 Today I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that I've never looked at before. I've actually never heard of until just recently I discovered this over on DistroWatch. So on DistroWatch, I noticed that kind of high in their page hit rankings is WOT OS. And WOT OS, again, I'd never heard of it. Apparently it is a Debian based distribution. I love Debian. It uses LXDE for its desktop. I like LXDE. LXDE uses the open box window manager. You guys know open box is one of my favorite window managers. So I'm pretty excited to check this thing out. It had a release just a few months back, November 2022 was their last release. WOT OS R12 was the release. And before that they had not had a release since way back in 2016. So for a number of years, this was a dormant project. So that's probably why I hadn't heard of it before. And you know, with that release back in November, the project is now active again. It's not just a one-off release. I actually checked their sites already planning on the next release of WOT OS. So people are actively working on this distribution. And the fact that it uses Debian and open box, I'm pretty excited. So I'm going to spin up a virtual machine and take a look at WOT OS R12. So I've downloaded the ISO and created a VM here. So let's go ahead and boot into the live environment and we boot directly into the LXDE desktop environment. So I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and run through the installation process. So it looks like they're going to use the Calamaris installer. One thing I noticed, the resolution, now of course I'm in a VM, I probably should change the resolution, the screen resolution, but I noticed it's very, very, very small. So I'm going to click on monitor settings. And when I say the resolution is very small, actually the screen resolution is big, but it's shrunk and the font size is really small. It looks like the default resolution is 1920 by 1440. That's kind of a odd resolution to set as a default for a VM. So I'm going to choose a more sane 1920 by 1080. Yeah, I'm assuming that was to satisfy the developer. He probably uses that particular resolution on his equipment. But yeah, probably for most general computer users, you probably want to set that to a better resolution as a default for a virtual machine. So now the Calamaris installer, I can actually read it. Let me move it over away from my head and American English is the language. So let's go ahead, click next. It has not correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. It's chosen the Eastern time zone. So let me find somewhere in the central time zone and then I'll click next. English US is the default keyboard. That's correct for me. Then do we want to erase the disk and give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine to WatOS or do we want to manually partition the drive? I'm just going to go ahead and let it do the automatic partitioning. Well, I say that I'm actually not going to do the automatic partitioning because WatOS, it looks like by default it's going to give nine gigs essentially of my 25 gig virtual hard drive over to a swap partition. That is absolutely insane. I'm not going to do that. So we're definitely going to do the manual partitioning. So let's go into the manual partition. Let's see if I remember how to manually partition something using the Calamaris installer. Let's do new partition table and master boot record is fine for the VM here. I'm going to have 25 gigs of free space. Let's go ahead and create something on that. We're going to create a primary partition, extend for file system, the mount point, the mount point should probably be slash, right? It should be root. And then we need to enable the boot flag and then hit OK. And I'm actually not going to bother creating a swap for the VM. There's no point. But if you needed to create a swap, then you would obviously not give the entire space of that drive to that partition. You'd save four gigs or whatever if you were doing this on physical hardware, save a few gigs for a swap partition and then create the swap. But again, it's just wasted space in a VM, so I'm not going to do the swap. Now it's asking about creating a username and password. So DT is my username, I called the VM here, WOT OS dash VRT. And then let's give a strong and complicated password to the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then log in automatically without asking for a password that's not ticked on. I'm going to leave that not ticked on. I want to be forced to enter a password to enter all my computers for privacy reasons. Next, when we get our summary, location, good keyboard, good partition scheme, looks good. Just going to click install. And typically this portion of the installer takes about five to 10 minutes on my hardware. So I'm going to step away, make a cup of coffee. I'll be back once the installation has completed. And wow, that installation actually only took about two, maybe three minutes. Like this thing installed very quickly. So I'm assuming that it's pretty minimal out of the box. It probably doesn't install a lot of programs. So I'm going to go ahead and restart. Now you can see the checkbox here that's already ticked on. Leave that ticked on, click done. And it should reboot the VM and press enter to continue. And it should detach the ISO automatically for me. And it does. And now we boot into our freshly installed WOT OS R12. And we get to our login screen here. So my user was DT. And let's enter his super secure password. And once again, the screen resolution defaults to 1920 by 1440. This, you know, it makes the text very, very small here in the VM. But we can fix this. And this time when I fix it, it will be permanent because now we're actually changing the resolution on the