 There are a literal ton of art space distros out there and many of them are good many of them are bad really it all depends on why they were created and what they're trying to do and Honestly, I don't particularly care whether or not your distribution has a purpose for existing because a lot of art space Distros and Debian based distros weren't created with the idea that they're going to be the next big thing They were simply created for the developer's use and they're just being shared publicly every once in a while However, there is a distribution that comes along that tries to do something new even if it is based on a Larger brand distro. So today, we're gonna be taking a look at a distribution called crystal Linux And this is an art space distro So when I heard about it, I was like, oh man another art space distro I'm probably not gonna look at it because I've taken a look at it so many but Then I saw what they were trying to do and the fact that they're trying to do something in a different way So today we're gonna take a look at it and see just what it is. They're trying to do differently So right off the bat You're going to see something that you've never seen before and that is because they have their own custom installer now There's a part of me that thinks, you know what? Why do we need another installer? We really don't need another one Calamari's is really good Why do you need to spend all the effort to create something new? There's a part of me that thinks that and and would probably argue that in any other situation However, this is a very good installer and the fact that it's still in beta doesn't bother me at all because it's actually Really well done. So let's go ahead and go through this and let me show you why I like it so much So the step-by-step nature of it is similar to pretty much all other installers So there's nothing truly unique here when it comes to the progression of your installation at least not really But the overall package of how it looks how it feels is a very Nice departure away from the traditional Calamari's installer, which is the installer that the vast majority of ArchBase distros actually use So let's go ahead and hit the start button here And as you can see there are some animations now the animations are not smooth And that's because I'm in a VM here But I'm assuming that if you were to do this on hardware the animations would be nice nice and smooth So you can search for your time zone here, and then I'll select that and do next now Interestingly, you can't search for your keyboard layout. You actually have to do the scrolling for that so we'll scroll all the way down to the United States of America and then you can select the drop down here and choose between several different versions of US keyboard, so I'm just gonna hit normal and hit next and then we're going to create our user so Matt as a good username a very strong and Secure password and then we'll leave these two checkboxes on here So we have root access and a pseudo access for this user What next and then here's where it's something that is kind of broken at least it was for me I've already installed this once and I had no clue what onyx was But I assumed that it was this highly customized version of GNOME because what we're using right now in the live environment is GNOME Even though it looks a little bit like budgie in some places, but it's definitely GNOME with a whole bunch of extensions So I'm assuming that's what they call onyx So I selected onyx and then proceeded with the installation, but I ended up with just vanilla GNOME So I was very confused by that and I will see if it happens again. It's possible that this is a VM issue It's also possible. It's just because this is definitely in beta They've warned you on their GitHub page that this is a very early version of this distro So you're to expect bugs. It's not meant to be stable whatsoever. So I'm not blaming anybody here It's just possible that something has gone wrong But they do offer several other desktop environments and window managers So they have GNOME, Plasma, Budgie, Mate, Cinnamon, LXQT, Sway, i3 gaps, Herp's Love WM, Awesome WM, and BSPWM The fact that they offer window managers is just I mean, seriously, this is a brand new Brands making new distribution. Like it's only been around for just a little while and They're doing a lot of stuff here from scratch specifically with the installer and the fact that they offer The ability to install a whole bunch of different window managers and desktop environments out of the box is very nice It's very ambitious too, but it's also very nice. So I'm happy to see that I'm going to go ahead and leave the Onyx selection here Just because I want to see at the end of the day if I get this highly customized version of GNOME The thing is when I installed it earlier, all the extensions for the stuff was there in the extensions manager But none of them were enabled. So I'm not sure again what was going on there So we're gonna go ahead next now we can enter a host name. So right crystal VM here It gives you the opportunity to enable IPv6 loop back the time shift and ZRAMD are both selected by default That means that this is going to be using butterfs as far as I'm aware. I'm assuming that's the reason why they use time shift It's possible. They could just be downloading that and then using the R6 version of time shifts So we'll have to check that later. We'll go ahead next And it's going to allow you to select from automatic partitioning or manual partitioning and they do have built-in manual partitioning so you can create your Partitions right here within this awesome installer, which again is fully custom This is not something that I've ever seen before and it does give you options to open g-parted or open a terminal So you could use something like fdisk or cfdisk if you wanted to do that But there's also a graphical way of manually partitioning So if you wanted to create your own home partition or a separate home partition or your own swap or whatever you wanted to do You could do that I'm gonna go ahead back and then forward again and then go back to actually I could just hit Automatic partitioning there and I'll hit next and it's going to confirm all this stuff now Here's the best part of this installer Bar none for me every single installer that I've ever used for Linux has this summary page, right? And I think everyone's seen this and usually people just skip over this They don't even bother going through and I mean they might look and make sure you're writing to the right hard drive But they don't check any of the other stuff But if you do do that Which you should because you want to make sure that you've chosen the right language and all that stuff if you've made a mistake You have to back back back to that step and then do the editing in this here You can edit it right from here So it will take you back to that particular step by hitting that little pen button and then you can select whatever You need to and then you can go back through the installer Unfortunately, it does take you all the way back through the installer You have to do one right after another but it's not that big of a deal You just hit next until you're done It would be cool if there was a way once you've gone back to edit that one thing if you could go right directly back to the Summary, I'm not sure if you could do one of these buttons