 Today I'm going to be taking a look at the latest release of ArchCraft. ArchCraft, as you may guess by the name, is based on Arch Linux and it ships with the OpenBox window manager, which I love. Big fan of OpenBox. It was like my first standalone window manager that I ever tried when I switched to Linux about 15 years ago. And I still often love to play around with OpenBox, and it also ships with BSPWM. So it ships with a standalone floating window manager and a standalone tiling window manager. Both of them have been heavily customized. I've taken a look at ArchCraft a couple of times in the history of the channel. I took a look at it in its very early days when it was kind of first released. People begged me to take a look at it because it was supposed to be like this Unix porn, you know, screenshot that's come to life as a Linux distribution. It was just going to be this gorgeous distribution. And the problem with those Unix porn screenshots, right, when you go to that subreddit and look at these beautiful customized window managers, as most of the time, they're not very usable in real life. They've created this work of art that really isn't that functional. It really isn't that usable again for daily use. And that was kind of my complaint with that first video I did about ArchCraft is they created this gorgeous work of art. But the font size in it was so incredibly small, I couldn't read anything. And I couldn't change the font size because every menu system, every terminal I open, had a very, very tiny, like six point font that physically it pained me to even look at that screen. And I got so frustrated on camera, I just cut the review short and you know, it was, it was one of the worst reviews I've ever done on the channel or one of the first impression videos I've ever done on the channel, taking a look at a Linux distribution. I hate being negative on these kinds of distributions. I typically when that happens, I don't even release the video, but people were really interested in ArchCraft at the time. So I did release that video. And I did think it was important for the developers to know that they really, really needed to focus more on people being able to use their distribution rather than creating something that looked good or a screenshot. And they did fix that because a few months later, I took a look at the release of ArchCraft and it was a lot better. The font sizes were much more appropriate for people with older eyes like me. And you know, it's been probably well over a year, maybe close to two years since the last time I've taken a look at ArchCraft. So I'm going to take a look at their recently released January 2023 edition. So I spun up this virtual machine here and I'm going to run through a very quick installation. So let's go ahead and boot into the live environment. All right. And it boots us into this live environment. This looks like it is the open box window manager here. And let's go ahead and launch the Calamaris installer and the Calamaris installer. You guys, I'm sure are familiar with it by now. So I'm not going to spend too much time explaining anything. I'm just going to run through this very quickly. So English, American English is my language. So I just need to click next in this list. It is correctly chosen the central time zone in the U.S. for me. So I just click next. It has chosen English U.S. for my keyboard, which is fine. Let me click next. And then for the partitions, I'm going to erase disk and give the entire partition, the 25 gigabyte partition that I created in this virtual machine over to ArchCraft. For swap, I'll swap to a file. For file system, I'll leave it as the default extend for file system. And let me go ahead and click next. Now let's create our name. Our username is going to be DT. The host name of the computer I'll call ArchCraft dash invert. In case I ever have to SSH into this VM, it's nice that I have a descriptive host name so I know what operating system I'm looking at. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then log in automatically without asking for a password. I leave that ticked off because for privacy reasons, you should always have to enter a password to get into your machine. And then use the same password for administrator account that's ticked on by default. I'm going to leave that ticked on that way. My sudo password is the same as my DT password. Let me click next. We get a little review. Locations good. Keyboards good. Partition scheme is good. Let me click the install button and away we go. This portion of the installation on my machines typically take about five to ten minutes. So I'll pause the recording and I'll be back once ArchCraft has finished installing. And the installation has completed. Now I need to click on this checkbox here, restart now, and then click done. Let me move my head, the done button, and it should detach the ISO from the VM and reboot us into our freshly installed ArchCraft. And we've come to our login manager. This login manager looks like it's probably SDDM, the simple display manager, the same login manager that KDE Plasma uses. Now let me go ahead and log into the open box session. Let's take a look at it first. And we get our