 Today, I'm going to be revisiting a Linux distribution that I first took a look at about two or three years ago on the channel, and my initial reaction to this particular Linux distribution was pretty harsh, pretty negative, and to be honest, a lot of that was just me coming at it at a bad time. You know, sometimes, you know, real life gets in the way sometimes of making videos. Maybe you're just in a bad mood that day or at the time, I really just didn't like taking a look at a lot of Linux distributions. It's kind of burnout on these Linux installation and first look kind of videos that I typically do. And it came across on that very first time that I took a look at Instant OS. And Instant OS, after I took a look at it a couple of years ago, really, it hadn't had an update in a long time. And matter of fact, most people when you were talking about Instant OS, looking at Instant OS online is they just assumed it was a dead project. But no, no, no, about two or three weeks ago, they put out a new version, a beta release. This is beta seven of Instant OS. I'm going to take a look at that today. So I've spun up a virtual machine here. I gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM and two threads of my 24 thread CPU. So should be plenty of resources, by the way, for those of you not familiar with Instant OS, it is a arch Linux based distribution. It has a different kind of window manager desktop environment. It's very reminiscent of DWM and a lot of the suckless utilities like D menu and things like that. I want to say that it was originally a fork of DWM, the Instant window manager that we're going to be taking a look at. So let's go ahead and install Instant OS. All right. And we're in our live environment and it doesn't look like we get any kind of wallpaper drawn or anything. I don't know if that's meant to be like that or kind of a glitch. But it says virtual machine, would you like to switch to 1080p resolution? So that is a nice touch, because obviously I would and then it draws the wallpaper. That's why it was a black screen. That makes sense because if it draws the wallpaper before switching to 1080p resolution, the wallpaper wouldn't be sized correctly if you switched to 1080p. So yeah, very cool. So we have our welcome out, welcome to Instant OS. And we may take a look at some of this later, but right now I want to do the install. And OK, so the keyboard would work in this. I don't know if it was a fork of D menu or a Rofi or what this this kind of menu system is, but it does look nice and it does function well. And it looks like we're going to do an installation in a terminal. Now we're going to get some prompts here. So says downloading installer dependencies. All right, I guess it finished the download. Now it says welcome to the instant OS installer. So let's click next. All right, select keyboard layout. And for me, I'm going to use US and select language English and then select the mirror location. Let's see if they have any US mirrors. They do. Is this system a virtual machine? Yes, I'm assuming that's to make sure correct drivers are installed. And of course, it wants to know what type of virtual machine I'm using. KVM slash QEMU says morning. QEMU on AMD is not meant for desktop use and is lacking some features. This installation will work, but some features may be disabled. OK, so select region. So this is going to be for your time zone. I'm going to be in America slash Chicago. So that will set the time to be in the central time zone for me. Select the disk. I only have one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. So there's only the one disk for me to choose. And then it says install on this particular disk. It will delete all existing data. It's just a warning. It's going to format the drive. I'm going to choose yes. This backup installation logs to IX.io disabled by default. Sure, why not? And set username. I'm going to call my user DT. Let's set the DT password. It needs to be a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. And then confirm the strong and complicated password. Enter the name of the computer, the host name of the computer. I'll call it instant dash vert. I think I misspelled vert, though. I can change the host name later if I really want to. Says edit advanced settings. Use only if you know what you're doing. So since they say edit only if you know what you're doing, I'll choose no. So they probably should have no be the default on that question if they really don't want people to actually go into the advanced settings. Then we get our summary screen and I go down here to continue. The installation will now begin. This could take a while. You can check install progress and logs by clicking on two in the top left. So we'll switch to a different workspace if we want to check the logs. I'll click OK. It says mounting partitions, getting a little echo area at the bottom where we get some information. And this is very cool. I really like the installer, their little custom installer that's essentially kind of like a a D menu