 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at an Arch Linux based distribution called Zero Linux. I've had several people request that I take a look at this particular distribution and I've got to say it does look really cool. For one thing, their website, I like the blurb on the front page. It says Zero Linux is an eye candy lover's wet dream, right? So this distribution better look good because according to them, it's all about the aesthetics and I got to say the screenshots do look good and it looks like they have three main additions. They have KDE Plasma, GNOME, and XFCE. According to their website, it looks like KDE is the flagship edition. So I'm going to go ahead and download that. The ISO for their KDE Plasma edition is 2.8 gigabytes in size and once I get that downloaded, I'm going to run through a quick installation and do a first look, give you my first impressions of Zero Linux inside a virtual machine. So I've booted into Zero Linux here inside a virtual machine. This VM, I gave six gigs of RAM, I gave it two threads of my 24 threads CPU, and I gave it 25 gigabytes of disk space because it being a nearly three gig ISO, I'm assuming it's going to install a lot of stuff. So I wanted to make sure I had plenty of space in this VM, 25 gigs should be more than enough for most Linux distributions. So I'm going to go ahead and choose the start Zero Linux installer here from their welcome screen. And this is the Calamari installer. It's a very familiar installer. It's one that most Linux distributions use these days. We get the welcome screen, which you can change the language if you need to choose something other than American English for me. American English is fine. So let me move my head out of the way and I'm going to choose next. And then we get the core and this is the, I guess, of where we can choose what kernel. It says stock arch kernel, and that's the one I want. Let's see, we could also go ahead and install Intel GPU drivers, AMD GPU drivers here in this VM, everything should be open sourced and part of the kernel. So I don't think I need to worry about video drivers. So I'm not going to tick on any of this extra stuff. I'm just going to go ahead and click next on this. And then other packages, Android and iOS tools, add support for Android and iOS. In this VM, I'm not going to bother audio and music tools. Well, let's see what audio and music, it says audio players, converters and editors. Do I get a list? If I click the arrow, yes, we get lists and then audio players. I guess by default it was going to install them all. I definitely don't want that, but I don't mind. We'll just do something lightweight, audacious is fine. G music browser is not bad. I do like radio tray as well. Like I could do some of these audio editors, well, let's see what they offer. So let me get the list. Audacity is still here and that's going to be the older version of audacity even that Arch is still shipping with the one pre telemetry. So typically I'd probably install that or install one of the audacity forks. Our door is here as well. But for purposes of saving time, I'm not going to install any of this stuff because I'm not going to be editing software in this VM. I'm not going to convert any audio as well. And then the other audio tools, things that you can use to change metadata and stuff like that. I'll turn all of that off. This is actually really cool. So I've seen a similar setup with ArcoLinux. ArcoLinux has a, they use the Calamari's installer and allow you to install a lot of extra packages right here in the installer up front, saving you time. And I'm assuming that's what ZeroLinux is also doing is they're trying to do the Arco method here with the Calamari's installer. And I love that because I think it's one of the things that makes Arco a really great distribution. So I'm really happy that ZeroLinux is following the same path here. Let me put my head back on the screen. I'm going to move this over and just quickly, I'm assuming that they're going to ship a default suite of applications. Like this is just if I want extra stuff, I'm assuming. So I'm actually not going to install any extra stuff because I want to see what they actually ship with without me choosing anything extra. So I'm just going to choose next. The time zone Calamari's has figured out I'm in the central time zone in the U.S. I'll just click next. English U.S. is my keyboard layout, so I don't need to change that. I'll click next. And then what do we want to do with the disk? I want to erase the disk and give the entire 25 gigabyte virtual disk to ZeroLinux. It looks like it's going to create a butter FS file system. And we have the choice of doing no swap, which typically in a VM, I would do no swap. There's no reason to have a swap in a VM. But if this was on physical hardware, you probably want a swap. And I'll do swap file. And it looks like we did have the options. I guess if you didn't want to do butter FS, we could do either extend for or XFS. I'm fine with butter FS since it's the default. So let's go with that. Then let's create our user. So I'm going to call my user DT. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically without asking for a password? No. The reason you create a strong and complicated password is to make sure that you have to enter a password to get into your machine. So I'm not going to take that on. I will take on the next option. Use the same password for the administrator account. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. That way the DT users password is the same password for Root and Sudu. So let me go ahead and choose next. And then it gives me a summary of everything we chose. And all that looks good. I'm going to click install. And then it's going to warn me that it's about to format the drive and write the disk and install. Now, this portion of the installation typically takes, I don't know, about 10 minutes on my equipment, although it does warn me that the install could take upwards of 30 minutes. Now, that probably depends on how much extra software you chose to install. Since I didn't choose any extra software, I just went with the base packages. Hopefully it won't take too long for me. I'll pause the video until the installation has completed. And that portion of the installer has completed. That took about 10 or 12 minutes on my machine. Now, again, I didn't choose any extra packages to install. That's why it was a little quicker for me. If you chose a lot of extra packages to install during the installation process, then again, they warned you this could take up to 30 minutes to install. Now, to go ahead and complete the installation, we need to click restart the system, which will reboot the machine. That's what I'm going to do right now. And I rebooted the machine. And wow, that was a really interesting grub menu. That grub screen was only there for about three or four seconds. But that was one of the most interesting grub screens I've ever seen. I hope you guys can appreciate what we're dealing with here. Obviously, when they say this is an eye candy lover's wet dream, they're taking it to some rather extremes. But I have to admit, I'm kind of enjoying this. So let me go ahead and log in to KDE Plasma. It looks like by default, they're going to use a Waylon session, which would probably be fine here in this VM. But I'm going to go ahead and choose the X11 session just to make sure everything is good. And we have logged in to our freshly installed Zero Linux, their KDE edition. Let me go ahead and configure the display settings. So I right click on the desktop to get to this display settings. And I'm going to choose 1920 by 1080 for resolution until it to keep those changes. And now every time I come back to this VM, it should always log me in at 1920 by 1080. Once again, we get our welcome tool here and we have our NVIDIA card checker and NVIDIA legacy drivers. That's great that they include this because many desktop users, of course, are going to have NVIDIA graphics cards. And sometimes getting those proprietary drivers that you need can be a little tricky. We have the shell configuration. That is interesting. Let's see, use this tool to configure your shell. Switch to ZSH and it looks like OMZ, oh, my ZSH. That framework is installed along with this and the P10K prompt. The ZSH shell prompt is installed, or we can refer back to default bash. So what do they use by default? Let me go into the console and let's see what shell are we using. They are using bash by default because NeoFetch tells me that the shell is bash 5.1.16 is ZSH installed. It is, but it's a very plain vanilla ZSH prompt. So let me go ahead and close the terminal and let's switch to ZSH with the OMI ZSH framework, a plugin system and the P10K. That's the power level 10K shell prompt theme. And then it opens the terminal and we're going to need sudo privileges to install those packages, the OMI ZSH and the power 10K theme. And the installation script has completed and it tells us it's done. Now log out and back in to apply. So I'm just going to close that terminal and open a new terminal. And now now we have the power level 10K theme. And you can see because it actually tells us this power level 10K. Let me see if I can zoom in here. Yeah, zoom in here in console. And you can tell we got this little fancy shell prompt here. And then that lets you know you're in ZSH because if I switch over to bash, it's just a standard, you know, plain vanilla bash prompt, which is user ad host and not much else. There's no real fanciness going on in their bash prompt. So let's exit out of bash to get back into ZSH. I do like the NeoFetch information that they've included. Of course, we got the zero Linux logo here. You know, it's very arch like, but it's got a like a X that's overlaid on top of it. And of course, we got some information here, including how many packages were installed by default, 1,250. So again, I didn't install any extra packages, but 1,250 packages are installed by default on the KDE Plasma edition of zero Linux. Looks like the Linux kernel is five dot 16 dot eight. It's going to be rolling release, right? So you're always going to be on the latest and greatest kernel. You're always going to have the latest and greatest software with arch Linux and any arch based distribution. So let me exit out of that utility back to the welcome screen. Butter FS tools says that's coming soon. Configure Samba. I don't need a Samba because I'm not going to be interacting with any computers that are going to have windows on it. Samba is for file sharing extra packages. I believe that is yeah, where we can install some gaming stuff. The gaming AIO installer. What is AIO? Oh, OK, I click on that and then we can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Proton GE. That's very cool. So, well, we have a button to install Doom Emacs as well. I'm not going to install Doom Emacs because it's a lengthy installation process, takes about 10 minutes or so to to install Doom Emacs and install KDE Windows Tiling. No, I wanted a Tiling window manager. I didn't install a proper one. The plugins to make KDE a Tiling window manager, they're OK, but it's still not really a proper Tiling window experience. I'm not going to bother playing with that. Install KVM and QEMU. So this is virtual machines. So KVM, that is the Linux kernel virtual machine. It allows you basically to use a program like Vert Manager, which is the virtual machine program that I'm using actually to actually take a look at zero Linux. So that's what I've got installed on my machine to do this review here. And it says Disable Startup. I'm not going to bother doing that either. So let me exit out of that. That's a really neat welcome tool, though. There was a lot of good options there. Your video drivers, installing