSusa package manager, which is Zipper. And what you want to do typically with your package managers, the most common operations are updating the system, installing software, removing software, and maybe searching for software. So to update your system, you're going to need sudo privileges anytime you install or remove software or update your system. So do a sudo zipper space up, and that is for update and give it your sudo password. And we should not have a whole lot of stuff to update here. It says there's going to be 38 new packages to be installed. I'm going to decline that for now. So let me cancel that and clear the screen if I can type clear correctly. So again, that was a sudo zipper up to update your system to install software. You're going to do a sudo zipper IN for install and then name of package, for example, Htop. I'm not sure if Htop was already installed, but we'll install it just in case it's not. And it looks like it wasn't. So it's installing Htop and a couple of dependencies for Htop. Let's actually run Htop. See what kind of system resource usage we're using about. Well, let the CPU settle down. We're using about six, seven percent of the CPU. That's kind of high for what we're doing, but we did just run a system update. A lot of times updating the system will spike the CPU usage a little bit. For the RAM, I gave this VM six gigs of RAM, sentiments using about 937 megs of that six gigs of RAM. That's pretty standard for the sentiment desktop environment. Other zipper commands that you need to know, we talked about installing software to remove software. You do zipper RM for remove, name of program. So this would remove Htop. And I'm going to decline removing it to search for software. You would do zipper. You don't need pseudo privileges to search because you're not actually changing anything on your system. You do zipper, search, name of program. And let's do Htop. And it's going to hang for a minute because, of course, it's searching over the internet. And OK, finally found the Htop package. You can see the name Htop, the summary. The description here and interactive text mode process viewer for links. And you didn't have to type the full word search, just like you don't have to type the full word for install. You know, install was I in remove was RM search is SE. So I could have done zipper SE Htop. And it's the same command. Once again, it's going to take a minute for it to go out on the internet and search for Htop in the repositories. And it returns the same information. Now, one cool thing you can do with zipper is you can get a list of everything that's installed on the system. The same thing that you can do with apt with apt list dash dash installed. You know, it gives you a list of all your installed packages or Pacman dash capital Q lowercase Q and Pacman gives you a list of all your installed applications. You could do zipper SE for search and then give it the dash I flag for search installed packages. And then it gives you this list of all the packages that are installed. Each package on its own separate line, which you guys already know. You can then take that and pipe it into the WC program, the word count program. Give it the dash L flag to get a line count. And we will get a accurate count of the packages that are installed from zipper. You can see we have one thousand five hundred and seventy two packages installed on Gecko Linux out of the box. So let me close that out. So that is just a very cursory overview of the recently released Gecko Linux version nine nine nine dot some other long numbers. It was released about seven or eight days ago. And so this is the tumbleweed branch, the rolling branch of Gecko Linux. And this is with the cinnamon desktop. Again, they offer a variety of different desktop editions. There were like seven or eight different desktop environments available for you if you prefer something other than cinnamon. I've taken a look at Gecko Linux two or three times in the history of the channel. And every time I take a look at it, I am impressed. I mean, it is a rather nice Linux distribution. It has kind of that old school quality to it. You know, that it's just trying to be a nice desktop Linux distribution. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel. You know, I mentioned that the cinnamon desktop that they're using has kind of an older retro kind of look, right? And I like that, right? Too many Linux distributions these days are trying to be cutting edge and they're trying to do new things, you know, new weird desktop environments, new package formats. And in many cases, they're ticking off their user base, right? They're they're pissing everybody off to the point where I think a lot of these newer Linux distributions are pushing people back to windows. I hate to see that where Gecko Linux kind of has that old school almost that Ubuntu feel, right? The way Ubuntu was to Debian Gecko Linux kind of has that feel. Gecko Linux is the Ubuntu to open SUSE almost. Overall, I think it's a fine distribution. For me, I would be right at home. I could live in Gecko Linux, especially the rolling branch because the rolling branch would serve my needs better. But for most Linux users, probably the static branch is probably where you want to be. 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 Devon, Gabe, James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, West, Akami, Allen, Linux, Ninja, Chuck, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diolka, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Costco, Lee, Max and Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fodor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Stephen and Willie, these guys. They're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the recently released Gecko 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 because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work, you like these videos about Linux distributions and free and open source software and you want to see more of this stuff, help support me, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.