like these aren't actually buttons So no that doesn't work, but that would be cool if that was possible So maybe that's something that they could add later on but other than that I love the fact that it gives you these basically shortcuts back to these settings so you could edit them if you want to Alternatively, what would be neat is if they just when you hit this button if it just kind of expanded down Left you on this page let you do the editing and then you could hit done or something that take a lot of extra effort Obviously, but it would be in addition to this feature that make it even more awesome So I'm gonna go ahead hit next and then it's going to Install crystal now the thing is this took me Probably about ten minutes last time when I was installing this in when I installed this in the VM last time so It definitely is not the fastest install ever again. It's on the VM So that's possible the reason why that's happening Also, they give you all this information on what it's doing, but it doesn't keep scrolled to the bottom So it just kind of stays up here at the top And if you want to see what it's actually doing right this second you have to scroll down and then it will stay at The bottom personally I could take this information part here take it to leave it really it's not anything that I really need to see but I understand as a Situation where this is a brand new type of thing Maybe being able to see where an error might pop up might be beneficial for not only the user But for the developer as well, so I'm gonna cut the video here. We'll come back and look at crystal when it's all done Okay now that that's done that didn't take nearly as long as the first time install it so perhaps I just was Having problems beforehand or it's also possible. I didn't give it as much memory as I did this time So that's a possibility so I'm gonna go ahead and hit reboot here hit restart and then we'll wait for it to reboot It won't take very long It does have its own custom grub screen there as you saw Which is nice one of the things that they've done a really good job of is that you're not going to see any arch Linux logos Here so a lot of art space distros forget some things when they like for neofetch They'll have it just say arch Linux or something like that Which is fine if they're just aiming to have you install arch Linux But a lot of distributions claim to be custom and then forget to change the logo sometimes So it's nice that crystal has done a good job of not forgetting to change those logos everywhere, so Let's see here. Yeah, as you see this is just vanilla. No, I'm not exactly sure What that onyx thing is then either it's supposed to be vanilla gnome And this is what it's supposed to look like or something has gone wrong I'm not actually sure because if you we type in extensions here the extensions Manager is here. It's now. It's not the extensions manager. It allows you to install things Which is a little bit disappointing, but it does show that there are a ton of Extensions here already installed, but none of them are enabled So I'm assuming that they're supposed to be enabled. They're just not yet for some reason So that is definitely something that is Hopefully be fixed in the future Other than that, there's not a lot to take a look at here because this is again a very brand-new distro But I will show you some things so first let me show you the terminal and we'll look take a look at the Neofetch so if we type in Neofetch again, this is based on art So none of these version numbers should be for all that surprising you're gonna get the latest version of the kernel It has bash 5.1 16. This is running GNOME 42.4. It has at a weight as the default theme This is gonna terminal. There's not much that's surprising here again They've done a good job of making sure that this says this is crystal Linux not arch Linux and it does have a Custom ASCII art there, which is also very nice, right in terms of install applications. There's not much here So you get the extensions manager. There's some QT stuff here for development. There's the settings panel There's Vim installed by default, which is just I mean seriously guys. That's the best part about this whole distro It's amazing you install them by default You have my heart because for whatever reason the vast majority distributions do not install them by default and I don't understand Why I mean they installed nano nano comes with most Linux distributions And I suppose that's fine if you use nano, but I like them I want them to stop Matt stop. You don't need to go on this rant again Okay, but anyways other than that they have g-edit calculator a few GNOME apps So things like weather clocks things like that now. I don't see like GNOME maps here So they haven't included every single GNOME application unless I'm missing something which I don't think I am That's literally all there is in terms of actually installed software. So you're not getting a very Blow there's actually more extent GNOME extensions installed and there are actual applications Which is highly unusual. So this is definitely a work in progress distro But also if this is the way they're kind of going to aim for when they're More fully released. I would say that this is a very minimal distribution, which is actually quite nice So you're going to find you install this thing and then you kind of build it up yourself Which is kind of the arch ethos, but obviously easier to install than arch So other than that, there's not much here to take a look at this is crystal Linux You can kind of tell that this is still a brand new Work in progress distribution. So there are some things that they're obviously still working on things like getting the desktop set up Like you'd probably want things like that. But other than that, it's a nice start. I love that installer I think it is fantastic. Now. Maybe that's just because I like new shiny things It's possible that's the reason why I like it so much But the thing is is that despite the fact that like I said at the beginning I don't really think we need another brand new installer I like the fact that developers are putting effort into something that Enthuses them, right? You can tell from the polish of that installer that they have put a lot of effort into making it really good And I like that about it It makes me very Enthused for the future of the district when they put that level of effort into making something like that good at this point Development if they can put that effort into creating some other tools that perhaps you install extra software or Allow you to tweak the system in certain ways. That'd be really cool So if they've like I said if they put that amount of effort into the installer It'll be interesting to see what they do in the future to make the rest of the distribution kind of stand out So that is a very brief look at crystal Linux if you have thoughts on this distribution You can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast You can follow me on massive honor odyssey those links will be in the video description along with all my other social media stuff You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all just Amazing amazing people. So thank you so very much for your support I can't even begin to say how grateful I am without you the channel just would not be where it is right now So thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time