all your gaming stuff, configuring the shell, the ZSH shell, the fact that you can install Doom Emacs, they put in a ton of work on that welcome screen. Now, since this distribution said it was all about the eye candy, let's talk about aesthetics. I like it. I like the icon set. The circle icons look good. I like the default wallpaper. I like the theming. It's interesting because we've got this top panel up here. They've got some spacing around the borders here. That's kind of an interesting touch. And then you've got your bottom centered dock. So it's a very Mac OS X experience, right? With the top panel and then the bottom dock. And this dock. What dock are they using? Are they using Plank or they may be using Latte Dock, which is a dock designed to be used with KDE Plasma. So I'm going to hover over the dock. I'm going to do a control right click to see if I can get any kind of information. Edit Dock. So if I edit the dock, Latte. So that is Latte Dock. And I'm not going to bother changing the dock. I just wanted to see which program that was. So that is Latte Dock. Let's see what programs are installed. Under development, for most people, you're not going to be interested in any of this stuff. But, you know, there's some cute stuff. Obviously KDE Plasma's cute based desktop environment, CMake, Graphics, it looks like. We have KColorChooser and WinView. WinView is your image viewer in KDE Plasma. Under internet, we have the Avahi server, KDE Connect that allows you to sync your mobile devices to your computer. And then we have Vivaldi is the default browser. That's an interesting choice. Vivaldi is proprietary software rather than free and open source. It is based on Chromium. So I would expect it to be, you know, just as good as any other Chromium based browser as far as performance. Unfortunately, the license prevents somebody like me from using it. Looks like it is Vivaldi 5.1.2567.39. Let me close that out. I don't know too much about the Vivaldi browser. I have not used it very often. Occasionally I come across Linux distributions that do ship it by default and occasionally open it just to look at it. But I've never used it for more than two or three minutes at a time. Of course, during the installation process we could have chose probably a dozen different web browsers to install. So I can't fault this particular Linux distribution for shipping proprietary software out of the box. Arco Linux also does the same thing. And people often ask me, you know, you talk about how you love Arco and I'm enjoying zero Linux right now, but they ship unnecessary proprietary software like a proprietary web browser and you don't complain. Well, they did offer me choices, right? I just went with the defaults for purposes of this video, but obviously I would probably switch Vivaldi out with something like Brave or Cube browser, LibreWolf and you know, any of the free and open source browsers that we have available on Linux. Getting back into the menu system, we have a lost and found category. That's interesting, nothing really in there. Multimedia, we have video for Linux. V4L2, that's usually used for webcam stuff. And under office, no office suite. So we have a program called localize. I don't actually know what that is. It says you do not have to be a software developer to be a member of the KDE team. So I'm assuming this is for KDE development, I don't know. But we don't have anything like LibreOffice or I didn't even see a PDF viewer actually installed because typically that would be under the office category as well. So I actually did not install that much software. Then we have a setting stuff. So this is where you would add, remove software. So let's see, they are using, is this PAMAC? Let me go to about, yeah, PAMAC 10.3.0. So PAMAC is a software center, a graphical software center available on Arch Linux and ArchBase distributions. And the great thing about it is it's a package manager and it has support for not just the standard Arch packages, but you can also turn on the AUR, which almost every Arch user is going to want AUR packages, but you could also turn on flat pack and snap support as well. Now, not a lot of Arch users use flat packs and snaps because the AUR really has everything, but it's nice to have that as an option because sometimes I find packages that are broken in the AUR and then I have to try a flat pack or a snap. And I'm glad that's available as an option to tick on and off here in the software center. Going back into the settings categories, some other stuff. We have AR and R, which is a graphical front end to XR and R. So this allows you to configure your monitors. Now this program AR and R is really important. I actually use it all the time, well, not all the time, but anytime I reinstall Linux distributions, I have triple monitors, I have three monitors. Sometimes when you plug it into your graphics cards, the monitors are not arranged in the correct order, right? So how would you arrange them in the correct order? You use AR and R because you would have three screens here and then you would just drag them into the exact layout you want, basically. And then you would do the checkbox to save that layout, which is just a shell script. It's actually a shell script that executes that XR and R command, XRender command. Then what you would do is in your auto-start programs, that script, that XRender script, put that there, and it will always configure your monitors correctly when you log in. Other stuff in settings, we have Grub Customizer, which is interesting. And so I'm gonna have to give permissions here to do anything with Grub, but I'm assuming this is where you could change that really fancy Grub screen. Now I don't really want to change it. Here's that really cool background that we saw when I first booted up the system. Yeah, yeah, I like all of that. I'm not gonna change that. And then we have system settings. So