 One of the distributions that I've been meaning to take a look at for a little while is fedora silver blue And I've always been putting it kind of off just because I'm not a big Genome fan like I think if you've followed the channel for any amount of time you'll know that I'm just not a Genome fan and I kept pushing silver blue off for that reason I just like I didn't want to use Genome the idea behind silver blue was always interesting but again It's Genome so I didn't really want to use it But there is an alternative project also done by fedora that's called quinoa white and quinoa is the same idea silver blue But instead of Genome it uses KDE and that's what we're gonna take a look at today. Now. This is a like a first-look video Very early stages. I've been using it now for about three days off and on and my idea of what? Silver blue and quinoa actually, you know what those things are is a it is very much in its early stages I'm just now kind of getting my eye my head around it So if I make a mistake in something that I say just know that it's done out of ignorance not malice So I do plan on using quinoa right now for the next month or so and I'll do a long-term review video after I'm done So what I should do first is talk about what the idea behind silver blue and quinoa actually is and that Idea is something that is kind of unique in the Linux space You don't find distributions that are like this very often. I think there are a couple others but Really quinoa white and silver blue are the ones that are the most popular and the ones that are most developed So the idea behind them is that they are immutable and if you don't know what that word means don't worry about it I didn't either from what I can tell immutable means that there is a portion of the Linux file system basically the stuff that makes up Linux itself that is Completely untouchable by the user or user space and what this allows quinoa and Silver blue to do is to be very very stable and also to have it so that each version of quinoa or silver blue are exactly the same as all the rest as long as the versions are the same that portion of the Operating system never changes and that allows for developers to be able to test Programs and containers and all this stuff easily knowing that the system that they're on it's going to be the same no matter What install of that system it happens to be it also has other benefits as well because if that stuff that to mix up the Linux system is in a container and Not accessible by anything it means that that stuff is secure and that makes the entire system more secure now Like I said, I don't know if I'm explaining that well or if I'm even explaining it correctly I'm still getting my head around what immutable means and why it's good from what I can tell Mostly at this point. It's mainly focused towards developers So if you're not a developer the benefits of an immutable system, they're kind of superfluous They're not necessarily something that is going to give you a lot of benefits It doesn't mean that you can't use it doesn't mean that it's not good It's just that a lot of the things that are built into something like Kino white are More suited towards people who are going to be developing software of certain kinds with that being said I thought I would try it out So what I'm gonna do today is just kind of take you through a few of my initial thoughts about Kino white Itself, so let me actually show you my Kino white system and this is what this it looks like now Now like I said, this is just the standard Katie plasma desktop I've done some ricing obviously because of course I did and there's not a lot here That is going to initially set this apart from other distributions Like if you just popped in front of a computer it had Kino white on it You wouldn't know that this was different than just regular fedora where things go different is how you install software So the suggested way of installing software is through flatback It's the way you're supposed to install the vast majority of your software and you can use the flat hub repository So you can get a wide selection of software through flat pack and it's really easy You can install it through the terminal if you wanted to install from the terminal you could do something like flat pack install audacity if you wanted to Right and I already have audacity installed, but it would install audacity you can also use discover If you wanted to use discover, I don't know anyone who really likes discover all that much But I'm sure there are people out there like that It's never been the best software store in the world, but it's not bad and it's definitely gotten better over the last years It's still Pretty slow, but it's not as slow as the snap store. Let's put that out there Anyways, you can install flat packs from there And if you've enabled the flat hub repository flat hub will also integrate here as well that's the way you're supposed to install the vast majority of your software and Because flat pack itself is containerized. It doesn't interact with that lower level system at all anyways and It means that you're adding kind of a Additional lever level of security on top of everything else Now what happens if you come across a program that isn't available through pat flat pack or flat hub or any of the other flat pack repositories, well, there is a way to actually install things to your base system and That is through a program called RPM Ostry like so and you just do install Let's just say then my Vim does not have a flat pack. So