 In today's video, I'm going to be taking a quick first look at the recently released Manjaro 21.0 codenamed Ornera. And Manjaro has three main editions. They have GNOME, KDE Plasma, and XFCE. Today I'm going to be taking a look at their XFCE edition. Manjaro's always been one of the best arch Linux based distributions out there. Manjaro's probably the best arch based distribution as far as for people new to Linux. Like if you're coming from Windows over to Linux and you're even remotely thinking about trying an arch based distribution, Manjaro is probably a good starting point because Manjaro really tries to remove a lot of the pain points associated with running something like main line arch. So I've already downloaded the ISO for 21.0, the XFCE edition. The ISO was 2.4 gigs in size, so a pretty big ISO. So I expect there's probably going to be a ton of programs already pre-installed for us here. So I'm going to go ahead and switch over to the desktop and I'm going to run through a quick installation of 21.0 here inside Vert Manager. So here at the start, we have settings for we can change our time, key table, language. We can boot with open source drivers, boot with proprietary drivers, and help and MIM test. So I'm going to go ahead and boot with open source drivers, which should be fine here in this VM. If I was doing this on physical hardware, booting with proprietary drivers is probably the choice I would typically do because sometimes you're going to have video cards and Wi-Fi chips that need proprietary drivers, unfortunately. And now that we're in the live desktop environment, the first thing I want to do is launch the installer because really I'm going to install it first before I take a look at it. So let's go ahead and open. This is the Calamari installer. And the first thing the installer asks us is our language and it has correctly chosen American English for me. So I'm just going to click next location. It has chosen the Eastern time zone here in the US. I'm actually in the Central time zone, so I'm going to change that. Then click next keyboard. It has selected English US. That is correct for me. So I will click next. We have the choice of erasing the disk and giving Manjaro the entire 25 gigs of the virtual hard drive I created for this virtual machine. That's what I'm going to choose. If I wanted to, I could create a swap or a swap partition or a swap file. I'm actually going to do, you know what, let's do the swap file because it really doesn't waste any space. A swap partition is kind of wasted space and a small VM. I don't like doing those, but I don't mind creating a swap file. And of course, if you had something more exotic to do with your partitioning, you could choose manual partitioning and create the partitions yourself. I'm going to go ahead and click next though and let's create our username and our password. So I'm going to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons. And that's for our DT user. We can also set a password for the administrator account, the root user, or I could just click here that says use the same password for the administrator account. So the password for the DT user and the password for our sudo user are going to be the same if I have this ticked on. And that's what I want. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. And then we have our summary screen, location looks good, keyboard looks good, partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click install and it's going to warn us that it's about to format our hard drive and write to the disk. Of course, we're in a virtual machine, so there's really nothing to be worried about in my case. If you were doing this on a physical machine, you would have to make sure that you actually do want to format that drive and install a new operating system. I'm going to let this installation run for a few minutes. Typically, this portion of the install process takes about five to 10 minutes. I'll be back once the installer has completed and the installation has completed that really only took about three or four minutes at the most. Now in the Calamaris installer, what you need to do to actually complete the installation, you do have to click restart now here. If you were doing this on physical hardware, this is where you would unplug the USB key from your computer here in this VM. It's going to take care of that for me, I think. I think it'll detach the ISO itself and yeah, it looks like it's booting up just fine here. Yeah. And then we get our login screen. Let me make this VM full screen and let's go ahead and log in to our CFCE desktop environment. And the first thing I'm going to want to do once I get in here is just for purposes of taking a look at this. I'm going to go ahead and search for a terminal because the first thing I want to do is actually change the screen resolution. So I'm going to run a Xrander command Xrander. If I don't give it any flags, it will actually give us a list of possible screen resolutions that are available on our system. So I'm going to copy 1920 by 1080 and then I'm going to run this command Xrander dash S and then paste 1920 by 1080. And now we have a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution, which is much more appropriate for the monitor I'm recording here. Now Manjaro 21.0 was released about two days ago, I would say, and being a rolling release being based on Arch, there's already some updates. I've already got this update application popping up and letting me know that apparently there are upgrades available for Firefox, Thunderbird and the Manjaro Linux systems. I guess that's one of the scripts that comes with Manjaro. I typically would apply these because these are probably important updates, especially to your browser and your email client. They're probably important security updates. But for not wasting time on this video, I'm going to decline the update for now and let's get back into the Manjaro Hello program. So this is our welcome screen and these kinds of Hello programs are really nice for new users who you don't know anything about Manjaro, maybe you don't know anything about Linux. And it gives you a lot of options here on how to quickly get some information. For example, documentation, you have a read me here, if I clicked on it, then you get actually that information displayed right here in the Hello program here. That just tells you a little bit about the project. How do I go back? Can I go back? There's no forward or back button, so I'm not sure we could change the language. There's the home button. I'm not used to using things with title bars. I guess it's because all my years using tiling window managers. I don't know why I didn't see the home there. So that was read me. We have release info, which would, of course, tell us about the current release. We have the wiki and that would probably open a web browser to Manjaro's wiki, I would assume. And that's exactly what it does. And the Manjaro wiki is actually not bad. They've got some good documentation. And of course, being an ArchBase Linux distribution, you can always go to the Arch wiki as well. Almost everything in the Arch wiki also applies to Manjaro. You also have links to support forms, how to discover software. You have links to the mailing list, how to get involved with Manjaro, how to help out with development and how to donate to the project. And you also have an applications button. If I click that, that's a very nice list of all the applications, I guess, that are these applications that are actually installed. Or no, not all of these are installed. These are applications that are available. Firefox is in bold. So it's letting us know Firefox is the browser that is installed right now. But we could install Vivaldi or Chromium or Midori or Opera. And of course, there's dozens of other browsers as well. These are just some of the more popular ones that they're going ahead and letting us know about. I'm not going to choose to install any extra software at the moment. The other thing is I don't want to always see the startup program every time I log into XFCE. So I'm going to click that slider here. That way it no longer automatically starts every time I log in. I really don't need to see that screen ever again. And for some reason I need to come back to it. I could always just open the menu system and type the word hello. And Manjaro hello is the name of the program. Now very quickly, I do want to go through the menu system here and show you the applications that are installed out of the box here. So I'm going to go to the accessories category. And under accessories, we have application finder, which is almost like another menu. It's a window that pops up that shows you all the programs that are already installed and let you search for them. That I guess is useful if for some reason you didn't have a panel with a menu. Like you can remove this panel if you really wanted to. But for most people, I think to search for your programs, you're just going to use this menu system here anyway. So I'm not sure if the application finder program is that useful to be honest. There's a bulk rename tool available for us as well. Catfish file search allows you to search your file system. So enter your query above to find the files or click the icon for more options. So what this is is say you're searching for a file somewhere on your system. You know it contains some kind of string, a string of characters, but you're not sure what directory that file actually exists in. You could do a search for it. So that is catfish search. Also under accessories, we have our clipboard manager, which I think is already active because I have the little clip icon down here. So let me actually click that. And you can see 1920 by 1080 is in my clipboard. Let me move my head so you guys can see this. This is really interesting. Say 1920 by 1080. Remember I copied that in the terminal. That string 1920 by 1080 is still sitting in my clipboard. The clipboard, by the way, is clipman settings. Or actually it's just called clipman, but we can adjust the settings here with clipman settings. And going back to the menu to accessories, we have in-grampa, which is a archive manager. This is where you zip and unzip and things like that. We have calculator. Calculator is actually a really nice GTK-based calculator. I always install a calculator on my systems, and typically I install either calculator or another program called Calculate, which begins with a Q, Calculate-GTK. You know they're really good GTK-based calculator, but Calculator has everything you need. You can change to scientific mode, and it's got all the standard functions that you would expect a calculator to have. Also under the accessories category, we have GTK-Hash, we have HP Device Manager, of course that's for your Hewlett Packard printers. We have Light DM, GTK Plus Greeter Settings. So the Light DM, GTK Greeter is when you log in and you have to type your username and password to log into your desktop environment. That is the Light DM Display Manager there, and you can edit that in some ways. I mean, you can change the background, you can change the appearance a little bit. I typically don't play much with Light DM as far as trying to tweak it and customize it, because honestly, how often do you see your Display Manager? Typically when I log in to my computer, I rarely reboot. I can go days at a time without rebooting my machine. So I don't see my login manager that much for me to worry about that, but for those of you that really like pricing your systems, you know, playing with some of the customization options for Light DM is probably something you will love. Now, let me resize this menu so I can actually see more of the descriptions and everything. Also under accessories, we had our Manjaro User Guide, just more documentation about how to use Manjaro. We have Mousepad, which is the plain text editor for the XFCE desktop environment. It's pretty standard. It's just a plain text editor. There's really no bells and whistles to it. It kinda is similar to Windows Notepad, right? In Windows Notepad, there's not much to it. It's just a plain text editor. Mousepad is very similar. We have our Notes app here. If I click on Notes, we're gonna have a icon that will appear down here in the sys tray, and of course we could leave a note like this is a note. Of course I misspelled it, but it doesn't matter. Close that window. I could always come back down here and get that note again by clicking on the little note icon here in the sys tray. Also under accessories, we have our screenshot utility. We have sensor viewers. Show all sensor values. I'm assuming this would be widgets to display things like your CPU temperature and things like that. Yeah, that's what that is. And then continuing on, more in the accessories category. We have software token tools here. We have our task manager. So this will be a graphical task manager that'll show us how much CPU and RAM we're using. Well, that is blinding white. Well, you know what? I'll check CPU and MIM usage in a better application later because man, that hurt to even look at that thing. They really should add a dark mode to that. Also we have our Thunar file manager. Thunar is the default file manager for the XFCE desktop environment. It's actually a really nice file manager. Also under accessories, we have XF burn, which is our CD and DVD burning application for the XFCE desktop environment. We do have a games category. We have the steam installer and that's it. Under graphics, we have G color two, which is choose colors from a palette or a screen. So it's like a color picker, I'm assuming. Let me click on it and see. Yeah, it's really not much to that utility. But also under graphics, we do have a really neat utility called the GNU image manipulation program or GIMP. GIMP is actually just a fantastic program. GIMP is the program that I use to create all the artwork for my YouTube channel. Everything you guys see as far as thumbnails and channel headers and all of that I create using GIMP. We have our internet category. And under internet, there's actually not much in here. We have the Avahi server. We have Firefox as our browser. We've already taken a look at that. HexChat is our IRC client. Most people these days don't use IRC chat. It's kind of something that was really popular 25, 30 years ago. Not too many people use IRC now. But if I click the connect button, one neat thing that a lot of distributions do these days is to help people that maybe don't know how to use IRC. If you just click the connect button, it automatically connects typically to your distribution support channel. But it looks like that's not the case here. Let me move this out of the way. What is it trying to join? Is it trying to join the HexChat channel? I think so. You know what I was hoping would happen is that this would automatically connect us to the Manjaro channel for Manjaro support. Because again, Manjaro is kind of aimed for newer to Linux users. At least it kind of attracts that crowd. And for those people having a quick and easy way to get support I think is a nice touch. Getting back into the menu system under internet, we also had Pigeon Internet Messenger. Now that is a program probably almost no one has a use for anymore. Nobody uses instant messaging chat clients. So this would be like the old AOL Messenger and ICQ and things like that. Younger people probably don't even remember any of those programs. But nobody really uses instant messaging anymore. We have Thunderbird of course as our email client. Under multimedia, we have Audacious as our audio player. Now that is a really interesting choice there. So Audacious is actually really nice. You can actually theme it to look however you want. It's a pretty powerful program. I've played with Audacious a little bit in the past. I don't have any audio of course to play here in the VM. Also under multimedia, we have post audio volume control. We have Qt V4L2. So that's video for Linux. And that would be, I sometimes use V4L2 if I need to play with settings for like my webcam and things like that. We have VLC media player. So this would be probably what you would use for playing your videos here in Manjaro. So that is VLC. So Audacious for your audio, VLC for your video. Although really you could use VLC for both audio and video if you wanted to. XF Burn is also here once again. Under Office, there are no office programs installed. So we have Dictionary and QPDF View. So we can view our PDFs. But I'm surprised they didn't install LibreOffice out of the box. That's a weird choice because they have so many other programs installed. You would think they would have went ahead and installed the LibreOffice suite because I think most desktop users probably would have a use for LibreOffice. There's a other category. It looks like some more HB stuff, a Hewlett Packard stuff. It's probably scanning for devices that are plugged in. I'm assuming is what that script would do. We have a Settings category. And the Settings category is all of your standard like desktop settings where you can change your GTK theme or your screen resolution. Like there's gotta be a graphical way to change screen resolution, even though I did it in the terminal earlier with the XRender command. There is a display program here that would have allowed me to do the exact same thing I did in the terminal. This is just a graphical front end to the XRender program. And if I get back into the menu system and just start typing settings, there is a Settings Manager. And the Settings Manager will list all the settings kinds of programs. So you can either get all of your settings programs by clicking on the Settings category in this menu and they display here or just launch the Settings Manager program. And you have them all here as well. You can think of the Settings Manager as kind of like the control panel in Windows, right? It's the place you go to change all of your settings for everything. There's a System category here. And under System we have Add, Remove Software. Now I'm assuming that's gonna be our graphical way of installing and removing applications. Now, if you want to, of course you can add and remove software and update your system in the terminal. That's probably what most Linux users probably eventually start doing just because many times it's easier than navigating these graphical programs. But if you wanted to, you could go in here and browse for programs to install. For example, it looks like I could install Arduino or Blender or Inkscape, LibreOffice is here. I mentioned LibreOffice. If I wanted to, I can install LibreOffice by clicking this button. So it makes it really easy. You can also update the system. You can see I just clicked the Updates program and it's telling me I've got three updates. I click Apply and it would update the system for me. And there's also an Installed button here. This lets me know all the programs that are currently installed. And if I wanted to, I could remove them. For example, if I didn't need HexChat for any reason, I could just click the Remove button and it would automatically remove HexChat from the system. Now one of the things that's interesting looking at this is Htop is installed out of the box. And that's really the other program I wanted to look at was Htop because that's what I'm gonna check out, System Resource Usage In. So let's see if I can zoom in in this terminal. And let's check out Htop. Now I've opened a ton of programs here in the last 10, 15 minutes. So this may be a little higher than what it should be, like on a cold boot, but let's check out CPU usage. Three, 4%, it's about normal. We're not doing much at the moment. And then Memory Usage. 627 megs of the four gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's actually pretty respectable. I could easily cut that in half by killing all these programs that are running down in the SysTray. So I just wanted to see what it was with a few programs running because I'm gonna hit Q to quit out of Htop. Now what I'm gonna do, let's get rid of our notes. Let's get rid of the package manager that's also checking for updates. That really sucks up CPU especially. Let's get rid of the clipboard. You know, let's just get rid of those three things and then run Htop. Let's see if there's an actual difference. Now we're under 600 megs, 589. I actually thought it would drop more. It actually only saved us about 50 megs. But again, I still have, it looks like I have the network manager running. I'm gonna leave that. I have volume control down here. I could spend some time and try to de-bloat the system a little bit, but to be honest, 600 megs of RAM is pretty lightweight. I mean, that's way lighter than your proprietary operating systems like Windows or Mac. And to be honest, 600 megs is lighter than most Linux desktop environments. GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, they're all typically one gig or more on a cold boot even without opening a bunch of programs and having a bunch of stuff sitting in the SysTrace. So XFCE is really light. The other thing, let's check what our kernel is. I'm gonna do a uname space dash R to get our kernel version. And it's 5.10.23, so a very recent kernel. The other thing I wanna check is the number of packages installed. Now on my system, I run an ArchBase system. I run Arco Linux on my main production machine and I have a ton of stuff installed on my system. I have like 2,100 packages on my system. It's very heavily bloated, but let's see how bloated Manjaro 21.0 XFC is. So I'm gonna run this command, Pacman space dash capital Q. And if I did that, it will list out all the programs that are installed currently. And now I'm gonna take that same list, Pacman dash capital Q, and I'm gonna pipe it into WC, which is the word count program, and then give it the dash L flag for lines. So instead of a word count, what I really want is a line count 1057. So that's how many lines were in the output from that previous command, which means that's how many programs are installed on the system currently 1057. That's actually pretty slim. Like that's not bloated at all, in my opinion. I'm gonna go ahead and close out the terminal. The last thing I wanna do is, I typically do like to check out like the wallpapers that ship with these releases. So if I go to the wallpaper program here, and some of these wallpapers I think I've seen before, they've probably been available in previous versions of Manjaro, but it does look, they are some gorgeous wallpapers, for example. This wallpaper here looks pretty nice. Now, we are using a dark panel, kind of a dark theme. So I'd probably want a lighter wallpaper. That's nice. That would work as well. Let's see if I can get something really light. Something, oh, oh, black and white works really nice with dark GTK themes. But of course, it wouldn't be Manjaro without throwing in some green as well. That's kind of a weird abstract art. Actually, that one there. You know, I think that one would grow on me. I think I'll leave that one for now. So that was just a very quick look at the recently released Manjaro 21.0. Again, they have three main additions, GNOME, KDE Plasma, and of course, XFCE. They also have like a dozen different community additions. So yeah, they pretty much cover all the popular desktop environments and many of the popular standalone window managers. I know they do an i3, an awesome window manager. I think they do a BSPWM as well. I think they do an open box edition. Of course, you're gonna find things like Matei and LXQ'd as well. So, they've got all the bases covered if XFCE is not the desktop that you wanna run. All in all, Manjaro's always been one of my favorite arch-based Linux distributions. It's always well done. It always looks really nice, professionally done, very clean, very polished. And the reason I picked their XFCE edition to take a look at today is because I've always thought that they do XFCE better than most other XFCE distributions. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Absi, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Archfactor for 30, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Dilly, Daly, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Scott, Wes, Willie. I don't know, I may have messed up those names, but those guys, they're awesome. Those are 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. This ever-growing list of names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to help my work, please consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. When is Manjaro gonna make an X-Monad edition?