script, right? Everything's just these D menu selections where you choose all of your options. And you know, it makes a lot of sense. I think something some of the installer programs on Linux, while they're very cool, things like the ubiquity installer that Ubuntu uses or the Calamari's installer that so many distributions use, like Manjaro, et cetera. You know, those are really cool programs, but honestly, a simple script for the most part will get the job done. And since they said I could check the logs of everything that's going on during the installation, if I want more feedback, I can go to workspace two. And of course, there's the terminal that's actually running all the commands, right? So that's your log essentially. I'll go back to workspace one. I'm assuming that it'll eventually tell me when the installation is complete here. These installations typically take about five to 10 minutes on my machine. So I'm going to step away for a few minutes. I'm going to go make me a cup of coffee and I'll be back once this portion of the installer has completed. And it looks like the installation has completed. That took maybe about 10 minutes or so. It says instant OS was installed successfully. Do we want to continue to use the live session? Or do we want to reboot now to complete an installation? You need to reboot the machine eventually. So let's go ahead and reboot and it reboots successfully. And we get this very nice customized grub menu with the instant OS theming and the colors and everything. That's really nice. I like the little splash screen as well. And it actually boots very fast. It says virtual machine detected. Would you like to switch to a 1080p resolution? Sure. This blur causes massive issues on virtual machine. So I guess their compositing has some blurring effects that won't look quite right in a VM, but that's fine. That's a minor thing that to be honest, I don't mind blurring being turned off anyway. So I get a little bit of information here on the bottom right. If I move my head and we get March, Sunday, that's interesting. It doesn't have the day of the week, so it just marches the month. But what's the day? Yeah, so that's kind of strange. I don't know if that's a virtual machine issue or not. It says super tab switches between your two most recent tags. So tags are workspaces, essentially DWM calls them tags, instant OS or the instant window manager here is essentially a fork of DWM. So they're calling them tags as well. So and it says press space to launch an application. So that's interesting. So let's press the space bar. OK, and then we get essentially D menu or I think they call it the instant menu. Right. It's their fork of a lot of the suckless stuff. And then from here, I mean, we could launch something like Firefox if it was installed and it looks like it is. So Firefox is the default browser here, but I don't really want to look at Firefox. Let's click this. So this is a little menu system. It says applications. So if I click on applications, once again, it launches their instant menu. So that's pretty cool. How do I get the menu from a key binding, though, the instant menu here? Let me just try some common key bindings that typically work in a lot of window managers, tiling window managers. So what would Super Enter do? Super Enter gets us quick info. So it opens the terminal with quick info for instant OS. It says instant OS is using the ST terminal, the suckless terminal. And because of this, some things work differently. Selecting text is done with a shift and left mouse. OK, so this is just information about the terminal here, but I don't really care about that. OK. So how do I close Super Shift C? I believe it's the default close key binding for DWM, but that doesn't work. How about Super X? Super X does something else about Super Q to quit. Yeah, Super Q. So now that I know that Super Enter gets a terminal, Super Q would close. Right. Well, is it always going to come up with that that little quick info thing every time I open a terminal? I have to click Don't Show Again. I clicked OK, but I need to do Don't Show Again. Now Super Q, Super Enter. And now I just get my terminal without getting that extra information about key bindings within the ST terminal. So if I do space again to get the run launcher, which I don't mind that key binding, that's a pretty cool key binding. I wonder, file managers, what are they using? PCManFM, is it here? What about Thunar? No. What are they using? Nautilus, maybe? They're using the Nautilus file manager, GNOME's file manager. That is interesting. So OK. So Super Shift Space toggles between our tiling mode and, I guess, a floating mode. So that's kind of cool, right? Yeah. And then Super Shift Space again gets us back into the tiling mode where you would typically get, you know, it looks like a grid layout by default. I thought maybe it would use like the standard master and stack that DWM defaults to, but it looks like by default. Yeah, it does them in a grid. And I just realized there is this icon here, this pound symbol, which I'm assuming