installed WOT OS before when I changed it, it was temporary because we were inside a live environment. So that was just a one time fix. But now you can tell it to save that. And now every time I load this VM, it'll remember to default to 1920 by 1080 for the resolution. Now without going through the menu system yet, I can already tell you because of the installation process, because I've installed so many Linux distributions on this machine, hundreds of them, the fact that that installer took like two minutes. There's not going to be much in this menu system. I guarantee you that if I go into the menu system, let's see. Yeah. There is not very many programs installed on this thing. So that's kind of nice. If you like to install your own programs anyway, and a lot of distributions, they just install a suite of applications because they think that, you know, they'll pick and choose the right applications for the general public. Most computer users, they really don't care what text editor is there, what web browser is there, what music player is there. But if you're like me, you have your favorites of all of these particular kinds of programs. I don't mind that it ships not a lot out of the box because I'll install my own audio player and video player and text editor and whatever it happens to be. So under the accessories category, we have mouse pad, which is a plain text editor. It's the default plain text editor for the XFCE desktop environment. It's strange that they included that because leaf pad is the text editor for the LXDE desktop environment, which they're actually using LXDE, but they probably chose mouse pad because maybe mouse pad is a little better of a plain text editor. I don't know. I really haven't used mouse pad or leaf pad that much. Then we have a screenshot tool. Take screenshot. This looks like GNOME screenshot utility. It is. Screenshot3.38.0. I thought I recognized, yeah, which the GNOME, the new GNOME screenshot tool is actually really nice. I can understand why they included that. Vim is installed out of the box. Yay, right? This archiver is our archive tool for zip and unzip and targz and all of that stuff under graphics. There's nothing here. The document viewer, that's your PDF viewer, which, let's see which one they're using. Looks like they're using GNOME's. It's what I think this is. I don't have any about information here, but you know what? You can always get a program if, for whatever reason, a program doesn't give you like an about screen or anything to actually give you that information. Open a terminal and type xprop. For x properties, xprop, it's a command line utility. Your cursor is going to turn into an x. Click on the window that you want the x properties for. So I'm going to click on that window and you can see that that program is actually org.gnome.events. So that's GNOME's events. That is the PDF viewer, part of the default suite of GNOME applications. Also under graphics, we have G-thumb, which I haven't played with G-thumb before. It is a photo organizer. It looks like a photo manager image viewer, essentially what it is. It's for GNOME. Okay. Well, that would make sense why it's called G-thumb if it's a GNOME application. Again, I'm not familiar with G-thumb. I don't think I've ever used it. Firefox ESR is the default browser. It's Firefox ESR. It's the extended support release of Firefox. If I go to help and about Firefox, you can see this is Firefox ESR 102.4.0. Now keep in mind, this ISO was released five months ago, right? Back in November of 2022, I'm sure there's a lot of updates I could take. I'm not going to do that on camera, but it's based on Debian. So it's not going to be like a rolling release where like the whole system is going to have an update. See, just the things that are really important for security reasons. I bet there's some minor point updates for the web browser, for the kernel, maybe a couple of other applications, but it's not going to be like an Arch Linux update. Like if you downloaded Arch-based distribution and the ISO was five months old, you would probably have more than a thousand updates, right? It's not going to be like that on a Debian-based system. Also under the internet category, we have transmission, which is GNOME's BitTorrent client. That's actually a really fantastic BitTorrent client transmission. I install it on all of my machines. Under Office, we have nothing here. The PDF viewer is here, but nothing else. So no LibreOffice. Again, if you want LibreOffice, go install it. They're trying to keep this, obviously, they're trying to keep this minimal, right? That is the whole idea. They purposely didn't install any large programs other than Firefox. There's nothing installed here that you can say is like a big, heavy program. And obviously they're using LXDE, which uses the open box window manager. So it's going to be really light, really fast, really low on system resource usage, which is going to be perfect for those of you that have underpowered machines or older hardware. If you're looking for a distribution for a machine like that, maybe YOS would be appropriate. Under Sound and Video Pulse Audio Volume Control is here, of course. And then VLC is your media player, which makes sense. VLC is a fantastic video player. It also can play audio as well, so it can actually serve a dual purpose. That way, they didn't have to install two different programs, an audio player and a video player. VLC works fantastically at both. Under System Tools, of course, PCMan FM is the file manager. You guys have seen PCMan FM on practically most of my videos, right? Because PCMan FM is the file manager that I actually install on my host machines. Anytime you've seen me open a GUI file manager on camera, I'm always using PCMan FM. And partly, the