this is just your settings manager in KDE Plasma where you could change themes. Let's talk about themes. So we have a Breeze, Breeze Dark, Breeze Twilight, Layen, and Layen Solid. Yeah, so some pretty cool themes. The default is Layen. Yeah, I'm good with the default. I don't think I want to play with that. There was also a Zero Linux system tool, and that is our welcome screen. And we have a system category with some of the same stuff that we've already seen here. Yeah, not much to see here. Let's open up the system monitor. Let's see system resource usage. Looks like we're using 1.3 gigs of the six gigs that I gave this VM. We're using about 10 gigs of the 25 gigs of disk space. So it actually didn't really install that much stuff. CPU usage, it's hovering all over the place, but around 8% to 16%, you know, occasionally it spikes up a little higher. But again, this is a virtual machine, so performance inside a virtual machine is not indicative of performance on actual hardware. Under the Utilities category, we have Arc, which is the archive manager for Zip and Unzip and things like that. We have an Emoji selector, which is always important. We have Calculator, which is our calculator. That's interesting. That's a GTK calculator, but I would assume that Calc with a K would also be installed for KDE Plasma. It is not. Well, that's interesting that the Qt-based calculator wasn't installed, but Calculator is installed, which Calculator's a fine program. It's just typically when people make these additions of KDE Plasma, for example, they want all Qt-based applications or with GNOME, they want all GTK-based applications. Anything else interesting here, Spectacle is the screenshot tool. Synapse is installed. Let me launch that. So Synapse is a run launcher. It says, and press the down key to browse any recent activity, but we don't have any recent activity. I used Synapse a little bit, probably 12 years ago, like a long, long time ago. Synapse was a really cool run launcher that a lot of people used in Linux. I actually haven't heard about that in a while, but that's cool that they go ahead and ship it out of the box. Of course, you do have a K-Runner, usually, with KDE Plasma. K-Runner actually here, doesn't look like it. So you got some different stuff. So they have swapped out some of the default Plasma stuff with some other options. Now let me right-click on the desktop. I'm gonna configure desktop and wallpaper because I would like to see what kind of wallpaper pack they have. And I like the default wallpaper, but some of the other options here, Honey Wave. That actually looks really good. Yeah, very Plasma-like, right? This abstract art, very, very Plasma-like. That may be one of the default Plasma wallpapers. This one is really nice. Zero Plasma 1, zero Plasma 10. Yeah, I think with the kind of translucent theme they've got going on, a lighter wallpaper would probably be in order. Maybe this one here. Yeah, like I could, I could get down with that, right? That is a sexy looking desktop. And I think that's one of the nicest looking KDE Plasma desktops that I've seen around it. It's right up there with Garuda's version of KDE Plasma, their Dragonized Edition. Now, you are not stuck with the theming options that are here by default, because if I go back to the webpage for zero Linux, you know, at the very bottom of the front page you have customization, Rises and Themes. And then you have these four themes. Zero Lay-in is that default theme, right? That is what we were looking at here by default. But they have three other options that you could choose from. So there was Zero Dracool, which I'm assuming is a Dracula theme. Yeah, comes with some different widgets and it uses the Dracula theme. And they have an installation guide. If you click on it, it's a GitHub page, right? You go and probably clone this particular GitHub repository. And yeah, they give you some installation instructions. Actually, what you need to do is you need to edit your pacman.conf. And then I'm assuming you can just install a package directly from Pacman. So that's kind of cool. Other than the zero Dracool option, you had zero Nord, which is a Nord theme. And again, some different stuff going on with some widgets there. And then Zero Suite, which is very Gerudo-like. It's using those candy icons, you know, those really cool icons. So yeah, overall, I am incredibly impressed with Zero Linux. You know, one of the things with, yeah, so many Arch Linux-based distributions out there. And many of them are really just themed Arch Linux, right? They just throw some wallpapers, some theming, you know, some icon sets and call it a day and call it a distribution, you know, something unique. But Zero Linux really did take this to another level. Again, I think it rivals Gerudo because Gerudo is very heavily customized and you know, Zero Linux on their page and iCandy Lovers Wet Dream. Yeah, I think they hit it out of the park if that was their goal. Overall, yeah, I think it's a good distribution. If you guys wanna check it out, I will link to the Zero Linux website in the show description. Check it out, spin it up in a VM if you wanna give it a shot before you actually install it on physical hardware. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Devon Gabe James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes, Alan, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, Dylan, George, Lee, Linux, Ninja, Max, and Mike. Hurry on, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fedora, Polytech, Red Prophet, Stephen and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. 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 just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and you wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, please subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. Me personally, I would have went with Fish over ZSH.