 I've gotten a lot of requests over the last few months to take a look at a distribution called Farron OS. So what I thought to do today is actually take a look at it. Now, the one thing I have to say from my brief impressions of it so far is that it's very weird. It's not the weirdest distribution I've ever taken a look at. That's for sure. But it is very weird. And I think as we go through this, you'll see what I mean. So let's just go ahead and jump right into this. Okay, so when you first boot up into the live environment, this is what you get a tour or a welcome application is not all that uncommon when you first boot into a live environment. So I wasn't surprised to see this. But what I was surprised was when we actually go through this, is that it leads you to the installer, which is kind of cool. And it made me wonder the first time I went through this, what happens when you've already installed it? And I'll show you what happens then once you've actually installed it. So let's just go through this real quick. It's just we got a pretty welcome screen and then we start tour. And then it detects if you're running in a virtual machine, which I am. And it tells you that you they switch to X render instead of using OpenGL, which is pretty much normal for a VM, which is pretty much normal because OpenGL does not work well in virtual machines at all. And that's just basically the compositor, which draws the windows on the screen. So I'm not actually on virtual box or VM where so I can't do either of those things. I'm an advert manager, but that's not a big deal. So I'll just go ahead and click next off from this. And this is an interesting thing. Now, what's weird is that the welcome screen is definitely aware that it hasn't been installed yet. And you'll see that here in a minute, but it still allows you to do this part here, it shows you this on the way to leading to the installer. Now you can just click the install button up here, which would get you to the Calamaries installer, which we'll see in a minute. But for most new users, they're going to go through the tour right away, right? And that they offer you to transfer files from a backup from windows is what they're saying, but you can do this from any place at all. The it's obviously not a great idea because if people transferred their backup now, when they went to install it, all that data would have to be transferred over again. So it's weird because the welcome app is aware that this is not installed yet. Like we know that it is because if we click next here, again, we'll see install fair and wise, so it knows that fair and wise is not installed yet. So I wonder why this screen here is shown at all at this point during the installation. That's just my question. That's the first weird part moving on to the next one. We'll just go ahead now and install it. Now, the installation is also another weird part. So we'll install and this will bring up the calamaries installer. There's not anything that special about this, at least at the beginning. We have British English selected and then it jumps away from British English for a little while. And so you have to scroll back up and you look for American English because it says British English or you assume that American English would be at the top, but it's actually not. It's in the ease instead of the A's. It confused me a little bit, but that's, I don't know if that's kind of a calamaries thing or if it's just a fair and wise thing. I don't know. I've never actually paid attention. So hit next here and then we'll erase the desk. So an interesting thing here is that it does not give you a choice of whether or not you want to swap partition. You get one whether or not you like it at all, unless you probably manual partition, then you could probably do without. But again, most new users are probably just going to hit this erase disk part and they're going to get a swap partition, whether they need it or not. Again, not a big deal, but I prefer to have the choice. You also don't get a choice of file systems. We know that calamaries does have the option to allow you to choose what file system it has. So between like exd4 or butterfs, that's not here either. So not a big deal because this is very much pointed towards new users. But again, something that I noticed. So hitting next and then we'll install. Now, you'll notice that we skipped something, right? There was no time zone selection here. There was no user creation here. Nothing like that. And while that's not unusual, like there's several operators or distros out there that do the time zone and user creations post install. There's several of them that do that. Most of those use custom installers. I've never seen a distro that uses calamaries that doesn't have those things pre install. It's just something I've never seen before. So that's also very weird. It's cool, but it's weird. So I'm going to head and install this. It doesn't take very long, just a couple of minutes. Okay. Once that's done, I'll ask you to restart. So let the done button here. Okay. Now we're going to see the second half of the installer. And you'll notice that we're actually still in the calamaries installers. So it actually looks exactly like we just saw. And it will ask you to select your language again. It does remember what you chose, which is good with the next. It'll ask you