 And I am back chatting with my friend DarkZero, the maintainer of Zero Linux, and this is actually part two of a video series we did this week. We wanted to get together and do a co-lab, and we wanted to talk about several different topics, and we had the bright idea we'd split it up. We do some of the topics for a video posted on his channel, so those of you that are not subscribed to Zero Linux official, is that the name of the channel? Zero Linux. Add Zero Linux. Just Zero Linux? Yeah, okay. And I will link, I will link to the channel in the show description, so go check out that first video, and today's video will be part two as a continuation of some of those topics we were already discussing. But our main focus today is actually going to be talking about a new flavor of Zero Linux coming out, which is Zero Linux GNOME, or Zero G as it's being referred to. Yeah, not to be mistaken with Zero Gravity. Zero Gravity? Yeah, the game? Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about, well, first of all, briefly introduce yourself, and then tell us a little bit about Zero Linux, and then why you've decided to create this GNOME edition. Okay. Well, I'm Dark Zero, or if you want my real name, it's Steve. I'm the creator of Zero Linux. I've always maintained the vision of having one flavor instead of multiple flavors, the more flavors a distro has, the less quality it will have. I kept saying, oh, I will never create another flavor. I will never create another flavor until I started messing a little bit with GNOME, and I saw how easy it is, how much easier it is to maintain than KDE, because here's the thing, with GNOME, you cannot modify it too much, because the whole goal behind GNOME is less customization, more stability. That's usually the way these things go with software. The things that people perceive as easy to use are typically they don't have a lot of options. Yeah. That's why they're easy. There's not much to choose from. That is true. But with GNOME, people say, you can customize GNOME. Well, of course you can. You can customize anything, but was it meant to be customized? That's a different thing. They do host a lot of extensions on their website, but their mentality with extensions is we give them to you, but it's on you if you break your system. So with ZeroG, because I opted not to customize it as much as KDE, but I did customize it, and we'll talk about that in a bit, but I didn't customize it as far as I did with KDE. I just included eight very useful extensions that everybody installs after installing GNOME. I did a little bit of study behind the scenes. I saw a lot of people on Unix born. I saw people on Discord. I asked people, what are the extensions you use after installing GNOME? Most commonly, I get dash to dock, blur my shell. Those are the two most common extensions that users install on GNOME. A few others include stuff like GS Connect, because they like to transfer files between their computer and their phones. So I decided to include that. Everything else comes from the KDE side of me. Well, you gave me a link to the ISO, and I went ahead and installed it in a virtual machine the other day and played around with it for an hour or two. Just to get a good first look at this thing, and some of the things I noticed, well, first of all, let's talk about the installation. One of the things I noticed was that the installer refused to run if I didn't have a machine that had eight gigs of RAM. So apparently that's a hard setting that you've chosen for eight gigs of RAM for GNOME. Yeah, of course. That's to prevent the potato laptop users from using it. There you go. Yeah. You just answered it. Some people have the misconception that they can install it on a potato and to avoid people from installing it on a virtual machine with less than eight gigs of RAM, because I tried it on a virtual machine giving it just two gigs, like the standard that everybody gives a virtual machine. There was a lot of lag, and I needed to work and test everything with less lag. So I was like, we have to be realistic here. If I set it to one gig, a lot of maintainers, district creators and maintainers set a hard limit from one gig and above, but setting it as low as one gig is a bad experience. Generally, these days, just because of the kind of RAM that certain applications like web browsers suck up, anything below four gigs is really kind of unreasonable. Yeah, and I tried to set it to four gigs as well. I did a lot of testing behind the scenes. I tried four gigs. It was still lagging, dragging windows around in a virtual machine was really bad. And I tried to install it on one of my old machines that has four gigs of RAM. Once I had installed maybe 20% of the applications I use, it started lagging. So I was like, I need to set realistic expectations with GNOME. So I set it to eight gigs. That way, no one tries to install it on less than that. Yeah, I didn't notice any major lag or anything. So I don't know. It might be a video driver issue. I don't know what video driver you might have been using in your videos. The machine I tested on was integrated graphics. Oh, you were talking about on physical hardware, it was lagging. Oh, yeah. And that was probably... Not lagging too much. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't lagging like major lag on usable state. No, it was usable. But once you start installing your browsers, your applications, your everyday applications, it tends to start... You start feeling it. You start feeling that it's not as responsive as it needs to be. So I installed it on another machine, physical hardware again, with eight gigs of RAM. It was good. I didn't feel anything. Everything was responsive. I even ran OBS. Well, that probably was the RAM. When I ran a system monitor, I had a few things running at the time. It wasn't like on a cold boot. But it was using a little more than two gigs of RAM, which honestly hadn't unusual when you're using your computer. I have 32 gigs of RAM. So I installed it on this machine that I'm talking to you from, 32 gigs of RAM. I used this for a week. I managed to break it and make it unbootable. But I'm a maintainer. That's what I do. I used it. It was amazingly fast, blazingly fast. But after I had all my applications installed and ran, rebooted the computer on a cold boot, ran H-Top, saw that it was using 2.4 gigs on a cold boot. That's about what I... It wasn't really a cold boot, but that's what I was seeing too, was about to do something. So people have to understand is that the more applications you install, the more services will be running in the background because applications come with services. Sometimes whatever file system you're using, some of them utilize RAM a little differently, which is the next thing I wanted to bring up during the installation process is that it uses the Calamari Installer and it does let you choose between different file systems. The default you're going with is XFS. Yeah. The reason for that is quite simple. I deal with a lot of large files and XFS is the best file system for large files. Yeah. XFS is a standard, it's been around for a long time in Linux and it's still used a lot, especially in the server space. Yeah. But you don't see a lot of Linux desktop distributions for whatever reason. I can't think of really any off the top of my head that defaulted XFS and I don't know why because it is a very stable, probably just as stable as Extend 4, which is kind of like the standard. ButterFS was also an option in the installer as well. Those are the only three. I really believe in the rule of three. Don't have too much. It's just enough. And how many users really care about the file system? Not a lot. Most of them, they know they have grown accustomed to Extend 4, EXT4. Like I'm a nerd, but if you had said, you know what, ButterFS is the default file system, that's what I would have installed or Extend 4, you know, and obviously like my grandmother, she wouldn't even know what the file system is, you know, just too much choice is probably a bad thing there. Exactly. So with ButterFS, I'm offering just the ones that are most common to people. You got the nerds that install, use ButterFS. The extreme nerds use ZFS. The extreme nerds? ZFS is for servers mainly. But that's pretty much been the default for many, many years on most of the Unix operating systems and the BSDs. So that's why BSD or ZFS, you know, we've always wanted it on Linux, but because of licensing issues, it's better. Yeah. Now it's better when it comes to licensing, but I still don't understand ZFS. I'm not going to include something that I will not be able to provide support for. ButterFS, I can provide the minimum amount of support because I don't use it. I don't create snapshots. I don't care for snapshots. For me, creating snapshots because BTRFS doesn't allow you to create snapshots on a separate drive. They are working on it, but the snapshots sit on the same drive because they're snapshots in case you install a bad application that breaks your system to restore to. It's neat. It's a neat feature, but not for me. You know, the snapshots that you get with things like ButterFS and ZFS, that kind of stuff is neat, but those problems are already kind of being worked on in a different way. So many Linux operating systems now are starting to have these snapshots of their own. They're taking these like these generations that you get Nix or Geeks where you can just roll back to a previous working state. So once you're doing that, then you really don't need the file system to be taking snapshots for you. Yeah. And I think we're going to, I think every Linux distribution will eventually be doing that. It'll probably be another 10 years out, but they'll all have that kind of rollback feature with snapshots in generations. Yeah. The thing that I don't like about ButterFS myself is just my opinion. Please don't take it that I'm saying this in general. It's just, in my opinion, that ButterFS, to have snapshots, perfect snapshotting even to be implemented with Grubb the way it does, you have to install multiple things and you have to deal with multiple packages. And it's a little bit, for the average user, it's a little bit too much. It is. But for the nerds, it's okay. That's why the option is there. It's for the nerds. Extent 4 is for the beginners. I left that in for the beginners, so they know it very well. But the only thing that I try to do is tell those people, Extent 4 is becoming one of the slowest file systems to date, especially when you deal with a lot of files. But Extent 4 deals with small files better than XFS does, for example. XFS is the same thing as the XT4. When it comes to smaller files, it's very slow. If you have millions of small files, when you work on websites and stuff like that, yeah, it tends to be slower. But when it comes to large files like iTransfer, like ISOs, like movies, TV shows, XFS is flies compared to ButterFS and Extent 4. But that's the file system selection. It's only three. The user is free to select whatever they want. Well, those were just some of the things I noticed that stuck out with the installation. The standard Calamari's installer, for me, the installation was quick and smooth. When I rebooted... Here's another thing I forgot to mention. Since we're talking about the Calamari's installer, a lot of people ask me that question. A lot of longtime followers ask me the question. Why did I remove the package selection from Calamari's, the net installer from Calamari's? Well, the simple answer to that is something you just said, because without them, it's so simple, so breezy, just installed, no issues, even if you don't have internet, you can install the Xerolinix now. I did notice that it wasn't there, and I kind of appreciated that it wasn't there because especially for a distribution like this, and you, I don't know if you'll necessarily agree, but being that it's your GNOME edition, having people install a ton of, for example, Qt apps or some of the KDE apps that they use to... They might want to try some of the default GNOME suite of applications if they haven't before they start pulling in all of these other KDE and Qt dependencies for some of this stuff. Especially with GNOME, because today's subject is a GNOME edition, especially with GNOME, when you use Qt applications, they are not going to use... Most of them, not all of them, but most of them will not be using the system thing because the same issue with flatpacks. Qt apps are made for KDE and Qt-based desktop environments. I don't like the idea of cross-polluting frameworks, package kits or whatever they're called, but on KDE, we have no choice. On KDE, because there's a lot of applications, everyday applications that are GTK applications. There's a lot more GTK apps out there, that way, but with the GNOME desktop, I mean, honestly, there's really one Qt app that I just absolutely could not live without, which is... ...Kate in life. I got to have Kate in life, right? I got to have... All the same? Yeah. There's no other Fredo Bistorz video editor that I even want to look at these days. Yeah, like I say, there's a solution to every problem, but for seeming Qt apps, it's a simple thing, as simple as installing Qt5 CT and setting the theme to Kevantum, and all the Qt apps will be using the theme, but you have to install a Kevantum theme, so not a GTK theme. So yeah, but I don't like... In GNOME, people are less going to use Qt-based apps on GNOME than people on KDE using GTK apps. So GNOME, that's why I like GNOME. It grew on me, and that's the reason why I decided to create the... To add it to the family, but it's so stable. It doesn't break. I managed to break it because I was playing with Grubb, and I wasn't playing with... That was actually the next topic, was when I reboot after installation, one of the first things, obviously, you get, of course, is the bootloader. Yep. Looked a little different. I was like, oh, they themed. You got the little Grubb and blue letters, and then you've got a rounded gray box, and you've got a little Penguin icon next to zero G. And you would get the Windows icon next to, if you have a... If you do a boot with Windows... If you have multiple partitions? That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's... Staying within the essence of zero Linux, we customize. This is the whole... I started off with a tagline, an iCandy Lovers Wet Dream when I first started, but a lot of reviewers couldn't read that line because it was adult, R-rated or whatever. PG-13, maybe, I don't know about R-rated. But that's what zero Linux is all about. It's all about the iCandy, and with GNOME, I couldn't do that much because... There's only so much iCandy. I mean, there's iCandy with GNOME, but it was there to begin with. You didn't... Yeah. I'm not using any theme in the GNOME edition, just because, unfortunately, the way things stand with Live at Byta, not all GTK themes have been updated to support it, and the ones that have been updated are using hacks to patch and to make the theme work. I'm not saying they don't work. They do work, but you always encounter an issue here and there, a discrepancy here and there. I usually don't even play with the themings and big desktop environments like GNOME or even KDE, typically. I just go with whatever their default dark theme is. I don't even explore any other options. I just always go with whatever they shipped with, whatever was already there. I just can do that, but in GNOME edition, I had no other choice but to do that, and because I was targeting stability over customization in GNOME, and the stuff that I customized, of course, like you said before we started recording, it does look like a KDE fanboy created the... Oh, yeah. I'm going to show some screenshots, but yeah, when you first log in, you get your zero Linux welcome out, which we'll talk about in a second. Also, you've got the dock centered at the bottom. It's like, hey, this looks like a KDE fanboy slash Mac OS fanboy designed this with a top panel. You got the nice translucent dock and translucent panel, and it looks really good, but it doesn't look like a lot of other GNOME distributions, not out of the box. And of course, some of this is done with extension. As you already mentioned, you were using the dash-to-dot extension to move the dock. Blur my shell to do all this, but as you can see, there is no activities. I got rid of this, and this is, again, my own opinion, my own taste. Don't take it as I'm bashing on it. I just, to me, seeing this grid of icons taking up the full screen whenever I use GNOME, it's like a desktop environment trying to become an iPad to me. And I worked with Apple. I've seen iPads. I've used iPads. I never owned an iPad, but I wish I did because now I have comic books to read. Well, it would make sense for a touch device, but you're right. For what we're doing, just standard point and click with a mouse, and it doesn't make sense, it's wasted space having a full screen menu. But some people like it, and I'm not bashing on those people, they have all the right to like whatever they want. But for me, and since I'm the creator of this distribution, I was like, and I'm coming from KDE, and I'm a KDE fanboy, KDE show, call me whatever you want, but I will never leave KDE. But I replaced it with ARK menu. ARK menu is another extension that I love because it's the start menu done right. I wish ARK menu existed on KDE. That's how much I like it. ARK menu is one of the GNOME extensions that I often install on GNOME distributions. I want users to start using it. It exists. It's part of Xero Linux GNOME edition or Xero G. It's called extension manager. Going to the website and having to install an add-on to your Firefox or extension on your Chrome browser, just launch this application. It's in the dock. It will allow you, and it doesn't show you incompatible extensions to prevent you from installing extensions that will break your system. That's what I love about it. I noticed you also installed GNOME tweaks out of the box, which is something I don't understand why every distribution just doesn't install the tweak. You need that. It's almost essential to have that, but many don't. Going back to your Xero Linux welcome map, which I thought was just fantastically done, one of the neat things I immediately noticed was when I log in for the very first time before the installation, it had the option there was a button that said fix screen resolution VM or whatever. That's so nice because normally I can open a terminal and run the appropriate XRender command, but you've already got it where the button does it for me. I just hit the button, boom, goes to the correct resolution. That's smart. Because like you, I get frustrated having to run the XRender command or looking for the which display setting to set the resolution and whatnot. It's actually, it is the XRender command. I assumed it was. I didn't look at the code, but yes. Yeah, it's XRender space, sorry, dash S, 1980 to 20, and XRender dash DPI 96, because if you don't set the DPI, it's going to make everything huge, the text huge and everything. I decided to end the welcome app. Does look, people will notice it. It does look like the Manjaro. I was going to say it looked very inspired by the Manjaro world map, which is fantastically done to the manjaro team does a great job. It's a fork done for me by one of the distro maintainers of the CacheOS distro maintainers. It's written in Rust currently. But I would like to announce on your channel that you're rewriting it in Haskell. No, it's going to become an electron app. Because electron allows me, because the GUI that you see in the welcome app was created by me. You know, you're going to get a lot of electron hate, right? Well, the front end is going to be electron, but the back end is still going to be Rust, but there's a developer on Mastodon. Mastodon is so amazing. You find a lot of friendly people over there. I cannot say that. I wish I could say the same about Twitter, but he offered to lend a hand because it does need to do a little, a little bit of modification. So, yeah, it was great because you've got everything there as far as, you know, updating your system because obviously the very first thing, no matter what distribution you install for new to Linux users, very first thing you should do after an installation is update the system because the ISO probably didn't come out this morning, right? You always want to run the update. You've got installing your proprietary drivers. So your NVIDIA users obviously are going to need to hit that button right away. Yeah, everything about that welcome app, I thought was well done. I'll tell you why I wanted to create this app. It's all coming from my own frustrations with Linux. That's why I created the app. And I wanted it to be as friendly as it can be for new users. For example, update ArchMirrorList. Not everyone will know which command to type in terminal. Update the ArchMirrorList because... Well, you go to the wiki and read, right? That's what they say. Yeah, well, good luck having users read. But update the ArchMirrorList. I have that button in there. Why? Because sometimes you try to install a package from the Arch repositories. You get issues that the MirrorList is out of date or timeouts. And you won't be able to install the package. So when you click that button, it's going to fix it right up. For fix it, and you know, as well as I do, that I don't know for what reason. But we get a lot of key issues when we try to install packages. Updated keys and that was a script written by Eric that I modified a little bit. And I created the fixed Gnupig keys. That does it for you. And you're backing up and running and you can install whatever you want. Single button, simple. But installing the drivers. This is what I want to talk about. This is something that took a while to create because I'm an NVIDIA user. Yes. So I needed something to fix my problem. And does that button also give you like your proprietary Wi-Fi drivers or whatever? No, no, no. It's just strictly video. Yeah, just video drivers. That's I'll touch on what you just said about Wi-Fi in a second. But this is for strictly for video drivers, like for NVIDIA users. And mostly for NVIDIA users is really what it should be. NVIDIA on the button is really what it should be. I do have the ability to install ATI because, you know, some people have old ATI. Some people want the proprietary, yeah. Or some people have to have it, yeah. No, not proprietary. I'm talking about ATI, old ATI. You're the legacy cards. Legacy cards. Legacy cards. So and if you notice when you click either the free or the proprietary option one is the same. It will run LSPCI to show you which GPU you have attached to your system. Not everyone knows. Some people got their computers as a gift and they're not tax savvy. So they don't know what they got in their system. So by running the LSPCI command, it will tell you what GPU is attached in order for you to select the correct driver. So for NVIDIA, I got multiple options because you got the latest from 900 series and up. And everything else is legacy. So everything else is legacy, but all the drivers that Zero Linux provides are built by me, not the ones on the Arch repositories. They're TKG patched drivers that I built myself. There's the really series 525, I think, for 70 and 390. But they need to they need to run option one to know which graphic card is attached before they select which one to install for the for the open source drivers. Most people are going to if they don't know what graphics card they have, they're just going to be fine with the open source drivers anyway, because they're probably not the kind of user that would even care. But if they want to play a game, then they will have issues. Yeah, but they want to play a game. Yeah, they're going to have to have the proprietary NVIDIA driver for sure. Yeah. And for the open source free drivers, I just created that for the to differentiate between ATI and AMD GPU. That's it, because legacy ATI cards don't work with the AMD GPU driver. So you have to install the correct one. One other neat thing with your welcome app is the update system now, which I said everybody should do. I noticed it doesn't run like a standard like Pac-Man SYU. It runs top grade or can't run. It's got three options, three options. Stop being one of them and it's because of your video. You mentioned that no, not your video. I mean, it was part we talked about it on the patron cast, but it's top grade is a nuclear option. You know, you use the word. It shouldn't be automatically run, but I did it. And I was I was pleasantly surprised that it. I did it because of our discussion on the patron cast, but those patron cast can be useful. But when you update the system, update system, now you get the alacrity terminal that pops up and you've got three options. You got one, just update your standard arch packages, right? No, no big deal. Two is the flat arch. Well, yeah, first command is you are you are in the arch packages. Number two, update your flat packs. And number three, update everything no matter how it was installed. So if you grabbed it from any of the programming language specific package managers, it'll update firmware and literally that's why it's kind of dangerous. It's not dangerous. It's just you have to understand that it's going to update things that normally are not part of a standard update. And if you're fine with that, great. Yeah, that's why I put the warning on top in the big square on top and a nuke, a nuke in parentheses next to it. So just so people avoid it unless they know what they're doing. But the only reason I did that was because as we talked on the patron cast, some people might have docker containers. Those are huge. Other people have get repositories they don't want messed with. So, yes, that was my thing is sometimes, especially developers, they've got specific projects that are working in whatever language they're working in that are built by some of these programming language specific package managers, but they don't want that stuff updated until they they want it updated. Exactly. And I will let you I will let you know that top grade doesn't update app images. So your app images are safe. Well, app images, well, really, it flat packs as well snaps as well that they if they're able to be updated and the developer wants them updated, they should be able to update themselves. So really the user shouldn't have to manage that. Exactly. That's nice. It's there as an option. But but honestly, those package formats should take care of themselves. Yeah. And to go back to the drivers part and the Wi-Fi, why didn't I include Wi-Fi card drivers because the basic ones are already on the ISO. The general ones that are used by the majority of the people are already on the ISO because most people use either Intel or real tech. Right. But this is where the problem arises. There are some proprietary Intel and proprietary or niche. There's variations of these things out there. Yeah. So those are up to the user to figure out. There's a million packages on the drivers on the AUR. I'm not going to go hunting for a million different driver and include on my repository when it comes to Wi-Fi. So far I have had no one mentioned any issue related to Wi-Fi because those general ones are already on the ISO, like the RTL839 or whatever RTW839 date DKMS and honestly, everyone using Arch Linux or Arch Linux based distribution at some point, probably, you know, we say RTFM, but you probably want to read the networking page on the Arch Linux wiki. Yeah. Just to know how ethernet works. If you're using ethernet, just to know how Wi-Fi works because there are going to be times when you're going to need that information because at some point, at some point, things do break. I know we like to say, you know, things are stable and it is for the most part, but it's nice to have that information. Hopefully, you never need it, but. And users need to know how to figure out what a chip set their Wi-Fi card is using, not the brand that is stickered all over the adapter or whatever. You have to look deeper to understand which chip set it's using because on the AUR, if you want to find a driver on the AUR for your chip set, you have to know which chip set you are using. And the easiest way to do that is by running INC with the flag WA or NA, sorry, NA dash NA, it will give you your exact specific chip set and you go looking for that on the AUR and you can install the driver like that. And I do want to report one potential bug. I did notice I had seen as I rebooted after the installation started looking around at some of the programs installed on the system. You may or may not want this, but I probably wouldn't want new users to be able to just open G-Ported after the installation. G-Ported probably needs to go away because it's still there. I included it on the dock for so it can be accessed from the live environment in case they want to partition their drive on the live environment. But it's still there after a proper installation. Yeah, I can't separate because what you see is what you get. So what's on the live will end up on the if I remove it on live, it will no longer be there after the install. Yeah, I don't know if there could be like some post installation. I can do it scripted. But on GNOME, you didn't allow it. Yeah, because on GNOME, the dock is I mean, it's not that big of a deal. But especially people that are really new, they don't even know what G-Ported is. They may go around and yeah, delete their system. Right. It would be very, very dangerous for somebody to play with it. They didn't know what it was. With time, we'll see. And I wanted to talk about the post installation stuff that I added in. I added initialized snapper. This one is made for people who use snapper, but I don't know many that do. This button might disappear at some point. Switch to ZSH. Well, well, for people who love ZSH like I do. So included. I didn't notice you were using bash as the default user shell. Yeah, I don't touch the defaults. I don't touch the defaults when it comes to shell. It's up to the user to decide which shell they want. Restore the default desktop settings. This one is a really neat little feature. It's a script that I wrote. It's basically the base of it. The base idea comes from Eric, the scale command. That allows you to restore the ISO defaults. Right. But I took it a lot further than that. Way further than Eric ever did. It offered you two options because we now have two flavors of XeroLinux. It will offer you... It will ask you which flavor are you running, KDE or GNOME. If you select GNOME, for example, it will use decon command. To reset to the ISO defaults. If you are on KDE and select KDE, it's going to uninstall stuff, install stuff, move things around. It's more complex than... But it's a good way because a lot of people mess with their system and they might break their settings. This is a good way to get them back. And I noticed you had the deconf editor installed and ready to go on the ISO as well as the GUI. Because it's a powerful tool. I love it. It's not on the dock, so no people can mess with it directly. No, I had to search for it, but it's one of those things that people should think of it. Those Windows users out there, almost like a GUI registry editor or something. It's something you wouldn't want to go in and just start playing with. Same thing with decon, you've got a ton of little settings. You could go in there and tick on and off, but they're not... They're not the kind of settings like you'd go in like your GNOME settings manager and play with the appearance settings. No, these are more advanced stuff that really people shouldn't go in and tinker with unless they know what they're doing. Yeah, I do it via command line. It loads up my... Because with deconf, what people don't know, I'm going to be making a video soon about that, is deconf is not only a GUI tool. You can use it via the terminal as well. Sure. What the GUI tool is just a front end to those command lines. Yeah. Basically, what users can do is export, they install GNOME, they set it up exactly the way they want. They can export those settings to a single file. You can call it whatever you want. I call it 0dconf.conf. And I put it on my GitHub. That way, if I want to restore them for whatever reason, I just download that file and I run the deconf command to import the settings. So this is how I get... This is what I use to create what you see in 0g. So it's a powerful tool. I'm going to be making a video about that, how to reset, restore and import your GNOME settings because deconf can be used to reset to GNOME factory. So think about it as Fedora, the way you see Fedora, pure vanilla GNOME, by running... Or pure vanilla on Arch, even. I mean, it's the same baggage. I'm saying if you customize your desktop and you messed it up and you want to go back blank slate, you run deconf reset GNOME and it's back to vanilla. If you can do it on 0g and you will go back to vanilla, you undo all my settings and you get back... Because some people download the ISO, they mess with it, they don't like it, they don't like what I did to 0g. They want to use pure vanilla GNOME. They can just run the deconf reset command and they're back to vanilla GNOME. So it's a powerful tool. People need to learn more about it. Don't play with it unless you know what you're doing. I think another thing I noticed, well, there was a few things I noticed, but going through like some of the standard software that's installed, I think one of the things most people would immediately wonder about is you're using the GNOME software center, which makes sense because it is GNOME, but obviously Zero Linux has always used PMAC. Yeah. And then, of course, you know, Manjaro, and a lot of Arch-based distros that tends to be the best software center, the graphical software center, they all pretty much default to PMAC. So why GNOME software for Zero G? GNOME software is very limiting. I discovered it. That's why I was asking. Yeah, it's very limiting. Like if you open the GNOME software and you look for things like Paxseq or WTTR for the weather terminal app or whatever, you won't find any of that in there. Even though they're on my repositories and it's reading from my repositories, I've built those packages, but I won't find them. If you go to the command line, they're there, right? Yeah, of course. But I included GNOME software for one reason, because GNOME was meant to be stable. And if I offered PMAC, people are gonna start running PMAC and installing stuff willy-nilly until they break their system. I wanted the GNOME edition to be very stable to target stability and new users. They can do whatever they want. They're not gonna be able to break it very easily. But on the other hand, there's a little Pac-Man on the dock. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about the little Pac-Man icon on the bottom dot. What is that? That's Paxseq by one of the people on the Endeavor OS forums. It's a TUI that replaces PMAC because this will give you access to Arch packages as well as AUR packages. Because GNOME software does not give you access to the AUR. GNOME software is just pure repositories and nothing but pure repositories. And not even that. If you have packages on your pure repositories that are system packages, it will not show them. It will just show games or email clients or browsers, stuff like that, but it's not gonna show system packages. Like I can't go get a different Linux kernel, things like that from GNOME software. GNOME software never did. At least as far as I've seen, I could be wrong, but I don't use it. I use PMAC. I honestly don't really use it enough to say definitively that they've never done that. That's why included Paxseq. For the users who are advanced and who know what AUR packages entail, they can use Paxseq. But the GNOME software includes Flatpacks by default. It supports Flatpacks by default. I made sure of that because zero Linux is moving more and more towards Flatpacks. I have exactly 69 nice Flatpacks installed. So I'm using more Flatpacks every day. There's no Flatpacks installed out of the box on Xero. No, no, no. And I actually verified that too when I checked it. I leave that up to the user. Zero Linux is all about leaving the choices up to the user. It's just a UI. I only mentioned that just so you didn't get, because when you said you had 69 packages on the system, I wanted to make sure people knew that you didn't have 69 Flatpacks installed on Xero. I'm sorry, I needed to clarify that, yeah. No, I have 69 Flatpacks on my own system, KDE system, not on the GNOME edition. So don't worry about that. You don't like Flatpacks. You're free not to install them, but... You never have to use it, right? It's not like, you don't have to use it. It's there if you want it, but you don't have to use it. Yeah, I'm gonna skip all the rest because if you notice that zero G does not ship with Wayland enabled by default. I did notice that on the start menu, when you choose just standard GNOME, it's actually GNOME with Xorg and not GNOME with Wayland. Yeah, it says GNOME, but this time GNOME. Usually when you install GNOME, and when it says just GNOME, plain GNOME, it's GNOME Wayland by default. But since I disabled Wayland myself using GDM settings, so now GNOME means GNOME on X11. I decided that because I cannot use Wayland myself, efficiently at least, I decided, I'll leave the option to the user. They want to go bleeding edge, they have the choice. It's probably best for now too, because if you've got a lot of NVIDIA users, especially, you know, they're gonna have issues. And at least with Xorg, everybody should be okay. And if you really want to experiment with Wayland, hey, go for it, yeah. Yeah, just enable it. You make that choice, but you can't have people that have bad experiences out of the box. And a lot of NVIDIA users would have a bad experience out of the box. Here's the thing, a lot of my users are laptop users with hybrid. Yes, yeah. Hybrid has always been the bane of my existence. It's always been that way in Linux for some reason. And it's been that way for years, the hybrid graphics. I'm not gonna open that kind of worms. I just took the safer route and I told users, I don't have hybrids, I cannot provide support. Read the ArchWiki and figure it out when you're on. Just throw your hands up in the air and say, I can't read the ArchWiki. Yeah, and for the people who like Bash, to stick to Bash, I added, apply all my Bash, just to give it a flare, a little bit of a design flare. It's my settings, but you can customize into your heart's content. And people that want different default user shills, I mean, that is a simple, like five second install to install whatever shell you want. And I made it even easier. It's a button now. Right, that is important. That's some other software stuff. And you've got both the GNOME terminal and Alacrity. I'll explain Alacrity to you in a very simple way. Well, I know the explanation. Alacrity is the best terminal emulator on Linux. That's the explanation. This is one of the explanations, but since I'm a fan of yours, and you use Alacrity, so I decided to include Alacrity. Simple explanation. Now, I say Alacrity is the best terminal emulator. There will be some people that can't use it, because you mentioned legacy graphics cards. If you've got some really old graphics card, Alacrity will be a problem because it's GPU accelerated. Yeah, I know that's not something most people are gonna experience, but you're gonna have like 2% of your users are gonna open Alacrity and say, well, what's wrong with this thing? Well, GNOME terminals, what you're gonna have to use, just uninstall Alacrity. No, but I noticed the GPU acceleration only today. I was like, I'm telling it to be transparent. I set the opacity to 0.75 or whatever in the VM, but since the VM doesn't have GPU acceleration, it was becoming black. I'm like, oh yeah, Alacrity is GPU accelerated, that's why, but I included it just as an homage to you. If you wanna test why you should run Alacrity rather than GNOME terminal, run the tree command in both tree, basically read your entire file system and prints out a tree, run tree on root and get GNOME terminal, time it. So time tree slash, and it'll give you the time, it's gonna take like 30 seconds. You're gonna run time tree on root and Alacrity is gonna take like 10 seconds because the GPU acceleration helped it spit out all that output. And there's another thing I didn't mention in GNOME. One of the tweaks I did to GNOME was, you know how I keep mentioning that Nautilus, I hate Nautilus, I hate Nautilus? Because I went to the Nautilus settings, I had three settings. I was like, huh, I'm coming from Dolphin where settings will take you half a day to discover. Yeah, because you've gotta decide whether you wanna do double click and single click and then of course that's a big debate on it. Folders before files or files before folders, that's it, that's as far as it goes. And there's no right click open as admin, as root basically. I found a tweak on the AUR that brings that back to Nautilus. And there was other tweaks from the AUR I found. I dug a rabbit hole so deep when I started working on GNOME edition because I went to the AUR type Nautilus dash on the AUR because I wanted stuff to make Nautilus more like Dolphin. Well, not much I could find. I had only two things I could find, three things I could find was the right click open terminal because for some reason when they first released GNOME 43, there was, you could only do right click open console, the new console that they released with a C, not a K. So I needed something to replace console with. I added the something called open any terminal that allowed me to add a LACRETY to the right click context menu and open as admin. And the last one was share, right click, share. You have more patience than me because if there was one GNOME application that I would have to swap out with something better, I'd get rid of that file manager right away. I tried, it's tied. I don't know how tied it is to their desktop environment now. I know back in the GNOME two days, you actually could not uninstall Nautilus without uninstalling GNOME because Nautilus, the file manager, controlled the icon desktops. It still does. So it's, I don't know why they do that. I think they do that so people can't get rid of their horrible file manager. Yeah, the same thing goes for a Nemo and Cinnamon. And Cinnamon because it's a fork. It's a fork of the GNOME two Nautilus, yeah. But I tried a lot of file managers. I tried Thunar. Thunar has a lot of nice cool features and whatnot. I like it. It feels out of place on GNOME. Yeah, because it's still using older GTK libraries. Yeah, it feels out of place. I wanted to- It doesn't look quite right, but it's still a great file manager. They're all great. There's a lot of great ones except models, please. So, but because it breaks the immersion in GNOME, I'm sort of a perfectionist. If it breaks the immersion, it's not consistent, it's out. Yeah, most people probably wouldn't care. It's only the power users that hang out in a file manager anyway. And they're gonna be the ones, they know enough, they'll go get a different file manager. Yeah, they can. But for me to ship something consistent, I kept Nautilus and I tweaked it the way I want with the options that I use on a day-to-day basis using impactors from the AUR. But that's it. That's GNOME edition. It's not very much customized. It's still early days, right? Are you considering this a beta or is it ready for prime time? Oh, now we get into the nitty-gritty of the whole discussion. It is ready, people can build it for free. Why do I say for free? Because if you want me to put in the time and build you an up-to-date ISO, I kind of put it in following what we talked about in the previous video, it's a donation-based project now. If you want to download the ISO you've already built, they have to pay for it. Yeah. And if they want it for free, of course it's free and open source software, meaning everything's out there available for you. If you wanna go build your own ISO, you can. But the work you put in to build the ISO, you're gonna get paid for it, right? Well, I even created a video guide on how to build it, it's three easy steps. You run one command to add, no, first you add the repo to your pacman.com. It has to be on Arch, and not all Arch distros. Some Arch distros, for some reason Garuda, I have to add Garuda to the list of unsupported because I had a user on Garuda that wasn't able to build it for whatever reason, but Garuda have so many tweaks, God knows what they have. There's Garuda, Artix, Mancharo, in CacheOS, you cannot use to build the ISO. And Artix, I can tell you the problem is it's not SystemD. It's not SystemD, and they don't use pure Arch repositories. CacheOS, they use some weird architecture of V3 of Arch repositories. Mancharo, don't use plain, don't use... And honestly, no one really should probably go about building the ISO themselves, unless you just wanna do it for fun. If you're doing this to save a couple of bucks, it's not worth your time. Just pay this man for his ISO. Thanks, dude. But I encourage people to build it for free sometimes because I want them to get to the nitty gritty of how to use Arch. And people tell me, I don't wanna have to install Arch just to build your ISO. Well, you either can pay me to build the ISO or you can just download any Arch-based distro except the ones I listed. Oh, that was KOS. And honestly, installing Arch is like the... You don't need to install it, just boot into a live environment with one that gives you enough cow size. But just installing Arch to the point where you get to the command line, it's like a 10 minute process. Like if you're complaining that that's a problem, really pay this man for his ISO because you don't have time for anything else. You can just install a pure Arch ISO, you can just download it from their website, spin it up, install it in what? 15, 20 seconds because it doesn't install anything. I can install a base Arch without Xorg or anything without a desktop. You don't have anything, just TUI. Yeah, I mean, I can do a base install of Arch without even reading the wiki in like 10 minutes. Like that's not even a hard... Because of the Arch install script. Well, I mean, I just run the commands, but yeah, with the Arch install script now, you don't even have to do that. You just... In two minutes. There you go. So you can do that and just edit your pacman.com to have the repository where the tool that we... Okay. We now use a tool that is homemade. It's homemade by one of the team members of XeroLinux, KADISA. It does more than build XeroLinux. He added the ability to build the latest Arch ISO just by running... The tool is called ABS, by the way. Arch ISO build script. Because you can build the latest Arch ISO by running abs-v, vanilla Arch. It will pull down the latest packages and give you the latest and greatest Arch ISO. Yeah, basically. Not XeroLinux, just Arch ISO. Oh, so it's basically the same way the Arch guys are building their ISO every month or whatever schedule they're on. It just builds that ISO for you. And I built it on my machine. It took me exactly three minutes to build the ISO. You get the latest and greatest. Instead of downloading it, they uploaded it on the first. You downloaded it in the middle of the month. You get outdated packages. You say it took three minutes. Of course, the Arch ISO is not like everybody else's ISO because the Arch ISO is very, very minimal, right? There's not much on that thing. It's 800 megabytes. Yeah, it's really small. So I'm like, ABS allows you to do that, but it allows you to build XeroLinux. So you can build either the KDE version or the Nome Edition or Arch ISO. You got, it builds three ISOs. So it's a neat little tool. I want, I'm thinking of telling, giving him permission to put it on the AUR so more people do it. Is there a download link on the website? For the tool? No, for the, for zero G. No, for zero G, no. There isn't yet. If you go on the website, I cannot see what you're showing the users, but if you go on the website, there's a gift box and a bubble that says something. A purple gift box that says, we have a gift. Let's see. Purple gift box. Ah, I see it. And in the bubble it says, we have a gift. So when you click, where it says click here, it's not obvious because it was hidden. Because on Christmas day, we made it hidden and they had to hunt for the treasure. We couldn't make it obvious. We couldn't make the link obvious. So, but when they click on the click here, they're gonna get a pop-up that explains everything. It explains why it's behind a paywall, a donation wall, the ISO is behind a donation wall. And it explains, and it links them to the build if they want to get it for free because not everyone can donate. If they can't donate and they wanna build it for free, they can, the code is there. They just have to follow the video as three easy steps. Even beginners were able to build it on my server. They were like, I'm coming from Ubuntu. I didn't ever build an ISO in my life but following your guide was super easy. It takes a while on lower end system and slower internet speeds. But on my system, it takes five minutes to build. So, and internet connection is really bad. And if they wanna pay for it, all they have to do is click on the donate button. Yeah, on the main page, there's a donate button that explains my situation in Lebanon and then tells them about the, because as we talked in the other video, I am in a bad situation in my country. So, I need to monetize somehow. And this is the first step. Nom addition will become free for everyone just like the KDE version and it will join the KDE version. But until I figure out my bearings on how to monetize better, once I am able to monetize on YouTube, have merchandise and stuff like that, only then will the nom addition become the other side of the coin for free like everyone can have access to the ISO. Just no one thing. I want the users to know one thing that getting the ISO is getting you outdated packages. I'm not building the ISO every time I send it to someone. It's an ISO that already has been uploaded and it's sitting there, I just share the link. So, by building it, you will get the latest packages in and no need to update after installing. Other than that, we need to monetize our projects. I need to monetize my projects better. I'm still working on it because Lebanon is not an easy country to get money into. But so far, I have someone helping me to understand things and I'm not a guy who understands what do you call it, marketing and stuff like that. My thing is technology. I don't know what marketing and how marketing works. But basically, this is zero G. It's very simple. It was built with the beginner user in mind, stability. Not a lot of things were customized except making it look a little bit like KDE because I am a KDE guy and it's always gonna trickle down to everything I work on. Are you still looking for contributors to the project as far as people helping you with code or artwork, things like that? I am. I got someone on MasterDone like I told you earlier for the welcome tool who's gonna be helping me turn it into an Electron slash Rust app. I can't wait for the Electron app. That's gonna be awesome. It looks awesome. He showed me screenshots of what he's working on. It's still behind the scenes thing. I cannot share right now because it's not the final look. But from what I'm seeing, he's doing an amazing job because I don't know if you noticed in the current welcome app, if you click a button to do something, the welcome app itself becomes unresponsive. You cannot resize it, you cannot click buttons. This is an issue I think the way it was built by the developer. And it has another issue where if you click the application installer button, you go to flatbacks. You install a flatback. It's done installing the flatback. You close the terminal. It will not show you that this application has been installed, it will not keep the check mark. It will get rid of the check mark. Whereas if you install regular packages, once you install it, it's gonna keep the check mark. It's gonna detect that this package is installed. So there's a lot of issues on the back end that we're going to be working on. GTK development frustrates the hell out of me. The little bit I've played around with, making my own little GTK stuff. Like there's so many quirks to, like it's so hard to get like the simplest things to work. Yeah. People keep asking me why is it taking so long to create this, to create that? You think we are printers, we print code? Well, now we can rely on chat GPT, but you know, I can write the same code and make something at the command line that does anything like instantly. But when you, with GTK, because you're having to create this user experience and having to think about a UI and it's a whole different level of complexity on top of what you would already be doing with something like a terminal application, for example. Yeah. So, I'm like, okay, we need to make it simpler. And the way I did that with the current tool was I turned everything into a bash script. Everything in the back end is a bash script. And I think pretty much everything that's kind of simple should just bash. I love bash. Because that just makes sense. Yeah, it's easy and you can copy commands from. Anybody can understand it. Anybody can edit it or bug fix for you. Everybody knows bash scripting on Linux, right? Because that's always, bash is always there. And if you Google how to do this in bash, you're always gonna get the exact command. And now with chat GPT, this chat GPT bot thing, you can ask it to create a bash script. Yeah, just write me a bash script. Yeah, you just copy and paste the code and you're done. You created your script. It's easy to understand and that's how I love it. That's why the zero hello tool runs only bash scripts on the back end. I love it. I have control. I can modify the script. I don't need to modify the tool. I just modify the script and it's done. But yeah, zero G is going to appeal to a lot of beginner users. I can't wait to see what it becomes in the future. Because I think it's not gonna become anything. Here's the thing you just touched on another thing. This is it. This is zero G. It's not gonna get any better than this. It took me three months of testing and decision-making, mostly decision-making. Which extensions do I add? Which ones don't I add and stuff like that. But otherwise making it took only a week or two because I'm a maintainer of a distro. I know which packages to remove and which packages to add. Yeah, we've already done all of that. This is just the GNOME stuff that you added. I just wanted to know which, and in the next release, when GNOME 44 comes around in March, I think March 23rd or something, and Pop Shell gets updated to work on GNOME 44. I'm gonna be including Pop Shell because a lot of users love tiling their windows on them. Yes, they do. So I'm like, I'll include it, no problem. But that's the only thing that's gonna be added to 0G, but that's it. It's going to remain the same. I'll be just tweaking it a little bit like tweaking a few settings here and there. And that's it. It's gonna look the same. It's not gonna change. It's, that's it. It's done. It has reached its potential. Because touching GNOME more than I already did will just break it. Right. So as long as it works, don't mess with it. Exactly, if it ain't broke. But it don't break. Hey, bro, don't fix it, right? Yeah, so I think it's done. So, and I would like, I'm happy to announce that so is the KDE Edition. The KDE Edition now will only be receiving tweaks here and there and updating Calamaris every time because there's a new version, major version of Calamaris coming soon, version 3.3. You're not gonna break people's workflow one day with either edition where all of a sudden everything is different. Right. Alex, I'll say one thing. I've been using Manjaro on my HTPC for a long time. But I have to, I am set to say I have to switch to Windows because HDR is not supported on Linux yet. So I watch a lot of HDR. But what I love about Manjaro is I only update once every three months. I don't use the AUR with Manjaro because I know I don't want to break Manjaro. So every time I update, nothing happens. It updates and it stills, it doesn't break. So I decided to do with zero Linux the same thing. So now even users who installed it last month or the month before or the previous release, if I release one in March because I release on a quarterly basis, but once I release in March, the ISO I'm going to release in March, they just all they need to do is run update in their terminal and they're going to get everything I updated, no need to reinstall fresh. So the new ISOs are only for new users, not for current users. So this is how zero Linux will forever remain. I've done my work, I have served my sentence as they say. But now the work is just waiting for April to get a hybrid laptop so I can provide more hybrid support. But, and the tool will be updated, of course, as I said, but that's it. I'm happy to say that zero Linux is complete. I was going to mess around with window managers, but then decided I'll do it for myself. I'm not gonna do it. We'll get the Xmonad edition at some point. We're gonna get Xmonad, we're gonna get Qtile, we're gonna get awesome for me, but for everybody else, they have to learn how to build their own. But yeah. That was pretty much all I had on zero G. Any final thoughts? Yeah, it's a very simple edition for the users. Any contact information you want to disclose? Obviously I'm gonna link to the website and all of that. I have my Patreon, my fundraiser, of course. I prefer people donate to my fundraiser rather than Patreon for now because Patreon is kind of a thing that I need to figure out the tiers, what to offer for the tiers, because if I offer the same thing for every tier, it's not gonna be beneficial. People are gonna say, hey, we're not getting anything extra, so why would we pay on a monthly basis? For now, I prefer people donate to my fundraiser. It helps get the money faster, and they charge less on Patreon charges more. But yeah, there's my fundraiser. They can find me on Mastodon. I left Twitter. I am one of the Twitter quitters. I'm only on Fostodon and YouTube, and of course Discord. Yeah, I'll link to your. Discord. Yeah, I'll link to your YouTube as well, yep. Yeah, I'll send you all the details. Yeah, just send me an email with it, and I'll pass it along to the viewers. And if they want the ISO, I just need to clarify one thing. If they want the ISO, if they donate and want the ISO, they can message me on fundraiser, send me a private message, contact, let me tell you exactly what the word says, contact campaign. It says contact campaign. It will allow them to private message me so I can reply back to them, because I cannot private message a donate, someone who donates directly. They have to message me first. So they tell me, I would like your zero G, I will reply back with a link to download the ISO. Otherwise they can build it directly from GitHub. The video is embedded on GitHub. So they just click and follow the video guide and they have themselves a neat ISO. And everything, yeah, they have to read the thread of course, that I will update constantly on my forum to see whatever I, because I'm very transparent. If they follow me on mastodon or postodon, they will see everything, I'm very transparent. Everything I update in the ISO, I post about it. And I ask users what would they want and it's a give and take kind of thing. Thank you for this, hopefully everyone enjoys zero G. Everyone enjoys zero G. I think they will. I know the couple of hours I spent playing with it, I was pretty impressed with it. So I think fans of zero Linux that were wanting a GNOME experience rather than a KDE experience, we'll definitely want to check it out. Thanks for hanging out with me and let's do this again sometime. All right. And peace out and love. Peace. Keep the love coming to Linux. That's what he said. All right.