you'd have to install it like this now I've already done this But this is how you'd install it and one thing you'll notice is that you don't have to use pseudo now This is a part of the whole system that just kind of confuses me Because I don't understand Where this is being installed to if it's being installed into that lower level system that Is supposed to be completely untouchable by the user. Why don't you have to use a root password? I don't understand that now Again, I'm just kind of getting my head around this and it's possible that everything is being installed into like another portion of the System where it still doesn't have access to any of that protected stuff and that means that you don't actually have to install it with A root password or a pseudo password So I don't understand why that is that's something that I'm gonna have to discover and kind of learn over the next month or So because if you if I were to install this if I didn't already have it installed It would go through and install it all the way to the end never asking for a password now the one thing that you should know whether You use this or not is that if you install through this System you do have to restart your computer afterwards because this is making actual changes to your system by installing a binary of them and You if you were to install this and not restart you wouldn't have access to them until you did restart it now I know that sounds a little bit like Windows, but the benefits are is that each time you install something at least as far as I can tell It makes a I don't think it's called a snapshot But it's something like that where if you've installed something you can actually use a previous version of your system And you can choose that version of your system inside grub So if you wanted to choose something before you installed them you could do so and like I said I don't think that this is meant as a backup system I'm pretty sure that instead it's meant to be for developers who are testing different versions of software or something like that Because it's not it doesn't say anything about butterfests even though I'm sure that Fedora uses butterfests and maybe that's what it's kind of basing it on but It calls it something different. I haven't really truly got into it yet But you kind of get the idea that that kind of thing kind of exists so you do have to restart your computer after installing software this way and That's why they suggest you to get as much of your software as possible through flat pack because if you use a flat back You don't have to restart your computer now That is the primary thing that makes Keena white and silver blue different is the way you install software are these two different ways and one of them is kind of More of a struggle than the other and it's really recommended that you always use flat pack wherever possible now again Like I said, I'm just getting my head around this so I'm probably explaining some of this stuff wrong, right? I'm still trying to learn. I've read through their documentation here. I've read all the way through this part here of Trying to do up gate upgrades rollbacks and stuff like that So I've had some idea of what I'm talking about but I'm still getting to some of this other stuff now one of the things that I don't know if I'll get into a lot is the idea of a toolbox and This allows from what I understand very very new level of understanding here But a toolbox allows you to create like a your own like sandbox and allows you to create a system inside there That will allow you to develop things without ever touching any part of your system Usually things like pod man and stuff like that But as you can tell I don't know much about containers So getting into this is going to take a little bit of mental strain on my part in order to actually understand this But that's for later. I haven't got into it at all yet All right, so outside of the odd way of installing software. What is the system like to use? Well This version of KDE is one of the most buggy versions of KDE that I've ever Used in my entire life and I've used KDE a lot over the last five years Like I used to be the biggest KDE fanboy ever It was my desktop environment of choice before I discovered window managers and this version of KDE plasma is very very buggy So I don't know if I'm going to be able to recreate this probably not but if I were to change a setting so let's just go to When we're window management here, no, that's not the right one Workspace behavior. Maybe yeah, there we go if I wanted to change the screen edge So I hit no action and hit apply that actually worked just fine What I've experienced is that the settings app crashes all the time And of course, it's not going to do it on camera. It's going to work perfectly fine I don't know why the settings app closes or crashes all the time But it does and it always does it right after you've hit apply. I don't know what's going on there I'm assuming that it's a KDE problem not a kina way problem But again, I haven't experienced it in other places. So that's been crashing all the time I've also had problems where when my monitors go to sleep and I come back One of the monitors is completely black now You can move windows around to that other monitor and they show up just fine You can use it just fine But it basically it just removes your wallpaper and the thing is is that's not a big deal I would just right click and do configure desktop and change the wallpaper back to what it was But you can't actually right click on