 Today I'm going to be taking a look at Geruda Linux. Now, I've taken a look at Geruda in the past, but it's been a while. It's been probably well over a year since the last time I took a look at Geruda. Typically when I look at it, I take a look at their KDE edition, which is just gorgeous because of some of the artwork and the blurring and the animations. You know, KDE has some nice fancy effects, but one of the things about Geruda is they have a lot of different desktop editions. I wanted to check out something that wasn't KDE or GNOME because I wanted to see how they do some of the more minimalist desktop environments because they do offer other editions. They offer Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate, LXQ, and today what I'm going to do, I'm going to take a look at Geruda Mate because Mate is basically a fork of the old GNOME 2 desktop environment. It's a very traditional looking desktop environment. And I want to see if they're able to rice the Mate desktop environment the same way that they were able to do KDE. So I've downloaded the ISO for Geruda Mate, and I've loaded up this virtual machine here, and this boot screen is very reminiscent of the Manjaro boot screen because you have your time zone, key table language that you can set, and then you have two choices, boot with open source drivers or boot with proprietary drivers. That's very important. If you're booting on a piece of hardware that has an Nvidia card, you typically are going to need the proprietary drivers for me because I'm doing this in a virtual machine. All the graphics drivers are open source, so I'm just going to boot with open source drivers. And we boot directly into the live environment. The live environment, of course, is the Mate desktop environment. When you first boot into it, we do get a Gerudo welcome application that gives us links to various settings that we may or may not need to play with. For example, we have the Geruda Assistant, the Geruda Settings Manager. We'll take a look at some of this stuff once we actually get Geruda installed. There's also links to various Geruda services, their website, their GitLab, the Wiki, things like that. And of course, you can contact the Geruda team on their forum, telegram, discord, element, Twitter, or IRC chat. And that's important if you need support, especially if you need support during the installation process. That's good that they have those links there ready for you. I'm going to go ahead and click this big button that says Install Geruda Linux. And the Calamari's installer launches. Let me move it over so my head is not in the way. We get the welcome screen, which is just a welcome message, along with choosing the language for the installation process. American English is the default here, so I'll just leave that. I'm going to click Next. Then the time zone. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So there's nothing for me to do here. So I'm just going to click Next. And then English US is my keyboard, so I don't need to change that. So I'm just going to click Next. And then the partition scheme. So for me, I'm going to erase the disk. I'm going to give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine over to Geruda. If I wanted to do a manual partitioning, you know, I could click Manual Partition, and then click Next. And then partition the drive myself. But I'm going to do a race disk also. Do we want swap or no swap? For purposes of this virtual machine, just because I'm limited on space, I'm not going to create a swap. If you're doing this on physical hardware, you probably need to create a swap. So I'm going to click Next. Now, let me go ahead and create my username. My user is going to be DT. And then the name of the computer, the host name, I'm going to call this Geruda-vert. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then login automatically without asking for a password that's ticked off by default. I'm going to leave that ticked off. You should have to enter a password to enter any computer just for privacy reasons. And then use the same password for the administrator account. That's ticked on by default. I'm going to leave that ticked on. That means my sudo password and my user's password are the same. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. So I'm going to click Next. And then we get a summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click the Install button. And it's going to warn us that it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click Install now. And away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my machine. I'm going to step away, grab a cup of coffee. I'll be back once Geruda Mate has finished installing. And the installation has completed. So I'm going to click on the box here that says Restart. Now I'm going to tick that on. And then I'm going to click Done. And it should automatically reboot the virtual machine. And I love the little splash screen that we got there for a second. And then we come to our login manager. It looks like they're using Light Diem for their login manager here. So let me go ahead and log in to the Mate desktop environment. And we're logged in to our freshly