 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today I'm going to be talking about Heftor Linux. Now for quite a long time I used Arco Linux. It's a arch-based distribution and it's awesome. And then I started having a few problems with Pycom and I decided I needed to distrop. So after several failures on the Linux part of my machine, I decided to go to Manjaro and that's where I was for the last three weeks or so. And it was an okay experience, but I've decided that I'm going to, I needed to distrop again. And I've chosen Heftor Linux. And Heftor is a, if I'm saying this right, I have no clue if I'm actually saying it right. It's a spinoff of Arco. So I expected a very similar experience to what Arco is, only it's designed differently. So that's really the main thing is, but I was, I've been kind of shocked at how many different things there actually are on Heftor that the developer has gone through and created above beyond what Arco offers. So first let's talk about what desktop environments and window managers they offer. So they offer BSPWM, which is what you're seeing on the screen here. They also offer GNOME, HLWM, which I'm not actually sure what that is. Maybe it's Herbzloff. I'm not actually sure. Maybe it's something that I've never heard of. They also have Plasma and XFC. So really what you're getting when you install this is Arco, but with a few pack, quite a few packages changed and a different aesthetic. So I did not record the installation of this because I was actually installing on my machine. But when you're, when you install it, you get a choice between the basic install or a advanced install. An advanced install would be more similar to what you would get with Arco, where you get to go through and choose what packages are installed, what kernel you use, probably, and all that stuff. I chose the basic install because I was very curious to see how it differed. And one thing you'll notice if you install this is that it has way less packages actually than what a normal stock Arco would, you know, install on your system. You have about a thousand packages and that's pretty good for a very well-developed distribution. I've had some issues, which I'll talk about later, but let's first talk about my positive experiences. It's very pretty. The installer, which is eventually Calamari's, but they have a very nice welcome app where you get to choose between the basic and advanced installers. There were some deficiencies, like there was no easy way to update the mirrors. I'll talk about more about my mirrors experience here in a few minutes. So there was no way to do that, but they did recommend you run GPard beforehand, but that's pretty much normal for a lot of arch-based distributions. Once you get past the installer, which was very, very quick, you log into something that looks like this. And I will put a picture right here of the login screen, which is fully custom. I believe it's still LightDM, but I might be wrong about that, but it's very custom. It does have a really weird setting where if you install another window manager, it always defaults to the window manager or desktop environment that came with Hefter. So in other words, you have to change your session every single time you want to log into your other window managers. And that's kind of annoying. So every time I want to go into DWM, which is where I'm going to spend most of my time, I actually actually have to go through and select DWM every single time instead of actually remembering it like normal. In terms of applications, it's a little weird. So it does not come with Firefox install that comes with Brave. Some of the key bindings. So let me actually show you this. So first, this is URX VT. And it's apparently a URX VT that's not been patched like at all. Because for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get it to zoom in. Now, I don't use URX VT like at all. So I'm assuming that maybe it is patched, and I just don't know the key binding, but the normal ones don't work. So I control plus does not work. Control shift plus does not work. Control shift page up doesn't work. Control page up doesn't work. I even try to control Y and control U and stuff because sometimes those key bindings doesn't work. So I haven't actually gone through and changed it yet because I wanted to show you this. But it does use URX VT, which is an interesting choice. Because ARCO itself uses termite, which if you know me, you'll know that I think that termite is a fantastic choice because it's just the best terminal ever, just my opinion. So let's actually let me see. So if I can do CD, actually what I think I'm going to do is close this and open up termite. What the hell? I don't know what this is. We're going to close this. It does some weird things with the Rofi things too, as you just saw. For whatever reason, the main, so when I typed in termite, the top thing here that came up was ad block. I'm not sure why that is. It doesn't do that on the DWM version, or when I log into DWM, that doesn't happen. But for whatever reason, it does here. Not sure why. It's very weird. But anyways, this termite, I can actually zoom in. Let me just clear this out. I'm going to have to deal with the fact that I'm in Bash and I've not gone through and installed CSH yet. So just bear with me on that. None of my ALHs are here either. So I'm going to constantly just type in C to clear things and realize that my ALHs aren't there. So I have to either type in the whole thing or control L. It's going to be a whole thing until I get my lazy ass to installing CSH like I should. Anyways, cd into .config BSPWM. And then we will do ALHs here. CDSXHKD and VIM into SXHKDRC. So some of the, like I said, some of the key bindings are weird. So you can tell that this is a derivative of ARCO by the fact that the comments are exactly the same as ARCO, but they've actually just changed the applications to super left one, give you Brave. I've uninstalled Brave almost immediately. I don't care for Brave because it's like a parasite. It takes over your entire system. You can't, if