 I'm always on the lookout for distros that I can take a look at and sometimes when they're really weird distros I will put them in the series that is more For that kind of thing other times I try to look at them in a more serious way and that's what we're going to be doing today We're gonna be taking a look at a new distro called nitrics now This has been around for quite a long time, but it's new to me So I thought I'd take a look at it now a couple things you should know Nitrics is based on Debian and it uses the Calamari's installer So we'll pretty much see an installation like all the others and it has its own desktop environment That's based off from KDE Plasma So it'll be really interesting to see what this is all about because they go through and do quite a bit of stuff with something called Maui kit and Maui kit is basically like a development platform slash design library slash something else that allows developers to design and code applications that are very good looking and highly versatile So it'll be interesting to see how they have utilized Maui kit To make an interesting looking desktop environment. So that's what we're going to be doing today. Let's go ahead and jump into nitrics So we're going to be booting this into a virtual machine So we're going to go ahead and hit this to get to the live environment It's always good when you see a text that says failed doing something or error So that'll be interesting to see if that gets past that which it appears like it's going to That's probably because this is a VM. I'm assuming. So we're going to just go ahead and just assume that it's not broken So it looks like it's coming up. Let's go ahead and see if we can open up open up a terminal here So this is the terminal and I think we're going to go through and be able to use x render here To change the display resolution and we are which is good Um Well, at least we did for a second It did not stay And then it goes right back to that. Okay. So that's uh, let's go ahead and search for displays then Okay, we get nothing here Okay, let's go ahead and close this And uh, where did all the applications go? Interesting. All right, um that's uh Let's search for display Here and uh, okay, so it just highlights it. It doesn't actually bring it to the top. That's okay We'll just choose 1920 by 1080 from this list We can find it is at the top, of course and hit apply And it didn't stay Okay, I'm assuming that this is as a problem because of a virtual machine error. So we're just gonna We'll just assume that it's a virtual machine thing and that in normal situations you want to have this problem So let's just go ahead and change the display driver and see if that will work Okay, so we just I changed the graphics drivers in virtual box and we get full screen So we're winning and so I was right when I said that the problems I was having before Were caused by the virtual machine. So let's go ahead and open up the installer here And it comes full screen, which is interesting choice. Now. This is supposedly the calamari's installer But this doesn't look like anything like the calamari's installer. I've ever seen It's definitely different. So, uh, let's go ahead language here and hit american english and then next And then We'll choose the region which would be The scrolling hardly ever works well in a virtual machine and there's no there's no Search box. Oh, here we go a few moments later at this point. I'm just going to choose one You know at this point I think I'd rather have the map back that I always bet you about the map This is kind of not a great experience I can see why somebody in the comments when I said I would prefer to drop down why they said it was a bad idea Because if you have to scroll through all of them, I can see why that'd be a bad idea. You should have multiple options here um Also, this shit is not an alphabetical order Okay, why isn't an alphabetical order that are i'm back at the top? uh, no mm prst like yeah, but there's a d here and I'm very confused. Okay All right, you want to know what? I just saw Toronto. We'll choose Toronto. Uh, that's good enough here Anyway, it's next. Okay. That was much harder than it should have been Uh, definitely they need a search box or something Okay, next that was fine. And then here's a credential. This is definitely if this is the calamari's installer This is a different calamari's installer than I've ever seen. It's definitely way different So, uh, let's type in our user name here and name that's fine n o s m will be good and we'll enter our password very strong and complicated Interestingly, did you notice that it actually shows the letter before it hides it? So if you're gonna stream this with your actual password, don't do that because it actually shows you the The letters that's not secure at all. Why bother hiding them if you're just going to show them before you hide them Like I can understand that should be a toggle a toggleable option Okay, and we'll enter the same password, which you now know because you can see the letters Not that it was hard to guess anyways, but still and here we have a scroll bar Why we didn't have a scroll bar before that's interesting. Okay, so next And then now this looks familiar So we're just gonna go ahead and erase disks It'd be It's weird that they went through and themed everything else the installer and this looks like every other partition manager in calamari's They didn't center everything which is kind of driving my ocd a little bit. Uh, you know crazy So i'm going to go ahead and hit next and then install And install now, okay, so i'm going to let this install. I will cut away and come back when it's done Okay, so as you can see The installation failed and it had something to do with grub and we all know that that's a fantastic place to be So what we're going to do is say screw you virtual box Obviously you're a complete failure in life And we're going to move over to vert manager and see if this will actually work in vert manager Let's go ahead and close this a few moments later View full screen. I still have not learned that key binding And interestingly enough, we're still getting errors there at the beginning, but we'll see if we can get this thing to install My guess here is that this is not meant to be, you know installed in a virtual machine That they've set they've created some settings for their installation that just doesn't work with vms and that's would be sad but Sometimes that happens, but we're going to try one last time. It's not going to be like that last wtf video Where I tried like five times this will be the last try If this doesn't work, we'll just go through the live environment and say effort But we're going to try to install again So i'm not going to worry about setting the language. I'm not going to go through that again So if you go if you click into one of these things And then There's no doesn't seem to be a way to go back. Also, apparently this is going to be like Oh, there's america right there. I was like I was looking for something different. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Anyway, so we should be able to scroll down now to Detroit or chicago or new york or There we go right there. There we go. That wasn't as bad as the experiences the last time because I kind of at least now know What I was doing I still think that there should be a search box Of some kind. Don't give me the map. I don't want the map, but our search box would be nice So we're going to go ahead and enter this stuff again It doesn't matter again with The strong no longer strong insecure password. It's just a password because you can actually see what it is I I don't agree with that choice at all It's if you're setting this up in a public place people will be able to see that I mean if they they'd have to be quick obviously, but still it's uh More it's much more insecure by showing the letters. Uh, at least by default anyways Try again And then next and then install and install now I'm going to let this do this thing. I will cut away so you don't have to watch through the whole thing And uh, we'll see if it works this time Alrighty then So this is Another failure. So I'm going to assume I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that this is a problem with This being installed in a virtual machine And like I said, you know just a few minutes ago I'm not going to go through and uh install this again. It's possible. Maybe I installed download the wrong ISO Because I'm seeing i 386 here And that should definitely not be what we're trying to target. I don't think that that's right It's weird though that if that's the case it install it actually, you know Boots up into a live environment. So I'm going to actually close this or not close it just Go out of this full screen and I'm going to go and check the ISO and see if perhaps I downloaded the wrong one for uh, the wrong cpu architecture It doesn't say that it says amdc because he for That is weird. Okay. Um, anyways what we're going to do We're going to make lemons that eliminate. We're going to go through and just look at the A live environment. We can't install it. So We'll do what we can. So first let's go ahead and look at the File manager. This is one of their custom applications and it is Gorgeous as you can see now, let's go ahead and see if we can change the display resolution So let's go up here hit the settings icon and go down to displays which is um right here And we'll change the display resolution to this and apply It doesn't stick. Okay, so that It it doesn't matter because it didn't actually stay so that is definitely a uh, That is definitely a failure on that part as well. Okay, so the We're not going to be able to make it any bigger. So we're going to have to deal with black bars Which is uh disappointing Theming wise this is gorgeous. I wish I could install it and actually use it Or you know play around with it on a an installed system, but I can't for obviously so Interestingly, these things are not in alphabetical order, which is again messing with my OCD, but it is a very good looking file manager. This is written in Maui kits So this is one of the applications they've created themselves on top of kde, but through the the UI framework framework known as Maui kit and as you can see It's a really good looking now. I think this is kind of like g2k and that you can Actually, it doesn't look like you can actually resize this thing at all. Okay So if we go up here, it does it will go to full screen Okay, so I was going to say I thought it was like g2k where if you Um resized it. Oh you can resize it from the top But not from the corners Okay, that It's almost certainly probably a virtual machine problem I keep blaming the virtual machine because I want to give them a benefit. This is not the case But I thought you could do it from the sides and make it smaller and it would be like, um, a responsive type design. I could be wrong about that Um, in fact, I probably am But I just didn't remember anyway, so the system settings here. This is basically just the kde system settings From the olden days. It's not one that is Full of featured like the rest of kde because you can see there's a lot of stuff here that's probably missing It actually more looks like the xfce settings manager, but if we click on this you can see this is definitely kde This is this is precisely what what the the workspace the the window behavior Screen looks like in Plasma, so we know this is plasma underneath by that which is Uh comforting at least close this now And then so we've looked at this And it looks pretty Does this have tabs? It does have tabs Um, it was quite slow to open up a new tab, but it's quicker now. Uh, let's see here d Can you do that control f to search? Yep. Good. Okay. What about Like a settings panel does it have like a settings panel? That looks like the only settings we have we can see if this will Open terminal here over here settings. Okay, cool So we can change the size list item size the safe sessions That is cool because all right I've been actually looking for this feature in in an actual file manager Like it's broadly available for a long time where you close it and it'll actually open back up You know in the same place that left off as there doesn't seem to be one other than this That's a cool feature other than that. There's not much here in terms of setting and Here's the thing if you don't like single click to open Apparently you can't change that Uh, that's an interesting choice. Um, that's gonna probably make some people at least a little upset Maybe you can change it from the settings application. Uh, that sometimes happens. Okay So that's index their file manager. So this is Nota this is probably going to be notes. Yep, that's going to be notes another model application Uh, it looks like it's set up as at least some of it of an ide so that you can go through Hey, you have number lines at least I'm not sure no syntax highlighting at least Unless you have the ability to So you get a syntax highlighting languages. Okay, here we go. Cool. All right So we can choose a language from oh, there's a lot of selection here So you could choose a language and use this as an id if you wanted to that's really cool Okay, so that's nota and again another Maui kit application We can discard that. Uh, so we got a regular firefox here system settings and the nx software center So let's go ahead and open up this and see what this is. All right, so Pro tip if you're gonna have a software center, don't have it open up Like that so that you can only see just one thing have it open up full screen Um, again, it's possible that the problem with that is This is a vm in the in the live session. So it could have a problem with that Uh, this is not based on any software store that I've I'm familiar with it looks like it has a whole bunch of app images So I believe if I remember correctly that nitrix does focus a lot on app images So if you are interested in downloading stuff Good chance that that's going to be in the form of an app image and they do go through and feature quite a few Maui kit applications. So that's cool. There's a station, which is the terminal application Most of these are probably pre-installed. I'm just gonna guess. Oh, maybe not. Let's go ahead and download that Oh, yep. See all these are going to be app images. So if you're not interested in the app image thing Nitrix is probably not for you Um, I'm just going to go ahead and close that that's I don't know You know anything in terms of app availability Uh, how this would be but it looks like it has Libre office. So it automatically beats elementary OS Um, it has brave obs is here opera Uh, and that's even a proprietary web browser Gimp on google chromium vs. Codium falcon, which is another web browser So there's quite a bit of stuff here and again, I believe yeah, it's gonna all this stuff is going to be in an app image So the selection of software looks really decent and that's cool By choosing app images, you're they're going to have a lot of stuff that you can install just Out of the box and it's in a very pretty box. Like this is a very Very nice looking app center and it's very well done I'm not the biggest fan of app images I don't think that there is well integrated as something like flat pack But I like them better than snaps. So there's winning. Okay. So let's go ahead and open up the app Drawer here and see what else we have installed. So we have covantum for changing Theme kaden live. I did start right in the middle. Didn't I I did so you can install itch.io We have inkscape here by default arc. Now. I don't know if these things would actually be installed Out of the box because again, I can't install it. We have the whole heroic game launcher That's going to be for the epic game store. I believe let's see. We're station, which is going to be the terminal emulator Let's go ahead and open this up in here do We'll zoom in Maybe won't zoom in Interesting Okay. Well, you want to we won't zoom in then fine be that way We'll do uname dash a defined ourselves the to kernel. So this is using 5.14. So that's very Very new. Let's go ahead and do free dash m. This is going to be a very Hard test because we're in a live environment and things are probably running that probably wouldn't normally be 838 megs plus we've opened up stuff. So that's probably not all that accurate. Let's see if neo fetch is installed It is not. All right. So neo fetch There we go. So we do have a custom Ascii art here. This is using kernel 5.14 as we saw this is has 1600 packages by default Interestingly enough, I don't know whether or not that's going to be counting the app images that are installed I don't think it does Uses zsh out of the box, which is cool. I like zsh by default. This is using nitrix dark as the theme The love icons. This is the station terminal Again, ignore that cpu architecture because uh vert manager just does not report that correctly Okay, so that is probably as much as i'm going to be able to see here We can go back here and see if there's anything back on page one. There's not okay, so In terms of installed software, there's not a ton here There's some gaming stuff. So we have things like wine and the hero game launcher Though interestingly enough, I don't see steam Do you see steam? I don't see steam here. So it's interesting that they chose to install wine and the heroic game launcher, but things like lutris not here at least as much as I can see And steam's not installed by default. So it's interesting that they chose those two and not the more popular game launchers Maybe it's because those things are open source That's possible. Okay. So there's not much more I can do here. Uh, seeing how I can actually install so Uh, that is it for this now Like I said, I'm going to give them the benefit out and say that their iso is not broken And uh, just think that this is probably a virtual machine problem The reason why I couldn't get it installed is because I was trying in a vm Maybe their Just chose just not meant to be used in vms anywhere or maybe uh, and this is highly possible. Maybe I did something wrong Uh, it's been Very possible that I just you know am a dumbass and you know Set it up improperly. So, uh, whatever the reason chances are if you tried this on hardware it would work fine In terms of design This thing is very pretty like very very pretty It's I have tried this before now that I've used this like it looks very I had forgotten the name but now that I've used it it looks very familiar And from what I remember they have gone through and added quite a bit of functionality to some of their applications Like before the last time I used this there were no settings in the index file manager Like there was no no settings at all now. There are uh, not a lot of settings Obviously, there's not a lot that you can customize for it But the fact that they're still making progress is Commendable and they seem to be making swift project progress because they keep coming out with updates to their outburning system Throughout the year and that means more features to their custom applications, which is great and Also, because it's based on plasma, they have a very good underlying desktop environment that will allow them to use different things Now, I don't know how much Cute stuff is going to be here Because they use app images. It's going to be a little weird that way, but I will say that In terms of looks and feel it's very impressive. I like it a lot I think that it is probably early days and that's probably why we've had since we saw some errors in Installing it and also there's just not a ton of settings in the applications themselves And system settings are all confined to the kde system settings But not the full You know breadth of system settings that you would be expecting on a plasma system. So That is it for this video if you want to get in contact with me You can do so at the linux cast on twitter You can follow me at the linux cast on odyssey if you're interested In viewing these videos on a platform that is not youtube And you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon chris east coast with gentus fun 2 patrick l marcus maiglin jackson neck and tool steve Mitchell artson americamp dr. Lee j dog and the bsd's rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time