welcome application that launches. The very first thing I want to do is I want to change the screen resolution. I could open a terminal and do this at the command line with X render. But let me see if there is a graphical way to do this. So the Arch logo here I thought would open like an open box menu, like the open box right click menu. That's kind of what you would expect it to do. But it actually launches ROFI instead. Interesting choice, because they could have made that just open your standard open box menu, which is a much better way to navigate with the mouse because if you're clicking on it with the mouse, then you probably want a mouse driven menu system. So honestly, having that launch ROFI really doesn't make sense. Just something that I think the devs probably should think about. A R and R is here. So I guess that's the graphical front end to X render that they're using here. So if I right click on it and let's choose 1920 by 1080 as a resolution and change that and now everything looks okay except you know the top panel and the wallpaper and everything is kind of wonky. So let me see if I can restart open box here. I wonder if I could log in and log back out and it would remember everything. So right click system log out. Are you sure? Yes. Click the check box, but that is weird logging out. I guess I have to hit enter. So even though it looks like you could click on it, hitting enter on the keyboard actually was what I needed to do there and it still didn't, it didn't save my changes. Well what I could do right click terminal emulator, I'm going to do X render dash S 1920 by 1080. I wonder if I could do like an open box. Is there like a restart command to open box? Yeah, but it didn't change the screen resolution. We need some way for it to resize everything, resize the panel and resize the wallpaper preferences, display. Okay, so this is the graphical way I guess you could change the resolution from right here inside an open box menu. This is like a dynamic menu they've created for open box. So that's nice. Do I have a reset button? What would the reset button do? Just make everything back the way it was back to preferences, display, modes 1920. Okay, so if I change it from the menu system, I guess it actually does restart open box with the new wallpaper settings and new poly bar settings and everything as far as everything is sized correctly. So that is important to know. Of course that is strictly for virtual machine users on physical hardware that probably wouldn't be an issue at all. So now let me get back to the welcome screen. Let's see if they have any kind of quick launcher for the welcome screen. Since I missed it before, I guess I could do the right click menu, know where their welcome screen would be, applications, accessories. I don't know other maybe. This is probably a situation where I would need to use Rofi. So welcome, hello. Start, I don't remember what the name of that program was. I guess we're not going to take a look at that program because I don't, about ArchCraft maybe? I don't know. I got to hit enter because the mouse doesn't work. That's weird. The mouse, mouse works for things like that, but it didn't work. Yeah, this is kind of weird for a floating window manager as far as open box. They should really have this right click menu come up when you hit this instead of Rofi. Also Polybar and they've got Plank here as a dock. The reason they have Plank here as a dock is because you have to have Plank as a dock if you're using Polybar because there's no task bar. If I open the Alacrity terminal, there's no task bar in Polybar because it was not built for a floating window manager. Polybar was really built for I3 and BSPWM. BSPWM doesn't come with a panel, right? Polybar is kind of the panel everybody uses in BSPWM. I'm assuming the devs because they were using Polybar and BSPWM wanted to use Polybar also in open box, but it's completely inappropriate because without a task bar, and you can tell it's built for a tiling window manager because the main thing it displays are workspaces which are important in a tiling window manager because it's all about workspaces in a tiling window manager where a floating window manager, you have workspaces but they're not nearly as important. You know, I want a task bar. I want to be able to minimize this and actually be able to get it back up by clicking on something. Otherwise, this panel is pointless. All this panel does is display widgets, which is pretty, you know, it's nice I guess for again taking screenshots, but it's kind of a useless panel. If I'm having to use Plank for the most part with my floating window manager, get rid of Polybar and just have Plank, right? Now you've kind of made it bloated having essentially two panels because one panel really does nothing for us and the other panel, you know, or get rid of both Polybar and Plank and install something like Tent 2. Tent 2 is a panel for standalone floating window managers that has a proper task bar and quick launchers, assist trays built into it, clogging and you can theme some widgets with it. And it's much more appropriate for something like Tent 2 or you could even install something like the LX panel, the old panel for the LXDE desktop environment, Polybar again, good for screenshots but for functionality, for usability. It really doesn't make any sense. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do our right click and get the open box right click menu. Let's see what is installed out of the box really quick. So accessories, we have our file manager, let's see what file manager they've chosen to use. They are using Thunar. I do like the icon set. That's very nice. If I do an about this is Thunar 4.18.1, Thunar again, definitely a good file manager. I like the choice. And let's see, we also have the KVandom manager, we have Nitrogen to set our wallpaper. So if I do Nitrogen, it should show us all our wallpapers that are available here. Let me see if I can resize this window. This window is really hard to find the borders. Like there's no border on this window. Like I can't grab it to resize it. I don't know what this theme is. You can grab it right here at these corners. Like down here on the sides, you can't grab that thing at all. That, yeah, I don't love that either. Again, the theme is very pretty but from a usability standpoint, that's got to be fixed. There's a lot of the wallpapers. I've seen a lot of these, a lot of standard like arch wallpapers. Got the Dracula wallpapers for the Dracula color scheme. That's nice. We've got some Windows 11 wallpapers. Very, very weird. Like there's some strange choices in there, but you know, wallpapers, it's just a matter of opinion, right? It's all subjective. One person likes this wallpapers is what another person probably doesn't like. I'd probably take the Windows 11 wallpapers out though. Also under applications and accessories, Plank is the dock. The terminal emulator, they have a lacquerty down here. I'm assuming that's what this terminal emulator link was opening. If I do X prop, X prop tells me the X properties for an X window. And this terminal actually is the XFCE4 terminal. So that's the XFCE terminal, the one that's listed here, okay. And then we have VM installed out of the box. That's nice. X archiver for our archive tool for zip, unzip, that sort of thing. X color under development. We have Genie. Genie is nice for plain text editor or for IDE for those of you that like doing any kind of programming and scripting and things like that. Also under graphics, we have view noir, which I believe is the image viewer. And we didn't really have anything else under graphics. So no gimp or inkscape or crit or anything like that. No kind of professional kind of graphics tools. Under multimedia, we have simple screen recorder. That's interesting. I don't see like an audio player or a video player. That's kind of a strange choice too. You would think they would ship something out of the box, you know, some small audio player like audacious or dead beef. Or you could even ship a video player like VLC, VLC can play audio or video. So that's strange that there's really nothing in the multimedia category. For our networking, we have Firefox, I guess as the web browser. And there was also a link for just web browser, which I'm assuming is just another link for Firefox. But let's see about Firefox 108.0.1 is the version. And if I go back into applications and go to network, the mill reader, see no application. So I'm not sure what that is trying to do there. I'm not sure if there's even a desktop email client installed or not. And then web browser also launches Firefox. So there's two different entries for Firefox in that menu. Under office, we have our actual document viewer. So actual is a PDF viewer essentially under the other category. We have Rofi and the Rofi theme selector. And then your standard like settings kinds of programs, such as LX appearance, I'm assuming now this is the XFC appearance tool where you can change your GTK themes. And then we also had a R and R a render, which is a GUI front end to X render to change your screen resolutions and change the orders of your monitors. If you have multi monitors and things like that, some Bluetooth stuff, which I did notice in their change log for this release, they did have a better Bluetooth support out of the box now. Some of the other changes from their change log, they also mentioned that pipe wire is installed out of the box. Now, let me open the Alacrity terminal and make it full screen and see if I can zoom in, see what key bindings are using to zoom in. All right, Rofi came up by accident. That is so weird. I don't know why Rofi came up, but it does not. You can't escape out of it. Let me try that again. Launch Rofi by hitting that icon, but escape does not do anything. If I hit enter, like I can launch the program and then close the program that I want. Well, how in the hell am I supposed to close Rofi? If the escape doesn't this is some very odd choices. I guess if I clicked back on the button, Rofi goes away. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's some major and I'm going to call them bugs. I mean, some of this is design choices, but I'm just going to flat out call some of this a bug that needs to be fixed because, again, for usability, some of this is a problem. Let's do a U name dash or what kernel are we on being arch based rolling release? We're on six dot one dot one. If I do a where is pipe wire, you can see they are using pipe wire for the audio server. And if I do a Pacman dash capital Q lowercase q, it'll give me a list of all the packages that are installed out of the box here on Archcraft. If I up arrow and pipe that into the word count program WC space dash L for a line count, see how many lines are in that output. One thousand and three. That means there's one thousand and three packages installed out of the box on Archcraft using Pacman. Now, is there any kind of like a flat pack support or snap support? If I do a where is flat pack, it's not installed out of the box. I'm assuming snap D would not be either at the image clear the screen. I really didn't expect any of that to be installed out of the box, though, because this is kind of a minimal system. I mean, it really, it didn't ship like any kind of office suite or anything like that. I wouldn't expect it to, you know, have have those kinds of programs as well, those package formats. So this is the open box window manager. I mean, there's a lot of preference stuff. I mean, this is really the calling card for why you would use something like Archcraft is these right click dynamic menus here. So these menus inside open boxes, right click menu, they're script driven. So meaning some of these can dynamically change and, you know, things like that, which is a really neat feature to open box. It's one of the reasons I always loved it is some of the script ability with open box. So you can change color schemes and, you know, terminal colors. For example, you have, oh my goodness, 65 terminal color schemes that you could quickly choose from here in the menu system, change style. So these are your GTK themes, change your font from right here. So that is very, very cool. Again, for, for my taste, I think they've made some strange choices with open box, but again, I think, I think it's probably more geared toward tiling. So let's take a look at the BSPWM window manager. So let me go ahead and log out and again, why does, is that not working? If I hit enter, it works though. Let's change the session. How do I change the session? Yeah, that's very weird. That may just be a VM problem there because that I had to hit a certain spot to get it to change from open box to BSPWM there. Let's go ahead and log in and we're going to have the same screen resolution problem here and BSPWM. Oh, now I need to be able to launch Rofi. Is there a key binding? Super enter launches a terminal problem with the super key is I am an X-mone ad today on my host machine. And the super key is in use on X-mone ad as well. So I'm going to have some, some issues there. How do I close the window? Super X, possibly super, no, not super X, super Q, super shift Q, super shift X, super shift C, super shift C. Okay, standard key binding, super shift C, I believe is the default closed key binding in DWM and X-mone ad, possibly Q-tile as well. I'm not sure on that. But now that I'm in a Lackardy, one thing I could do is I could CD into .config slash BSPWM LS. There is BSPWM RC. So let's VIM into BSPWM RC and see what we've got here. Of course, this won't show us key bindings because the key bindings are handled by the SXHKD, the simple X hotkey daemon. But this shows you a little bit of some of the window rules here inside BSPWM. I'm not going to play with this on camera. Here is some of the startup scripts. It's also executing the MPD, the music player daemon. I'm assuming that is what is handling like the music displayed here in Poly Bar. If I click on it, nothing happens. I thought maybe, oh, there it goes. I just had to click the right spot and pause it. OK, so that is the music player daemon. And because it's a daemon always running in the background, I'm assuming if I played this, started it playing and I exited out of BSPWM. I killed the window manager, but MPD should still be playing. Like I go to my login manager. You'll still hear the music playing. I log into open box. You'll still hear the music playing MPD is kind of neat. I used to play around with MPD a lot back in the day. These days, not so much. So let me click quit out of the BSPWM config. And let's go into the SXHKD config and check out some of the key bindings. What I really want to search for is the ROFI key binding alt F1. Yeah, I would have never guessed that key binding that is horrible. Why are we using function keys? I've complained about this so many times with so many Linux distributions. A function key is such an odd key on most keyboards. Most keyboards may have function keys or they exist on a different layer. And the run launcher is something you're going to open hundreds of times a day, right? It should not be binded to such a horrible key binding, right? And I still can't escape. I don't know how to get out of ROFI. Ah, OK, well, the super key. That is interesting. Super launches ROFI and super again. OK, so that's weird, but they've got alt F1 here as well. Well, what is handling the super? Maybe it's also listed here somewhere else by search for ROFI. Got some ROFI menu applets, so super plus. And then all of this stuff, ROFI music, so super M. Gets a music playing screen inside