installed Geruda Linux Mate edition. We have the Geruda setup assistant. I do notice the screen resolution is not quite right. I'd like to change that to a 1920 by 1080 resolution. But let's run through the assistant and see if that straightens the problem out for us. I'm going to click OK. And it says, well, it's asking for a sudo password. I'm assuming it's going to update the system is probably what it's about to do. Yeah, it's doing a sync of the repositories. Now this ISO that I downloaded was about one month old. So one month old on an Arch Linux base distribution, a rolling release distribution, there is going to be some packages that need to be updated. So this may take a few minutes. And yeah, there's several packages that need to update. Let me go ahead and hit Enter on that 385 packages. This should take, I don't know, three or four minutes. And I do notice that after it runs the updates here, it's performing a performing snapper pre snapshots for the following configurations. So it's doing a snapshot for us because by default, they are using butterfs for the file system. Now if I did the manual partitioning, I could have chose a different file system, but I just went with the defaults here. And of course, one of the programs that needed to update was the latest Linux kernel. It looks like they're using the Linux Zen kernel. So, and that was the case in past editions of Geruda that I took a look at is they use the Zen kernel, rather than the standard generic Linux kernel. The Zen kernel is used for increased performance, especially for those of you that are into gaming and things like that. The Zen kernel can offer a little bit more performance. This is a system updated press enter to exit. So let me go ahead and do that. It's checking to see if we're an Nvidia user. This is a virtual machine, so it didn't have to install any Nvidia drivers, but that's nice. I really like the fact that it forces that update right away. It checks for proprietary Nvidia drivers if they're needed. And then we have the Geruda setup assistant. So do we need to set up a printer scanner or Samba support? Do we want to install additional Geruda wallpapers? Sure, why not? Do you need pen testing software? No. So an input. So this is for various fonts. So you need some Asian fonts. That's where you'd find that. Software centers. I would assume that it's going to have its own software center installed out of the box, but I'm not positive on that. I could go into applications, system tools, and see if they have a software center or if I actually need to pick one. I guess I need to pick one. So I would probably, you know what, I would go with OctaPie just because I like it. And then kernels. We've already got the Zen kernel as our default kernel, but if you wanted to, you could switch over to something like the LTS kernel, if you prefer. For Office, typically I install LibreOffice, but I'm not going to install any of that. And this virtual machine for browsers, we have a lot of browsers that we could install. I typically install Brave, but I'll go with whatever their default browser, which I'm assuming would probably be Firefox. For email, I have various email clients, including Thunderbird, Geary, Milspring, those three I've used, and they're really nice. Communication, you have a lot of chat clients, like Telegram and Discord and Element and things like that. Internet, like some BitTorrent clients and FileZilla, the FTP client, that's one I often install. You've got an audio category, a video category. If I scroll over, you've got a lot of different software categories, but I'm not going to bloat up this virtual machine because I'm not going to really live in this virtual machine, so I'm just going to hit OK. Once again, let's give it a sudo password to install extra Gerudo wallpapers I asked for, just because wallpapers are really the most important thing you want on the system, right? Press Enter to return to Setup Assistance, and it says Success. Your system is set up, so let me click OK. Now I still want to change the display resolution. So in Mate, the program is called Mate Display Properties, and if I look in probably System Tools, Mate Display Properties is not here. Maybe it'll be called Monitor, Monitor Properties or Display Properties. I don't see it. It's not under universal access, and it shouldn't be under any of these other categories because these are like for actual programs. It really should be under like a systems category. The preference is here it is. Look and feel. Have appearance. That's not yet. Mate tweak. That's probably not yet either, but let me click on it just to verify that that is not yet. Why can I never find this? You know, I've had this problem in the past, finding this. This is the Mate Control Center. Maybe I could get to it from here. You would think it would be under look and feel, and there would be something about monitor settings, monitor properties, display properties. You know what? I'm just going to go. I know the name of the program, so in Mate, if you do Alt F2, you'll get a run launcher, and I'm going to do Mate Dash, Display Dash Properties. And this is the program I was looking for, the title