 Here in the last few weeks, I've been getting a lot of requests to review a Linux distribution that I had never heard of. And that Linux distribution is called Geruda Linux, Geruda. That's an interesting name. It kind of sounds like a cheese, but I'm not going to hold the name against this distribution. People keep telling me that it might be the best ArchBase Linux distribution out there right now. So that is a tall claim and I want to try it out. So I'm going to download one of their ISOs and take a look at Geruda Linux for the very first time in a virtual machine. So I'm going to go over to the Geruda Linux website and their website is GerudaLinux.org and reading the blurb on the main page. We can choose our desktop environment and our selections include KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, LXCute, Deepen, Wayfire, BSPWM, and I3WM. So I will choose one of these. Let me go to the download page and it says, please read. It says, our additions are optimized for performance on real hardware. Installing on virtual machines is not recommended as it might result in a bad experience. I get that, but I'm just taking a quick first look at this thing. So doing it in a VM will be just fine. I'm not doing any kind of performance benchmarking or anything like that. Obviously, it would be unfair to do something like that inside a VM rather than on bare metal. But today I'm just going to take a quick look at one of their additions inside a VM. Now the requirements. Look quite hefty. Now typically when I review these distros in a VM, typically I give it two cores of my CPU, four gigs of RAM and 25 gigs of storage space. Well it says requirements recommended 40 gigs of storage space. That's a huge amount of storage space just to install a Linux distribution. That's crazy high. And they also recommend eight gigs of RAM. I get that on a normal machine in a VM. I'm just going to give it four gigs of RAM. I'm sure it'll be fine. And they have minimum requirements. So these are the recommended requirements, 40 gigs of storage space, eight gigs around the minimum requirements. There are only 30 gigs of storage space and four gigs of RAM. And then we need to remember that our username and password for the live environment is going to be Geruda for the username, Geruda for the password. I like that they include that information on the download page because I would have had struggled with that. They not told me that. Now do I want the KDE Plasma addition? I like KDE Plasma and since it's the very first thing on the page, it's probably their flagship desktop environment. So I might pick that. We have their KDE Ultimate Gaming Edition. Now that's going to be a really large ISO and it's going to require a ton of storage space and I'm not going to be doing any gaming. So I'll skip that. They do have a Lite Edition. And their Lite Edition for KDE is 2.5 gigs in size. That's still not a Lite ISO, that's still a hefty ISO 2.5 gigs. The one right under it is also a KDE Edition, Geruda KDE Dragonized. And look at the way they spell Dragonized. You got DR46 Onized. That is a very hacker way to spell Dragonized. The person that made this ISO is a legit hacker. I mean, they would not have spelled Dragonized with that 46 in the middle of it if they weren't like, if they didn't have some serious elite hacker skills. So that's going to be the one I download, I think. Let me go ahead and grab that. I'm going to torrent it. All right. So I created this VM. I gave it 4 gigs of RAM, 25 gigs of storage space. I think that's going to be plenty for this thing, just to take a look at it. And the boot menu really looks like Manjaro's boot menu. It's got the same kind of options if you guys have ever booted into a Manjaro live environment. And I'm just going to go ahead and boot directly into Geruda KDE Dragonized. It may take a minute or two to finally boot into the live environment. This is the same as booting directly off of a live USB stick. You know, sometimes the getting into it will take a minute or two. And I did have to change the video driver in the VM to get it to load up. It was actually going to hang on that black screen there. So I went and changed the driver to Vert IO. So those of you using Vert Manager, it looks like if you change to Vert IO, you will get the splash screen here at the beginning where before it looked like it was struggling to load up an X environment and it was just a black screen. So all right, and let me get rid of that message there. And we have this welcome screen here, the Geruda welcome. And let's see if Control Alt T would bring up a terminal. Do they have that key binded? It looks like they do. All right, man, this terminal looks good. I kind of like that blur effect they've got going on. That's console with a K, that's KDE's console. And wow, look at this shell prompt here. Is this the fish shell? Does NeoFetch tell me what the default shell? Yeah, user bin fish 3.1.2. So already this KDE dragonized version of Geruda is impressing me because they are using fish as the default user shell. This is something I told you guys I wanted to see in my own operating system. Like if I ever created DTZOS, it would use the fish shell. So already I'm pretty impressed with this here. I'm going to run a quick X-Rander just to get a better screen resolution here. I want to see, you know, what my options are. 1920 by 1080 is an option. So all right, now that I've got that set, let's go ahead and run through the installation. Now, where is the Geruda installer? Do they have it down here somewhere, maybe in the dock where it's easy to get to? It doesn't. Oh, it's right here on the desktop. So let me close the welcome and click on the installer. And this should launch the Calamari's installer. I will say that the live environment already without even really playing with anything, the live environment looks gorgeous, gorgeous wallpaper, gorgeous icons, that terminal with that weird blur effect going on. Just looked just amazing. All right, so the installer, we have the welcome here. We need to choose a language by default. It's set to American English, which is fine for me. So I'm going to click next. Then I need to choose my time zone. They have chosen the Eastern time zone in the US. I'm in the Central time zone, so I'm going to choose Chicago here in this list. And then the keyboard English US is chosen. That's correct for me. And then we have our choice, whether to do the automatic partitioning or the manual partitioning, I'm going to do the automatic partitioning. And it's going to create a 25 gig butter FS disk of file system here. Very cool, butter FS as the default file system. I kind of like that, too. What's your name? I'm going to call my user DT. What is the name of this computer? I'm going to say Geruda VM. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically without being asked for a password? No, the reason you create a strong and complicated password is, you know, for privacy reasons, you want to have to enter a password to get into your computer. Now, do we want to use the same password for the administrator account? So this is your sudo password. Do we want the DT password to be the same as the sudo password? Yeah, that's fine. That way, I don't have to remember two different strong and complicated passwords. Then I'm going to click next. And here is the summary location. Looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click install. It says the Geruda installer is about to make changes to your disk in order to install Geruda rolling. You will not be able to undo these changes. So this is a warning if you were doing this on physical hardware. It's about to format that drive and start writing to that disk. And any information on that disk, of course, would be lost here in the VM, though there's no dangers. And then the installer is going to run typically this portion of the installer will take, you know, about 10 minutes, typically. So I'm going to pause the recording and I'll be back once the installation has completed and the installation has completed. That just really took five to 10 minutes or so. Now in the Calamari's installer to complete installation, what you need to do is click restart now and then click done. And it will reboot the VM in my case, or you guys doing this on physical hardware. You know, it'll reboot your actual computer and you need to unplug the USB stick sometime during the reboot. So let me go ahead and all right, we got to a grub menu. So the installation looks like it went well. Let me go ahead and load up KDE, the dragonized version of KDE. All right, we got to our login manager. Let me enter my password and we wait for KDE to boot up. And we have booted into our KDE plasma dragonized desktop. And I've got to say, this may be just initial first impressions. The best looking Linux desktop I've ever seen, like everything just looks good, that wallpaper, the colors, the blur effect going on and some of the applications. I like the dock at the bottom with these really cool icons, these very stylized icons, the menu system here inside KDE plasma. That's got some blurring going on. It's just really, really just a very clean and polished look. Probably the best Linux desktop I've ever seen as far as just aesthetics. The only one that I think maybe comes a little close is the Deepen desktop environment. You know, some of the Deepen releases here, especially here recently look very good as well. And we do have this welcome screen here. I'm not sure if I want to go through a lot of this. A lot of this is just information about Garuda, such as web information. I'm not going to click on any of that. And you have contact information. You have a link to their GitLab, their Telegram group, their Twitter. And we have some web services that we could enable. Things like Bitwarden and Private Bin, some cloud stuff, Circs for a search engine. I'm just going to go ahead and close out the welcome. Let's start with the dock at the bottom. I'm assuming this is probably Latte dock, which is often used with KDE plasma. And we have links to the welcome program so we could launch it again if we needed to. We also have our terminal, which is Alacrity. Now, in the live environment, it was console with a K. Console with a K is also here. So we have two different terminal emulators in the dock. That's interesting. I use Alacrity these days. I really like the Alacrity terminal because I just know all the key combinations and the key bindings and everything, and it just looks good. And we have the fish shell inside Alacrity. We have some nice transparency inside Alacrity. But of course, console with a K being a KDE application has that really cool blur effect going on. It has that Gaussian blur effect. You know, where the Alacrity transparency really doesn't have a blur. It's just transparency, but console, you know, actually has a blurring effect. And that's probably one of the advantages if you were going to use this of just using the KDE applications is because some of the latest versions of plasma now have this really cool Gaussian blur effect. You know, and same thing in the menu system, you know, well, you can't really tell because the wallpaper in that area where the menu is is a solid color, but if it was different colors like out here, you can tell, you know, you've got that same kind of Gaussian blur going on. Now, I'm just