you're going to use Brave, you have to have Brave be your only browser on your system because you'll never see the other ones ever again. Because even if you set those as default, Brave just decides to show up whenever you click on a link. It's annoying AF. I'm assuming code here is actually the actually Adam. I'm not sure. I don't know if Adam is actually, so if I do super F2 here, do I get Adam? No. Also, if I did super F1 when I had Brave installed, it didn't work. I'm not sure why. I have Gimp installed. Super F4, does that open up Gimp? No. So none of these actually work. That's one of the problems I've experienced. Because none of these, at least at the top, actually go through it. And so normally what you say is that maybe the SXHKD demon isn't working. That's possible. But if some of these other ones, after you get past the super key ones, like super H, that works. Right? Weird, right? So some of these are working. So we know SXHKD is working. But some of the toggles aren't. So usually then what that would mean is that the applications aren't installed. But I know that Gimp is installed. So I can do super shift D and do Gimp. Yeah, and Gimp will install. That was a weird splash screen for Gimp. I'm just saying that that's not the traditional splash screen. So that's weird. Yeah, so I don't know what's going on with that. These are some of the problems that I've had. And it's the reason why I almost immediately went through and just installed DWM and my own .files and everything and had not spent any time here in the BSPWM thing except for like the first hour or so where I was astonishingly confused over why some of the keybindings just didn't work. Now I've haven't gone through. I wonder if super R works. Super R will work. It's weird. Some of these work. But some of them don't work. It really doesn't make sense. So one of the cool things I didn't notice is that this has scratch pads enabled. So if I do super D, which is usually Rofi or D menu for me, and I believe that is what it is on ARCO, you're supposed to get a scratch pad. But of course, that didn't work this time. And actually this time it just closed that completely out. So I don't know. Again, the keybinding thing is really weird. It just they don't work. So like super D is supposed to bring you a scratch pad. And it did when I first installed. So but now it's not. I mean, it's because super Q is supposed to be quit. Not super D. We'll try to get back to BSPWM. See, it didn't actually quit. It's just gone. We'll just recover it, I guess. It's very weird. So like super D is supposed to do this thing here, but it does not do it. It's very, very weird. I don't know if that's a hefty thing or maybe just BSPWM is going crazy. This was by far the weirdest experience I had with the whole thing. Other than that, it's been fairly good. The whole not remembering what session you were using beforehand with the light with the display manager or whatever. That's weird, but I can deal with that. This right here would prevent me from using the BSPWM install. It's just not, I mean, I think I probably will go through and just find my old BSPWM SXHKDRC file and use that instead and see if it will work. It's just really weird. Anyways, I went through an installed DWM and just that's what I've been using. In terms of application selection, I guess I kind of gloss over that other than Brave. It's mostly meh. Now, because I've installed a window manager, it's kind of hard to go through and see actually what's all installed on the computer. I could go through and just, you know, scroll through this, but a lot of the stuff like it doesn't have Firefox pre-installed. I did that. It does have Pulse Audio, which is not surprising because everything does. It does have the Arco Linux tool because this is Arco Linux. It should work fine. Better lock screen GUI. I'm guessing that's actually what is controlling the lock screen. I wonder if I open this up. So this just does wallpapers. I mean, that's cool, but fairly useless. I mean, because changing wallpaper is not that hard. Let's see here. It has variety installed, which I would probably uninstall if I continue to use this very often. Some of these, like I don't know what this Avahi Zero Conf browser. I'm sorry you can't see this. I can't make it bigger. I've actually, I made the Rofi thing a little bit wider, but the text needs to be bigger. Bluetooth manager, which is just going to be blue man manager, I believe. It did have Ranger installed out of the box. It has color picture picker. Discord is something I installed. Disk is GNOME disks. Fixed hard-coded icons. I don't know what that is. GPire is here. G-sync, which is, I believe, is a GUI version for R-sync. Again, an interesting thing. Oh, here's that welcome app. This is the, so when I have to have installed, this is something that Rco doesn't do. Actually, Rco may have an Rco welcome app. I honestly don't remember. Hmm. I'm not going to say one way or the other. I think they do now that I'm trying to remember, but it's been so long since I've installed Rco. So it's just a welcome page. And then you can go through one click out applications. I did this with Firefox. It was so slow. And that's going to lead me to the mirror. Don't let me forget to talk about the mirrors because I had a hard time with the mirrors. It has a link to their social things and some links to become patrons and their website and stuff. So it's an okay welcome app. But it's, like I said, installing the stuff is slow because the mirrors out of the box are wrong. So unless you're like specifically for wherever the developer is, they're using his mirrors. And I believe they were the UK mirrors. So when I tried to go through and update the system, it was slow. It took like an hour and a half. I have good internet. So I had to actually go through and use arch Linux when mirror generator thing on their website to go through and generate the mirrors that I needed and change it in pack the pacman comp file on the system. And that's annoying, you know, that if Arco has a button on their installer that