 There are Dozens of Debian based distributions out there and they're all good or bad to varying degrees depending on how often they're updated how well they're maintained So on and so forth. One of my favorite Debian based distributions is actually called Sparky Linux I've looked at this before I've made a video on it before and it's really good Recently they came out with version 6.0 and I thought I'd take a look at it. So that's what we're going to be doing today We're gonna be taking a look at Sparky 6.0 potolo. I'm sure I'm gonna be butchering that name I probably won't use it again. So let's go ahead and take a look at what's new and then we'll install it and Take a look around. Let's go ahead and jump in So here are the release notes. This came out. I think yesterday So this is hot off the presses as they say So it's based on Debian 11 bullseye, which is very impressive considering that Debian 11 bullseye just came out like last week The fact that they were able to go through and release Sparky Linux 6.0 just a week after the stable addition of Debian was released is just highly impressive especially when you consider their other Debian slash Ubuntu releases that just take forever to get their releases out after an LTS release. So The fact that this just took a week is very impressive So like I said, it's based on bullseye. They have several Updated packages now because this is Debian don't expect bleeding edge. You're gonna find Very stable software here. That's the purpose of it. Now that being said I don't think anybody is going to be using Sparky Linux who expects bleeding edge If you're gonna if you're not if you want a bleeding edge You're either going to find a Debian-based issue that's based on unstable or you're gonna be using something like Arch So you use something like Sparky because you want a Debian-based distribution that has a desktop pre-installed for you That also has the most stable software available. So that's what Sparky Linux is What seems to be the biggest change is they've changed their Way of distributing apps from something called aptus to the app center So we're gonna have to take a look that supposedly has around 2300 Popular applications and 20 free preconfigured desktops. We'll see how that's been redesigned or how it's well I remember that vaguely I'm not sure if I remember liking it or not. I think I thought it was weird But we'll take a look at it again this time. So we also have a brand new welcome screen and We also have something called rise of VPN application pre-installed So if you're interested in using a VPN called rise up then you can use that most people probably need to use something different Sparky 6 comes in Xfce, KDE and LXQ. So if you are familiar with any of those desktops, you'll probably be fine Apparently you can also go through and look at other pre-configured desktops as well We'll take a look at that here in a few minutes when we install. So let's go ahead and just jump into the installation So we're going to be installing this in a virtual machine I've given this eight gigabytes of of RAM and for CPU cores we'll just go ahead and Get this started so we want us English will select that Very pretty startup screen. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I actually did select the plasma version of Sparky Linux this time. It's been a while since I've looked at it iso with with ice with plasma on it So I decided to choose this now. This is the brand new welcome screen We'll take a more in-depth look of that look at that once we've installed So let's go ahead and double-click the installer here and get started. So this is the calamari is installer We want American English. We'll just go ahead and run through this real quick. Detroit is fine English us default is fine. We'll erase the disk. Do we get it? We do get an option for swap we'll just do swap to file and We will go ahead and hit next we will enter my name here and That all is also fine. We'll call this Sparky. Oh s just for fun And we'll have a very nice password that no one will ever be able to guess Right here and we by default. I remember this part here. They have login automatically automatic checked by default I'm gonna uncheck that because what's the point of having a password if you're just gonna, you know log in automatically and Then we'll hit next and then we'll install. We'll see how long this takes. I'll cut the video here And we'll come back once it's done Okay, so that's done I'm going to go ahead and shut this down normally instead of hitting the restart button But if you're in this position, you could go through and just hit the restart button after you've removed your installation media For me, I have to remove it from virtual box. So I have to shut down And it actually did it for me this time. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't so we're just going to hit start again And we'll see what the startup times look like here in virtual box It'll probably be just fine like normal The days of linux starting up slow are pretty much gone even on You know slow hardware startup times are usually pretty good. So let's go ahead and enter our password here. This is sddm I believe for your your display manager and we got a the traditional katie Splash screen and then we have our katie desktop so This is the brand new sparky linux 6 welcome screen We have the home page, which is probably just going to take us to yeah It's just going to take us to the sparky linux home page if we close this It does bring up the welcome page again. So that's kind of nice We have forums wiki get repo It probably takes this to everything that they have on get a donate button app center Which we'll take a look at here in a minute upgrade. I wonder what this does So this is the system update tool It's just running apt in the background probably so it's just a gooey And we'll go ahead and actually Run this and see what it comes up with That's actually going to open up a terminal. So it's not even Doing all that much. It's just a button to run apt Which is nothing wrong with that so we have a Your system is up to date. Okay And it's still asking for another password. So But so this is going to be for the locale So I think we can just exit this because we already have english installed That's if you want to install another locale and that's done So we have a little box down here. I don't you probably can't see it says updates are available run system upgrade now Let's run that again. I think we're going to have the same results. We just add I'm assuming Exiting now. Okay All right, so we got update we have about system info info And then backup so backup probably uses So when you hit backup system, it takes you to wiki page Okay I'm not sure how useful that is really I would expect it to launch like something like timeshift or something instead of just being a link to a web page, but Better flow at your boat So we'll go ahead now and check out the app center Again, why you have to enter your password to get to the app center? I'm not sure You should only have to enter your password when you want to install an application You shouldn't have to do it to to launch into the app store Or at least I wouldn't think so. It seems like they're asking for root permission before they actually need root permission But we'll just go ahead and take a gander around this now. Supposedly this is brand new Whether or not I've actually looked at this before I don't remember what it was like In sparky linux 5. It's been quite a while. So we'll look at games here. So there's uh, Obviously, we always go for games Let's see what a card card games they have in here. So a whole bunch of solitary games Cool um Interestingly enough the Sometimes the when you go to a page it reloads the whole application. So let's see if we can do that again Extreme touch racer. Yeah. See it. See how it like reloads the whole app center thing. That's really odd I think he did that before I commented on that before so there's a whole bunch of games here. That's really nice Uh, I wonder about like is there like a search thing here? Let's see if steam is in here Uh type of cute. So it actually opens like a another application in order to do the the search That is weird and apparently steam is not in here. I don't Nope, no see here. Oh, yep right here steam. It's at the end So your search for steam should be at the top because there's not many things. I mean These are the I mean it's alphabetical order But still So steam is here. Lutrus is here We'll go back to here and take a look at the desktops. That's be interesting So if you want to install any of these desktops, you can do so awesome window managers here bspwm budgie I don't know what cde is Cinnamon, I don't know what draco is either. I've never heard of that enlightenment flux box gunam flashback. I'm assuming Is what is gunam flashback, you know, does it say? It doesn't say what it actually is I've never heard of gunam flashback before. Maybe it's like a gunam two version of gunam Uh, we got i3 ice window manager jwm kd plasma lumia Lumina lumina x lxde lxde. So that's pretty old. That's not even maintain anymore as far as I know lxcute mate An s cd. I don't know what that again. I don't know what that is open box open box noir peck wm never heard of that trinity uukui never heard of that again window maker and xfc Uh, so there's a big selection here and some of these are really rare like so much So I've never even heard of them. We don't have things like dwm here x more ads not here But the fact that there is even a selection is really cool. I'm just gonna install one of these I'm just very curious. So I'm gonna install bspwm and see what it looks like to install it I'm just very curious It's gonna. Oh, it's gonna change the light dm. So that's really Not great. We're gonna maintain sd dm because we don't light dm will just break For whatever whatever reason light dm hates me and breaks on everything that I touch So we'll just stick with sd dm The install time on that is actually Quite long. I usually when you install bsp, I don't remember bspwm being actually as You'll long to install when I installed it on dm before but Yeah, so this is let's see if we got like gimp or whatever graphics editors blenders here Dark tables here gimp is here inkscape is here. So this is a very well Stocked app center. It's also really weird because it's kind of like an uh, Like a web app or something. I'm not sure why it reloads between pages That's just something that it does and it's not a big deal, but it's weird The search is also really weird the fact that it opens up as like a separate application in