 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of Q4OS. Q4OS is a Debian-based distribution. It's based on Debian 11, the testing branch, and I've taken a look at Q4OS a couple of times in the past, but I wanted to take a look at this new release because they're doing some different things than how it was in the past when I took a look at it because, for one thing, they're now using the KDE Plasma desktop environment by default, where before Q4OS was really focused around the Trinity desktop environment. For those of you that don't know what Trinity is, Trinity is a fork of the old KDE 3.5 desktop environment from like 15 years ago. KDE 3 stopped development at 3.5 and moved to KDE 4, which was a completely different version of KDE. The desktop is a completely different toolkit and everything changed and people hated the move from KDE 3 to KDE 4. So some people wanted to stay on KDE 3. So they just forked it, created the Trinity desktop, which is essentially KDE 3, and just kept it going. And Q4OS was a really interesting distribution because it's really the only distribution I really know that uses the Trinity desktop environment and it was very lightweight. With a full desktop environment, typically this sucker was only using like 200 megs of RAM. It was really, really slim and fast. They had 64-bit ISOs and 32-bit ISOs. They still do. But now, because KDE Plasma has matured to the point where, honestly, most people probably can use KDE Plasma rather than Trinity. As far as system resource usage, KDE Plasma really isn't that much heavier than Trinity, if we're being honest. So today I'm going to take a look at Q4OS 4.6 codenamed Gemini. Just taking a quick look at the release announcement from the Q4OS website. They are calling this a long-term support release, claiming that this is going to be supported for at least five years. They are shipping Plasma 5.20 by default, but optionally, you can use the Trinity desktop environment, Trinity 14.0.10. And they've worked really hard, apparently, so that you now have the ability to install both Plasma and the Trinity desktop alongside each other and they'll play nice. Remember before that was an issue, because obviously Plasma, some modern version of KDE, where Trinity was a fork of the older version of KDE and having both of those on the same system, sometimes they didn't play well with each other. So let me go ahead and spin up a quick virtual machine, and I'm going to run through a quick installation of Q4OS 4.6. So let me go ahead and boot into the Q4OS live environment here. I'm going to go ahead and open the display manager and change the screen resolution here. All right, and now that I've got that set, here is Q4OS, their welcome screen. And let me see, can we actually run through an installation from the welcome screen? No, this is installing applications, installing your multimedia codecs and all of that. But on the desktop, we have install Q4OS. And I'm assuming that would go ahead and launch. The Calamari installer, and you can select your language here in the opening screen. By default, it's set to American English, which is correct for me. So I'll click next time zone. It's already chosen the central time zone in the US for me. That's correct. Keyboard layout, English US is correct for me. So I'm just going to click next. And then we have package selection. What do we want? Q4OS desktop, let me read this, because I'm actually not sure what these are. So the Q4OS desktop package is recommended for regular users. It's your full feature desktop. That's going to include web browser, office suite, and a full application suite. So that's probably the one I'm going to go with. Q4OS basic is a desktop with common utilities and system tools, but it doesn't have all that extra stuff that you really don't need, like your office suite and stuff like that. You'll go install those kinds of programs yourself if you need them. Q4OS live. There's no additional software installed at all. This is basically your live media environment. It'll be cloned onto the target system. And then Q4OS pure is for experts only. This is a minimal desktop. You will be free to set anything up by yourself. So I'm going to go with Q4OS desktop because that's the one recommended. Now let's go ahead and partition our drive. I'm going to choose the first option here, a race disk. I'm going to give Q4OS the entire 25 gig virtual hard drive of this virtual machine. It's going to create a swap. And that swap is going to be 8.8 gigs. Oh my goodness. I really don't want to waste 8.8 gigs of space in a 25 gig virtual machine on a swap that probably will never be used. I'm going to go ahead and manually partition them because I refused to accept such a large swap. That's one third of the drive will be used by a swap. I can't do that. So let's run through the manual partition tool. So I'm going to create a new partition table. And MBR is master boot record. That's your legacy BIOS. Or you could do GPT for UEFI in this virtual machine. I will do MBR for master boot record. Now I have 25 gigs of free space here. Now what I want to do is I want to create and what do I want to create? I want to create an extend for partition mount point. Let's go ahead and make the mount point root. And for flags I will make this a bootable partition. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to click next. And then it says a GPT partition is the best option for all systems yada yada yada. Which is good advice because on physical hardware most machines these days do support UEFI. But again I'm in this virtual machine so master boot record will be fine and be the best option for me at the moment. Because I didn't set up this particular VM to use UEFI. Now let me go ahead and create my username and password. So my name is DT. My username is going to be TT. The name of this computer I'm going to call it Q4OS-vert. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then do I want to log in automatically without asking for a password? No. That's ticked off by default. I'm going to leave that ticked off. I want to have to enter a password to get into my computer. That's for privacy reasons. And then use the same password for administrator account that's ticked on by default. I want that ticked on. So what this is is your sudo password and your user's password are the same. That way you don't have to remember two different passwords. Then I'm going to click next and we get a summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to go ahead and click install. This portion of the installation typically takes five to ten minutes. So I'm going to pause the video and I'll be back once Q4OS has finished installing. And the installation is completed. That took about maybe ten minutes. I stepped away to make me a cup of joe and when I got back it was just completing. And in the Calamari's installer what you need to do once the installation has completed make sure this check box that says restart now make sure that is ticked. And then click done and it should reboot for you. And that's what I'm going to do right now. All right and we get our login screen. Let's go ahead and log in to our newly installed Q4OS 4.6. It says congratulations setup has finished. We had a little pop-up bubble there that said configuring the system. And of course that's before the plasma desktop even loads. That's probably checking things like a screen resolution, what kind of graphics drivers you need, things like that. I'm assuming that's what was going on there. So once again let me go ahead and open the display settings and change the screen resolution. This will be the last time I'll need to do that. Now that this is properly installed when I set the screen resolution this time, every time I come back to this virtual machine it should remember that I want a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. Once again we get the Q4OS helper and one of the really cool things about this is Debian which is of course the parent distribution. Debian only ships free software by default to enable third-party proprietary multimedia codecs. For example you have to add some third-party repositories to Debian, some non-free repositories that is. Well Q4OS makes this simple because they just have this button right here that says install proprietary codecs. And you can see we get this k-dialogue box down here that says multimedia codecs are downloading and then we get a little multimedia codec setup wizard. And do we want to install all of this? I'm just going to tell it install whatever the heck it wants to install. Now I don't really need these multimedia codecs in this VM. I doubt I'm ever going to play any kind of audio or video in this VM. I'm probably going to blow away this VM after this video. But this is really cool. If this was on physical hardware you absolutely would need to run through this. If you're installing this on a physical machine you have to install the proprietary codecs. Otherwise you're in for a miserable experience once you decide you're going to watch some video on your computer. And it's been on this screen for a few seconds. Let me click next. I think it yeah it's already finished. So that only took maybe a minute to install all the multimedia codecs and then install applications. I'm assuming this would launch our software center. Yeah so it was syncing the repositories and then it launches the software center which is actually called software center. So that is interesting. Looks very old school but I kind of like these old school software centers instead of the big graphics and whiz main you know kind of buttons and you know everything now looks like it's for a mobile touchscreen and you know this looks like a normal software center application where you could search for something like is H top installed. This is zero of 54 actually zero of 54. It's got 54 packages here. Is that all let me click package manager. And that opens the discover software center which is actually a more fully featured software center and I've got 18 updates I could take I'll decline the updates. Let me search for H top and discover. Yeah H top is here and it's already installed so I don't have to install. So I wonder what the point of this software center here which only has 54 applications. Now it has 54 really useful applications for example Google Chrome it's a proprietary web browser I wouldn't install it personally but it is the most popular web browser on the planet. I know a lot of you guys probably use it and being proprietary software it's not in the standard Debian repositories so they're making it very easy for you guys to get that or if you didn't want the standard version of Firefox maybe you wanted the ESR version of Firefox the extended support release they make that very easy to get VLC media players here wine is also in here we have graphics applications like gimp and inkscape some multimedia stuff like Kate and live K3B blenders in here audacity is in here. So I'm not really sure what the point of this little software center is that only has 54 applications and I don't know why this this button here in the welcome screen wouldn't just automatically launch the discover software center which is actually Katie's software center so other things you have in the welcome screen switch to the kickoff start menu so this is an alternate menu system for Katie plasma and if you didn't want like a standard kind of start menu down here what you could do is you could switch to the kickoff start menu says this action is available for Trinity desktop only oh okay so that is actually interesting they probably should fix that if you're using plasma we don't need to see that so so that is an alternative menu for the Trinity panel so in Katie plasma you are stuck