 I'm always on the lookout for new and exciting distros to take a look at and today I found a new distro that is based on fedora. Now if you are someone who's followed the channel for the last few weeks at least you'll know that my new daily driver is fedora. So when I found a distribution that is based on fedora I get kind of excited because there really aren't too many out there that are based on fedora itself. The distro we're going to take a look at today is called RISIOS and it is very very close to fedora if you don't know what you're looking for. So the first thing we're actually going to do this time is take a look at the installation because the installation will kind of show you exactly how close this is to fedora and if you were to stop at the installation you'd probably think that it is just fedora with some rebranding. So in the installation you'll see that basically what you get is a pop-up window asking if you want to try it or install it and that is the exact thing you would get if you were to install fedora and then it will bring up the anaconda installer. So once you move past that it's the standard fedora install. You select your drive you move on to hitting the begin installation button and it installs. That's basically the entire installation process. Once you have rebooted after the installation is when you will make your user account and stuff like that. Now unfortunately I didn't record that part but it is a little bit different than fedora in that there's not like a button to enable third party repos there but other than that it is mostly the same as fedora. Now the reason why I said if you stopped at the installer you'd think that this was just fedora is because once you've moved past the installer and you've set up your account it really does have some features that are different than fedora itself. So the first one that you'll see is actually this. Now this is the welcome screen. Now if you've ever used fedora before you'll know that fedora does not have a welcome screen it just doesn't. Now it does have a GNOME tour. If you are new to GNOME there is a little slideshow that GNOME will give you that will show you some of the new features that have been there since GNOME 40. It is not an impressive tour or welcome screen really it's just there and not interactive at all. It just moves from one slide to another kind of boring. It does its job but it's not that great. With Rizio S you do have a welcome screen and this thing is interactable and it has a lot of really good things in it. Now like I said when you have that initial setup which I'm upset that it didn't record it there is no slider there for you to enable third party repos which is something you do get with fedora and the reason why that's not here is because actually in the first steps area here you have that ability right here in the welcome screen which is I don't know whether or not is better or worse. I actually think it's probably a little bit better because there is an explanation here over what those repositories are whereas with fedora there is no explanation other than hey here's some third party repos would you like them yes or no that's basically all you get with the standard fedora. So if you were to click on this you will get something that looks like this and this is called Rizzi script. This is one of the things that they've done that is unique to RizziOS and basically what it is is a GUI front end for some scripts that they've written to do certain things. So it tells you exactly what it's going to do and then it gives you the option next and then it gives you an option to select whether or not you want to install something called tainted codecs. Now I've never actually heard of tainted codecs before or had them called that before maybe that is actually what they're called but the way it explains it is it enables extra drivers that may be restricted in some countries. I'm going to go ahead and enable it I'm not sure what it will actually install it'd be nice there if it would say what actual drivers it was going to install it will ask for your password and then it will show you everything that it does which is basically just a container around a terminal. Okay once that's done it will pop up and say that has ran successfully now something that is interesting here that it doesn't tell you that it's really going to do at least that I notice is that it updates your system so that initial run of DNF is always pretty slow so I was expecting this to go pretty much faster than because it's just enabling the repose but what it really does is it updates your system first and then adds the repositories so it did take three or four minutes now once we okay that does go away now another thing that the welcome screen does really well is that it lets you have an option to set up flyhub now out of the box fedora doesn't offer this at all you have to go to flyhub.org you have to go to the fedora part and it will tell you how to enable flyhub with this you can just hit this one here it'll give you another script you hit next give it the password again and it will enable flyhub now that one took very little time which is exactly what you'd expect now it does require you to reboot which is a thing that flyhub almost always forces you to do however when you do this on fedora you don't have to reboot most other distros do require reboot so I'm not surprised to see that here but that is based on fedora is still a little weird but anyways we can go ahead and hit reboot later we'll do that here in a second now another cool thing about the welcome app I'm I know I'm kind of focusing on the welcome app but that's actually what makes this distribution a little bit unique in that it has this welcome app something that fedora doesn't have once you've done something in this first steps list it goes away so you can't do it again and that's actually a good thing because some people would see that it's still there and then assume that it didn't actually work even if they saw the success message they just assumed that it wasn't there now I'm assuming once you've hit this here this is not something that you have to complete you just hit that if you close this does that go away no that stays which again makes sense because that's not just a one-time thing right like adding a repo or enabling flat flat hub is now I'm going to reboot the computer now to enable flat hub but I want to come back to the install web apps thing because that is another thing that RISDOS has that regular fedora does not have so from what I can tell the web apps application here is forked from Linux Mint so if you've ever used the web apps application from Linux Mint you'll see that this is somewhat similar now basically what this allows you to do is create applications desktop applications from web pages so you could say go to twitter.com and you can make that a web app and then you'd have twitter as an application on your desktop another thing that is really cool about this is that there isn't actually a store here