 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at StormOS. StormOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution. It's developed by a friend of the channel, Mr. Ben Fitzpatrick, those of you that watch my monthly chat with patrons. That particular livestream Ben usually joins us every month. And if I go to the Sourceforge page where the source code is hosted, where the ISOs are available for download, they offer two different desktop versions for StormOS. They offer XFCE, which is what I'm going to take a look at today. They also offer a KDE edition. Now, some of the features of StormOS is the fact that, of course, it's Arch Linux. It's going to have an easy installer, the Calamaris installer. It's also going to have a package manager, a graphical package manager, installed by default. They're going to use PEMAC, which is the package manager that's developed by Manjaro, those of you that use Manjaro, probably familiar with the PEMAC package manager. They're also going to install Yay as a AUR helper. And you can see some of the other features include plenty of apps to make your user experience fun and easy, shell scripts to ease the user into the world of Arch. Well, we'll take a look at some of those. And aliases in the users bash RC to make working with the terminal a little easier. So that's kind of cool. So what I've done is I've downloaded the XFCE version. I'm going to go ahead and spin up a virtual machine and take a quick first look. So I've booted into StormOS. Again, this is going to be the XFCE edition. The ISO size was 2.7 gigabytes in size. And the boot screen here looks very similar to Manjaro's boot screen. I don't know if they're basing off of Manjaro. They mentioned it's an arch based distribution, but they're using some Manjaro components. Obviously, obviously they're going to use PEMAC, which we already talked about, as a package manager developed by Manjaro. But a similar boot screen here because you can boot using non-free drivers. So this is very important for those of you on machines that need non-free proprietary drivers for graphics and Wi-Fi, things like that. That would be a good idea to boot using the non-free drivers. I can boot with free drivers though inside a virtual machine. Everything all the drivers needed for VM to work are open source. And we have booted into the XFCE desktop environment before going any further. Let me go ahead and get into the display settings. And let me change the display. So it's a little easier to see what's going to go on here. I keep this configuration. Of course, this is temporary because we're in a live environment. This isn't an installed version. So when I actually do install this, I will have to make that same adjustment for the resolution. But let's run through the installation. So it's a Calamari's installer. You guys have seen this a million times. So I'm just going to rush through this. By default, American English is set. That's fine. Click Next. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. I'm going to click Next. English US for the keyboard is correct. Next. And then what do we want to do with the partitions? I'm going to choose a race desk, meaning get the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine to storm OS. So I'm going to click Next on that. And then what is your name? DT. And we'll give DT a strong and complicated password and require strong passwords. No, I'll leave that ticked off because I can make my own password strong and complicated. I don't need to be forced to do that. Log in automatically without asking for password. Definitely not. Use the same password for the administrator account. Absolutely. That way, the sudo password is the same as DT's password. And then we have a section where we can install some extra software. They have this section here, not free apps. So this is going to be proprietary software, closed source software. We have Lutrus, Steam, TeamViewer, Telegram. I don't really, I'm not going to use any of these on camera, but I do want to see if they actually get installed properly. So I'll choose TeamViewer. Why not? Just to install something, because I'm not going to install anything from the Optimus app. So this is for people whose graphics cards require Optimus support. I don't need that, kernels. We have the option of installing the Zen kernel, the LTS kernel, the NVIDIA LTS kernel. That's important. If you want an LTS kernel and you use an NVIDIA card, you have to choose NVIDIA LTS. And then you have the Harden kernel. I'll go with the default kernel, just the generic kernel. I did take on SteamViewer just to see if that installed correctly. You know what? While I'm at it, let's go ahead and install the Telegram app as well. Click Next, and then we get a summary screen. Location is good. Keyboard is good. The partition scheme is good. Let's go ahead and click Install. And it's going to warn us it's about to format the drive and write to the disk. Install now. And now we get our little progress bar. This portion of the installation typically takes about 10 minutes on my hardware. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once StormOS has finished installing. And the installer has finished that took about five minutes or so. So I'm going to tick on Restart now. This is what you need to do in the Calamari's installer after you're done. Hit Restart now and then click Done, and it should reboot the machine for you. And our reboot is successful. We get a grub menu. And let's go ahead and launch StormOS. When we come to our login menu, this looks like it's using LightDM for our login manager. Let's go ahead and log in. And we boot into the XFC desktop environment. Once again, let me change the display really quickly here. 1920 by 1080. Apply, keep this configuration. And now that this is properly installed, I'll never have to do that again. XFC will forever remember that I want 1920 by 1080 for a screen resolution every time I launch this VM. Now one interesting thing here is the fact that we don't have a wallpaper by default. We just have a plain color. I'm sure that's probably not what was intended. Let me go into desktop settings. So if I right click and go to desktop settings, let's see. Are there any wallpapers available for us? We have background and no. Well, let's go and search for a folder. No, user share backgrounds is the folder, which is correct. But why did it not find these images? Because there is a wallpaper pack here. Yeah, when I go and manually to let the search in that folder, it does give us wallpapers. So a little bit of a glitch there. So let's see if I can adjust the size of this window. Yeah, just a little bit so you guys can see a few more wallpapers displayed in the preview. Really nice wallpaper pack. Let's try some out. Yeah, that's a little too busy for me. And then there there are some nice wallpapers here for those of you that like some artistic stuff here. Of course, we got the Star Wars wallpaper actually has really nice because that's more my speed that's very minimal being you know, black and white and against the dark theme that we're using here. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That one is even cooler, right? That might be one of the best wallpapers ever. I'm going to have to rip that wallpaper out. I think I'm going to I may need that as part of my own wallpaper collection. You know what? I'm going to go back to the Stormtrooper because that's pretty cool. Although I don't know did the Stormtroopers maybe in the newer movies they do do they use AR 15s with scopes on them? Maybe they do as a strange choice for the gun. Now, when I first logged in, I did get a warning that there were updates available. If I go down here into the sys tray, yeah, and click on the little icon here, it's letting me know that there are some updates because being based on Arch Linux, it's a rolling release. The ISO I downloaded was maybe two weeks old. So not a very old ISO, but rolling release, you're getting updates practically every day. I'm not actually going to bother updating the system on camera. Other than doing the updates, we can click the install tab to get a list of everything that is currently installed on the system. If you want to remove one of these programs, click the trash can and Pacman will uninstall that program for you or you can browse for new applications to install. If you want, let's close all of that out. It looks like it did install Telegram, one of the non free apps we chose during the installation. So that's good. So let's take a look at what is installed by default. I'm going to go into the menu system here and let's go into accessories. Can I adjust the size of this? I can. All right, grab that under accessories. We have a lot of the standard XFCE applications. We have the application finder, which is basically just another menu system kind of like we had here. It's just in a window form instead of a menu. And then we have bulk rename tool. We have a character map, the clipboard manager, which is is it already turned on? No, but when I click on it, you can see now we have the little paper clip symbol sitting in the cis tray. This is Clipman. This is our clipboard manager. We have GNOME disk and that's for managing your disk partitions. Typically, you're not going to want to play with that unless you have some real need to. Then we have HP Device Manager. That's important for setting up your Hewlett Packard printers. We have the menu editor and that's for editing this menu here. If I click on that, it did not launch anything. Let me try that one more time. Go to menu editor. And yeah, I'm not sure what was supposed to happen there, but nothing happens. So that is some sort of bug. There we have mousepad, which is our plain text editor. It's the default plain text editor for the XFCE desktop environment. This is mousepad 0.5.8. And we kind of like the window decorations here. They're very macOS like the window decorations, although the macOS would have them on the left side rather than on the right side of the window. Also under accessories, we have our notes tool. We have planner screenshot. Let's see what screenshot utility they're using. GNOME screenshot utility, I think. Very plain, but it works. I mean, you don't need much out of a screenshot tool. We have sensor viewer, software token, solar, which is