to choose a time zone. That one's fine. And then I'll ask you to choose a keyboard. That one's also fine. Again, it's a little weird that they don't ask you to choose your keyboard in the first half of the installer, but you don't actually use your keyboard in the first half of the installer. So it's not that big of a deal, but again, it's here instead of in the first half. So we create a user here. We'll call this fair and OS VM enter a very strong and complicated password in memory of DT, and then we'll set up and it will configure the locale, create the user, and then it does something weird. And you would think that it would take you right into the system, but it doesn't. Watch what it does. Yeah, it reboots the computer. Like I don't understand why they bothered switch splitting the installer into if they still had to reboot the computer after you did the second part. It doesn't make any sense. Plus everything that they're doing there doesn't really require a reboot. I wouldn't think because you can change. I mean, possibly the locale, but I don't even think that that's true. I think you can change the locale with the system running. I don't understand why that would need a reboot. It might possibly need me need a log out, but it wouldn't need a reboot because you're not even logged in at that point. It's really weird. Most systems that have the split installer where you do the setup after the install, just take you right into the to the installed system. So Papo S, Fedora, both of those have split install systems. And once you get past the install and do the second half, it just takes you into your system. This doesn't it reboots the computer. It's a little weird, right? And I'm not even sure that it actually reboots the computer because usually an invert manager, when it reboots, it takes you out of full screen. This didn't do that. So I'm not actually sure what's going on. So like I said, it's weird. So here's another weird thing. This is a KDE based distribution. And we're going to see this over and over again as we go through this. There are many things here that don't go with KDE. And I'm just going to put that out there. It's not a big deal. It's just a little weird. So the first thing you'll notice is that this is not SDDM, at least as far as I'm aware, this looks like light DM to me. And I'm pretty sure it is, which is not a big deal. Again, it's just usually when you install a KDE based distribution, you're going to get SDDM as the display manager, not light DM. So I'm going to enter a password here. We'll go here. There is a splash screen just like you'd normally expect with KDE, which again, makes you think SDDM, which is because usually SDDM controls the splash screen, but that was not SDDM as far as I'm aware. I mean, unless they've made SDDM look like light DM, which is possible, I suppose. All right. So we do get the tour again. So I am going to go through this again, because it is different than what it is in the live environment. So we'll hit start tour. It again notices that we're on a VM. So let's hit next on that. And then we do get the transfer files to fair and OS thing, but it's different. I don't know if you noticed this from before, but the first screen said transfer files from Windows. Now it says transfer files to fair and OS. And it doesn't look like the actual mentioned windows here at all. Like there's no mention of windows here at all, which is fine, because the transfer tool that you open up here by clicking on it is just a transfer tool that can transfer from anywhere. You're not actually transferring from another partition or anything like that. You're supposed to be transferring from a external hard drive or something like that. You just hit restore data. It's going to ask you where the data is located and so on and so forth. It's a great little tool and I'm glad it exists. It's just weird that this is different. Like when we saw this in the live environment, I asked why that screen was there because you wouldn't want to transfer your data before you installed the system. Now I know why this is here, but why is it different? All right, it's inconsistent just a little bit. So we'll hit next. It's going to ask you if you want to install third party codex, which most people will want to things like MP3 and stuff like that. We'll not be included on your system unless you do this part here. I'm not going to bother doing it now because I'm not going to play any music or anything, but we'll just hit next. Now I'll also give you the option between two different modes. So this is the default mode. And this is similar to what you'd expect with like a Windows 11 like style thing as the menu over here instead of in the center. But whatever, it also gives you a tablet mode, which looks more like this is more traditional windows, if you will. But with an application dashboard, we'll go back to the other one. Well, next it now will take you through a little bit of what you need to do in order to use the system. So it tells you where the menu is. It tells you where the menu management stuff is. So this is going to be like the task manager. But next, this is it'll tell you what the system tray is, although we have some icons here that aren't actually showing up right now. I don't know why and we'll hit next again. It'll show you how to use search. So all left to to bring up K