 When you think about distributions that have a ton of derivatives, there are three that really come to mind, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. There are a few others. Fedora has a few derivatives. OpenSUSE has some derivatives. Pretty much every one of the main distributions have derivatives, but those three seem to be the most popular to base your distributions off of. Probably if you did a survey, you'd find that Ubuntu is the most popular distribution to base your distribution off of, which is weird because Ubuntu itself is a derivative of Debian. But it seems like three or four times a year we come across a brand new distribution that is based on Ubuntu, and this year is no different. So the distribution we're going to be looking at today is called Qtfish OS, and it is a Ubuntu distribution or Ubuntu-based distribution running the Qtfish desktop environment. I know absolutely nothing about this other than a little bit about how it looks, so we're going to take a first look at that today. Let's go ahead and jump in. So we're going to be installing this in a virtual machine, so let's go ahead and hit the start button here and see if we can make it full screen. So we get this nice little Qtfish logo, which is nice. So this is what Qtfish looks like out of the box, and this is the live environment. So let's see if we can figure out how to install this thing. Now I can't make this bigger because I didn't want to change the graphics drivers in order to do so, so we'll have to wait until afterwards after we install this in order to make it truly full screen, but let's go ahead and see if we can figure out how to install this thing. Here we go, install. It's interesting that they don't have the install icon pinned to the dock, but they don't, and they also don't have it so that the dock auto hides. So how are we supposed to see the buttons here? Let me go ahead and shut this down and go ahead and try to change the virtual box display drivers to see if we can make this bigger. Okay, so here we are, and we did get it to go full screen. We'll see if we can get it to install because a lot of times when you change the virtual box display drivers to actually enable full screen without the guest additions, the installer actually fails, so we're going to have to actually see if that works. So let's go ahead and hit the launch launcher again and click install cutefish, and we got the Calamari's installer. So that one's fine. This is just a typical install. We'll erase the disk. We'll use, we'll go ahead and just no swap because we don't really need one, and we'll hit next, and we'll enter our credentials and then hit next again, and then we'll install it and then install now. Now I will cut the video away, and then when we come back, we'll boot back into the OS and see what it's all about. Okay, that's done. That's lasted about five minutes or so. So let's go ahead and hit the restart button and we'll restart and see how this goes. Now a few things you should know before we jump in. This is a very early development version of this version of cutefish OS, and it's not anywhere near complete. So I'm not going to be reviewing this in terms of completeness or how awesome it is or anything like that. I'm going to try not to be so over critical, but I will point out some things that are missing and stuff like that. So that if you decide to try this, you know what to look for. So another couple things. This is based on QT and there's several, there's going to be several KDE apps installed. But there are also a few custom applications, which I'm very curious to use. So let's go ahead and log in here. This is a very nice display manager. I don't know what this is. This may very well be SDDM, but it could be something different as well because you can make basically make any of the display managers look any way you want. So out of the box, this is what you get. Now, like I said, this is early development. I'm assuming that once they move into actual distribution of this, that you'll get a welcome app or something like that along those lines. But as of right now, you don't get that. So in the doc, we get a launcher, we get Firefox, we get a calculator, the file manager, which is custom to them. Although I would say that this looks significantly like a fork of Nautilus, which is weird because this is again a QT based desktop environment. But this looks astonishingly like Nautilus. It does not look like Dolphin in any way. So the fact that this looks like this, again, I would suggest this looks like Nautilus. But this is a custom Qtfish file manager. And it's very pretty, right? That's going to be the whole thing about this desktop environment is that it's meant to look very attractive. And it does it looks. I mean, let's just be honest about this. It looks like macOS. But I think that's that's probably what they were going for. This is kind of like a more modern version of what elementary OS probably should look like because elementary OS is looking for a macOS kind of vibe. But they're trying to looking like a macOS from 10 years ago, at least unless you turn on the dark thing. But you know, that's just my opinion. So we got the files app here, which we might look at a little bit more later. We'll look at the settings for a second. This is the terminal. Again, this looks a little bit like a no terminal. And it is a little broken. Like, you have to be very specific with where you drag it. Otherwise, you catch those tabs. But again, early access. And you can add tabs and there's no settings here, which to speak of. But very simple terminal. Then we have Kate, which is a text editor, which is a KDE text editor. And then we have them, the Muon package manager. Now I've heard of this before