for you to use now it basically what this is is pre made applications that are web apps and you can see that there's actually a lot of stuff here for you to choose from so like Apple Music, Deezers here, Pandora's here, SoundCloud, Spotify, web, title, YouTube music that's just an audio category there's also a lot of iCloud stuff here other websites like Google Contacts, Gmailinator though I'm not sure why I don't see Gmail here itself probably because there are email clients available for you and maybe here somewhere and I'm just not seeing it there's also stuff here for development education which this is a frontend for Google Drive there are web games here as well which is cool so basically what this will do and I'm going to go ahead here and install one of these things so that you can see it let me choose one let's go ahead and choose notion so we'll download that and it allows you to change the name the icon and all this stuff is completely customizable you can also choose the category and what browser it would use although Chromium seems to be the only option here for now and that basically what this category would do is allow you to choose where it shows up in your menu if you were to use a different menu now the GNOME menu it's the GNOME activity thing itself isn't categorized so that's not that big of a thing right but if you were to use something like Arc Menu or something that actually uses categories you could then have this in the proper category so I'm going to go ahead okay here and then we can see that notion is now right here in the application menu and it looks like an application which is kind of cool right it's still just a website but it acts like an application and because it's an application it will probably use the notification system from GNOME and all the stuff that comes with that which is really really nice and of course you're not limited to the stuff that's in the store you can create your own as well so if you wanted to use twitter or gmail or whatever you could easily do that you just click plus name it give it the address give it an icon put it in a category and then hit okay that's all you have to do that's really cool so actually I'm going to do that so I'm going to call this twitter and I'm going to do https colon slash slash twitter dot com and then there's this button over here that will find icons for you which is also really really freaking nice that means you don't have to go searching for an icon and then you put it in a category which internet is probably the best one okay now if I open up the applications menu go here we can actually see that twitter is right here and it's now an application right on our desktop that is cool and again it's a feature that fedora does not have now it doesn't mean you can't get it on regular fedora it'd be quite easy to just download this application because it does exist I'm not sure if it's in the repose or not I wouldn't know because I've never actually tried but I wouldn't surprise me if it is going back to the welcome screen because we're still not done with welcome screen the quick setup here just gives you access to categories of applications you can download so if you want to find specific applications you want to download like things like steam or whatever you can hit this it'll bring up a script that will then install stuff for gaming what's weird here and what I really wish they do is tell you exactly what they're going to install because they don't do that so it just says set up an environment for gaming it doesn't say anything here and it doesn't say anything here it just tells you whether it requires reboot or requires sudo it doesn't say what it's actually going to install so we're gonna actually hit next here oh I was just too impatient I should have known that you actually get to choose what it's going to install so you can choose all the game launchers you want the tools stuff like that things like discord piper green with envy stuff like that for the nvidia's gpus retro arch if you want to do emulations docebox stuff like that uh that is much better than I thought it was I was judging it way too soon so that is really cool I'm not going to install that because I'm on a vm so it doesn't really makes any sense but I'm assuming all the rest of these are scripts as well so you can launch this as a script and with it next here and it will give you options for what office suite you want to install what email client install zoom and install microsoft staff teams both of these are proprietary obviously but they're very very very very very very very very unfortunately popular uh but anyways you can select these things so if I'm going to select the library office and I'll select thunderbird because those are the two best ones I'm gonna go ahead next and then it'll ask me for the password again and it will install those things it's basically just a script to install those things and it's going to be the same for all these other options as well that's really cool so those are the the rizzy scripts which are things that the developer will obviously had taken time to create and put a lot of effort into because they're definitely things that most people would want so as you can tell so far this is very much a distro that is focusing on making fedora just a little bit easier for a new user to use because out of the box when you install fedora if you get past the fairly antiquated installer and the set up process for your username there's really no help right there for you yes there's that tour but it's not a great tour right it's not going to teach you how to install applications or how to set up flat hub or even that flat hub even exists like if you just installed fedora and just started using it you would have no clue that flat hub even exists now you might learn about flat packs but you wouldn't understand if you're brand new to linux that flat hub is even there right because they never mention it with this it's here it's right in your face in the welcome screen and it explains what those things are which is really nice it really does a good job of focusing on people who probably are new to fedora which is again a really good thing now we're finally done with the welcome screen the rest of these tabs are for support and contribution so we can close this as well so we can see the things that were installed so we have livery office here now and thunderbird so those things were installed just like you would expect them to be now other than that the default applications are actually really really minimum you get the genome applications and that's basically it the only change that i've seen that they've made in terms of applications themselves is they instead of using firefox they use chromium i'm not sure why they made that choice but it's not a offensive choice i would just uninstall and install firefox now what's interesting here is that they've actually removed the genome tour it's not here so if you don't know how to use genome that might be a problem now i know i bashed the