bar, Monitor Preferences, but I didn't see Monitor Preferences in the menu system. It was probably there. I just didn't want to waste any more time looking for it. Right? Let's go ahead and keep this closed, and now this virtual machine should always be set to a 1920x1080 screen resolution from here forward. So first impressions, I got to say, I do like the Eagle Wallpaper Garuda. The name Garuda means Eagle. It's a type of Eagle, I believe. The GTK theme they're using, and the Mate theme, you know, it does look nice. The icon set, it's really quite attractive. It's still got that old school GNOME 2 kind of look and feel. So really attractive desktop environment. I do like the welcome app. So let's go ahead and go through some of what is in the welcome app because they've got a lot of stuff going on here. There's a lot of Garuda applications, as far as Garuda-specific applications that they built. So the Garuda Assistant, when you click on it, the welcome screen hides, and the Garuda Assistant appears. And you can see you have tools to update the system, reinstall all packages, edit the repositories. Now, a lot of this stuff is kind of dangerous. This is not stuff you really need to go in here and do. Now, updating the system is fine, but like playing with the repositories or even clearing the cache can be a little dangerous. Removing orphans can also be dangerous. Make sure when you click that button and remove orphan packages, make sure it's not actually going to uninstall something that is actually important. That's not an orphan because sometimes things, Pac-Man will label something as an orphan that's not really an orphan. Like, you know, it'll all of a sudden decide it's going to remove the Linux kernel as an orphan package. Make sure that doesn't happen. For most users, I would say the only thing they're going to use here would be the system update. That's if you didn't want to do just a Pac-Man SYU in the terminal, like most people. Or, you know, you could get a new mirror list, refresh the mirror list, or refresh the key rings. So if you have a problem installing software, it is giving you an error about the key rings or out of date, you can refresh the key ring. You also have butterfs snapper. So this is for the butterfs snapshots. And it already took one snapshot at least because remember it did one when we did that very first update of the system. So let me launch this and see. Now there's the butterfs assistant. Let's go ahead and look at sub volumes. There's the sub volumes snapper, which are the snapshots. We already have six snapshots that we could roll back to. So if there's an update, say I take a seventh update. So we got six snapshots. Let's say I take another update of the system. And for whatever reason, the system is broken. I can always roll back to one of these previous snapshots and get back to a working system. So that is the beauty of snapshots and especially snapshots with the butterfs file system. And then you have system components here. And this is for various support, audio support, pipe wire support, jack support, things like that virtualization. I'm actually using vert manager for this virtual machine so I could tick on some of this stuff. Printing and scanner support. So if you needed like the cups, printer drivers, for example, if you were plugging in printers and scanners, so that would be very nice to have. And then settings, our default shell, bash, fish, SH, which SH is not a shell. I'm not sure what this SH is, just a sim link to whatever your default shell is. So that's weird that that is in the menu system. That's probably just the way it was scripted. Hey, list all the shells on the system. You know, one of the shells is actually SH, but that's really just a sim link to one of these other shells. I won't fish as my default shell though. So I'm going to hit apply. And of course we need sudo privileges to make that change. So enter my sudo password. So that was the Gruda Assistant. We have Gruda Gamer. Oh, this is really nice because you have all the various launchers like Steam and Heroic and Lutris. And you could actually just click these on, hit apply and get all of these installed. And remember Gruda, one of the things is, I wouldn't call it a gaming distribution, but they do focus a lot on gaming, especially including that Zen kernel out of the box. That's really what that is for. Well, let me go ahead and close that window and get back to the welcome screen. The Gruda Settings Manager for hardware configuration kernel where we could choose a kernel. A lot of this I think we saw earlier when we went through the setup. You can add users, change time and date keyboard settings, locale settings. I don't need to play with any of that stuff. We have the Gruda Network Assistant, which I probably don't need to play with any network settings. But yeah, so you need to play with some of the IP stuff or trying to get your Wi-Fi working correctly. There is that. Gruda Boot Options. Let's see what the boot options are. So it's the kernel parameters. So this string here, or when you boot, what are the kernel parameters? I also background images. So that would be like your grub theme. We have a system