it It is completely broken when it comes to the desktop being interactable I looked this up and this has been going on kde since 2015. There was a bug report in 2015 Where this somebody experienced this and apparently hasn't been fixed. So that's definitely a kde problem The weird thing is is I haven't experienced that specific problem on any other version of kde that I've used I have other problems with multi monitors on my arco install where things like when I turn the monitors on The panel moves from one screen to the other and back and forth. That's really weird But that's an xorg problem I'm pretty sure because xorg doesn't like keeping the names of the monitor static Which is a little weird, but that's kind of beside the point The only other thing that I should say is that this opium os tree command here is really slow like Really really slow now This is I don't know if it's based on dnf, but it definitely takes after dnf dnf is not the fastest package manager in the world On any day of the week you can make it faster. There are some tweaks to make dnf faster But for the most part there are many other package managers. They're just way faster than dnf rpm os tree is slower way slower than dnf is I have noticed that some programs and sell faster than others I'm assuming that has to do with package size, but just know going in if that's when you do use this Be prepared for it to take a little while now. I wonder if I can actually show you how slow this is so rpm os tree up I think it's update or is upgrade. I can't remember. Let's go back here and find out It is upgrade. Okay, so upgrade like so And move this here where you can actually see We'll see if that's actually takes as long as I think it did. It's actually probably going to go faster than Possible because I just did this last night Yeah, it's it's faster than it was But if you've waited a long time between updates that takes quite a while like I'm talking like 15 minutes It was last it took a long time last night And while that's not a big deal because you're not supposed to use the at least the the rpm os tree Installing very often at all. You're supposed to use flat pack I can see where when you do actually have to install an update That could take quite a while and that's just something that you should keep in mind Again, not that big a deal because you're not going to be updating and upgrading very often anyways But it's something to keep in mind. So those are my initial thoughts on keto white just again It's very early days. I've been using it for three or four days off and on and it's not a horrible experience The kde stuff kind of by the wayside. That's just because kde can be kind of buggy I'm not blaming keynaway for that the actual idea behind an immutable linux distribution At least so far is interesting one of the things I'm going to have to strive to do over the next month Is find a reason why people should use it or more like normal people should use it because from what I can tell At least so far is that this is mostly aimed at developers But the reason why I was so interested in it is because I've heard a lot of people talk about silver blue and Kena white and they talk about how this is going to be basically the future of linux how in the future every linux distribution is going to be immutable And maybe that's true because like the steam deck has an immutable operating system on it The user has no access to that lower level system and if the steam deck does that you can see how other linux distributions and Things like that are going to try to kind of emulate that they're going to try to Take that idea and like everything that fedora does it kind of filters down into the rest of the linux community And eventually they all adopt the things that fedora does so if that holds true The immutability of the operating system is something that will also flow down into other distributions So that's why I wanted to take a look at it and see what the future holds if this is the future How's it going to be, you know, is it going to be great or is it going to suck? You know, are we all going to have to go back to using windows or is linux going to continue to be, you know, pretty cool? Well, so far It's okay. Uh, there's definitely some things that are different. There's definitely some things that I would change but so far You know, it's not that it's still interesting to me. I haven't Nuked and paved yet. So that is it for this video if you have thoughts on Kino white or silver blue you can leave those in the comment section below I again, I just want to reiterate that this is very early days and I may or may not have done a very good job of explaining What this actually is? So if you have questions leave them in the comment section below I will try to answer them or maybe somebody else will have a better answer than I will That's always possible Usually likely anyways, if you want to follow me on twitter You can do so if you want to follow me on mastedon or any other social media network You can find those links in the video description If you'd like to support me on patreon, you can do so patreon.com Slash linux cast I'd like to thank my current patrons robert sid devon patrick fred kramer Trydevil maiglin jackson i'm tool steve separate linux garrick samo kb tgb keith andy uncle bonehead gary antoine Mitchell d dog carbon data jeremy shone odin martin ross edwardo art stern elliott mislaw Merrick camp drash li peter a crucible dark venus experiments vm. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time