going to quickly go through the menu system just to see what is installed by default. Now, this was kind of a light addition. They don't call it light. Well, actually they do. Looking back at their web page, they did call this KDE dragonized light. And the ISO was 2.0 gigs in size. So still a big ISO. So there's some programs installed, but it shouldn't be that heavily bloated. Under the development category, we really don't have much here. Some cute stuff, which, you know, most people are not going to be interested in playing with graphics. The only thing here is ocular, which is the image viewer. That's that's interesting. So it actually is a light addition because I would have expected more stuff to be in that category. Same thing with internet. There's really not much here. Some avahi server stuff, the KDE connect. And of course, Firefox is our web browser. Let's open up Firefox and let's see what version of Firefox we are on. I'm actually not sure about this particular release, how old this ISO was. I didn't get a date on it. Looks like Firefox opens up to some different web pages by default. And that's kind of weird. Dark reader help. I don't know what dark reader is or why this is loading up in my Firefox. That's kind of strange. We also have another tab here and this is welcome to local CDN. Okay, let me go to the help information, help about Firefox. And this is Firefox 82.0.3. So that's a pretty recent version of Firefox on my Arco Linux installation on my main production machine. Firefox is already on version 83. So just slightly behind, but again, I don't know how old this ISO is. I actually opened up console here. And if I did a pseudo Pac-Man dash capital S lowercase y lowercase u, let's see how many updates are available if I decided to take an update here. And this may take a second to sync all the repositories. One of the repositories is called chaotic dash a u r. So that is interesting. It says replace K Docker with chaotic a u r slash K Docker dash yet. Sure, why not? Not sure what K Docker is. I'm not a KDE guy, so I don't really know that much about the KDE plasma desktop. But it doesn't look like it was a terribly big update. If I chose this update, it's really just a few things that needed to be updated. Seventy one packages, which for a rolling release distribution, you know, it looks like it's pretty up to date. I'm going to decline the update for now and close out console with a K. I do like the global menu and the window decorations that are integrated. I don't know if you guys notice that when you go full screen with an application, you have the global menu, a very Mac like global menu. And then the window button controls are also integrated into the panel at the top. I really, really like that. That's a nice touch. Let me open up console with a K one more time and zoom in if I can. Let me do a U name space dash R. And the kernel we are using is five dot nine dot nine Zen. This is the Zen kernel, which is really geared toward a better performance. You guys, especially if you were going to use this as like a gaming machine or something like that, you know, that's typically when I see people installing things like the Zen kernel, I'm not much of a gamer or anything. I'm definitely not going to try to gaming inside a VM. But I do like that they are using that Zen kernel because that just gives Linux desktop users, you know, another option other than all those distributions that ship with the standard, the generic Linux kernel, you know, Geruda by shipping with the Zen kernel. Again, I just like that there's another option out there for people back to the menu system. Let's see of the multimedia category. VLC is here. And that's all you need. VLC can play audio and it can play video, of course. So that's the only thing here. Again, this is kind of a minimal installation office. There's nothing here ocular again, but there's no office programs. Really settings is the quantum manager is here. Our system update tool and we have some Geruda stuff, the Geruda settings manager. Let's launch that and see what that looks like. And this is where we could change our locale settings, language packs. So, you know, some of the stuff that you set during the installation, time and date, things like that, if you ever needed to change those settings, you could get into the Geruda settings manager to change some of that. And we have a system category here. And this is where most of the programs that are installed on the system actually are. So you don't have a whole lot of standard applications, but system applications, you have a lot of them. Of course, we've already talked about the two terminals, Alacrity and Console. Bleach bit is here. That's a system cleaner. Dolphin, of course, is KDE's file manager. Let's see how Dolphin looks. We haven't actually launched it. I love the Gaussian blur that they've got going on there. It looks really cool. I love the icons. This is just, I can't stress enough just how gorgeous this Linux distribution looks. And we have the Geruda assistant. I'm not sure what that is. Let's launch that. OK, so this is refreshing the mirror list, updating your system. You know, some of the stuff that typically I do at the terminal, most of you guys probably do at the terminal, too, if you use arch or arch based systems, but not everybody's going to know those commands to do that stuff. So the Geruda assistant is definitely good to have for new to arch Linux users or people that just want to avoid the terminal. You know, you can just click one of those things here and get that done without actually needing to launch a terminal and actually typing a command or sometimes having to look up that command that's