that is meant to designate that we're in the grid layout. Oh, and if I click it, what did that just put us in? That put us in the master and stack. So you know what I bet earlier when I was hitting keys on the keyboard? I bet I toggled off the master and stack and probably went to, well, we've got a bunch of layouts. So there's a ton of default layouts. But somehow I ended up in that grid layout. I bet master and stack is, in fact, the default layout. But you can see when I toggle through them, you had about seven or eight different layouts including rows, columns. There was a monocle layout, your full screen window layout. Let me get back into this little menu here and go into applications. Of course, that's just D menu. So I'm not sure why I would ever click on this unless I want to get into something else. We have a hot link to the terminal, but Super Enter gets a terminal. There's really nothing in here I would ever need to come to unless I want to maybe use it as a system shutdown, like a session manager, like to log out and things like that. There is the settings here, which is neat. Opens this little D menu or instant menu. I should quit calling it D menu, instant menu here over on the right hand side of the screen with our system settings. So this would be like a GNOME settings manager itself. It's in a different kind of format right here inside this menu system. So that's pretty cool here. If I click on instant OS, let's see what instant OS settings are available. So we have our auto start script. So the programs that launch on auto start, we could edit that. I'm not gonna play with it on this video though. We have animations. So do we want animations? They're currently enabled, but we could turn them off. So that's cool. Because for me, I do like animations because they are neat effects. The window animations, when you're opening and closing windows, they're kind of cool, right? But are they necessary? Well, depending on the machine you're running, especially if you're running really old equipment, sometimes turning off those animations does save on a little CPU. One peculiar thing that I'm not crazy about is I just noticed that anytime I click the screen, it'll launch this instant menu. And that's cool, but I mean, you already have space for it. Why do I need the mouse to also do this? Because typically when you are launching a run launcher, like the menu or ROFI or instant menu or whatever it happens to be, you're actually going to type, right? This is not a graphical program. I mean, I guess I could click on something, but it's got 2,500 items available for you to choose, right? You're actually just gonna type a quick search for something and hit enter, right? So you're probably never going to use the mouse in that menu system. So why would you ever want to launch it with the mouse either? I probably, if I could disable the mouse doing that, I probably would because every time I want to do something on the screen with the mouse, it's going to annoy me that that menu comes up. Checking out some of the other key bindings that are available, SuperIN launches our file manager, the Nautilus file manager, right? SuperIN, they also have Ranger as an option for a file manager, SuperR launches Ranger inside the ST terminal. I probably would want a better file manager than Nautilus for a graphical file manager, Nautilus. It's not the greatest. This is kind of a strange choice. I'm not sure why they ended up going with Nautilus because there's so many fantastic file managers available on Linux. Some of the other standard key bindings, so would SuperH and SuperL resize? Yeah, so that's shrink and expand. If you're used to the Xmonad of terminology, they call that shrinking and expanding the windows. DWM calls it increasing and decreasing the width or something like that, I forget exactly. But SuperH and SuperL, so a lot of things are of course VIM key driven, right? So if I do a bunch of windows here, SuperJ moves down through the stack, right? Moves one direction, SuperK moves back up through the stack. You know, it just circles around the windows in the other direction. And then if I do a Super2, I go to Workspace2, Super3, Workspace3, Super1 takes me back to Workspace1, SuperShift2 takes the window that had focus and moved it to Workspace2. If I go to Workspace2, there's that window. Let me launch H-Top so we have something different running. If I go back to Super1, Workspace1, there's the other two terminal windows, Super2, SuperShift1, I'll send that window back to Super1, right, Workspace1 here. And then we'll just SuperQ to close all those windows. One thing I really like is I do love the branding with the wallpaper and the logo. Whoever did this wallpaper, that's a really nice job. I do also want to play with the widgets up here for example, that just launches the instant menu when I click on the date, that does the same thing. Yeah, so I thought maybe the widgets would actually have some different functionality but that they apparently do not. I'm gonna go back into the settings because I