I've never ever used it. So I don't know much about it. But you're going to be able to basically install anything that's probably in the Ubuntu repositories directly from here. Now, whether or not this is better than using something like discovery, I don't know. It's going to be a little bit less user friendly. I have a feeling because this is more like synaptic package manager than what you get in something like discovery. But you're probably going to be to install more stuff from here than you would in something like discovery anyways. There's one thing I see here that I'm completely missing. How do you shut down almost every desktop environment has the ability to shut down, log out and all that stuff from somewhere. So we're going to have to investigate this. So far I've not found it. Now we do have a dark mode here. We'll look at that here in a second and we'll list the settings. Bluetooth. And that's it. There doesn't seem to be a power off or a power down button anywhere in the OS yet. I may have been wrong about that. Where was that again? Was it here? Interestingly, that's right there where it's at. Okay. So they bury in the volume icon. That is really weird. I mean, because when you think of shutting your computer down, you don't think to click on the volume icon. But yeah, that's right there. And then we have the standard basically the standard KDE log out stream. We can escape out of that. Okay, so it is at least it does exist. It's just, you know, buried. So let's go ahead and look at the settings. Now by default, it starts on the WLAN page, but that's not going to work because I don't actually have a wireless card in this virtual machine. It's just an ethernet. So we'll just go ahead and skip to appearance and we'll try the dark mode because dark mode is superior to everything. That should be the default. That's just my opinion. We do get it. See, this is what I'm talking about. Little broken. Okay. So we got dark mode in there. Does it apply to Firefox? No, kind of. Launcher kind of turns dark a little bit. The calculator? Yep. File manager? Yep. And Kate? No. Okay. So Kate doesn't take on a dark theme. The moone thing. The moone thing does. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. I have no clue. So that's kind of a little bit hit or miss, but that's okay. We'll just go and close all those things that we just opened. But the dark theme definitely does look very nice. Everything about this looks very nice, but you can tell it's still in development and that's a good thing. So we do have accent colors, which is also really nice. Change it to something a little bit different. Dim the wallpaper on dark theme. Oh, that's cool. So you kind of kind of make that so it's a little bit less hard on the eyes. We should go ahead and look at the background and see what comes with it. So there are a few here. These are very, very Apple-esque. Yeah. Let's go ahead and change to a different one. Let's change to this one. Okay. Cool. The dock can be changed to a different side if you want and can be made even bigger or smaller, which is good. I'm going to go here. Why not? You can also auto hide it, which is also good. So far, no animations to speak of, but it's possible that that's just because we're in a virtual machine. There might be animations available when you run this on hardware. I'm not sure. A lot of times when you're running in a VM, the animations just don't show up. We have some mouse settings here, date and time, language, the normal stuff, fairly well thought out and very well designed. You'd probably get the same amount of languages that you get with Ubuntu, so this is based on Ubuntu. I don't really need to do that yet. Cancel things. Interesting. Are we going to be in a loop here? We did go away, but it doesn't. Other than allowing you to change the mode, it doesn't really actually give you a lot of options here. But again, we're in a development mode, so let's go see what it says about. So it's using, doesn't really tell you exactly what it's using underneath. So like any of the KDE apps that it has or anything like that. So we're just nowhere on system versions 0.4. So this is very much an alpha product, probably using a kernel $5.11. I'm not sure what according to OMG Ubuntu, it's based on Kubuntu 21.04. So it's not based on the LTS, but instead is based off the most recent interim release of Ubuntu or in this case, Kubuntu. What I find most interesting is that most of these applications look very much GTK based, don't they? I mean they kind of do. Now the accent color did not translate over to the folders, which is kind of disappointing, but hopefully they fixed that along the way. But like I said, these applications look very much like GTK applications. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they're not GTK, but instead are MauiKit. Now MauiKit is a design toolkit for Qt-based applications. I believe they're Qt-based applications. I could be wrong about that. I don't know much about it. I just know that exists. I know that several other desktop environments are using MauiKit for their kind of things, and they do resemble GTK based applications quite a lot. So this is possible that this is MauiKit, but there's no way for me to tell. Now let's go ahead and see what other applications we get by default. So we get Bluetooth manager, MPV media player, ART, which is an archive manager. Eliza, which is the KDE music player. Gwen View, which is the picture viewer. Komoso, I believe this is for webcams. Kate is the text editor. Scanlight is for scanning. Speculatacle is a screenshot tool. QPDF View is for viewing PDFs. Transmission is your P2P client for Torrents startup disk creator. So that's kind of be kind of like Etcher or something. And then