says, you know, update mirrors, that's great. You know, that's the way it should be. And even before they had that, I believe they chose the mirrors based on your location, which is the way it should work. Now, it's possible to have to have that and I just didn't see it. It's possible because I did go through it quite fast. So maybe correct me if you've used this before and you'll correct me in the comments if I'm wrong. But the mirrors was a big issue for me because like I said, it was so slow. It's just one of those things where you really don't want to have to deal with a thing. I mean, if I were installing regular arch Linux, I'd have to deal with it. But I'm not installing regular arch Linux, I'm installing something with a GUI installer. And it should just be that kind of thing should just be taken care for you now, especially when, like I said, ARCO has a button for it. It has had for probably a year now, at least. So let's see if we can go through some more of these applications. We were in the ages. After SDDM GUI. Yeah, that did not open up anything. Probably has something ringing out now in the background that I actually didn't want it to do. Oh, wait a minute, hold on a second. That was just so this just basically controls if you can, if you auto log in, I'd love it if I could go through and set it so it's just, you know, because it allows you to choose for the if you want to auto log in, but it doesn't let you choose, you know, the default session, which is a little bit disappointing. I will say that the wallpaper selection on after is very good. These are, I mean, these are just a selection of them. Very good. Definitely better than ARCOs, I think they're more colorful. I mean, there's a couple here that are actually from ARCO, I guess. But some of these I mean, just some of these are really, really good. I really do enjoy like this is the default one. I believe this is a conch. But I might be wrong about that. It's not a very useful conchie like with the conchie in ARCO tells you some of the stock key bindings. This one doesn't. I don't know if I do super shift question mark if I get no sometimes that will give you like a cheat sheet. Maybe it's super super if one's supposed to open up brave, but that didn't work. All right, it doesn't matter. scrolling back down. This is the one downside to not having a menu. You can actually go through this stuff very easily. LibreOffice was something that I installed it not come pre-installed same with Kaden live. Mel is here. That's not surprising. Nemo is one that I installed. Neil is one that I installed notion is one that I installed. Power manager, that's going to be XFC power power manager, I bet. I think that's what that is. I got to stop closing that. I think I got to scroll all the way back down. QBitTorrent is here. The QT stuff is interesting because I wonder if that QT stuff came with Kaden live. I wouldn't see a reason why that would be here without installing plasma. Ranger was here, I believe, by default. The screenshot tool is one that I installed. I couldn't find a screenshot tool on here before when I was trying to take a screenshot earlier. So if there is one, I just don't know what it is. Thunar is the default file manager, which I'll probably uninstall. ToDoist, I installed that. UXVT is the default. Terminal, Vim, obviously, VLC was here and Zim is the one that I installed. So that's all the programs that were installed in the system. Plus, I mean, at least half of those ones that are things that I installed after I've used it for a little while. So the last thing, actually, before I switch over, let me show you this. The Polybar thing here is, I don't know, it looked prettier in the screenshots on their website. You have the CPU thing here, which I find Uber distracting. But for some reason, they have the file system module set to some weird drive on my system. I'm assuming it's like the Scarlett audio thing that I have has a little bit of memory in it. And it's always almost full, because it's not meant to be storage. It's not set to root. It's not set to the root drive. So it's very weird. Anyways, So Super One opens up GIMP, Super Two. That was really weird. I mean, I hit Super One and GIMP showed up. And I hit Super One in the... I'm so confused. All right, anyways, it doesn't matter. As you can tell, the key bindings thing really bother me. This is so just some of them are so weird. And some of them just don't work at all. So I don't know why that is. I don't know if that's... Maybe it's just something weird on my system. It's completely possible. It's okay, because I'm not going to use BSPWM anyways. I'm going to use my DWM and keep playing around with Xmonad, which is a video that I'm going to be doing here pretty soon. But overall, it's pretty good. Honestly, I mean, the BSPWM experience, not that great, but it's basically just ARCO underneath the system. So I've just gone through and customized it to be the way I want it to be. Will I stay on Hefter or just go to ARCO itself? That's an interesting question. I think it's going to depend on updates and stability. If this is as stable as I found ARCO to be, I'd probably just stay on this, because like I said, I've just customized this to be the way I want it to be. And it's just fine. But if it's not as stable, for some reason, or if they, you know, introduce some weird theme updates or something, I don't know, then probably not. But it'll be interesting to see. I'll probably keep you updated, because I'm sure I'll do a video in like two weeks or so saying, oh, I've distro hopped again, because that's what Matt does. Matt distro hops all the time. Anyways, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't give it a thumbs down, you can also support the channel by subscribing to it. Obviously, you can also hit the little notification icon. If you want to support us monetarily, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I would like to thank our patron, Devon C, for being our very first patron, and hopefully not the last. Anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.