 elementary OS 6 has been in development for a long time and for those fans of elementary OS 6, it feels like it's been going on forever and ever and ever. But it feels like we're finally reaching the finish line with elementary OS 6. So if you're an elementary OS 6 fan, you're probably pretty excited to hear about what some of the new features. So recently they released a beta for public use for the first time. And I thought I'd install it today and we'd go through some of the new features. So those of you who really like elementary OS 6 can have something to look forward to when it finally does release later this year, hopefully later this year. So let's go ahead and jump in. So we're going to be installing this in a virtual machine. And I would before I even start this, I should just remind you that this is beta software. So they're going to be bugs and slowness and stuff like that. That's has nothing to do with elementary OS as more to do with just the fact that this is beta software. So just keep that in mind. Something I'm kind of surprised about is that they've actually kept this loading text. The whole idea of elementary OS is to kind of hide some of those more Linuxy aspects of their distribution. The fact that they've kept that is kind of weird. You don't even get that stuff on Ubuntu anymore. So it's very weird that they've kept it. Okay, let's go ahead and install this. So this is their brand new installer. I'm not quite sure of the differences because it's been a long time since I've looked at elementary OS 6. But I will tell you this, that this is very polished. And it's much different than what you'll see in any other distribution. So this is not like another calamari or ubiquity installer. So let's go ahead and we got English selected by default. United States selected by default. English US selected by default. And the default keyboard layout is correct. So in this screen here, you could choose to do the demo mode, or you can do a clean install. We'll just choose clean install. The custom here would allow you to go through and resize the partitions and stuff. Do clean install, check the hard drive, duration install, and we don't need to encrypt. That's all there is to the installer. That's literally it. I don't know whether or not I'll cut away the video here, it'll depend on how long it takes. The first time I installed it, it didn't take very long at all. And it actually rebooted on its own. So we'll see if it does that again. Okay, here we go. That took about, I don't know, maybe three minutes or so. So I'm what I'm going to do is go ahead and shut down. Normally what you do here is remove your installation media and then just hit restart. But because I'm on a virtual machine, I need to go through and make sure that virtual box has removed that sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't. And this time it didn't. So we'll just remove that and hit start again. So this is what you'll get the first time you start up elementary OS six. It'll ask you for your language again. I really wish that was persistent because we already chosen that once. So we really shouldn't have to choose again, but we'll do it again anyways. Same with the keyboard and the keyboard layout. So we're going to choose our username and enter a password and then finish that up. And we'll log in again. All right. So this is elementary OS six beta. Now it does warn you that this is an early access built and that you will not be able to upgrade to the stable release once it's released. So if you do download the beta to try just make sure you remember that it is early access or you're not going to want to run this on production. And also you'll want to remember that you won't be able to take this to the stable release once they finally release elementary OS six. So we'll just run through this startup or this welcome map real quick. Welcome to elementary OS six. I feel very welcome. So it's going to allow you to choose the light and dark theme. So this is the first time that elementary OS has a system wide dark theme for you to enable. So this is something that people have wanted for a long time. Several of their apps beforehand had dark modes, but they were just app specific and you had to enable them yourself. This is something that if you check this you get dark mode throughout the entire system. And it's very good looking. So some dark modes are kind of terrible. I'm looking at you Twitter. I mean, I don't understand Twitter thinking a dark mode should be blue. I'm just it's really dumb. But so this is a dark theme done really well. You can also choose your accent colors. So we'll just choose. Let's choose purple. Purple looks good. Okay, location services enabled by default. I'll go ahead and leave it on. Prefer to be opt in instead of opt out. This is basically to remove the blue light from their screen to enable to allow your eyes to see better without getting strained and stuff. So we'll just leave that off. Automatic housekeeping. So that's kind of cool to remove temporary files and trashed files automatically every 30 days. So that's nice. That's something I kind of wish to have on my own system prompts you to go to the app center, which we'll do later. And then