runner. Again, it's a KD based distribution. We'll hit next again. I'll tell you I'll give you a button to the store. We'll look at the store here in a minute, which is another weird thing. Well, next, and then it will give you an option between light and dark theme or the default. And then it will ask you if you want to set up KD connect. It will allow you to set up the blue screen reduction thing that KD comes with. And then we'll hit next and then we're all done. So that is the tour. It's a very good tour, a little bit consistent from the tour we saw in the live environment, but just something we point out. So the first thing I'm going to do is open up the settings. And I'm going to change this resolution. That way we can get full screen. So we'll change it to 1920 by 1080. If I can find it, apply, hit keep, and then we can close this. Now, the next thing we should look at, I suppose, is this is the memory usage and stuff like that. So I'll open up a terminal here and we'll do free dash M. And that tells us we're using 970 megabytes of RAM out of the box. That's a little high, honestly, for KDE, but it's also inconsistent because the last time I installed Farron about an hour ago, it was at 600 something. So I'm assuming that the KDE settings takes up quite a bit of RAM and it's still running for some reason. I don't actually know why that that's higher than it was before. If we do you name dash A, we'll see that this is using kernel 5.13. So it's not the most recent version of the kernel. It makes me think that this is based on Ubuntu LTS instead of Ubuntu 21.10. I'm actually not sure what it's actually based on other than I know it's based on Ubuntu. A few moments later from what I can tell from the brief read that I just did, it is based on the LTS, but it doesn't actually say anywhere. As far as I can tell, I may just be missing it, but I know it is based on Ubuntu. So if you're you're looking for an Ubuntu based distro, this is an option for you. Now, let's go ahead and close this. And I'm going to take you through some interesting choices and applications. So the first thing you'll notice, if you look down here in the little dock thing, you'll notice that Vivaldi is their default choice of browser, not Firefox, not Chromium or on Google Chrome or anything like that. They chose Vivaldi. Now, Vivaldi, as we know, is not an open source browser. It is proprietary. And someone will say, well, Vivaldi is based on an open source browser. That it's still proprietary, because it has proprietary stuff on top of it. I'm not one of those guys who's going to poo poo this choice a lot. Vivaldi is a fine browser, as it is, like it can browse the web. And that's really all you need. My biggest problem with Vivaldi is it comes with a ton, ton of other stuff. It's really, really bloated. But the interesting thing here is if you go to internet, you get a web browser manager. Now, what would be cool for me is if this web browser manager was actually part of the tour, like if you were going through the tour and you saw this and it gave you the option to install something that you're more familiar with, because most people don't use Vivaldi. That'd be cool. But instead, they hide it away in a menu, which is, again, fine, but it is what it is. It does give you an option to pretty much install every major browser out there, including going on web, which is, again, an interesting choice. Falcons here as well. Nobody uses either of these browsers. They just don't. OK, so let's click on the next icon in the dock. So this is a KDE based desktop environment. We know that for sure. If we right click on this, this is KDE right down to the studs. But if we click on this, you'd expect to see Dolphin, right? Dolphin is the file manager for KDE. It is. We all know that I think it should be Crusader, but I've been voted down, but it's Dolphin. Should you open this up? That's not Dolphin. Yeah, that's Nemo. Nemo is the file manager for Cinnamon, the Cinnamon desktop. So that is the first interesting choice. Now, why they didn't bring in Dolphin, I don't know. I'm assuming it's because of complexity. They want something simple. And again, that's not a big deal. It's Nemo is a fine file manager. In fact, I'd say it's probably like the third best one out there. I prefer Thunar just a little bit, but that's my personal preference. Nemo is perfectly fine. It just doesn't go here, which is why I noticed it so much. So we'll close that. So the next thing you'll want to notice is the store. So we'll go through the store. Now, again, this is a KDE based distribution. I'm going to hide this for a minute. So what would you what would you expect? You'd expect discover, right? Or something custom. I would when I when I saw that they had a fair and store, I thought that they would do a custom store. But after opening up a couple applications, I figured that it probably wasn't going to be discovered because discover is not great. Yeah, it's genome software. OK, now, again, this is based on the boom, too. So it's not that big of a surprise, really. But I will say that this is an older version of genome software. It doesn't have any snap or flat pack support or anything like that. You're not going to choose where the software is coming from. This is just a collection of dead packages, basically, as far as I'm aware. And that's not a knock on it. It's good. The old version of the genome software store was actually a favorite of mine. It's actually really well done. It runs fast. You don't have to wait for it to open up because this is not a snap. It's just there and it works really well. Again, it's an interesting choice because this is a KD based distribution. This is a G2K app. You're going to see that a lot. OK, so we'll close that in terms of software selection. You're going to have basically everything you get on Ubuntu, or at least older versions of Ubuntu that aren't based on snap because snaps not installed here by default. Flat packs are installed here by default. But as far as I can tell, there's no flat hub integration here at all, like inside the store. I could be wrong about that, but I did not see anything. Usually there's like a little drop down box up here where you can choose where you're getting the software from. That's not here. So it also I don't see any drop down here for choosing flat hub at all. So but flat pack is installed by default. So those are the things that are docked on this on the bottom here. And when I first started this up and I clicked on these just like I normally do buttons, I need to click on them. That was the first real indicator outside of the welcome app that this was going to be a little bit different. So we open up the menu here and you'll see right away that this is the standard KD menu that they switched to in, I think, five to three, five to four. I can't actually remember, but they just switched to this away from the previous launcher. So if we go to graphics, we'll see that it has several K applications. So this is stuff from Katie, we got Krita, which isn't normally a default Katie application, but it's still a cute application. So it's in replacement of something like GIMP. And it's weird, a little weird that they chose Krita because I would assume, given that they've not shied away from choosing GTK stuff that GIMP would be here. But again, they've chosen Krita. Again, not a big deal. It's just an interesting choice. For internet, we have Geary instead of something like Thunderbird. But again, not a big deal. We have a Ramina, which is a remote desktop application and Vivaldi, as we said, and KD Connect, which we already knew he was here. VLC is the media player. We have LibreOffice installed. And then we get to the system settings and the system tools. So here we have some interesting things. So first, again, this is a KD based distribution. I keep saying this, but it has GNOME disks. Instead of the KD partition manager, I understand this choice because the KD partition manager is bad. It's just overly complicated and not easy to use. And GNOME disks is very easy to use. So I understand why that's here again. But it's just one of those choices, right? We have the Synaptic Patrick Package Manager. And we all will also see that there's the GDB package installed here as well in the other screen. And the login window thing here will allow you to change the late DM stuff, the system maintenance application, as far as I can tell, is actually custom. And it'll allow you to install package language packs and stuff like that. It will tell you the system information, show you the crash reports and a few options for like removing duplicate packages and stuff like that. So that is a really cool application. There's also a Wacom tablet finder here, an update manager, which is also as far as I can tell actually custom. So it'll allow you to do your updates in a GUI and also allow you to choose the mirror. That is cool. I'm actually actually I'm thinking, now that I look at this a little bit closer, this looks an awful lot like the Linux Mint Update Manager. It does, doesn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if it's based on that. I wonder if we can actually see here, update manager. And it just says for me, fair enough. So it's either custom or it's I'm just imagining things when this looks like the Linux Mint one. Okay, we'll also see the transfer tool which we saw earlier. Time shift is installed by default. Now here's something really weird. So the tour is what we went through before, but there's also this thing here called welcome screen, which you don't see at all. I'm assuming that this is a previous version of the tour. I'm assuming that's what this is. I'm not actually sure why they're both included, but they are. So we'll close that. And then the last thing I wanted to show you was the system settings. So just to actually prove that this is a KDE based distro, this is the KDE settings manager. They haven't done anything special here, as far as I can tell. This is just the regular old KDE systems panel, which is great because that gives you an option to do a ton of customization. So this is KDE. It just has a ton of GNOME apps. That's where everything is a little weird for me. So in terms of layout, before we go, you'll just notice that we have the menu down here, system tree out here, clocks up here. And that's just another KDE panel that they've made as the notifications and the clock. That's basically what that is. So Farron OS is an interesting distribution. When I went into this, I knew that it was based on KDE. Like I figured that this was just going to be a boon too with KDE on top of it, with some look and feel customizations, maybe some custom tools, stuff like that. And while there are some custom tools, which were cool, I was very confused right off the bat with the welcome screen. Not necessarily because it's a bad welcome screen, but because of that transfer files was there. And I wasn't even really confused about it until I saw the next page where it said install. So I knew then that the welcome screen knew that we weren't installed yet. So why were they asking me to transfer the files? So that was the first thing that was weird. And then the split install where you do the install first and then afterwards it asks you to create a user and all that stuff. Not unusual at all, but the fact that then reboots the computer or it seems to reboot the computer is also really weird because why split it up if you still have to reboot the computer? Now, like I said, I'm not actually sure that it actually rebooted the computer. It just said that it was rebooting the computer. It definitely did something. Like usually, like I said, invert manager when you reboot the computer, it takes you out of full screen. You have to go back into full screen. It didn't do that here. So I don't know if it actually rebooted or what it did, but it definitely did something. And then once you get into the system, you just find a weird mash of GTK and KDE stuff. And while there's nothing wrong with that, it just in the back of my mind, I keep thinking, well, if you have a whole bunch of GTK stuff, that means you have a whole bunch of GTK libraries installed. And that means you have a whole bunch of extra packages, which you wouldn't normally have to have if you just stuck with the KDE stuff, which has a lot of shared libraries. Because if you're going to use KDE, you're going to get most of the KDE stuff. Like I guarantee most of the KDE dependencies and stuff are on the system, because most of the KDE apps require that stuff. So you're not actually saving anything by installing a whole bunch of GTK apps. What you're actually doing is bringing a whole bunch of GTK dependencies down on your system. Now, that's not a big deal. Most people don't care for package counts at all. It doesn't matter to them. And it doesn't really matter to me. But the point is that you're adding extra stuff on top of there. Now, I can understand why they did it in many places. Like it makes sense. Like the Genome Software Store is a better software store than Discover. I don't think that there's anybody out there that will disagree with that. Discover has gotten better over the years, but it's still not great. But then again, they have the Genome Software Center that's old. So they don't have flat hub integration at all, as far as I can tell, which means that they're losing out on the opportunity to provide a broader width of software. They've chosen Vivaldi as the default browser. Again, it's a choice. It's not one that I would agree with. And they make it easy to change, but it's still something that people are going to notice. It's also something that most people are going to have to deal with because the vast majority of people aren't going to be interested in using Vivaldi at all. Even if they're not free and open source zealots, they'll probably go install Google Chrome, which they probably would have to do on every desktop. But again, it's one of those things that you notice. The choice of Nemo as the file manager, again, makes sense if you understand that this is pointed towards new users. Dolphin is overly complicated. They're going for something that was more simple. Nemo is more simple. It's interesting that they didn't choose Nautilus. They chose a lot of other Genome stuff. This was the one thing that they saw that they chose from Cinnamon or Linux Mint. Also the update manager, which I'm still pretty sure came from Linux Mint, but I could be wrong about that. So it's an interesting collection of choices that they've made in this distribution. So there's nothing wrong with any of it. Like it's actually a pretty good distro. The little bit of time I've spent with it has shown that it is fairly fast, even in a virtual machine. And it's not overly bloated, so you're not going to see a ton of software choices that overlap, which I always find a good thing. So if you're looking for an Ubuntu-based distro that is interesting, that uses KDE, but has made some interesting choices, I would give this a try. For me personally, I'm not exactly sure that it would be for me simply because they've, you can tell it's a very highly opinionated distribution and I would want to make different choices and I just install a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's just more of a me thing. I'm much more interested in having control over what's installed on my system. And while you can make those choices here, it would just mean the work you're going through and replacing the stuff that they've put on here. So that's just me. So that is fair and wise. If you have questions about this, you can leave those in the comments section below. You can follow me on Twitter at thelinuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Robert Sid, Devon Patrick, Fred Kramer, Megalyn Jackson, and control Steve A. Subrogate Linux, Derek Samuel, Mitchell Arts Center, J-Dog, Carbon Data, Jeremy Sean, Odin Martin, Andy Ross, Merrick Camp, Joshua Lee, Peter A. Crucible, Dark Bennett 6, Primus, and PM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.