a Logitech unifying receiver peripherals manager. Well, that's cool for those of you that are using Logitech equipment. Task manager, which is just your graphical system monitor, right? See how much CPU and RAM we're using. CPU, not much, but we're not really doing anything. Memory usage, we're using just under a gig of RAM. I gave this VM 6 gigs of RAM to work with. That may be a little high for XFCE, but I have a ton of stuff running down here in the system tray, right? Because we have a weather application, we have a mail application, we have clip man, which I launched. It didn't launch by default. We have the package manager also running that sucks up, especially a lot of CPU when that thing goes and starts syncing the repository and things, you'll see the CPU spike. So that is affecting the system monitor a little bit back into the menu system under accessories. We had a lot of stuff installed. Thunar, of course, is the file manager for the XFCE desktop. And we have a USB image writer, and that's for burning your USB sticks. Thunar, let's take a look at Thunar, like the icon said, nice minimal icon set. This is Thunar 4.16.10. Thunar is one of the better file managers as far as graphical file managers that we have on Linux. It's not bad. Under the development category, we have milled, which is a program to view diffs. So you could view two different files side by side that have minor differences. That way you can see the diffs, right? The lines that don't quite match. And you can, you know, basically merge in the changes that you want to merge in. So that is milled. I've never actually used that program myself. I typically for viewing diffs, I just do it like in Vim with Vim diff or in Emacs, there's several diff tools built into Emacs, but melds a nice little tool. Under graphics, we have document scanner, which is of course, for your scanners, those of you that still have a scanner, I actually have a printer scanner combination over here somewhere. I can't remember the last time I scanned a document that was been a long time, probably a couple of years. Flameshot, which is a better screenshot utility, it launches and it sits in the sys tray. There is Flameshot. So and you know, you can go ahead and select a region, you get all these little control buttons and everything. So Flameshot is a really powerful screenshot utility. It's probably a better choice than the GNOME screenshot tool. Also under graphics, we have GIMP, which is the GNU image manipulation program. GIMP is our free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop. The thing about GIMP is it's fantastic. I do all of my thumbnails, all of the channel artwork, everything I do as far as graphics, I use GIMP for. And it's just a fantastic program. I've done video tutorials about GIMP for those of you that need help with it. Also under applications, the internet category, we have the Avahi server, Deluge, which is a BitTorrent client. It's a really nice BitTorrent client. I believe it's a Qt application instead of a GTK application. But you know, it doesn't really matter. You're going to end up mixing and matching Qt things and GTK programs along the way. But Deluge is a very nice BitTorrent client. Also under internet, we have Firefox for our default web browser. We have TeamViewer, which we installed. Let's see if it launches, just to make sure it launches. The TeamViewer daemon is not running. Okay, so the program will work once we start the daemon. I'm not going to bother. TeamViewer is proprietary software and it's something, especially for remote desktops, there's plenty of open source remote desktop applications. So I wouldn't recommend TeamViewer, but I know a lot of people have to use specific applications for work. And TeamViewer, unfortunately, is one of those proprietary applications a lot of people have to use for their jobs. So that's nice that it is available and so easy to install from the installer. Zoom is another piece of proprietary software that so many people these days have to use. Let's see if Zoom launches. It does. Okay, close that out. I don't want to start an instance of Zoom. Zoom is one of the better web conferencing pieces of software. It's proprietary software, but at least it's good. Unlike something like Skype, which is a proprietary web conference software that's not very good. At least it hasn't been on Linux in my past testing. Another really bad web conferencing software that's proprietary is Discord. People quit using Discord for recording, especially, I see so many YouTubers that use Discord for recording interviews and podcasts and things like that. And the video quality sucks. It's always glitchy. The audio is always bad. And I see these people complaining that they don't know why their videos and podcasts turn out so bad. What's wrong with their cameras? What's wrong with their microphones? It's not the camera. It's not the microphone. It's the Discord application. Don't record in Discord. Zoom is a much better application if you're going to use proprietary software or use Jitsie if you're a free and open source advocate like I am. Under multimedia, we have both audio volume control. We have video