 We have so many Linux distributions that base off of Debian or base off of Arch Linux, but there's really not a lot of Linux distributions that base off Fedora. Today, I'm going to take a look at a Fedora-based distribution. I'm going to take a look at Ultramarine Linux, and I don't believe I've ever tried Ultramarine before. I don't think I've ever heard of it until now, so this will be interesting. I'm going to go ahead and download it, and I'm going to take it for a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. If I click on download, you can see they've got several desktop editions. They've got their flagship edition, which uses Budgie. They also have a GNOME edition, a Pantheon edition, which Pantheon is the elementary OS desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma edition. I'm going to download the flagship Budgie edition because they say that is recommended. If I go back to their homepage, you can see the blurb. It just works. So it's Fedora-based, and you can see it's designed to stay out of your way and be easy to use, very attractive website, not much information on the website, though, to be honest. There is a wiki, but it is not exactly the most extensive wiki I've ever seen. So I'm going to go ahead and grab the ISO and run through a quick installation. So the ISO I grabbed was the latest one. It was put out about four months ago. You can see this is Ultramarine Linux version 38. So the version number coincides with the last version of Fedora, which was also version 38. So let's go ahead and boot into this. So we're logged into the live environment. Of course, the live environment is Budgie. Let me go ahead and launch the installer. Being Fedora-based, I believe they're going to use the Anaconda installer that Fedora uses. And it launches the Anaconda installer full screen here. Let me move my head so you can see the buttons here. So the first screen here is choosing our language. I am English and then the variation of English, English US. So let me go ahead and click continue on that. And then the next screen, localization, English US, time and date. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm assuming it magically did that based on geolocation. I shouldn't need to do anything with network or host name. So really what I need to do is the installation destination. So let's go ahead and this is the part of the Anaconda installer that always messes me up because by default, it already has this selected, but it's not obvious that it already had it selected. So make sure that you have the check here. So now that I have that, I'm just going to do the automatic partition there and then click done. That's weird that the done button is in that section of the screen for that portion of the installer. It's really a rather inconsistent experience, the Anaconda installer. It's my least favorite installer on Linux. I find it rather confusing because I don't use it that often. Let's go ahead and create our username, create our strong and complicated password for my DT user. And then once again, click done in the top left hand side of the screen, press done again to use password anyway. So it's saying my password is too short, but I'm going to say use it anyway. So it makes you click done twice if you use a short password. And after that, I'm going to click the begin installation button and away it goes. It's formatting the drive, making our file system, installing all the packages. And this portion of the install typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my machine. So I'm going to step away, grab me a cup of coffee. I'll be back once Ultra Marine Linux has finished installing. And the installation has completed. That took just a few minutes. And now I need to click on the button that says finish installation. And on reboot, we have a grub bootloader. So it looks like it installed just fine. And we've come to our login manager. It looks like they're probably using LightDM for the login manager. So let me go ahead and enter my super secure password. And we're logged into our budget desktop environment. And to verify that that login manager was LightDM, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit the super key to open the menu here, our start menu here in the budget desktop environment. I'm going to type term terminal for of course our terminal emulator. I'm going to zoom way in. And anytime you want to know if a particular program is installed on a Linux system, the way where is, and in this case, LightDM. And you can see that the login manager is in fact LightDM. One of the things you probably notice is the shell. We do get some syntax highlighting and some completions here in the shell. One of the things that they're doing here in ultramarine Linux is they are using ZSH as their shell. So they're using the Zshell as the default user shell rather than bash. Let's take a look at some of the programs that are installed out of the box here in ultramarine Linux. So let's just go ahead and browse by category. So under accessories, we have a lot of your standard budgie slash GNOME type accessory applications such as the archive manager, which I imagine is going to be probably file roller, which is the archive manager for GNOME. Yep, so this is file roller, version 43.0. Also under accessories, we have a screenshot utility, of course, the calculator, which is almost certainly going to be the GNOME calculator. And you might go to about calculator. This is the GNOME calculator 44.0. And of course, we're looking at the basic configuration, but if you wanted, you could do an advanced scientific type calculator as well. Going back to the menu and the accessories category, we have GNOME disk, which is a disk manager or partition manager. We have the files manager here, which in the menu system is just called files. The actual name of this program is Nautilus. And this is Nautilus 44.2.1. Going back to the accessories category, just quickly, we have a lot of the standard GNOME applications such as fonts, clocks, maps, the text editor, which I'm assuming would be Gedit. Yeah, it looks like it's Gedit. I'm going to go to about this is text editor 44.0, which is actually Gedit 44.0. Under the graphics category, there's really not much here. We have a document scanner and an image viewer. LibreOfficeDraw is here, as well as the GNOME photos application. And basically this is your photo manager. Of course, in this VM, I have no photos to view. This is photos 43.0. Under the internet category, we really don't have anything here other than the web browser, which they're using Mozilla Firefox. Let's go ahead and see what version of Firefox we have here. This is version 116.0.3, a little bit of an older version of Firefox. But again, this ISO is about four months old now and I