we're ready to go. Okay. So we're the biggest feature in elementary six, at least user facing is the dark theme. So if we open up a couple apps here, we can see every single one of these here have a dark theme or not only that they have a dark theme, but they also are respecting the dark theme. So that's really quite cool, right? And it's definitely a major improvement over the light theme that they had before. At least I feel the light theme was how you say dated. It reminded me of macOS from like 10 years ago, where they had that really weird skewer morphic, like silver metal color for all their applications. That's kind of like what this is. This reminds me of something much more modern. Although it's basically the dark version of at a weight is what this looks like. I mean, so it's not anything extravagantly different or anything, but it does look so much better. In addition to the dark theme, there are also minor refreshes to the look and feel. So you're going to notice more rounded corners in the top and bottom. The typography and fonts have changed for the first time. So that they've moved to something called inner inner typeface instead of open sans. So that's not something I can really notice because I haven't used elementary OS in so long. But the font does look nice. I'm assuming if you downloaded something like elementary OS tweaks, if that's still a thing, I don't even know if it is, you could probably change the fonts if you wanted to. Another big deal and something that I can't actually show you is multi touch gestures. So if you have a trackpad, you can actually now use multi touch gestures to move between your workspaces. So when we have workspaces here, we can move to different workspaces and so on and so forth. But again, I can't actually show you the multi touch gestures because I don't have a trackpad. But there are videos out there if you want to see how that looks in action. The gesture support is something you can configure in the settings. So if we search for gestures here, there is a lot of stuff here you can do to customize those gestures and allow them to do different things other than what they are set as default. So three fingers, four fingers for swipe horizontally and swipe up and pinch. So that is really cool. And I don't allow you to basically do some things now. It's not like you can do anything with these gestures, like you're limited to what elementary OS has given you so you can switch multi test and view and toggle minimized. Same thing here. And the pinch is zoom or nothing. So it'd be really cool if you could set those gestures to literally do anything you wanted to do. So like launch an app or launch the application menu or whatever. But it doesn't seem you can do that. You can just do whatever they've set as the defaults. So we already saw the installer that is also brand new. It's being co developed with systems 76. So that this is something you might see in the brand new systems 76 pop OS desktop environment or whatever that they're going to be coming out with later on. So that's really cool. It's nice to see development on new ways of installing Linux because while I love calamaries and I love the flexibility that it gives developers, it's also something that is kind of, I don't know, well used and it's very widespread. So it's kind of nice to see some other options that aren't, you know, you book ubiquity. So there have been some improvements now with flat packs. So if we open up the app center here, elementary six now supports sharing flat packs app system wide. So that means if you install flat pack, it's not just for your user, it can actually be installed for every user on the system, which is good. And it's part of a plan to ship applications in elementary OS as flat packs out of the box. It's not quite there yet as far as I know, but by the time final release comes, flat packs will be the default. So it's interesting to see how despite being based on Ubuntu, elementary has kind of adopted the flat packs instead of the way instead of snaps, which is what, you know, obviously Ubuntu itself has adopted. So I mean, it's interesting. So another thing we'll notice that I can't really show you is that firmware updates from the system settings. So if we open up the settings here again, and we do a search for firmware updates, we can actually, if there were firmware updates available, firmware updates provided by device manufacturers can improve performance and fix critical security security issues. So elementary OS 6 will notify you of updatable firmware firmware in the system settings. This is for hardware that is compatible with FW UPD. It's that's a background system application that works to integrate upgrades for firmware into the Linux system. You can download the firmware updates from the settings. So again, that's not something I can really show you, but it's kind of cool. So it's stuff for like drivers and stuff like that. I don't know if you'll see anything for like bios here or not. I'm not sure. Elementary OS 6 is not going to be using Wayland by default. So this is just plain old Xorg. You don't have to worry about anything. You know, we're messing around with your Xorg settings. So that's cool. If you're not