for Linux that's for capturing your webcams. We have simple screen recorder, which is a simple little tool that'll record your desktop. And we have VLC, which of course is our multimedia player. Typically you'll use VLC to play videos, although it can play audio as well. Back to the menu. We have a ton of stuff installed in this thing, which is nice. It's good, especially for people that have bad internet. Some of these distributions that ship so much software are actually a good thing in many parts of the world. Under the office category, we have EbiWord, which is a word processing program. We have a dictionary program. We have Good Numeric, which is a spreadsheet program. Osmo, which is a personal organizer. I don't know if I know Osmo. I probably have seen this before, but it looks like your typical calendar, note taker, organizer, you know, like keeping up with your daily agenda. So really neat little program. And then we have a other category. And I'm assuming since I'm not familiar with any of these that these are some of the custom scripts that were mentioned on the source forage page. For example, Axclate, I don't know what this is. You're a download link. Okay, a download link for what? It wants a URL, but I don't know what it's trying to do. So this is a problem, because I have no idea what the program wants from me. It's asking for a URL, but does it want like a web page URL? Does it want a URL to a video image? I mean, what's it trying to download? And there's no description, right? In the menu entry, you see most things, if I go to accessories, have the title of the application and then a description exactly what it does. But in this other category, yeah, they are devoid of descriptions. So I don't know HP UI scan. I'm assuming is for your HP devices, your Hewlett Packard printers. You know, it's a scan and set everything up. Obviously in this VM, nothing's going to happen here. So no big deal there. Menu X does have a description that says view multi-page documents. So let's launch that. Okay, so this looks like a little helper program. It says, Hello, DET. Welcome to menu X, the StormOS edition for this program to work. You need the following programs zip, unzip and curl. Zip, unzip and curl are usually installed on most Linux distributions. So that's not a problem. And the reason you need zip, it looks like it's going to create some backups of stuff on the system or you can if you choose to and it's going to use zip and unzip for that. So I'm not going to run through any of this. You do have some Pacman stuff toward the end. For example, we can update the mirrors for StormOS if we choose 6A. So let's just try one just to see. Yeah, it's updating the mirrors. This may take a minute. So I'll just let this run. And once it's completed, I'll restart the video. I'm going to pause the video while this runs. Actually, I won't pause the video while this runs. I'm going to go back to the menu entry for this because this was the only one of these custom scripts that has a description. View multi-page documents. But I don't think that description has anything to do with this program because there was nothing about viewing documents anywhere in that first part. It was about doing backups, archives, zip, unzip and that had a lot of package management stuff with Pacman and YAY, updating the mirror list. So I don't know. So these need descriptions. This one needs the right description and the other four just need a description. Play Movie is a pretty good name. I'm assuming it's a movie player. By default, we get the file picker that launches. Though this is not the application itself. This is the GTK file picker that wants to know what video are we trying to play. I don't have any videos on the system to play, but I can assume that would launch our movie player. Also, under other, we have WGetM. WGet is a application that downloads stuff from the web. You give it a URL and it'll pull down like a web page for you. So let's run that. Give it a download link. What is your download link? You know what? I'm going to give it the distro.tube home page just to see what happens. It says .mp4. So that one is downloading an .mp4. So WGetM for WGetmp4. Well, they should probably name it WGetmp4 just so it's clear what it is. Or again, in the menu entry, give us a description. That way I know exactly what kind of file it was looking for. I still don't know what Axelclate was was looking for. It wanted a download link as well. And this program finished updating the mirror list. Let me do a sudo pacman-syu. And this is not selectable option up because we're still in the script. Let me open up a new terminal and do a sudo pacman-syu. This will be the first time we've actually resinked the repositories and tried to update. And let's see how fast the mirrors are now that we've updated the mirror list very fast. The Linux kernel, which is huge, just really took just a few seconds. So very good speeds here. I'm going to minimize this while that goes. And one thing I did want to do is let me relaunch the terminal. I've got the other terminal running the update so I had to launch a new one. Because they did mention that the bash rc had some aliases. So I was going to open the bash rc in Vim, but Vim is not installed. Well, I guess I'll install it. I'll use vi. Vi is not installed. That is very strange. I have never encountered, I don't think, a Linux distribution that did not have vi installed. Because that's the standard text editor on Unix-like operating systems. It has been there for decades. So the fact that vi is not installed is really weird. I'm assuming nano is here. That's very strange. It's their distribution. They can do what they want with it. I have to remember how to use nano here, though. But it looks like we have install as an alias for sudo pacman-s. So you can do install name of program instead of sudo pacman-s name of program. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I like these aliases. You got one for uninstall pupd, which is just a resinking and then updating. Yupd, which is doing the same thing, except instead of with pacman, you're doing it with yay. So pupd is with pacman. Yupd is with yay. Then you have an alias for edit, which is sudo mousepad. That's interesting that you give it sudo privileges by default because most things you're not going to need. You know, I will probably let them do the sudo edit or create a second alias for sudo edit. You know, sedit, for example. Because you don't want to be editing everything as sudo because it's going to change permissions or if you're creating a new document, what it's going to do is it's going to create it with root permissions. For example, let's put this to the test. If I do edit, which is again sudo mousepad, and let's do test.txt, or create a new document, right? And then this is a test exclamation. And now I do save and close. I do an ls in this directory. There's test.txt. Let's do an ls-l for long format. You see test.txt is on by the root user because we opened it essentially with root privileges with sudo. So that alias definitely needs to be changed. That's a bad alias that's going to cause people problems. So I would, if this was me, I would go down here and I would change this to test edit. And then what I would do is I would create a new alias for plain edit. Edit is mousepad. That's probably how I would do that. And if I do control x to quit and then y to save. And now when I do edit test 2.txt, this warning me, where the root account this may harm your system is because we have to resource the bash rc. So let's source the bash rc, the new bash rc. And now edit test 2.txt. And now we no longer get the warning that we're root. This is a test. And then let's save and then quit. And once again ls-l for the long format. And you see there's the first one we did with the old alias that saved it as the root user. And then test 2 with the new alias we created actually saved it as our home user. So let me close that terminal. I still get the other terminal running the update which is this icon. So that's interesting the taskbar. They minify everything to just an icon no name. And it's centered which is cool. So that was just a very quick look at StormOS. StormOS, essentially Arch Linux with a customized Xfce desktop with a full suite of applications. I do like that they did some unique things. They were trying to add some custom scripts. And you know you had also the bash rc had had a bunch of custom aliases to help people use the various pacman and yay commands when you're doing your package management stuff inside the terminal. That was nice. The one thing about the custom scripts. I don't know if those were actually developed by the StormOS team or if they grabbed those scripts from somebody else outside of StormOS. But those scripts they need descriptions on what they actually do in the menu system. They also could probably benefit from proper man pages or if you can edit the script in such a way that it has a help flag so I can do what was one of the names of the scripts. Wgetm. So I could do Wgetm space dash dash help and actually get a list of flags and maybe a description of what the program is or a man page. So I could do man Wgetm and get proper documentation to read. That would be something useful and it would be something that wouldn't be too difficult to add to those scripts. So that might be something that the StormOS devs actually consider in the future. Overall I'm pretty impressed with this distribution. I think it's a solid entry for those of you that are looking for Arch Linux with an easy installer with Xfce. Give StormOS a try. Now before I go let me think a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul Scott-Wess, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Angry, Diokai, Dylan George, Lee, Linux Ninja, Maxim, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch of the Door, Polytech, Red Prophet, Steven, and Willie. These guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys this episode you just watched about StormOS it wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. StormOS didn't pay me for this video even though they should. If you enjoyed this video and you want to see more content like it subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys peace. You have to have VI installed by default.