haven't updated the system. So we probably would have a newer Firefox if I did an update. Under the office category, looks like they installed the entire LibreOffice suite. If I open LibreOfficeRider, which is the word processor, let's see what version of LibreOffice this happens to be. So if I go to help, this is LibreOffice version 7.5.5.2. Let's go ahead and close that out. Under the sound and video category, not much here, cheese, which is a webcam application, clapper, which is the media player and sound recorder, which if you had a microphone plugged in, you could record you speaking through a microphone using the sound recorder. Then system tools, the usual suspects here, your control center, where you can change various settings. You have the budgie desktop settings tool, which is where you can change all the look and appearance stuff. So your GTK theme and icon theme, your cursor theme, you set fonts. You can decide whether you want the panel to be on the bottom or maybe at the top of the screen or wherever it is that you want the budgie panel to be. Also under system tools, you have your firewall manager here. Let's see what they're using for firewall. Using firewall D, and of course you need sudo privileges. So I'd have to type my super secure password for this. I go to help and about, you can see, this is firewall dash config 1.3.1. Most desktop computer users probably won't have much of a need for setting up a firewall, but for those that want it, it is there. We also have our LightDM login manager. We can change various settings for that. You need a sudo password to do that and other than that, we have of course our terminal emulator as well, which let's go ahead and launch the terminal emulator because there's a couple of things I want to check out. The first thing I want to check is let's do a, where is pipe wire? Just to verify that pipe wire is the audio server. And I want to do a sudo dnf update. Let's see what kind of updates we have. Again, the ISO is a little older because it's based off of Fedora 38. Fedora 39 should be actually released here in the next couple of weeks. And it's probably going to be, I don't know, several weeks or maybe even a couple of months before Ultra Marine gets to a new version out based off of Fedora 39. One thing that has always bugged me about dnf as compared to other package managers like apt with Debian or Pac-Man with arches, it's very slow. The syncing of the repository has been going on for nearly a minute now. So it hasn't even started updating any packages, right? It's just syncing the repos. Oh my goodness. Yeah, this may take a second. I may have to pause the recording and come back once it finally tells me how many updates are available. One thing you'll notice is it is syncing some extra repositories. You can see we do have RPM Fusion repos enabled in Ultra Marine Linux. And that's really what Ultra Marine is. It's Fedora with these extra repositories, the RPM Fusion repositories, because that's going to give you a lot of extra software, a lot of proprietary software that Fedora does not ship out of the box in its standard repos. Some of it is for legal reasons. And Ultra Marine being a community-based distribution, it's not a corporate distribution and being based outside the US, Ultra Marine is based out of Thailand, I believe. They don't have those kinds of legal issues that Fedora would have by shipping some of that proprietary stuff already enabled out of the box. As far as updated packages, there are 259 packages that would be upgraded if I ran this update. I'm gonna decline that because that will take a little while. Let's see how many packages are installed on Ultra Marine Linux out of the box. Let's see which packages are installed via DNF. So if I did a sudo DNF list installed, I believe is the command, yeah. It gives us a line-by-line accounting of every package that is installed on our system and that DNF the package manager knows about. So I'm gonna up arrow and I'm gonna pipe that same command into WC-L. WC is the word count program. Dash L is a line count rather than a word count. And however many lines are in that output, 1,911, that's how many packages are installed on our system. Or at least that's how many packages are installed via DNF. Let's do a where is flat pack because I believe flat pack is enabled out of the box. It's enabled out of the box on Fedora. So you would expect it to be here on Ultra Marine Linux as well. And it is, but I'm not sure if there's any flat packs that are actually installed. Let's do a flat pack list. And it doesn't look like there's any flat packs installed. So flat pack is enabled for you but no flat packs have been installed yet. There is no snap on the system. If I did a where is snap D. The snap D daemon is not present but it would be very easy to enable snaps on this as well. You would just do a sudo DNF install snap D and thankfully it doesn't have to sync the repos again because it already took all that time to do it earlier but you can see it would install snap D. I'm gonna decline that as far as app images. Of course you could download app images, make them executable and run those as well. So there you have it. That was a very quick and cursory look at Ultra Marine Linux 38, a version of Linux that I have actually never looked at before or distribution of Linux I've never looked at but it is rather comfy. So Fedora, many people love Fedora. I've run Fedora on my physical hardware before and it runs just fine. I have no issues with it as far as finding all the software. You can find anything you want within the Fedora repos especially if you enable those third party repos like RPM Fusion and Flatpak which Ultra Marine enables out of the box which Fedora does not enable things like RPM Fusion out of the box. And that's really, if you wanna, I guess a more new user friendly Fedora because that's what Ultra Marine is trying to be a new user friendly Fedora. It's got everything you want. It's got good artwork and theming and icons and fonts and the proprietary bits or some of the bits that for whatever legal reasons Fedora doesn't have out of the box. Ultra Marine really eliminates a lot of those pain points. So if you want a new user friendly Fedora give Ultra Marine Linux a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Daniel Gabe, James Matt, Paul Royal, Wes, Armoredragon, Commander Ingrid, George Lee, Mestho, Snape, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realiteats4Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Soulastry, ToolsDevlar, Warchintu, and Ubuntu, and Willy. These guys, they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about Ultra Marine Linux it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fabulous ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.