 So, I don't think I've talked about it before, but Regolith was my first experience with a tiling window manager. So I was a KDE guy for the first two years or so of my Linux career, and then I decided I wanted to experience a tiling window manager, but I wasn't quite interested in giving up all the niceties of a desktop environment. And Regolith offered me a solution, because basically what Regolith is, is a version of i3 that comes with the GNOME backend, which means that you get all of the niceties, as I said, of a desktop environment. So you get things like the settings application, which allows you to control Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and power management and all sorts of things. Anything you can control with the settings app of GNOME, you can control in Regolith, but it has i3 instead of GNOME. So that's the basic idea behind Regolith. At the time, which was probably about three years ago or so, maybe a little bit longer. At the time, the premise was that you would use Regolith as a learning mechanism to learn a tiling window manager, how to configure it, how to get used to the key bindings and such like that. That was the purpose behind Regolith. It would allow you to be okay with using a window manager without having to give up all of the things that you would if you were to use just a traditional window manager. You'd have all the back end support that you get with a desktop environment. So that was the claim about three years ago. Now move to the present and the premise is basically the same, but the implementation is quite different. So what I wanted to do was take a look at Regolith. And I have over the last four days, I've messed around with Regolith on hardware on my laptop, and I have some interesting experiences. Let's just put it that way. So before we jump into my opinions on everything, let's go ahead and talk about what Regolith is. So as I said, Regolith is an implementation I three, but with the genome back end. So you get a very customized version of I three, but you also get genome settings and everything that goes with it. So as you'll see in the B roll, it functions basically like I three does. It's a tiling window manager. It has a bar at the bottom or the top, depending on what theme you're using, it has some modules in the bar, and it's fairly customized. And we'll talk about theming and stuff here in a second. But basically it's I three, but with genome settings, and we'll talk about the genome back end here in a minute. So that's just the basics of it. So when it comes to the actual I three configuration, that's where things get a little funky, especially if you've ever used I three before, you'll know that I three is traditionally managed in a single configuration file inside of your dot config directory, or inside of your home directory, either or they usually both work for Regolith. That's not the case. It's configured in a very odd manner. So first of all, the configuration files are located in your slash user directory, which is you, as you know, is in the root directory, which means that if you want to edit those things, you have to have pseudo privileges. So that's one thing. Second of all, they've split their configuration into many different files. And while that's not unusual, because even I do that for my I three config, there is some weirdness there. So if you open up those, and you see here in the beer, the B rule, a lot of the configuration files have to do with key bindings. First of all, second of all, the way they do key bindings is they set an X resources variable. And then they call the binding. So they use X resources and we'll talk more about this here in a minute. Basically they use it so that they can easily switch between different layouts and themes. So I have many thoughts on this and I'll cover those later, but just know that this is not the way I three traditionally does it. So the configuration is irregular. And I would say not all that user friendly, but it is well documented on their website, although their documentation is not correct in some places. And I'll talk about that again later when I talk about my opinions. So the overall configuration of it is a little weird. But if you follow some of the documentation, you probably can get a hold of it. And the main issue that I have with this right now that I'll talk about is that because it's not the same as I three, if you've ever used I three before, you'll find that configuring this is quite a bit different than configuring traditional I three. So the inconsistencies there are something that we'll see as a theme throughout the rest of this video. Now, one of the reasons why the configuration is so weird is because they've done a lot of work when it comes to theming. So as you'll see in the b-roll, they have eight or nine, maybe 10 themes. Most of they have like grubbox and they have Nord and they have solar eyes and things like that. And they all look very nice. They have the color scheme is going for them. The bars don't differ all that much. They only have one that is at the top, all the rest of them are at the bottom, but they mostly look the same, just a different color. So you're not going to get a ton of different variation on the bar, but at least they have different color scheme going for you. And they've done a good job of making sure the wallpaper matches and the terminal changes colors. So because they've used the X resources, they've managed to make it so that when they change to a different theme, basically everything goes along with it. Anything that can follow X resources will change themes and that's actually really nice. Now, as someone who has written an I three color changing or theme, theme change or script, I can tell you that it's pretty difficult, especially when you have multiple different things that you need to change every time you change to a different theme. So it gets even harder when you use poly bar, which they don't use. So I'm fairly impressed with their theming. I would say that I would have liked to have more variation in the bar, but other than that, the fact that there is theming is really nice. So the themes kind of make up for the oddness in the configuration files. I'll talk more about that later. But if you really like those themes, at least the weird configuration stuff makes sense. So if it was just that, it would basically just be I three with some weird customization. But basically the whole idea behind this is to give you the support of a desktop environment back end. So if you want to change wallpaper or you want to manage your Wi-Fi or you want to manage the power settings is like that in a traditional tiling window manager, all that stuff would have to be extra. You'd have to as the user go in and add applications that control those