tour earlier but that it's not here is something that i noticed i think it's probably a safe to it's not going to be that big a deal because a lot of people know to hit the super key in order to get to something on a operating system if they don't see a button for it and of course you have this button up here now one of the things that is a little bit different is there's no word next to this so this icon is actually fairly unnoticeable so if you don't know about the super key hot key to get to stuff you may miss this and usually in genome there's a word called activities up here i believe that's what it's called and that makes it a little bit more noticeable now there are two more things about rizio s that make it a little bit different than fedora the first one is called tweaks or rizzi tweaks so rizzi tweaks is a replacement probably for genome tweaks and also the extensions applications so this is a conglomeration of several different things that you'd probably want to download if you use fedora so you'd want the genome extensions manager you'd want genome tweaks these things would allow you to make customizations to your genome desktop environment this of course comes installed by default and there was a link to it in the welcome screen so what this application allows you to do is change the theme change the fonts change the layout so you can change how it functions with workspaces change what happens in the bar change what happens with the calendar and stuff like that up there you can change how the mouse and keyboard work and some of the settings that go along with that and you can change what the windows look like so you can have it so that your windows action key is something different you can change it so that different clicks do different things one of the things you won't find here is a minimize option because that is given to you by default and that is the way it should be genome by default does not give that to so that is an improvement here at least this application also gives you an option to manage the extensions that are installed now it does not have the functionality of the genome extensions manager which actually allows you to install extensions right from the application that'd be cool to have that kind of integrated here because then it's all in kind of one place but it might add a little bit too much complexity but this does at least give you the option to manage the extensions that are installed so as you can see there are several extensions installed including dash to dock and the sound input and output device chooser thing which you'd actually see up here in this which is this thing here we also have some additional scripts here so RISI scripts things to install brave chrome edge operand vaulty i'm not sure why these things are here honestly i'm not sure that this part really fits in with the rest of the application it just seems kind of out of place but at least it gives you the option and then there's a place here for the developer to have some experiments kind of like a labs thing that allows users to kind of use like a beta version of this application so that is RISI tweaks the other thing that is different in RISI that is not the same in fedora is when you open up a terminal now if you open up a terminal like so you'll see that first of all neo fetch pops up right away and they've done a good job of making sure that their logo is here but also the prompt is different now usually when the prompt is different you can assume probably that they're using a different shell in this case they are in fact using zsh so that is a completely different shell than what fedora uses but fedora obviously uses bash this is zsh and and as a zsh fan i like this change quite a lot i'm not a big fan of that prompt i've changed that but there aren't a lot of distributions that ship with zsh by default and this is one of them and that makes me happy if for no other reason that i think that zsh should be used by more people so that's just you know a personal thing so those are the things that are truly different with RISI from fedora other than that you're going to see a lot of familiarity here if you've used fedora before this is very much fedora with some new user facing tweaks added on top of it that RISI tweak tool the better welcome app which is just one of the best welcome apps that i've seen in a long time the RISI scripts that they've included so that you can install a whole bunch of different things which are really really nice again something that is very much focused on new users but is also good for returning users who don't want to have to install that stuff by hand so those are the things that really stood out when it comes to RISI OS now i'm sure there are a few things there that i didn't miss i only used it for about an hour or so but i have to say that i'm really impressed because when you base your distribution on something else especially when you're basing your distance on something that is as popular as fedora you really have to do something to differentiate yourself otherwise you're just going to be fedora and then there's the question of why would i even bother you know i mean why would i use this and not just use fedora because fedora is going to have a better support like if you have problems with fedora you can go to the fedora forums and have all your support questions answered and people aren't going to say well you're not actually using fedora with RISI or any distribution based on fedora or boon or whatever you're going to have a different time trying to find support because you're using much smaller distribution and you're not really using the base distro anymore because you're using something different right so when you base your distribution off from something different you really have to give your users some reason to use it you have to differentiate yourself somehow and RISI has done a very very good job of that because one of the things that fedora doesn't do a very good job of is explaining itself to new users and giving new users options to set their system up they expect you to be able to install fedora and know exactly what you're supposed to do right out of the box things like enabling the third party repos enabling flat hub installing all of your applications and stuff like that and while that's a fairly good assumption for most people probably you're going to understand that you need to do those things if you have used linux for any amount of time if you're brand new to linux and you stumble upon fedora as your first distro it's not as new user friendly as it could be and RISI has done some of that for fedora and it's done a really good job so to the developer bravo i really do like it so that is RISIOS i'm assuming i probably mispronounced it for the entire video if i did apologize for that if you have comments about this distribution you can leave those in the comments like you below i'd really like to hear from you if you want to follow me on twitter 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