cleaner. Let's see which system cleaner they're going to use. There's several programs that they could use for that. It looks like they're going to use Stacer. It's going to install Stacer first, which I think is a smart choice. Instead of having it installed out of the box, most people will probably never clean their system. But if you, so when you click the button, it actually installs Stacer first and then runs it. Let me go ahead and quit out of Stacer. Really nice program. I think I did a video about Stacer about five years ago now. The ButterFS Assistant. We already saw the partition managers probably G-ported. Yes, it's going to run G-ported. I'm going to decline to run that. And then add remove software, which launches whatever software center I guess we installed. Remember, I installed Octopi. From here, I could look for a piece of software such as Htop. Htop is already installed. That's why the box is already colored green. But if it wasn't colored green, I click on it, the ticket on to install, and then you click the check box or whatever here in the top panel here. And it would install Htop for me, but luckily that is already done for me. So let's go ahead and close out of the welcome app. There was a lot of good stuff in there though. Let me quickly just go through the menu system to see what is installed out of the box. I know there's going to be quite a bit of stuff already installed out of the box because it required about 30 gigs of disk space to install. So a lot of stuff here. We have caffeine, which caffeine, that caffeine indicator. You can see it is here. If I do an about this is caffeine 2.9.12. So manually control the desktop's idle state. Let's close that out. Let me go ahead and kill the icon because I don't want it to continue to run because later I'll check system resource usage. So let me close out caffeine. What caffeine does, it prevents your like screensaver and stuff from being activated if you want to turn that stuff off. Really neat little application. And we have in grandpa, which is the Monte archive manager for zip and unzip and things like that. And various other Monte specific tools such as the Monte calculator, their font viewer, the Monte search tool micro. So micro is a terminal based text editor similar to nano, but much more powerful than nano. That's the Monte terminal. But you know, you could just start typing. This is a line of text. It's not modal. It's it's not as extensible as things like Vim or Emax of course. But micro I do think is a really nice improvement over something like nano. We also have pluma, which is the GUI plain text editor for the Monte desktop environment. This is pluma 1.27.0. Very similar to G edit. Pluma, I believe is a fork of the old G edit. Also under accessories, we have Redshift. We have software token stacer again, which wasn't here until we click the button. But now it's here. Take screenshot as a screenshot utility and Warpinator, which is send and receive files across the network. Under graphics, we have Eye of Monte, which is the image viewer. We have the Monte color selection tool, Shotwell, which is a photo manager. Really nice photo manager. Oh, opening Shotwell actually cause the Monte desktop environment to crash. That is interesting. Let me see if I can replicate that. Let's go back into graphics. Go to Shotwell. Yeah, a little bit of a bug with Shotwell, at least inside a virtual machine. Now, obviously being inside a virtual machine, sometimes you can have unexpected issues in a VM that you wouldn't have on physical hardware. But I'm glad I got that on camera, just in case anybody from Geruda is watching. Under the internet category, let's see what we have here. We have Fire Dragon. So I'm assuming that is a rebranded Firefox for a web browser. Yeah, so it's Firefox rebranded to Fire Dragon. I'm assuming they had to rebrand it because they made some minor tweaks to it, probably for things like privacy. Maybe they included some extra plugins that of course Firefox wouldn't ship out of the box. And because you ship it modified, you have to fork it and rename it. So they renamed there's Fire Dragon 112.0.2. So pretty cool. And actually we do get a welcome screen here to let us know exactly what they did add They added some plugins such as Honey, which is a product of PayPal. Dark Reader, which a lot of people like having Dark Reader on their web browsers. Pretty cool. Theme generation modes. So I'm not sure what this is. I guess some more filters for Dark Reader. Yeah, cool stuff. So Fire Dragon. Other than that, under internet, we had Thunderbird for our email client and transmission for the BitTorrent client under Office. Nothing here. We have our PDF viewer, which is Atral. And the Monte dictionary. Under programming, we have Meld, which is like a diff program. So a diff, if you've ever run diff in the terminal, this is a GUI version of diff. It just, you take two files and it shows you the differences between those two files as far as line by line, what is different. Micro again is here. Under sound and video, we have Celluloid for a video player, MPV for a video player, post audio volume control, Rhythm Box for audio player. So let's