really ready to use Wayland, which it's not really surprising because elementary OS 6 is going to be based on Ubuntu 20.04 and 20.04 was still using Xorg as well. So this is not based on the latest Ubuntu. Hopefully elementary OS 6 will actually come out before the next LTS, of course, then by that time, they'll be working on elementary OS 7. So we'll see. So there are a few other changes. So screen locking and sleep experience should be much more reliable and predictable. I'm not exactly sure what that means, because again, I'm not an elementary OS user. So apparently there were some problems in the past with screen locking and sleep computer computer going to sleep and then being kind of unpredictable. And when they go to sleep and stuff like that. So that seems to have been improved. There are several accessibility features that have been improved. The notification system has been completely rewritten and redesigned. So if we click up here at the top, you'll be able to see that it has kind of like a notification center now. And it's like I said, it's been completely redesigned. The server in the background has also been redeveloped. So the notifications on your system should be even better. The apprithony browser has now become the default browser, which I thought it already was. There's a new task app, which is this here. This room looks astonishingly like Apple to do, if I remember right, the to do apps in the Mac, it looks almost precisely like that. The mail application, which used to be based on Geary, I don't know if it still is or not, has gone through a major rewrite according to it's floss.com. There's now an option to show Numlock and Caps Lock in the panel. So you'll see up here if you have the Caps Lock and Numlock enabled, apparently that's something you have to enable from the system settings, show on panel right here. So if I hit Caps Lock, it kind of it kind of shows up there if you can see if you can touch it, it kind of goes away. I'm not sure if that's going to stay there persistently in the final release or not. But not a big deal. There's also improved booting experience with an OEM logo. I didn't actually see the OEM logo thing because the usually when they have the OEM logo like an Ubuntu, they actually show the Ubuntu label logo when there's an OEM logo present or not present. So I didn't actually notice that on startup. And finally, there's supposedly some improved performance on lower clock processors and slower storage mediums like SD cards. So they're kind of focusing on being able to use this on something like a Raspberry Pi maybe in the future. So that'll be interesting. And it's nice to know that there are focusing on lower spectrum machines. So that's elementary OS 6. And I've always been kind of a nace here for elementary OS for many reasons. And I don't really need to go into them. But I mean, there's just a few things I didn't really care for the design before the whole skeer morphism thing that they had going on. I didn't really care for their whole propensity to have developers develop just for elementary OS 6 and kind of further fragmenting the Linux ecosystem in that way has always, you know, rubbed me the wrong way. They're seeming hostility towards the user actually being able to customize the desktop has also rubbed me the wrong way. So elementary OS 6 has just never been my cup of coffee or whatever, you know, it's just not hasn't been and it this elementary six is probably not going to change that. But I know there are a lot of people out there who like elementary OS. And if you're one of those people elementary OS 6 is going to be a fantastic update for you, just the fact that there's a dark mode now that makes it makes it look 100 times better in my opinion. I mean, just does it completely removes my argument of the look and feel of it. So, like I said, it's very good. And I think the biggest issue I have is that it's taking forever. I understand that what they're doing is is hard work and stuff. But this is based on the LTS last Ubuntu LTS. And we're not I mean, it's still almost a year away to the next LTS. But it's not, it's not really that far away, you know, we've already been we're very close to think out starting to think about it, we only have one more interim release of Ubuntu before the next LTS. So the fact that they're still doing elementary six and we're just getting close to that next LTS release is kind of worrisome. But again, they're a small team. So it's not all that surprising. So that's elementary six. Let me know in the comments below if you're looking forward to it or if you've tried it and let me know if you're interested in some of these new features. Thank you for watching. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Facebook at the Linuxcast. You can also support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast patrons in tiers 2345 get early access to several of my videos each week. So if you're interested in that, make sure you check that out at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons, Devon, Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, Merrick, Camp and Mitchell. Thanks everybody for your support. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.