neat that that is there. The one that I really wanted to check out is this one right here, Geruda Gamer. So let's see what that is all about. Geruda Gamer. OK, so this is where you can install a lot of your Linux gaming stuff. So if I wanted to, I guess, install Steam, play on Linux is here. Lutrus is also here. We can install wine, wine tricks, proton, proton tricks. So this distribution is definitely geared toward the gamer by having all this gaming stuff on it, all these gaming launchers available for you, not to mention the fact that it has that Zen kernel. It's definitely geared toward those that want to do some serious Linux gaming. Also under system, we have each top. Well, let's launch each top because I haven't even checked out what kind of system resources we're using here. Now, keep in mind, this is a VM and also because of all that blurring effect that's going on and everything, I expect system resource usage to be sky high, especially in a VM. When you add all that blurring and all those nice effects, they look good, but they do suck up a little CPU and a little RAM CPU usage. I'm using about 10 percent of the CPU and not really doing anything. So typically you would expect, you know, one to two percent of the CPU being used. So that I can tell you the CPU, especially is probably the blurring effect that's causing that to be a little high memory. We're using one point one gigs of the four gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's pretty high for a plasma desktop. But again, you know, some of the nice effects, you know, that's going on with the compositor is probably causing some of that stuff to be a little high. Also under the system category, we have Timeshift. Timeshift is a really cool program. It takes a snapshot of your system. So that's basically a way to back up and restore your system. So if you ever have an issue, you know, you can restore from one of the one of the previous snapshots you took. And really, that's about everything that is installed. Again, very minimal as far as the number of programs of real programs. Obviously, the system utilities category had some stuff in it. But for the most part, there's no office suite. There's really no graphics programs or no multimedia programs other than VLC. But really, you're going to have to install all your standard applications that you probably are going to want to use. So if you want to office suite, something like LibreOffice, you're going to have to install it. Same thing, you know, for somebody like me, if I installed it on my main production machine, I'm going to need Caden live and audacity and OBS and MPV. And a lot of the stuff that I work with all the time, I'm going to have to go and install all of those programs, and that's fine. I prefer that approach rather than those distributions that are quite heavily bloated out of the box. They ship with a ton of applications pre-installed. But the problem is a lot of those applications that are pre-installed are applications I don't use or I'm going to have to swap out with something else, something else that I prefer. So I like the more minimal approach of not shipping that many applications installed out of the box. Now, I'm going to right click on the desktop and let's see. How do I change the wallpaper and KDE? I got to remember how to use KDE Plasmids been so long since I've looked at it. All right, for wallpapers, we really just have two wallpapers to choose from the default one. And then this one here, which is looks like one of the standard Plasma wallpapers, actually, that looks pretty good too. But you know what, I think I like the default one better. So I'm going to apply that. Let me go back and right click on the desktop icons. Can I change the icons? Actually, what I really need is a control panel, I think, to change the icon set. I just want to see if I can change the icon set or what's available. And the default icon set is called beauty line. So those of you that want this icon set, that's the one to go look for the other icon sets or this standard default and way to icon set, which is that default Gnome icon set that just looks horrible. Nobody wants to use that the breeze icon set, which actually is rather nice. You guys know what breeze looks like. If I hit apply here, you know, it's just your standard KDE breeze icons and breeze dark is also here. But honestly, I would not change from that beauty line icon set. I just think, you know, that completes the look, right? That's the total package right there. That wallpaper with that icon set and that KDE theme. And it's just it's the most beautiful Linux desktop I've ever seen. And that's it for this first look at Gerudo Linux. This was Gerudo Linux, the KDE Dragonized Edition. And I really didn't know what I was going to get into when I took a look at this. And especially with the name, that Dragonized name, the four six for the for the A.G. Inside Dragonized. I was like, that's a goofy name and a goofy spelling. This is going to be a goofy Linux distribution. And it's not this distribution. I got to say just for spending half an hour or so taking a very quick cursory look at it is really impressive. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Devin Fran Gabe, Corbinion Mitchell, a commie, Archvijta 530. Chris Chuck, Donnie Dylan Gregory, Lewis Paul, Pick V.M. Scott and Willie, they are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this first look at Gerudo would not have been possible. Show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is supported by you guys, the community without you guys. I couldn't do what I do. I hope you consider supporting my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.