reason I use PCMan FM is because in the early days of Linux, I fell in love with the open box window manager, which was often used on the LXDE desktop environment. And PCMan FM is the default file manager for LXDE. That's kind of how I discovered PCMan FM. If you have the GDeb package installer, and what this is, this is a program that allows you to install Debian packages, .deb file. So if you go to the internet and find a .deb package, how do you install that? Well, GDeb, I'll do it for you. So that's for installing those Debian packages, those third party Debian packages that are not in the repo. You know, it's a random Debian package you find on the internet, which you really should be careful about installing those, but sometimes it is necessary. We have GParted here, which is a partition editor, partition manager. It's not something that you really need on an installed distribution, right? It's good to have it in the live environment because people need to partition a drive in a live environment before the installation. But once a distribution has been properly installed, you probably shouldn't keep GParted around because new to Linux users might get in there and play with that thing and not realize that they could completely hose their system by playing with GParted. HTop is installed out of the box. And I've opened a lot of things here in the last few minutes. So system resource usage might be a little high here, but 332 megabytes of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this machine. So really, really light. So that is the beauty of using something like LXDE with open box. Also under system tools, we have LXTerminal is our terminal. So let me actually open the LXTerminal and zoom in. Let's do a uname dash R. The kernel they're on is 5.10. It makes sense you'd be on an older kernel being Debian based, right? This again, we're not on a rolling system here. Now let me run apt list dash dash installed and get a list of all the programs that were installed out of the box line by line here. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to rerun that command and I'm going to pipe it into WC space dash L. WC is the word count program dash L. That flag is a line count flag. So how many lines of output were in that command? 1,440. So that is the number of packages that WatOS installs out of the box because I haven't installed anything else. So that is just what was installed in the default installation. Getting back into the menu system under the preferences category, we have a lot of your standard preference settings, things that you would see for your typical desktop environment, customized look and feel. That's going to be the LX appearance program, which is a program I install on all of my systems when I do standalone window managers, tiling window managers. I use a lot of the LXDE program. So I use LX appearance. This allows you to change the GTK theme and the icon themes, typically what you would use LX appearance for. Now you have to understand, let me open a window, changing the GTK theme changes the window, right? But it doesn't change the title bar theme because the part here, the top, the title bar, that is controlled by OpenBox, the window manager. It has its own theming. And if I go into the menu system, go into preferences, there is the OpenBox configuration manager, and you would select whatever OpenBox theme. And that would change the actual title bars of the windows. Other than that, on the panel, we have our sys tray, we have our clock, we have a screen locking icon, and we have a log out icon. Pretty standard panel, all right? If you've ever used any panel in any traditional desktop environment, or if you've ever used Windows, Mag, you'll know how to use the LXDE panel. Now let me right click on the desktop. I'm going to go into desktop preferences. Let's see if there are any other wallpapers to choose from other than this beach, because, I mean, it's a nice wallpaper, but let's just see what else is here. Let's see, that actually, yeah, that is nice, because it's a little darker. That would look good with a lighter theme, like a lighter color panel. So they do have a few things to choose from. That's just the WatOS logo splash. Let's see what this is. This is just like a starry night. And then wall is the name of this one. And it's some mountains, yeah, not much here for wallpapers, but honestly, I'd probably just go back to that second one that I chose. That's probably the best out of the three or four nature photography wallpapers that they have. Overall, WatOS R12, looks like a pretty solid release. I'm excited that I found a new distribution to hopefully keep track of in the future, because, again, Debian, like Debian, open box. I like open box, right? It's actually using the full LXDE desktop environment, which you don't see a lot of distributions use now, because LXDE, it kind of died a few years ago. And now, I think it sees some development now. You still have some distributions that will ship LXDE, but it has kind of been left behind. And I think that's unfortunate because it was always one of my favorite full desktop environments in the early days of Linux when I first switched. Now, before I go, I need to think of you special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, a homies to bald, Matt Mimit, Mitchell Royal, Paul West, Armored Dragon Bash, Chuck Commander, Ingrid George Lee, Marsha Methods, Nader, Yon, Paul, Peace, Arch, Infador, Politec, Realities for the Less Red Profit, Roland Tools, Devler, Williams, and a bit. These guys all these names. These are my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at what OSR 12 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. I love a distribution that only installs the bare essentials, like Vium and H-Top.