 Fedora just had a big release a couple of days ago, the release of Fedora 36, and every time Fedora has a new release, I typically take a look at the main edition of Fedora, their flagship edition with the GNOME desktop environment. But I didn't want to do that this time around because Fedora is kind of weird with Fedora. Every time Fedora has a release, it gets a lot of coverage, but no one ever looks at any edition of Fedora other than the GNOME desktop. It's kind of what everybody takes a look at. Nobody takes a look at any of the other various Fedora spins. And it's a little bit different than, say, with Ubuntu, where when Ubuntu has a big release, a lot of the main flavors of Ubuntu, things like Kubuntu and Ubuntu Mate and Ubuntu Budgie, they get some love, right? They get a little bit of coverage, where Fedora, none of the other spins really get some cover. So today, what I wanted to do, and people have been asking me to take a look at this particular edition of Fedora, is the i3 spin of Fedora. So I noticed that Fedora 36, the i3 spin, was also released. So I downloaded the iSo, and I'm going to take a quick installation and first look inside a VM. Now, I mentioned I've had many people ask me to take a look at Fedora i3 in the past, and I've actually tried to make this video at least twice in the past, in the previous releases of Fedora, where people ask me, hey, Fedora has i3 spin, can you take a look at it? And I was going to make videos about it for Fedora 35, and maybe even Fedora 34, going back a little while back. But I never could get Fedora i3 to actually install properly for me, at least not in a virtual machine, which is typically how I record these first impression kinds of videos. And because I couldn't actually get it to install properly, obviously I wasn't going to make a video about it, because that would be unfair to the distribution, right? I'm not going to throw shade on a distribution, because maybe there's some bugs, you know, some obvious work that needed to be done. So I'm hoping that Fedora 36 i3 installs properly, and I can actually take a look at it. So let's go ahead and get started. So I'm going to switch over to this virtual machine here, and let's go ahead and boot into the live environment. All right, and we've booted into the live environment. We have a little pop up, a little terminal window here. It says you have not configured i3 yet. Do you want to generate a config file? So we can auto generate an i3 config. Now, inside the live environment, I'm not going to do enough with i3 to matter with a config, because I'm not going to edit the config inside a live environment. So I'm just going to hit escape. And let me open up a terminal, or actually what I need is a run launcher. And I'm going to guess that super P does a run launcher. No, how about super R? About super shift P. How about super shift R? I actually don't know how to get a run launcher. Super enter does not bring up a terminal. How about alt enter? Maybe I'm using the wrong mod key. That's it. So alt is the mod key. So would alt P be a run prompt? No, alt R. Yeah, alt R is resize. That's not what I want to do. I probably should take a look at the config. So what I'm going to do is I am actually going to vim, I'm assuming vim is installed dot config slash I three slash. And if I just do tab, is there anything there? No, there's actually nothing in that particular directory. I guess I should have auto generated an I three config because I'm not really sure how to get the key binding for a run launcher, because how can I launch the installer, the Anaconda installer until I find a run launcher of some kind? I guess I could launch the installer from the terminal since I know alt enter launches a terminal. Let me see if D menu is installed. If I do it, where is D menu? D menu is installed. So let me do alt shift Q to quit and which closes a window. Alt shift Q. Here's one of the default key bindings because it's using D menu. As it's run launcher, it's possible. It could be my D. So let me do alt plus D. Okay. And that gets us D menu. And now let me search for Anaconda, which is the install program that fedora uses. And I'm waiting for the Anaconda installer to actually load up. I don't think it's going to launch though. It could be a situation where we don't have privileges to launch it. We probably should launch it with a sudo or PK exec. Let me do alt D. And if I run PK exec, let me make sure I spell it correctly. PK exec space Anaconda, which basically launches it with sudo privileges or it should, but that doesn't look like it's going to launch anything either. Let me open up a terminal and let me just switch over to the root user because maybe I just need to SU and actually be root to actually launch Anaconda. I'm going to do Anaconda space ampersign, just so I could close this terminal if I wanted to once it launches. Listen, I'm getting permission denied for some stuff. Yeah. So once again, I've tried to take a look at fedora i3 and I may not be able to. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how I'm actually going to do anything here. Let me do alt D again. Just type install, see if there is an installation program. There's the word install, but that's just your command line tool for install. That's not an actual installation program. That's essentially a command line tool similar to CP. The copy command installs often used as part of scripts when you're installing programs, but that is not the Anaconda installer. I'm pretty sure the Anaconda installer was the word Anaconda. But for some reason, I guess it's not going to let us run that. So let me actually look online for installation instructions for fedora i3, because this will be the third release of fedora that I've tried to take a look at this and will not be able to make a video on it. Unless I find a way to install this. And, you know, I was looking for a few minutes over at the official, like fedoraproject.org website. I didn't see anything specifically related to fedora's i3 spin, but I did find an article. Technowickies.com. I've never seen this site before. Very plain site. I really don't know what's up with it. But just looking at it, I can see that they eventually open a terminal. And this is very, very small, but they typed the word live inst. INST for live install, I guess in the terminal. And it looks like they are doing this as the live user, not as root. So let me actually try that. So let me switch back over to the live users. So let me go ahead. I'm going to do a kill all i3 and log back in as the live user instead of the root user. And now let me do alt enter. So alt no. OK, I guess when we auto generate the config, it changes the mod key from alt to super. So that is why the super key is now the mod key. So mod D, let's see if live inst from D menu will actually launch the installer for us. And that does not know. There it goes. And that just took a second. All right. So we finally figured out how to actually launch the installer. So that's a little tricky. And the the fedora documentation really needs to be up front, especially on the page regarding downloading Fedora i3 because they do have installing, right? But when you go to learn more for installing just a second, let this page load here goes to docs.fedoraproject.org. But it's installing using Anaconda. And I'm assuming this is a very general page for all of the Fedora spins. But for the i3 spin, you can't just launch Anaconda. I guess you have to do live inst. That's the the name of the program, right? So let's go ahead and run through the installation. English as the language is fine for me. So I'm going to click continue. Let me move my head out of the ways because I'm going to be covering up some buttons here. And now the C keyboard, we just chose time and date. It automatically chose America slash Chicago for my time zone. That's fine. It found my wired connection. So I shouldn't need to do anything with the network. So that's fine installation destination. So let's go ahead and choose a disk to install to. So I'm going to choose this one virtual hard drive that I have in this virtual machine. And I believe all I need to do after that is click done. Failed to save. No disk detected. So why did it fail to save that? Maybe I do need to actually do something here. So I click on it. Automatic custom, I want to do automatic. Well, I want to encrypt the data. No, I don't want to do encryption. Now let me click done. I thought that's exactly what I did before, but it didn't work before. But now it works. I've never liked the Anaconda installer every single time I use this installer every single time I've ever installed the door. I've had problems with this installer. It's confusing as hell. I don't know why they just don't switch to the Calamari's installer because this thing, if I struggle as many times as I've been stalled for door and I still struggle with your installer, then maybe there is a problem with the UI of your installer. All right, root account. Do we want to disable the root account or enable the root account? Yeah, I'd like to have a root user. So let's create a strong and complicated password for the root user and then confirm that strong and complicated password and allow root SSH login with password. Yeah, and just in case I ever SSH into this VM, I probably won't keep the VM. But if I do, sometimes I do SSH into these VMs. I'm going to click done and. Why is it not letting me go? OK, root password is set user creation. So let's go ahead and create a user. I'm going to call my user DT. He has administration privileges, so he has sudo privileges require a password to use this account. Yes, so let's create a password for the DT user. Once again, let's create a strong and complicated password and then click done. And I clicked done, but maybe I have to click done a second time. Yes, so that's twice I had to click done more than once. And then, of course, the partitioning. I had trouble because it didn't want to accept some of the changes I made. Yeah, did I mention I really, really hate this installer? But now that we've gotten through that, it looks like it's going to install just fine. So we'll let this run for a few minutes. I'll be back once this portion of the installation has completed. And that portion of the installation took just a few minutes. Let me hide my head again. It says for doors now successfully