order to Search something instead of just like a drop-down or something. That's again Weird so The way they do application the app center here is just A little out of the ordinary, but the fact that they've done this themselves And it's original and not they're not just using discoverer or Uh, gnomes software or something like that is highly impressive the fact that you've spent time to do something on your own I find that admirable whether or not it's a good app center. It would be for you to judge I think there's a lot of stuff here and it works. I think that's probably the Only two criteria that you have to have in order to be a good app store is you have to have a lot of software And it has to work if you meet those two criteria You've succeeded in what you're trying to do. So good job on that Okay, we'll close this and let's take a look now at installed software So development icon browser graphics quenview image magic Uh, library offices here is as well ocular and scanline for scanning internet. We got firefox esr kd connect kget, which I believe is a github client conversation A whole bunch of uh, obviously plasma applications that are going to be here as well quite rss, which is an rss feed reader rise up vpn in thunderbird and We had just that that menu just uh crashed interesting Uh from multiple multimedia got aliza, which is the kde music app k3b, which is a mp3 tagger Most of the stuff is just uh kde plasma applications, but we got something here called sparky tube, which i'm What exactly is this copy and paste video address below? So this is like a front end for like youtube dl cool Uh, that's really interesting. I actually kind of want this for my system And you just use youtube you youtube dl, but the fact that it's you know GUIs are kind of fun to play with every once in a while I'm a that's what i'm assuming that this is is a front end for YouTube dl. Okay. That's cool. Let's go back here. Uh, vlc is our video player And then uh, we have like a I believe that voco screen is a like a screen capture application uh, library office is here And then we got the standard settings and system utilities and stuff so outside of the plasma Application packages, there's not a ton of Stuff here that is not that stuff like uh, there we have nitrogen here to change wallpapers and stuff That may have been installed when I installed bspwm So that may not be here by default Well, then all the rest of the stuff is mostly just plasma applications along with library office and a couple others So it's a very minimal install There's not a lot here and it's just using the standard. So if we open up like dolphin This is just the standard Breeze theme. So it's not like very customized in terms of theme. Uh, they did change the icons, which is nice. Um Dolphin is so good. I wish I wish you could I wish I could use dolphin on my machine But it has so many dependencies. You got to install basically the entire plasma stack in order to get dolphin to work But I I really do think that dolphin is the best file manager out there, but in terms of Light weightness or light weightedness that it's not a word, but whatever In terms of heft in terms of dependencies and stuff Uh, it kind of turns me away from it. Anyways, let's go ahead and take a look at some statistics for Sparky linux now we got to remember we've opened up some things here So this isn't going to be fresh out of the box Statistics, but we'll do first. We'll do uname dash a let's see what kernel running. We're in 5.10 So this is fairly old, but again, remember we're in debian, so we're expecting that Uh, let's go ahead and do free dash m Now remember I've been I've opened up some things. So this may not be Indicative to what you'll get Fresh out of the you know box after fresh reboot 500 and legum 11 megabytes. That's just really good. Now also Linux uses more memory Depending on how much memory you give it So if you I've given this machine 8 gigabytes, it may use less on a machine that has less memory. So At least that's what I've come to understand But then that's actually true. I don't even know, but We'll just assume it is true because I heard somebody else say it Good job, man. Anyways, we do have a swap file here as we chose before Let's see if we have htop installed by default. We do not sersudo apt install htop Oops You're gonna actually spell it right So we're just running 66 tasks 151 threads Not bad at all. I mean For a plasma desktop That's actually pretty much on the low side And Plasma isn't really a heavy desktop these days. So that's actually really impressive So that's that let's go ahead and quit of that and let's see if neofetch is installed by default It is not so neofetch gives us a Really nice little logo here. It tells us the bash version is 5.1.4 plasma is 520.5. So That's a little older than what I would hope it would be But again, this is debian. So you're gonna kind of expect that now What I find most surprising about every debian install that I've Encountered so far is the number of packages that it installs Now some of this is going to be kde useful because kde just installed a ton of packages, but Even that machine behind me that's running Just bspwm and debian's like stock debian It has almost like 1700 packages and I don't know what they are. It's really weird And This is kind of weird too because we just went through all the applications and there's not a ton of applications here. I've seen distros with way more applications than this That seem to have fewer packages installed. So what again that might be just mostly the whole kde thing But that's a lot of packages So we're running k1 window managers. This is the sparky theme So they did actually go through and do a custom theme although I say that this is mostly just Breeze the icons are tele And this is console obviously and this is your terminal color scheme. So it's really nice if you're looking for a debian based distro That is light way well put together and is easy to install Sparky is a great option And it's just as great an option as it was Back in version 5 personally I would install this over just regular debiet and the reason why is because debian hides their non-free isos and That is a terrible experience because everybody needs the non-free iso almost everybody needs it in order to get Wi-Fi work and the fact that they hide it is a pan yes, and The experience of installing sparky is better because it uses a more modern installer It also has desktop environments that are pre set up for you So they at least look somewhat good and they haven't gone through and spent a ton of time Customizing the desktop environments that I've looked at actually before. Oh, no, I think about it Let's go ahead and take a look and see what the bspwm thing looks like I'm just really curious. So let's go back here and log out and see what the bspwm thing looks like So we could go down here and choose bspwm from the selector And enter the password again and this is bspwm with what the freak is that panel? Is that That can't be polybore that has to be like something like tint. What is that panel? I don't even know I'm going to find out though x prop So this is the tint 2 panel. Okay. I've never actually used tint 2 before so I couldn't It's not surprising that I didn't recognize it. So they used the tint 2 panel by default. I would get rid of that Like right away and install polybore polybore. I think is way better But if you're more interested in a more desktop environment type panel Tint 2 would probably be a good idea for you because it shows open windows It has clickable events and clickable icons and all that stuff. It has an icon trade by default tint 2 is actually good now what What terminal is this this is the uh, this looks like x term. I bet you this is x term So, yeah, this is x. I believe that's what x term comes, you know It shows up as But yeah, so this is bsp. We beat bspwm and you can tell we got the Fibonacci layout or whatever it's called. Let's see super shift c to close. No super x to close Super q to close super shift x to close All right, well, we're going to go cd into this Unfortunately, I can't zoom in because I have no code to zoom in on an x term. Is it control page up control shift page up control shift plus No So I don't know how to zoom in so apologize for that. So we'll the cd into dot config bspwm and do an analysis here So we have the bspwm rc. So we'll cd up a level and see if we have xs at hkd I can't even see that. So I can't imagine that you can either cd sx hkd Vim into sx hkd rc and vim is not installed by default apt install all right We're just gonna pause there for a second and have a mini rant every distribution should have vim installed by default It should be a rule. I mean It should be a rule. I mean everybody uses vim. It's it's so silly that it's not installed by default And it's not just sparkly linux. It doesn't have installed by default Ubuntu doesn't have it installed by default either and that's just a travesty All right, so we'll do a vim into sx hkd rc and we'll see what The kill command is so super Super alt escape is quit. No, that's going to be quit bspwm uh, so super shift W shoots. Is that what that says? Super shift w? Super super shift w Super shift w that is the weirdest keybinding for closing a window. I've ever seen in my life. I've never seen it before Uh by default that is really really odd. Yeah, so I changed that like Immediately that's really weird. So, uh, row they have rofi installed by default So they use rofi instead of dmenu. I like that. I prefer rofi over dmenu. So that's a good thing But also they use super r to show it Okay, so I've seen alt p. I've seen super d. I've seen super shift enter super space all those things super r Is never really rofi now. I can understand where they're going with it r rofi makes sense W for quit Not quite as obvious All right, so that's bspwm. I don't need to go through any of that stuff I'm just very curious what how they did the Theming and stuff on bspwm and it looks really nice because they have pycom running you can tell because there's transparency and stuff They're using x term I don't think that that's what I would actually Use as a terminal emulator by default because most people don't know how to use x term I know I don't I have no cool how to zoom in on x term And I'm assuming you use x resources in order to add that functionality and probably change the font size and stuff like that But even then I don't even know if that's true. I could be completely making that up in my mind So yeah, that is bspwm on sparky linux 6.0. I'm interested in looking at a couple of their desktops Who cares