 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be taking a first look at gecko linux now gecko linux comes in two versions stable and rolling I think they call it static and rolling and it's based on open Suza So it's based based on leap and tumbleweed now. I'm going to be taking a look at the static version of cinnamon It comes in several flavors including cinnamon Xfce genome LXQ and a few others so there's quite a few selections of desktop that you could use The way it differs from open Suza is that it tries to make open Suza easier to install so it uses Calamari's instead of the traditional open Suza installer and It's just is supposed to be more user-friendly is the whole stick behind it So that's what we're going to do today is take a first look at it now We're going to take a look at this in virtual box and We'll go ahead and give it an install and see how it does Interestingly, it doesn't have its own Logo here. It just uses the open Suza leap logo. So we get a little you don't want you don't hear it because I don't have Audio set up for my computer, but it has a little Opening sound kind of like Windows XP used to have so very interesting there. So let's go ahead and give it an install Shall we? So like I said, this uses Calamari's kind of like everything else does these days We're going to do next I'm not in Chicago. You're close. I'm in Detroit Hit next and erase disk. We'll leave it in no swap Next and we'll do our user details All right, and we'll leave it as use the same and administration password But we don't need to log on automatically. I never do that. I don't think anybody does And we'll hit install and install now. Now. This is going to be using EXT for yeah, there's nothing special about the file system here I thought maybe it used butter FS. I thought that that Open Suza started using butter FS by default, but I could be remembering wrong Unless it'll take about three or four minutes. So I'll cut away and come back Okay, so like I said that took about four minutes or so we'll go ahead and what I'm going to do now is Normally you'd hit this restart checkbox and then hit done I'm just going to hit done and then shut down so that I can remove the installation media from virtual box Okay, we'll look at startup times here and see how they how it does. I don't expect it to be terrible or anything Linux is pretty fast starting up pretty much no matter what distribution you use these days Interestingly, we're not getting full screen right off the bat, which is weird because we did in the live CD. So Something went interesting there We'll see if it live full screen comes up here It's not it's not loading This has something to do with virtual box Almost guaranteed. All right, so we're gonna Oh wait, here we are weird So I went out of full screen went back to full screen and we have the system Like I said something to do to do with virtual box probably because I have 3d acceleration enabled Which I don't normally do but it kept prompting me to do it. So All right, so no welcome screen anything to speak of we have some a leg a language installer up here Other than that a fairly clean cinnamon experience in terms of layout It's using numix as the Theme here And I'll talk a little bit more about the themes in a few minutes when we go into the settings panel So first we'll look at firefox here and take a look at the version number No, this I would expect this to be an esr Because again, this is based on leap which means it's the stable version of open suza So everything is going to be farther behind than what you'd normally expect because they want it to be all stable and stuff So this is the yeah, this is 78.5 point zero the esr esr release and We can close this Now I'm going to open up a terminal before I go through and open up anything else and see if we can find Go to free dash m We got 601 now this is after I've opened up firefox. So it's possible that this is a little bit higher than what it would normally be Uh, let's see Uname A this is using the linux kernel 5.3 Which is Quite old It's actually two lts as they go because the last lts was 5 10 and then one before that was 5.4 So this is like I said, this is quite old In terms of linux kernels and stuff. So that's something to keep in mind if you're Not worried about having the latest and greatest this is going to be just fine for everybody Who's like that if you're interested in something more rolling something more recent They have the tumbleweed version available. So That's not a huge deal. If this was all that was available, then it would be a little bit of a concern So let's see if htop is installed It is not so we're going to clear this out and see if I remember how to install programs on open suesas. So I think This is going to make me look stupid if it's not right Who said I didn't know how to do stuff in open sues, huh? I haven't used open sues or anything based on open sues in Probably two or three years. It's been quite a while. I forgot how slow zipper is though A few moments later Okay, so That installing that package took longer than installing the entire operating system it took Close to 15 minutes Now I'm a hundred percent positive that the That wouldn't happen again. So I'm actually going to try after I look at it htop to install something else That I'm assuming is in the in the repositories because I want to see if that time is Always that long because if it is always that long, that's ridiculous If it's just the first time thing that it has to go through and retrieve all the repositories That's fine. I can deal with that. All right. So first So we got htop here. We got 87 tasks 176 threads still using about 164 megs in terms of ram The most intensive task we have here looks like it's going to be xorg. Yeah terms of memory cinnamon. Yeah um So let's quit out of that We'll try to install something else. So zipper See if I can actually Yeah install Gimp See if gimp is installed Or in the repose Yeah, this is a lot quicker than it was Um, so that's not that's not a big big deal. So the first time you install something from using zipper It's going to take a while obviously Not something that I'd experienced before But that's just the way things are sometimes I guess uh, it's not something You find on other distros all that much now on ubuntu You do have to go through and do sudo like sudo apt update in order to get the most recent repository listings So this is kind of like that. I guess i'm so used to the archway of doing things Where you don't have to really update that kind of stuff the mirrors are like kind of automatically updated in the background for Whatever, but anyways, this worked just fine. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the applications that are installed Minus htop and gimp Obviously because I just installed those Now accessories, these are just basic accessories. We've got a screenshot tool and a text editor, which I believe is probably going to be Jeannie This is z xed I have never heard of that before in my entire life so Looks like it's a Just a regular text editor. So nothing special there uh, let's see a screenshot tool is going to probably be Yeah, this is looks like it's The one that comes with cinnamon normally. Okay. Uh, let's see other than that. Nothing out here. This is a Clipboard manager calculator calculator Graphics we got Liberia office draws here gimp. I install pixels for managing your pictures Internet we got firefox pigeon thunderbird and transmission office livery office still is here Sound and video we have clementine for music vlc for video Uh, let's see administration. This is going to be mostly stuff for The terminal I I believe this is The cinnamon terminal Oh, this is gnom terminal. Okay, so so the cinnamon habits on terminal I feel like it does I might be remembering that wrong too Uh preferences is going to be mostly our settings. So we'll just go ahead and go into our settings app here now One thing I will admit is I've had this installed before and tried to do this video once And I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get A dark theme I still never figured it out So if anybody's used this before or use I mean is more familiar with cinnamon than I am Let me know how you'd get a dark theme because I just choose mint white dark here. I just assumed that you know the whole thing would go dark But that's just for winners window voters icons is for icons controls is just You know, oh there we go, but Weirdly, there's not a mint There's not a mint version for here a mint y version for the dark That's really weird. Okay. Yes. It doesn't really matter. We'll just go back to the the The regular In terms of themes you got mostly you got the mint white stuff and then some mate stuff here And traditionally we with uh cinnamon you can add and remove stuff right from this Uh settings panel here other stuff in in the settings. We got backgrounds We'll look at the wallpaper, which you don't get any wallpapers other than this one. I believe yeah That's exact oddly enough the one that was there before isn't actually there Um, I'm assuming that's because it's not attached to that folder Traditional desktop effects. Now, there's one down here that I wanted to look at called tiling Enable window tiling and stamping that's just going to be for you know, this stuff here Is there associated keybindings? Kind of so use control to toggle between tile and snap mode It's not like it's not like the Papa West tiling thing that you get with you know, this is just traditional window snapping like this here. Yeah. All right So nothing all that great. They're just traditional stuff applets. It's going to be for the bar Down there at the bottom Extensions, I'm not actually sure what extensions is I'm going to find out for that. You can tell I don't use cinnamon like hardly at all transparent panels cinnamon max misses could be like Oh, this is for like genome extensions Hmm So you could use g tile here Which is the tiling window manager extension thing that comes with uh, I think that's what the Papa West one is based off of them is that so So these are like genome extensions. That's interesting. I didn't even know you could do that with cinnamon Like I said, I haven't played around with cinnamon nearly as much as I probably should have Uh, so you get workspaces down here at the bottom and You we could add one here and the animation is kind of cool, right? Surprisingly the animations actually work on virtual box something that isn't normally the case for me Now the other thing the last thing I want to take a look at is yes, so if you're not Familiar Yes, is the gooey way of installing programs and managing programs On open suzer and this is yes Now I've one of the reasons why I've never spent much time with yes Or with open suzer is because I don't care for yes all that much. I find it It cumbersome kind of bloated, um, but A lot of people are going to disagree with that because a lot of people like open suzer and a lot of people just swear by Yes, kind of like the arch us yarch users swear by pacman and Pamac and There you are and stuff. Yes is kind of that only with a much smaller following I feel But there's just a ton of stuff here you can use yes towards it You can use it for software management, obviously, which is what this looks like here So you can go through and open this up. It's going to refresh the Repositories and stuff before you open up and I'll do that every single time but you can always skip it So if we do a search for Steam let's just look at for steam So we do have steam here in the repositories and that'd be easy to install obviously Uh You'd have to make sure that you have the appropriate drivers For your video card, which would also be available in certain repositories now I don't believe every repository is enabled by default, but it kind of looks like they are Yeah, if you want to install Nvidia drivers, you'd have to enable those repositories Which is very easy through yes You just go through and find the appropriate one that you have to enable now the easiest way to find the most appropriate one is To google it because it's going to depend on which Driver you need You know because some of these repositories only go up to so far Like I said, if you need Nvidia stuff, it's all here. You just can have to figure out which one of these ones You need to install So that is yes in terms of a software manager Most of the stuff you'll find it in the default repositories So one of the reasons why a lot of people really truly love yes is because it's more than just the ability to manage your software You can also manage things like your network and your kernel your bootloader services manager So you can manage stuff that goes through system d even stuff like your mail server and your ntp configuration There's also firewall and sudo and user and group management stuff in this So it's just really your one-stop shop for Everything that manages your linux system all in a gooey style Application now the reason why I don't care for it is because it really does feel to me like everything just kind of thrown in here There is some organization and stuff and it's Very very powerful. It's just Not new user friendly like even a little bit. So that's that was always my biggest problem with it, but You can never deny that it's probably the most powerful tool on any links distribution in terms of actually managing your system because For most other linux distros a lot of this stuff you just have to do in the terminal Or you have to do it with several different obscure GTK or gooey applications Like if you wanted to manage your firewall, there's a there's a gooey application to manage ufw But it's a separate application. This is literally everything right here In one place. So that is yes Probably this is the reason why a lot of people come to open suza and With gecko, it's easier to install. So if you've always been a little um Overwhelmed or maybe intimidated. I guess is the real word Of open suza in terms of you know installing which oh installing open suza from what I remember isn't really all that hard But it's not as easy as you get it when you're using something like calamaris so First impressions of gecko linux very good. It's basically open suza with calamaris is the way I take it It's not a very Heavy distro. There's not a ton of applications that come pre-installed so You're not going to be getting a lot of bloat and stuff that you don't need which is good A lot of distros these days come with five or six media players and you know two office suites and stuff like that You don't get any of that. You just get the bare minimum And you could even go even more minimum if you went with the barebow version Because then you would install your own desktop environment and all that stuff So I'm pretty impressed with it now There are some open suza quirks that I probably wouldn't be able to get past like that first install of an application It took quite a while But that's just a thing that you have to deal with I'm not a big fan of yes, no matter how powerful it is I just get kind of lost in it a little bit. So Yes, isn't for me, but I know a lot of because a lot of people really really like yes, and The software management inside the terminal zipper is fairly robust And it's not something that I've used a lot I'm actually quite surprised that I remembered how to even install something using zippers so That's surprising in and of itself. So That's the first look at gecko if you've used this or you plan on using us Please leave a comment below and tell me what your experience with it is I like our conversations and stuff so Would you use gecko linux? Are you interested in something like this or would you just use open suza? So Leave that comment below Make sure you follow us on twitter at the linux cast on twitter At the at the links cast on facebook You can also support us on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast and with that in mind I would like to thank our patrons divan marcus marik camp 514 Thank every thank you guys for your support of the channel. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time