ROFI where I can start MPD playing again. So that's neat looking at some of the other key bindings here. We already know super enter gets us a terminal. Super shift C closes any window. And now that we know just super by itself will launch ROFI. Yeah, I think I could be just fine here. We still need to change the resolution. And in this case, I think I really will have to use a R and R or I could have used XR and R in the terminal. Do 1920 by 1080. Make that change. Super shift C and now super. Let's do nitrogen inside ROFI and let's it apply to restart. The wallpaper poly bar is still messed up. Well, let's super and to get ROFI would a kill all ROFI or not, Rofi, kill all poly bar work. It will now hit super again. Let's restart poly bar and I get poly bar, but not the right poly bar. So of course, this is me just messing around here. I don't know which poly bar if I just search for poly bar. No. Well, what I probably need to do is launch the Alacrity terminal in a CD into dot config slash the SPWM was there like a specific poly bar config in here? CD into themes. Well, if I can spell it right. L S poly bar dot SH. So if I do dot slash poly bar dot SH to actually run that script, I'll run it as a background process. So at the ampersand, yeah, now I get poly bar back. OK, so now I fix the wallpaper. I fixed the length of poly bar and got a proper screen resolution as well. So BSPWM is kind of a weird tiling window manager if you're used to dynamic timers like I am. The default layout is this. It's not a Fibonacci layout because a Fibonacci layout would kind of circle back around. This one kind of dwindles toward the corner. So dwindle layout is what they call it anyway, and like awesome window manager and DWM X mode. And they call this a dwindle layout where you split and then you split again, then you split again. You keep splitting all the way. You keep working toward that bottom right hand corner. So that's the default layout. And I'm assuming, yeah, so it's like super tab changes focus in the stack would super H. Super H gives me a split. Well, it could give me a split if I wanted a split there. Now I did super H. Now let me do super enter and I open a new terminal. So again, it's kind of a manual Tyler where if I want to, I can tell the windows and whatever direction I want. If I just want to take the automatic tiling, then you know, this here actually works because typically for me anyway, as a mainly a tiling window manager user, I rarely open more than three, sometimes four windows on a screen. So this dwindle layout, this is about as far as I'll ever get in it. And I could probably work with that. Most of the time, I'm probably just working with three windows with the master window on the left. And then the two windows order the stack. So that's fine for me. Now I have to say BSPWM, I do love Polybar for BSPWM. Like this makes perfect sense. What they've done with BSPWM really makes a lot more sense than kind of what they were doing with open box. I do like super gets me Rofi. Yeah, yeah, super again kills Rofi. I wish to escape because I'm so used to being able to escape out of any run launcher. That's just such a normal key binding that's kind of universal. Yeah, I wish they could add that back in in some way I don't know if that's possible. But that's just a very quick and cursory look at the latest release of Archcraft with the open box window manager and BSPWM as well. So you've got two very highly customized window managers, one floating window manager, one tiling window manager. So it caters to both audiences. And I think there's a lot of really neat things. Like that open box edition, that open box window manager, I had some critiques, but maybe I was a little overly critical, but some of the stuff they were doing, like some of the scripting, the customization options in that open box right click menu are beautifully done. It reminds me of the old Crunch Bang Linux distribution that's long been dead. Crunch Bang was a Debian based open box distribution that had a lot of custom scripts and a lot of dynamic menus that allowed you to customize things on the fly through that open box right click menu. And I really like what Archcraft has done with that. And to be fair these days, we really don't have a lot of Linux distributions that primarily focus on open box. You get a lot of distributions that have an open box edition, but Archcraft really is heavily focused mainly on open box. So if you're an open box user, I would definitely suggest trying out Archcraft. You don't wanna install it on physical hardware. You just wanna test it out. Check it out in a virtual machine like I did today. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Brian Gabe James Mett, Maxim, and Mitchel Paul West, Wendy Baldwin, Alex Harmon-Dragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid Ayoka, George Lee, Marshawn Nader, Yann Alexander, Paul Peace, Archon Fodor, Polytech Realitease for Les Red Prophet, Roland Steven, Tools Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. These are the producers of this episode. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace. Polybar and a floating window manager go together like peanut butter and ketchup.