VLC. That's all that comes installed. So it's very light so far. Now, like I said, very much this is in development. So when this comes out, it may have more or less software available to it. What I'm surprised at is that this was a 1.7 gigabyte ISO. So there has to be quite a few packages. Now let me go ahead and open up the terminal here and do first zoom in here. Okay, I wonder what zoom in is. So control plus is not working. Control shift plus is not working. Control page up is not working. Control shift page up is not working. Okay. So I don't know how to zoom in. So let's go ahead and see if NeoFetch is installed. No. So we'll go ahead and install this and see what we can find out. Okay. So we get the Ubuntu logo here. So they haven't had a chance to customize this quite yet. This is the QFish terminal. So this is a custom terminal for them. So they apparently have not instituted a way to actually go through and zoom in and zoom out yet. So we have 1,800 packages, which is quite high for the amount of software we just saw. Again, it's using kernel 5.11. This is bash 5.1.4. And it's using about a gigabyte of memory, but we've been messing around with stuff. So that's not probably all that accurate. It's also using the KWIN window manager. So overall, let's just pop up some of these applications here again, so that we have a desktop to look at. As you can tell, some of this stuff doesn't want to drag. And we won't drag that in. Okay. Now, I don't know if this is the VM lagging down because I've opened up so many things or if it's just because this is a development, you know, addition of the operating system. It doesn't really matter. We're not here to look at performance or anything. We're just here to look at looks because that's the bottom line of this, guys. This is meant to be a very, very good-looking desktop environment. And I think, so far, they succeed. This is probably better-looking than elementary OS, at least in my opinion, because it looks more modern. And I would say it is also better than deep-in if only because it doesn't have the shadiness that comes with deep-in, at least so far. So it is very, very good-looking. But it's also very, very early days. My worry is that they've bitten off a little bit more than they can chew. I don't know whether or not they can continue on because this is still very, very rough. And that's okay. Every piece of software starts off in a rough stage. I'm not judging it. And if anything, my response to this is very, very positive because it's very, very pretty. Now, I'm not much of a desktop environment guy. I'm more window manager guy. But from what they've started off so far, it's a very good start. I'll be very interested to see where they go from here. And I'd like to learn a little bit more about it as we go along because right now we don't have a ton of information about the things that are going into this development. So whether or not this is going to be meant for desktop environments like on computers, which is what I'm using on Orvis, because you can tell that the icons here are very touch-centric. So you could see this maybe existing on like a tablet or something. One of the things that they seem to have been doing differently is they've included two different package managers. They have apps like you saw me use to install NeoFetch and something called TAP, which I don't know anything about. So I'm not even going to bother trying. But apparently it's meant to be used in order to update the system itself so that the operating system can be updated in a rolling release type manner. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it's cool. So actually, I'm going to brave it. I'm going to go ahead and do TAP update. So this is what TAP looks like. Now we don't really need to look at them over. So that kind of reminds me. The output of that kind of reminds me of an AUR helper, doesn't it? I mean, it kind of looks like an output of an AUR helper with a package build and all that kind of stuff. That's interesting because it's downloading a tar.gz file and uncompressing it and all that kind of stuff. That is very fascinating. Oh, look at that screen tearing. So yeah, that's TAP. My question is why? We don't need another package manager, just use apt. apt can update the system just as well as anything else and it can be used in a rolling release manner. It's very weird, but I guess do what you want to do. So that is QtfishOS based on Kaboom 2 21.04. Overall thoughts, it's very pretty, but it's also very, very early. So if you want to try this out, install it in a VM or on a machine that you don't care about, this is not meant to be a daily driver. And I don't think that the developers would want you to use it as a daily driver either. It says developer addition in the ISO like name. So this is for people who want to try to help develop the system. But overall, looks really nice. And I'm looking forward to the future of this. Now I would be very interested to see if there is an official version of Ubuntu called QtfishOS sometime in the future. That'd be really interesting because Ubuntu adds a flavor every once in a while. Maybe Qtfish is the next one, but it's not there yet. So anyways, so that's it for this video. If you are interested in using Qtfish or if you're interested in development Qtfish, you can leave a comment below and let me know what your thoughts are on this very lovely operating system. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, let's take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast Webgentu is fun too. Marcus, Meglens, Sven, Jaxx, Knife and Tool, Joshua, Lee, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Merrick, Camp and Mr. Fox. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.