do want to play with appearance and wallpaper and let's browse the wallpapers. Just downloading wallpaper one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So this may take a few minutes. All right, and downloaded the wallpapers and then it immediately launched Nitrogen which is a wallpaper drawing program. So if I just click on one and hit apply and let me go to Workspace2 to see that wallpaper in action. Yeah, good looking wallpaper and check out some of the others. So that is the next in the list. I didn't mean to click on that. See, this is the problem with you clicking on the desktop always launching that menu. You're gonna have a lot of false positives. So let's hit apply on the next wallpaper. Yeah, that's not bad. Let's try some of the others. Try one of these darker wallpapers. I really like that. That would actually look really good with a light theme like a light colored panel and everything. Yeah, I really like that wallpaper. I think I'm gonna go with that one. I'm gonna go ahead and hit space on the keyboard to get our instant menu. Since they're using Nautilus it's so heavily tied to the GNOME desktop environment. I bet they're using a lot of other GNOME applications. So if I search for GNOME, yeah, we have GNOME font viewer and GNOME thumbnail font. So we don't have a ton of GNOME dash name of program kind of things installed. Are they using G at it? Yeah, so their text editor, plain text editor is G at it, which is okay. Again, not my favorite. Let's see what other common GNOME applications are there. There's events, which of course is the PDF viewer. Rhythm box would be the audio player if I could spell it right. But it doesn't look like it is installed. If I do a search for VLC, VLC is in here. Maybe they don't have a video player installed. Probably the easiest way for a program discovery here, since they don't have any kind of standard graphical menu that just lists like your .desktop files. I probably would just go to the terminal. I'm gonna zoom in here in the ST terminal and I'm gonna do a pacman dash q, capital q, lowercase q. If I do that it's gonna spit out all the programs that are installed on the system. What we wanna do is we wanna pipe that into lists. That way we start at the top of the list and now I can just hit space to go down the list. Just gonna quickly go through the list and shout out anything that seems like it's important. Looks like for the archive manager they're using in Grampa. It looks like Nano is installed for another terminal based text editor. So if you don't like G at it, you've got Nano as an option. I'm not a fan of Nano at all though. I find it very confusing to use. And Pycom of course is our compositor. We have pipe wire installed as well but pipe wire is also a standard on Arch Linux these days. It's being arch based. We have ripgrip Rofi. So maybe Rofi is what they're basing that menu system off of instead of a D menu. If I open a second terminal I do Rofi dash dash show run. Yeah, so this looks similar but it's definitely something a little different. Let me do dash show D run for just the desktop files. Oh, okay. And now this would be an easier way to actually search like your standard desktop applications without getting a list of almost 3000 binaries available on the system which is what D menu typically does. Customize look and feel. So would that be the LX appearance program? That would be. This is where we could change our GTK theme, colors, icon, mouse cursor, et cetera. Yeah, very cool, very cool. So this was just a very quick and cursory look at the latest release of Instant OS. This was Instant OS beta seven. And I gotta say I'm pretty impressed. This, you know, I could use this. There's a few little minor niggles to it that for me I would have to change. The only thing I would immediately have to change is the fact that clicking the mouse on the desktop launches a menu. I can't stand that because I would always be accidentally triggering that. So I'd have to disable that in some way. But everything else about Instant OS, I quite like being a tolling window manager person and mainly a person that so much of my workflow is kind of driven through tools like D menu which Instant OS has their own instant menu. Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Gabe James Maxim, Matt Minut, Mitchell Paul, Roll West, Armored Dragon, Bash, Potato, Chuck, Commander, Angry, George, Lee, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archimdor, Polytech, Realities, for Los Red Prophet, Roland, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys, they're my hyster. Patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Instant OS beta seven 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 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'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you want to support me, you wanna see more videos about Linux and Freon open source software, subscribe to Distro Tubo for on Patreon. All right guys, peace. When it opened Nautilus for a file manager, that hurt my heart a little bit.