things. So if you want to change themes, you download LX appearance. If you wanted to manage your audio, you download the Pavu control or something, you know what I mean? So all that stuff is something that you'd have to do as the user. But with Regolith, because it has a desktop environment back end and specifically has the canone back end, all that stuff is controlled inside of the actual canone settings panel. So you can change your wallpaper. You can manage power settings. You can manage your display settings, et cetera. All that stuff inside of the canone settings panel. And it works really well. It does integrate well with I three for the most part. You'll see in the b-roll that at one point I clicked on the multitasking settings in the canone panel. And obviously that has no implication for I three at all in the settings panel crashed. So they haven't exactly removed everything that can cause some problems. So that's something that they should definitely work on. But the basic idea there is that you can use the canone settings panel to do basically everything that isn't controlled by I three. So what I would like to see is eventually for them to work some of their I three configuration into that settings panel so that if you wanted to do extra configuration, but you didn't want to have to mess around with the configuration files, you could do some of that configuration inside of the settings panel. That'd be really cool. But as of right now, it's just the canone settings panel as far as I can tell. So that's the canone settings panel. And like I said, it gives you the support of a desktop environment in the back end so that you can kind of transition from using a full desktop environment into a tile window manager without losing that support. So that's really nice. So that's regular in a nutshell. Obviously there's quite a bit more that I could have gone into. But what I wanted to spend most of this video on was my opinion of it because this desktop environment or this excuse me, this distro caused me no end to problems. So before we jump in, there's actually one other thing that I need to mention about regolf itself. There's two ways of getting this. One of them is through an ISO, which is a traditional way of getting it. You can also install this on any version of Ubuntu or Debian through a PPA or some other method. And that means that if you want to just use a regular version of Debian, you can or a regular version of Ubuntu, you can or Kubuntu or Ubuntu or whatever you can. I will say before we jump into my opinion that they have a very mixed message when it comes to what they are. So the ISO itself is based on Ubuntu 22.04, but they also have a Debian edition. I'm not sure if that's actually an ISO. I didn't check it out. But there is a tab on their website for Debian. So if you'd rather use Debian, you can. And because they have that kind of mixed family there, some of the things inside of the Ubuntu version are actually saying that it's Debian. So all of the wallpapers are Debian. You'll see the Debian icon in quite a few places. So I'm not sure if they're in the middle of like a transition period where they're moving from Ubuntu to Debian. I don't know. I do know that Debian pops up in the Ubuntu version quite a bit. So now we can move on to the opinion part. So first, let's talk about the good stuff. So if you are brand new to a Tiling Window Manager, I like that that has the GNOME backend as support for you. It works astonishingly well. It means you don't have to add a whole bunch of extra applications to support yourself like LX appearance and power management features and messing around with the terminal and stuff like that. Every, most of your settings that you'll ever want are going to be inside of your GNOME settings panel. So you won't have to worry about that at all. And it means that for new users, you're much more supported than if you were to just hop right into a traditional Tiling Window Manager like i3 or Xmonad or DWM or whatever. So that's the good stuff. And overall, it worked phenomenally well. Once I got it properly installed, which I'll talk about here in a minute, it worked really well. It worked basically like i3. There is a lot of documentation inside of the actual menu system and stuff like that. So you can get to all the key bindings and stuff like that very easily. And it's fairly easy to pick up. So if you are new to a Tiling Window Manager, it works really well. And as it works, it works well enough for a new user and it works similarly enough to i3 that if you've used i3 before, you could get a hold of it really fast. But honestly, that good stuff is outweighed by the bad stuff. So when I say bad stuff, mostly all of the stuff is going to be colored by the fact that I'm a Window Manager user usually. And I have opinions on how Window Managers should work. And this doesn't really fit that view. And specifically, I'm an i3 guy. So a lot of the stuff offends my sensibilities and it kind of bothers me. So we're gonna talk about that. So first, before we jump into that, let's talk about the website. So if you go to Google and you search for Regolith Linux, like so, the first result you're going to get is Regolith Linux as you should. And you click on this, and this is what I did. Because there's this button here along the side that says get regolith, that's the first thing that I saw. I didn't pay attention to this, okay? And you really need to pay attention to this. So I got downloaded this. And this version here, if you were to download this and install it is based on Ubuntu 21.04, which for those of you who don't know is no longer in support, that obviously caused some issues. I had to do a dist upgrade and ended up at 22.04, I believe. And it wasn't a great experience because things were just broken, right? I mean, it's an old thing. It's no longer supported by either Regolith or Ubuntu. And it was just not a good experience. So I came back to the website thinking, and I remember that was after like two days of messing around with it. So I came back to the website thinking that, well, maybe Regolith is abandoned, you know what I mean? And maybe I just did not hear that they were abandoned. So I came back here to see if maybe that was the case. But no, it turns out that this is just the old website and this stuff shouldn't be used. So you have to click on this to go to their new website. So that was my first problem with Regolith is that I ended up spending a whole bunch of time with the old version. And it makes me wonder why the developers still have the old website up and why they haven't just used a redirect. Like, why isn't there a URL redirect to their new website? Cause obviously their old website and that old version is something that they shouldn't want people to use, but it's still there. And obviously not reading that top heading or whatever is my fault, but still it seems like a fairly easy thing for people to do is to go right to the button and not read the website. People are lazy inherently. So it was just a very stupid mistake for me to make, but also I'm not quite sure why that website is still up. So that was the first thing that I wanted to talk about. The second thing and the main thing that I want to talk about is this i3 configuration file. So they rely on their X resources variables a lot in this. And the reason why they do from what I can tell is because of the theming. And that's the way they've chosen to do it. And there's nothing inherently wrong with doing it that way, although I don't find X resources to be user friendly at all. And to begin with, Regolith was supposed to be user friendly. It was supposed to be that transition from a desktop environment into a window manager and very easily configured, right? Because this uses X resources, it's not as easy to configure as i3 is itself. i3 is a very simple window manager to configure. They've made it much more complicated than it needs to be because of the theming. Now, because of the theming, they have a good reason, but it makes it less user friendly, less configurable in my opinion. And it took me a while to get my head around it. When I first saw those configuration files, and I had no clue that they're using X resources because in traditional matte fashion, I didn't read the documentation. So I just hopped right in. I found the configuration file, which doesn't exist in the traditional place, but whatever. And I saw that and it was like, what is this nonsense? Because it's not a traditional way of configuring i3. And because of that, it's more complicated than I feel that it needs to be. And honestly, that's my biggest problem with it is that this is a distribution or a, whatever you wanna call it, if you don't use the distribution part of it, it's a distribution that is meant to be very supportive of new users when it comes to new users to window managers. And if you start with regolith and then say transitioned into regular i3, later on on a different distro or whatever, your experience on regolith isn't going to translate nearly as well to traditional i3 as you would think it would. Now there are obviously some similarities, but they're also still quite different. And that's the same for even if you were to transfer to a different window manager entirely. Every other window manager has different ways of doing things, but they're all usually have some similarities. Regolith has a lot more differences than you would expect it to, given the fact that they advertise it as a version of i3. And one of the greatest benefits of i3, window manager, is the documentation. And unfortunately, they've changed so much of that configuration file, not only the location, but also the syntax of it that a lot of that i3 configuration documentation doesn't apply, unfortunately, which means that you're going to rely on regoliths documentation, which isn't nearly as good. It's not bad, but it's not nearly as good as traditional i3 documentation. So at the end of the day, what I would argue is that this is not i3. It is a fork of i3. They've done a lot of work to make it appear like i3, but their configuration files have deviated in such a manner that it's just not as much, it's not as close to i3 as I originally thought. And that's a little bit disappointing to me. Now, as I said at the beginning, most of this is going to be because of my perception of what this used to be. So this used to be back when I used it much closer to i3. The configuration files were in the same place as i3. There were still some different naming conventions and stuff like that. They didn't have any of the themes and stuff like that and stuff, it just felt more like i3. And when I transitioned to actual i3, a lot of the stuff that I learned in regolith was transferable. Now I'm not so sure that if you had that same experience that that would be true. And like I said, that's a little bit disappointing to me. Now, if you go into this, expecting this to be a destination instead of a transitory point. So instead of using this as a stepping stone into the wider window manager world, if this is just the place where you're gonna go, then this isn't bad. It's not, in fact, it's not bad at all. But if this is the place where you're going to end, it has a lot of features. It has the excellent gunon backend for support. And it works really, really well. The configuration file is still weird, but it is learnable. And if you learn more and more about i3, or specifically, excuse me, if you learn more and more about X resources, then you would have a better chance of configuring it to your liking. But learning X resources doesn't really help you when it comes along to learning other window managers because most other window managers don't use it by default. It's used for color management and terminals and some bars, but usually it's not used for key bindings and scripts and the bar and stuff like that. Reguleth uses X resources for the bar, for colors, for key bindings. You name it, it uses X resources. And like I said, that is non-traditional. And if that's something that's okay with you, if this is the destination and you put that into learning it, it's not that bad. But again, it's different. And like I said, it rubbed me the wrong way something because I was expecting it to be much closer to i3 than it actually is. So that is Reguleth. It is, it's a good i3-ish implementation. It's not, it's not something for me. Let's just put it that way. Maybe, and I don't think it was built for me or meant for me. It's meant for people who've never used a window manager before who want that desktop environment support. It's not meant for people who are used to using regular window managers and configuring them like normal because it's just, it's too different. It's too weird. And if that's okay with you, then it's a good thing to use. For me personally, I didn't like it all that much, to be honest with you. It just, I like the traditional way of configuring i3, this one here. I'm not a big fan of X-Resources. So it kind of, it just pushed me in the other direction. So that's it for this video. If you have comments on Reguleth, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description. Thanks everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because you're all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenge will not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you. So very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. I know I said it at the end of every video, but I truly mean it. So thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. See you next time.