installed and ready for you to use. Go ahead and reboot your system to start using it. So let me click finish installation and it should reboot the machine for us. And actually, it did not reboot the machine for us. Maybe there was something else I had to do there to actually get it to reboot automatically for us. But I'm just going to open a terminal and type reboot. Oh, Fedora and Fedora, you have to be sudo reboot. It varies from distro to distro. Some distributions, you have to be sudo for reboot. Some you don't. Let me go ahead and make the VM full screen. But it looks like it did successfully install because we had a grub menu. Now, let me go ahead and log in. Let's go ahead and have it auto generate a default I3 configuration for us. And now let me do super D. And is there a display manager? How about a R and R? Is there anything display? No, you know what? I'll just do super enter. I'll do this at the terminal. You guys have seen me run the Xrander command many times. If I do Xrander with no arguments, it will tell me all the available display resolutions for the monitor, in this case, the display inside the virtual machine. 1920 by 1080 is the one I want. So let me do Xrander dash s for set 1920 by 1080. And now I get a proper screen resolution. And now super shift Q, again, is the default key binding to close a window. Super enter brings a terminal super shift Q to close. Super D is our D menu run prompt. If I escape, I get out of that. Well, first things first, let me do super enter to open a terminal again. And let me see if I can zoom in. Let's go ahead and see what terminal emulator we're using here. We're using XFCE4 dash terminal. So we're using the XFCE4 terminal. And that's an interesting choice. I mean, I guess every terminal is kind of the same. But I think it's not the greatest terminal emulator. I would think a custom spin, especially stripped down, tiling window manager spin of a Linux distribution. Typically, most of those kinds of users spend a lot of time in a terminal and they'd want a better terminal, right? They would want something like usually something like a Lackardy or termite, which is now dead. So not too many distributions use it anymore. Again, something like URXVT or maybe kitty XFCE terminal is kind of like way down the list of terminals I would have chose for this. But I just looking at this, I don't think this is an actually customized I3 desktop. What this looks like. And I think I was hoodwinked by some of you guys and taking a look at this. This just looks like vanilla I3, you know, just straight up I3 from upstream. Just the default package installed on Fedora. Nobody has done anything to this. This is probably like a auto-generated ISO from the Fedora team. And that's why I didn't know how to install it. There's no instructions on the page to install it. Because I don't think anybody really develops this thing. I could be wrong, but it just has this impression that not much is going on with this. So I probably wouldn't have taken a look at this had I known this was going to be the case. But what I'm going to do, let's take a look at the config file. Vim.config slash I3 slash config is the path to the config file. Vim is not installed. So let's do a sudo dnf install vim just to make my life a little easier. And it gives me the total download size for vim. It's asking me for confirmation. Yes, I actually want to install it. And now let me up arrow and run the vim command on .config slash I3 slash config to open our config file. And it's just going to be a vanilla I3 config, I'm assuming. Let me zoom out a little bit here where we can set the mod key. The mod key is set to mod four. Mod four is the super key. You wanted it to be the alt key. You could change the mod variable to be mod one. And that would be the alt key. But that's not what I prefer. I actually prefer it to be the super key. And I suggest if you're new to tiling window managers, probably use the super key because the alt key will be used in other programs where typically the super key is not used by anything. That's why most tiling window managers kind of default to the super key because it's not going to conflict with key bindings for things like your web browser, for instance. Or if you use eMax, eMax uses control key and alt key for a lot of things where the super key is never used. So that's why you use the super key for your mod key. And it looks like we have a startup application here for the network manager applet. So very, very small font here in the panel. But there is the network manager applet here at the far right. So it's got a little system tray where that icon sits there. Now I could change the font size because that font size is so incredibly small. To be honest, I can barely read it. I don't know what fonts are installed on the system. So I'm just going to use the generic monospace font. But let's set it to 12 pixels instead of 8. So let's write that. And how do I restart I3? I'm assuming it would be something like super shift R. And that is it. And now we get a much bigger font in the bar. Actually, it's really not a big font at all. I would say that's more of a normal sized font instead of that incredibly small font that was almost unreadable before. Let's see what else I want to play with here in the config. If it's a default I3 config, there's a few things I always change. For example, the direction keys. For example, moving focus around for windows. For example, let me open a second window and a third window. So super H should move me to the left, right? The VILM motion keys, I guess it doesn't. How about super J for down? OK, that moves me through the stack. And super K would move me the other direction, I'm assuming. No, so just super. So this is the problem. I'm used to HJKL. And what I'm thinking is H. H doesn't do anything. And J is actually what I would expect H to do. Because they do something incredibly strange in I3. It's one of the reasons why I don't like I3 as a tiling window manager. So why I don't really typically recommend people to start learning tiling window managers with I3 is because you're going to learn some incredibly frustrating habits. Once you play with other things that use the VILM keys. Because I3 does not use the VILM keys. So instead of using HJKL for the motion keys, they use JKL semicolon. Everything is shifted over one key. Now, imagine how incredibly frustrating that is for the people like me that have over the years. I've used so many programs that use the VILM key binding. So many programs on Linux use HJKL for motion. But you've got this one program, I3, that moves everything over one key, JKL semicolon. And I can't use it. I seriously can't use it. It makes me physically angry. Because I'm hitting keys and they're not doing what I expect. So I have to change this. So I'm going to get into insert mode here. And I'm going to do HJK. And then we'll just let me escape out of that and do CW for change word and change that to L. So we do mod HJKL to move the focus around the window stack. And then down here, we've got something similar to actually move the window through the stack. Mod shift, JKL semicolon. And I have to change this again to the proper VILM keys, H, J, K, and L. Let me write. And now let me do super shift R to reload. And it says you have an error in your config. So I could show the errors here. And I'm assuming the problem is when I change the keybinding. So I'm going to have a new key, keybinding that wasn't in use before. The H, remember, JKL semicolon was all used before. So I know the keybinding that I added that's a problem. We're going to be the H keybindings, mod H and mod shift H. So let me do a search for mod H. Actually, I don't have to search for it. Like it was right here, mod H. That's a split for a horizontal orientation. So what I want to do is change that. So instead of mod H for split horizontally, which makes sense, I'm just going to do mod Z for horizontal because Z is part of the word too. I think that makes sense. So just change that to mod Z. And then mod V is a vertical split. And then I have the VM keybindings now. So let me open up some terminals. So I'll open that terminal. And it splits to the right there. And if I do mod Z, mod Z, I guess that doesn't work. I probably did I not restart, write that, super shift R. And now let me go back to this window. If I do mod Z, I split. And now hit Enter. Yeah, OK. And now mod V and hit Enter. And you see, now I can split horizontally or vertically depending on what I want to do. And now moving through the stack, J is down, right? So super J just moves down, which in this case, which is just these two windows because it only moves down and loops back around through the stack. It won't move left or right. If I want to move left, mod H moves left. Mod L moves right. Mod J moves down. Mod K would move up. But they do loop back around. So mod J, mod K, kind of do the same thing. Do mod H and mod L loop back around. So if I do mod H to move left and left and left, well, it loops back through just these two windows. But it doesn't really affect the vertical stack over here. A little strange. The way I3 does things, it is a manual tiling window manager, meaning you have two things to decide. Do you want to split vertically? Do you want to split horizontally? And then you open the program you want to open. And the way you cycle through the stack of windows is a little weird because you use all four Vemmotion keys, H, J, K, L were in dynamic timers like DWM, Xmoned, Qtile. You use just mod J and K for up and down because it doesn't matter what the stack is. It just goes through the order of the windows that you open and reverse. So J will go one direction. K will go the other. That's a little different in I3. Let me close those terminals. Ultimately, I don't want this to be an I3 tutorial because that's not what I intended this video to be. So let me get out of that config. Let me do a uname dash R. The kernel that Fedora 36 is using is 5.17.5, a very recent kernel. If I do H top, how much RAM are we using in this very, very vanilla I3 window manager? 383 megs of the six gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's not shocking. Literally nothing is installed and literally nothing is running, right? This is a very, very basic installation here. Matter of fact, I don't know how many programs are installed. Will DNF list, give me a list of programs installed. It's actually doing a sync and that's probably gonna give me a list of everything in the repos instead of installed packages. So I don't think that was the right command. I probably should kill that. I could do control C to kill that. I believe DNF is actually very similar to apt. I think it's DNF list and in apt is dash dash install, but in DNF, I don't think I need the dashes. I think it would just be installed. Yeah, and then it spits out everything that is installed line by line. So if I pipe that through the word count program and give it dash L for line count, 1,336 packages are installed. That is, again, a very minimal installation, not much here. Now, typically I would take a look at wallpapers, but I don't even know if they have a program installed to look at wallpapers. Is nitrogen installed? No, let me just do a wallpaper. No, look for background. Yeah, they may not have a program installed specifically for that. So once again, super enter to open a terminal. Let me zoom in. I'm gonna do a sudo DNF install. I'm gonna install nitrogen. I think that's what most tile and window managers would probably use anyway for setting their wallpapers. So let me just quickly install that, just so I have something installed and then super shift Q to kill that super D to run D menu. And then let's type the word nitrogen. And if you've never used nitrogen before, let me move my head. What you need to do is you need to go to this preferences box the very first time you use it and go to directories add and navigate to a directory on your system that has some wallpapers. Now, typically the directory where you're gonna have your wallpapers will be slash user slash share slash backgrounds and fedora 36 default. Let's just select that. It looks like there's just going to be and just the wallpaper we're already looking at. So really no wallpapers here. So really nothing to look at here. And honestly, I don't think I'm gonna take a look at anything else here because again, there's nothing to look at. This is just vanilla I3, right? I3 from upstream out of the box, not configured in any way, just installed on fedora. So I'm actually a little surprised that I had a few people recommend me not just this release but also last release fedora 35 people kept asking me to take a look at fedora I3 edition because I think a lot of people wanted me to take a look at it. I'm just imagining. I don't wanna put words in people's mouth but maybe they think I don't give fedora enough coverage and maybe if they tell me that fedora has an I3 spin, a tiling window manager spin, it'll make me like I3 more, maybe like fedora more. And that's not really the case, right? Not this because you can install I3 on any distribution, right? Just vanilla I3. When people told me there was an I3 spin, I really expected it to be more, like somebody put some time and effort and work, tried to configure it and make it more user friendly. It had a whole suite of programs built in. Right now I would have to do a ton of work to actually make this thing usable. Now I wouldn't have to do a ton of work. What I would do, I have my own window manager configs on my GitLab, right? And I have some I3 configs. I could go grab some old I3 configs I've used in years past and quickly get up to speed, you know, install a bunch of programs and be okay with this. What this is I think is for those people that don't want GNOME and all of its dependencies on fedora and you want to use a tiling window manager, I think something like this makes sense. So what I would do, like if I wanted to use Qtile on fedora or Xmonad or awesome window manager, right? I don't want to install fedora, the flagship edition with GNOME, with all the GNOME programs and all those dependencies and everything that I'm never gonna use all those GNOME programs, right? And I would spend so much time trying to uninstall all of that stuff and install the programs I wanna use. Well, this I don't have that problem because now you install this stripped down version of fedora with practically nothing installed, right? I mean, it has the I3 window manager but once you install maybe another window manager you wanna use, if you didn't wanna use I3, well, then you can uninstall I3 and use, you know, awesome or Xmonad or whatever it is you wanna use. So I do think this does serve a purpose but for what I was doing, you know, taking a look at something, you know, there's really nothing to take a look at here so I'm gonna cut this video a little short here, guys. But before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the following individuals, Devin, Dustin, Gabe, James, Maxim, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, Armoredragon, Chuck, Manorari, Diokai, Dylan, George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja, Maastrums, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Polytech, Realiteats for Lust, Red Private, Steven and Willie, these guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community, if you like my work, wanna see more videos about Lennox and Freight Open Source software. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon and subscribe to him. All right, guys, peace.