how long this video is going to be shut. Let's just so super shift w to close this which is just whatever and we'll do Actually, we'll super shift w this and we'll do super r apt apt us Yeah, this is what we're looking for And then we'll go for desktops and let's install Let's see what their i3 one looks like Because that's the only other window manager that I really care about I've used the only other one that I've really used. I've used fluxbox before I've used awesome before Let's go ahead and use install awesome. Why not? See what their awesome installer install looks like that installed a lot faster than bspwm did which is interesting So we'll just do super shift w on this. We'll just or exit I suppose super shift w and then we'll do super shift Uh escape. I think is what I said was exit bspwm Or maybe a super alt escape. It was super alt escape. Again, that's really weird Uh, so I've seen super alt q super shift q super shift x Uh, usually escapes not a key that they use But we're going to go ahead and go into awesome here And enter the password and this is what awesome looks like Uh, that is the I believe the regular awesome Bar, but it is a little theme. So if we open up a terminal here we're in the fantastic floating mode Which is Really should not be the default mode and this is going to be in x term again It is yeah, so let's go ahead and go into cd. .config awesome And we'll do ls here and we'll vmrc.lua. Oops. I don't have my I don't have my aliases here. So I can't do that So again, I'm not gonna be able to zoom in because you know awesome sauce So we'll scroll down here. I'm assuming we're gonna have probably the same really weird keyboard needs For awesome as we did with bspwm. So let's see if we can mod key k It's gonna raise the client to the top. Okay, so we got mod shift q to reach to start quite awesome Mod control r to restart awesome. That actually makes sense. That's actually the first Key bonding and either of these things that actually has made complete sense to me prompt menu bar I don't see the one to come to close Probably just missing it. I'm sure I am All right, it doesn't matter But for the most part, that's just a standard awesome configuration They've changed the color of the bar. They've gotten rid of the title bar and they've removed some of the tags So they've only given us four tags You'd have to go through and add those other tags if you wanted more tags Obviously, I would so Yeah, that is sparky linux. I I'm impressed that they have the the window managers and the desktop environments to add on to that That's really great. So like I was saying before before I got distracted with other, you know, the window managers is I would recommend this for you if you want to use debian but don't care for the debian install process because debian Has zero non-free binaries or blobs or whatever in in its standard iso The one that you go if you go to debian dot org or dot com or whatever it is And download that iso that they have on the front page and then try to install it like on that laptop behind me It's not going to work because that laptop requires a non-free driver for the wi-fi card to work and They hide those isos. So that's a big problem with debian but Moreover once you get past that hurdle The desktop environments that they offer which they offer several I don't believe they offer any window managers, but they offer several desktop environments. They're all stock In terms of looks and feel and if you know what xfc looks like stock You'll know that it desperately needs a refresh in terms of design. It looks really bad and Honestly plasma out of the box doesn't look all that great either so The minimal amount of designing that sparky has done is actually really nice They haven't taken it so far as something like garuda or something like it's not crazy in terms of design It's very minimal And it may not be to the taste of everybody not actually you can change it But the fact that it's better than what debian itself offers is nice So if you want a lightweight minimal Debian distribution that is highly maintained Sparky is a good option for you For me personally, I think that app center would drive me crazy and I'd never use it So their premiere feature that they seem to work a lot on is the app center Would go waste it on me because I just used the command line But that's probably would be true of no matter what distribution based on debian that I used because most of the App centers or app stores that they have on debian based distributions, including ubuntu and mint They're mostly trash for me. I'm just going to use the the command line. That's just me. I'm a nerd, but If you're a new user and want to use debian This is a great option because the app center is actually really good and it has a ton of software in it. I mean When you're looking at an application store The is you need to work like I said and you needed to have a lot of software in it This one had a lot of software in it and that's a win. So Definitely give sparky linux 6.0 a try If you want to follow me, you can do so at the linux cast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon chris east coast web gentu is fun too marcus maiglin spend jack's knife and tool Mitchell mr. Fox art center american camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time