check out Rhythm Box. Wow, Rhythm Box also crashed. You know, and that is interesting that both ShotWheel and Rhythm Box crash because both ShotWheel and Rhythm Box are actually GNOME applications. They're part of the GNOME suite of software where all the Monte applications. Let's actually open some of them, such as the Monte calculator, you know, the Monte calculator and the Monte terminal earlier. We opened that in Grandpa, which is a Monte specific tool. Yes, I'm assuming some of the GNOME specific applications are the problem. Celluloid. Now Celluloid, I thought was a part of the GNOME project, but I am not sure on that. But it did open correctly. And something is going on there though. Under system tools, we have Kaja for the file manager. Very nice file manager for the old Nautilus before GNOME kind of ruined Nautilus. The modern versions of Nautilus are actually pretty bad. We have Alacrity for our terminal. So now this is not the same terminal we saw earlier because I think by default the Monte terminal is the default terminal. And what if you wanted, obviously they have Alacrity, which they have a lot of transparency going on and that I'd have to adjust the transparency because that's kind of hard to read, especially against this particular wallpaper. But Alacrity looks like by default. It reads NeoFetch. There is a problem with their Alacrity config. Looks like it's using an older config and they have something set for decorations theme variant. That particular variable, I guess, is no longer part of the config. It's deprecated, so the Garuda Monte team need to probably just remove that line from their config. Also under system tools, there's a lot of the Garuda specific stuff we saw earlier, like the Garuda assistant and all of the ButterFS assistant and all of that. We have Htop. Let's go ahead and run Htop and see how system resource usage looks here. Now it looks like we're using about 843 megs of the 6 gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. I would say that's pretty standard for the Monte desktop environment and I have opened up a lot of stuff here in the last few minutes. So that might be a little higher. If I did this on a cold boot, it'd probably be 100 megs lower or so. As far as CPU usage, not really using any CPU, which is expected because we're actually not doing anything on this computer at the moment. Going back to system tools, did we miss anything? Octopi, we installed that ourselves. Reflector, snapper tools, Wi-Fi, yeah. Looks like that is it. Universal access is the last category. We have onboard, which is our on-screen keyboard and that's for people with accessibility needs that need an onboard keyboard. Now one thing I would like to do is take a look at the extra Garuda wallpapers we installed. So I'm going to right click on the desktop, change desktop background. Let's actually take a look at some of these wallpapers. So here is Cosmos, White-Tilled Eagle, but I know we installed an extra backgrounds package. I probably need to click add and go find the directory that it actually installed these two. So I'm going to assume that the directory they installed this to probably going to be in the root file system slash user slash share slash backgrounds and then Garuda dash backgrounds. Yeah, there's a lot of extra wallpapers in this directory. I'm going to click open here. And now, yeah, we get all of these extra wallpapers here. Well, actually, we just got the one. So let me actually go back. I should have chose the entire folder. That is my fault. Go up to the root file system. Once again, user share backgrounds, Garuda backgrounds. Now I'm going to do a control A to select everything. And hit open. If it'll let me, it will not. Yeah, yeah, it did. It just took a second probably because that's such a large collection of images. Images are kind of big. So took the program just a second there. But now I did like this wallpaper though. By the fact, just the very first wallpaper I chose, I'd probably keep that one. I don't need to see the rest, but I will go through some of the others. I've seen that Dragon wallpaper before. Some more Garuda branded wallpaper. I do like this one as well. Here's one, some black with some purple accents. That's very nice. This one here, a little too busy for my taste. Here's a classic one. I know I've seen that one, especially in the Dragonized edition that I reviewed about two years ago now or so. Really, really cool wallpapers. I like these wallpapers. But for now, yeah, I got to go with that one because it's nice, it's bright. It's also very light in color, which is perfect against the dark GTK theme, the Monte theme here. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, a homies too bald, Matt Mimic, Mitchell Paul, Royal West, Armor Dragon, Bash Potato Chuck, Commander Anchorage, George Lee, Marshmallow, Mythos, Nate Irion, Paul Peace, Archimoudour, Polytech Realities for Los Red Profit, Roland Tools, Devler, William Zenibit. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about Garuda Monte would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free open source software like Garuda Monte, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.