with this panel here although I think you could right click on it and then you could go into configure application launcher or as it show alternatives let's do show alternatives yep and you could actually choose something different other than the standard application launcher menu you could do the application dashboard let me switch to that and now when you hit the start menu here you get kind of this full screen kind of dashboard very similar to the way that GNOME does it I don't like this kind of menu system so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to show alternatives and go to application launcher and actually get a proper kind of menu system here also in the welcome screen here we have turn on desktop effects I'm assuming that would take us to our effects settings inside Katie plasma I'm not going to play with that that's where you could turn on things like oh the wobbly windows and the desktop cube and things like that Katie plasma has a lot of fancy desktop effects that are kind of cool if you're into that sort of thing let's take a look at what is actually installed in the k40s desktop version because remember this is the standard desktop edition so it should have a few extra applications installed under games we have all riot solitaire so just a standard solitaire game under graphics we have when view which is Katie's image viewer we have LibreOffice draw ocular which is Katie's PDF viewer and scan light which is for scanning most people don't have a need for a scanner these days but if you did need a scanner that's nice as that's already installed on the system under the internet category google chrome is the default web browser in q4 os so they are shipping a proprietary web browser out of the box now that's one thing I would rather Linux distributions not do there's no reason to ship a proprietary web browser especially if you like google chrome you know chromium is essentially google chrome but it's free and open source software licensed under a free license just ship chromium right there's no there's just no reason to ship a proprietary software if people want to choose proprietary software there's nothing stopping them from going to get google chrome it's very easy because the software center makes it easy you you just click a button but I wouldn't try to force that on to people that ideologically you know are opposed to running something like google chrome let me go ahead and launch google chrome here and see what version they are on let me make this full screen and if I go into help about google chrome this is google chrome version 94.0.4606.71 and let me close that out and let me get back into the applications menu here under internet we also had kde connect and that is for syncing your devices to your computer your mobile phone for example syncing that to your desktop we also have conqueror with a k conqueror with a k is an old school kde application it is actually the default or was the default kde web browser at one time it's a horrible web browser it is also a file manager you can actually use it as a file manager as well kind of like you know it was trying to do the old school windows explorer kind of thing you know how in the early days of windows explorer was actually internet explorer the file the web browser but windows explorer was also the file manager but they were kind of the same application you could kind of do things in both internet explorer you know you could treat it as a either a web browser or file manager conqueror is kind of like that but it's not very good as either a web browser or file manager and then we also have thunderbird as our email client and let me go back to the main application menu under multimedia we have clementine for a music player clementine is a fantastic audio player it is a cute based audio player so it makes sense why you would ship this by default on a kde plasma distribution of course i don't have a music library here in this vm but you can navigate your file system you can set a playlist you can go to the internet and get various streaming services that you can listen to here inside clementine some of them of course you're going to need accounts for you can also connect your various devices to clementine it's just again one of the best audio players available on linux under applications and multimedia we also have k3b which is a disk burning application kind of like the scanning utility do you really need a disk burning utility well i still burned us so i actually use k3b it is the best disk burning software on linux free and open source software burn cds dvds blu rays and it's just fantastic we also have sm tube which is a youtube browser for sm player sm player is a video player and sm tube is a plugin for that so you could watch youtube without having to be on youtube vlc is a media player of course probably the most popular video player as far as free and open source software is concerned this is vlc version 3.0.16 also under applications we have an office category and we have the entire libre office suite base calc draw impress math and writer because remember the desktop version of k4 os includes a full suite of applications you know they install everything the kitchen sink so we have a full office suite here let's see what version of libre office we're on being a debian based distribution the applications are going to be older these are not going to be the latest and greatest of anything so this is libre office 7.0.4.2 uh even the desktop environment kde plasma 5.20 is the desktop environment that's a older version of plasma plasma has moved on but again this is a debian distribution this isn't an arch based distribution you know this isn't rolling release also under applications we have a science and math category which all that has is libre office math and then we have our standard settings manager stuff oh they have the synaptic package manager installed by default i actually did not expect that the synaptic package manager i've done a video specifically about synaptic in the past and i think synaptic is the best package manager available on any debian or debian based distribution a boon to a boon to base distributions as well if you don't have the synaptic package manager install i strongly advise you install the synaptic package manager it's much better than those other graphical package managers that are shipping on distributions like a boon to and mint and all of those distributions these days uh synaptic package manager actually was the default software center for many years in debian before they started moving to you know some of those more graphically pleasing software centers that are slow and bloated and kind of buggy and the only other category we have is our utilities category and this is where you're going to find applications like your archive manager for zip and unzip and that sort of thing you're going to find your calculator your font manager and we have a screenshot utility as well now because i launched a bunch of applications i do notice there's a few things running down here in the system tray clementine is still open let me quit that i'm going to quit a few things here just to get a good reading here because i'm going to launch a terminal i wonder of control alt t launches a terminal it does and what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in here and since htop was installed by default let's run htop and see how much memory we're using yeah we're using 863 megs of ram of the six gigs of ram i gave this virtual machine that's not that light i was expecting that to be quite a bit lighter but again we've got you know i opened a ton of programs there going through the menu system i probably should have checked that on a cold boot and i probably will hear in just a second let's do a uname dash r and get the kernel version this is kernel version 5.10.0 let's see how many packages are installed so if i do a sudo apt list dash dash and installed i believe is the command i don't even know if i needed sudo privileges for it but i gave it anyway that gets us a list of all the packages that are installed and of course we want a line count how do you get a line count in the bash shell well you use a utility called wc which stands for word count so pipe that into wc space dash l for line count rather than a word count and 2048 now that is the number of lines that was in that output which means 2048 is the number of the packages that are actually installed now let me do a reboot and on a cold boot what i'll do is i will see what kind of ram we're using inside plasma and back at the login manager all right and we're back inside kde so this is a fresh reboot here so now let me open the terminal it's console with a k i could have used control alt t but i was searching for it in the menu system and let me zoom in and now without me you know starting a million programs let's see how much ram we're using yes that's much more respectable 589 megs of ram of the six gigs of ram i gave this vm it's also checking for updates here and that's going to affect the system resource usage a little bit too anytime the package manager is uh syncing the repositories that typically especially the cpu it'll spike that a little bit that's why that cpu was like 15 percent 17 percent when we first logged in but now it's settled back down to a more standard 2 percent of the cpu is being used right now so let me go ahead and close out that terminal and there's really not much else to show with q4 os i mean it's the standard default kde plasma desktop it's going to be the standard default wallpapers i don't think they even have any branded wallpapers of their own to show yeah this is just the standard kde plasma wallpaper pack from debion you got some debion branded wallpapers that you could choose from yeah overall i mean this is debion with some third party repositories some proprietary software already installed for you out of the box uh with kde plasma now i'm a little i'd say i'm a little disappointed in q4 os in terms of q4 os was always one of the distributions i touted heavily and promoted heavily because i thought it was fantastic it was one of the smallest lightest weight distributions out there when it shipped with the trinity desktop environment by default it was essentially a old version of kde but it looked good kde 3.5 it was actually a very attractive desktop environment but this thing uses like 200 megs of ram it's very lightweight and also on older equipment when you can get the 32 bit isos you know q4 os with the trinity desktop environment on a 32 bit iso can revive machines that are 15 maybe even 20 years old in some cases and that is really fantastic now that this is just a debion based distribution with kde plasma with a couple of bits of proprietary software installed it's kind of just another distribution in my eyes now now maybe i'm being a little harsh but again it's just a an initial first look and my initial reaction to this uh that may change over time i may keep this vm around and play with it a little bit longer maybe uh play with it for a couple of weeks before i trash it now before i go i want to thank a few special people i want to thank the producers of this episode gave james michael paul scott west of commie ellen chuck commander angri dyokai david dylan gregory hyco lee maxim mike nitrix erion alexander peace archon for door polytech raver red prophet steven and willy these guys they're my high steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at q4 os 4.6 would not have been possible the show is 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 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 and if you like my work please help support me please subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace