 One of the distros that I always take a look at when they have a new release is elementary OS elementary OS I'm a big fan of now. I personally don't use elementary OS It's not a distribution made for somebody like me more of a power user But for really casual users, especially people that don't do much with their computers They're the kinds of people that just open up a web browser and browse Facebook, you know watch YouTube things like that They really never install extra pieces of software. They don't really customize their desktop in any sort of way You know think about, you know, you got elderly parents or grandparents, you know those kinds of people elementary OS is perfect I've had really good success installing elementary OS on Machines for those kinds of people so elementary just had a big release They just released version 6.0 and today I'm going to take a quick first look at elementary 6.0 codenamed Odin So what I want to do is I want to run through the installation process inside a virtual machine because elementary OS Does have a rather unique installer and installer They've been working on for a while and it's rather simple first select a language by default English is chosen for me And that's correct. I'm just going to click select and then what kind of English United States English So select again and then keyboard layout English US is correct and then What kind of keyboard layout whether it's default or Dvorak Cole Mac things like that? I'm using a standard keyboard and then what do we want to do with the disk? Do we want to erase the entire disk and give the entire disk to elementary OS or do we want to do manual partitioning? And then they have another option here try demo mode I'm assuming that's where we can just test it out as a live environment What I'm going to do is I'm going to erase the disk and give the entire 25 gig virtual hard drive of this virtual machine To elementary OS and I'm going to click erase disk and install Then we need to select the device the disk to install to there's only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine So that's the only one that is an option for me And then I'm going to click erase and install then it's going to ask Do we want to encrypt the drive by default? It expects you to encrypt your hard drive. This was a real machine I might do that especially if it's a laptop Because you know you could have that device stolen and then somebody could get into your machine Especially if you didn't have a super secure password and still you know important data from you But for purposes of this video, I'm actually not going to encrypt this virtual machine And then the installation process here will continue this typically takes just a few minutes I'll pause the video. I'll be back once this is done The installation process there took about five minutes and then it automatically rebooted itself And then we get more screens about selecting our language I don't know why when you select a language in the installer that it doesn't remember it upon reboot But once again when you first log in after the installation it asked you what language I'm going to choose English again And then English us for the keyboard layout and it's a default keyboard Now we need to create a username and a password I'm going to call my user DT and I'm going to create a strong and complicated password for privacy reasons for the DT user And then confirm the password and then finish set up And now we're logged in and let me get a proper screen resolution here in this VM So I'm just going to open up a terminal and I'm going to run X render space dash s space 1920 by 1080 Because the video driver I'm using in this virtual machine does support a 1920 by 1080 resolution there. So Now when you first log into elementary OS 6.0 I will say I really like the wallpaper very attractive wallpaper as far as the actual desktop environment As far as the translucent panel and the dock at the bottom It looks exactly the same as elementary OS 5 did so visually as far as the desktop environment It looks rather similar, right? It doesn't really look like they made any drastic changes We do have our little greeter program here that will go through some of the basics of elementary OS if I click next We'll get a little slideshow like do we want a default light theme or do we want a dark theme? I can actually switch that right here in the little helper program That's really cool. Then I'm going to click next. Do you want to turn on the night light program? That's a good idea for those of you that use a computer at night It helps reduce eyestrain, especially when viewing a monitor late at night So I'll click that on and then do we want to automatically delete old temporary files and trash files? Absolutely, and then connect online accounts if I click that it'll connect our online accounts What are our options cow div and I map so our email accounts? I'm actually not going to be setting up an email inside this virtual machine So I'll skip that for now and then browse the app center to get some apps We'll take a look at that in just a second and then ready to go open system settings to make any other Changes we need to do for example if I click on desktop We can change the wallpaper here. I actually quite like the default wallpaper if I go to appearance That's where we can change from light to dark things. We can also change the accent color right now The accent color is blue if I wanted to I could change it to purple that looks rather nice or mint Let me open up a program. Let me open up the file manager The file manager is actually not in the dock That is a rather strange choice because I would think the file manager is a program that you're going to use often enough It probably needs to be in the dock. So I'm going to add it Yeah, I like the dark theme. I don't see any minty highlights though Maybe the file manager wouldn't a good program to to visually show that I'm going to use the purple accents We can also adjust the text size right now. We're using the default text size But if you wanted to make it smaller or larger or even larger you can do that You can also turn on dyslexia friendly fonts. That's a really nice Accessibility feature that's added. I really appreciate that the elementary team were thinking about those little details as far as Universal access now docking panel this of course the dock. It's at the bottom This is the plank dock now if I wanted to change some stuff in the dock I think I could control and right-click. Yeah, and then go to preferences here And I could actually change the position of the dock because typically if I don't like docks especially at the bottom of the screen because most everything when you're Interacting with the computer such as your web browser think of the back button the forward button the home button your search bars And everything everything happens at the top of the screen usually the top left-hand side of the screen You're always here and to constantly be traveling to the center bottom for that dock to do things It's really tough on your hand as far as your right hand for the mouse It doesn't make sense these days for ergonomics and just for safety reasons health reasons You really don't want a bottom panel or a bottom dot put that thing over on the left is what I suggest for now though I will leave it in the default location at the bottom you can change the size and honestly I would probably make these icons a little smaller for my screen I I think 36 point font or 36 pixel size icons actually Makes a lot more sense because I could fit a lot more things to that dock now another thing We have a setting for is the panel translucency. Do you want a translucent panel or not for me? I actually don't care for the translucent panel me personally. I would turn it off But if you want to turn it on the cool thing about the translucent panel in Elementary OS is they do have this kind of dynamic feature where if you make a window full screen It turns the translucent panel back to a solid panel and because visually that makes sense You don't want to have that sliver of translucency at the top when you have something full screen So I like you know how that works, you know when you full screen a window it Changes the translucency it turns it off and it turns it back on when you un-maximize the window Also, you can turn on and off the entelehyde feature for the dock The entelehyde feature is what is set by default is that any window that overlaps the dock It causes the dock to hide itself. So if I make a window full screen the dock goes away By un-maximize that window the dock comes back. So let's go ahead and open up the elementary app center So this is your software center your app store essentially and one of the things that elementary does that's different than most distributions Is they're really trying to do a lot with flat packs most of the elementary apps that come pre-installed Are elementary's own apps that they develop and they package them as flat packs and most of the stuff that you're gonna find in The app center will be flat packs as well I think all of the stuff you find in the app center is packaged as a flat pack and If we just want to search for something let's go to the audio category right now There's nothing displaying in the audio category other than music, which is elementary's music app. It's already installed. So Communication mail which is already installed this elementary's own application I think what the problem here is it's not showing anything other than the installed applications is maybe we need to do like a Fresh update syncing the repositories. Let me open the terminal So if I do super T to open the terminal and then let me zoom in here I'll make the the terminal full screen here. Let's run a sudo apt update Give it our sudo password There may have been a way to actually update the repositories inside the app center I didn't see anything though the app center the graphical app center didn't look like there's no settings menu or Anything like that here. It's very bare But now do I actually have more things to look at no I don't me do super T to open the terminal one more time and now that I've updated the repositories Let's do a sudo apt install Package kit and once again give it a sudo password and now let me close the terminal out the super key rings up key bindings That's kind of cool So anytime you want to figure out what the key bindings are inside elementary Just tap the super key and tap it again to make it go away Now that I installed the package kit program now when I go into audio does it actually show me anything else? No, it doesn't I have no idea why I don't get anything Displayed VM is not here. He max is not here. Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with the app center It's definitely broken though because it's only showing me installed applications. It's not showing me anything else So essentially it's rather useless. Let me do a reboot and see if maybe it we need to do a reboot after installing all of that Reboot, I guess an elementary needs sudo privileges on most distributions these days that use system D as the init system You can just do reboot without sudo, but I guess elementary wants people To have elevated privileges to do a reboot of the system All right back to the log in manager and let's log in once again Once again, I'm gonna have to fix the screen resolution. So you run the X render command one more time Close out of the terminal and let's run the app center one more time and let's see if yeah We still are only showing installed programs and nothing else I can't search for anything other than for the programs that are already installed So yeah the app center at least inside this virtual machine is broken I don't know why that would be a virtual machine problem rather than I Don't know if that I'm assuming that would still be a problem even on physical hardware I have no idea how to sync the app center. So it actually shows me things because There's nothing to do inside the app center. I like there's no menu. There's nothing going on You can't right-click here. It's just like window features, but nothing And there's just nothing to do here It's a very bad center experience Let me do a sudo apt install Synaptic just so I have some way of installing software Here on elementary. I'll install the synaptic package manager Which is really the best graphical package manager for Debian and Ubuntu and all distributions based on Debian and Ubuntu Oh wait Well, that is really weird. Did you guys see I guess some kind of automatic update was going on and We actually have some operating system updates. Let's update all So maybe the problem was it was waiting to do this system sync this repository sync in the background and Then it would have eventually worked itself out. I was just trying to rush it I guess and now the system is up to date. Let me close that. Let's see if now the app center actually shows us things Let me go to home instead of default if I go to the audio category There's still nothing here except the music player The communication category now shows two things including one that I don't have installed Iridium which is a IRC client and you do have the option to actually pay for software So if you want to donate to the project that is really cool. I like that feature There's still hardly any software in the SAP center the office category still doesn't have a any kind of office suite So there's no LibreOffice. Let's see now. Could I find Vim? No, Vim is still not available Emacs is still not available is Gimp here. No, so a Lot of software that I use on a daily basis on a regular basis I would have to go get from somewhere else now. We did just install the synaptic package manager So let me search for the synaptic package manager if I can type Give it sudo privileges And now we can actually install things from the standard Ubuntu repositories using the synaptic package manager Of course, you could do all this at the terminal as well, but the synaptic package manager is a nice Graphical package manager. I did a video about the synaptic package manager a few weeks back check that out If you're confused how to use synaptic, let me go ahead and open up the web browser It's just called web in the doc here And I think this is based on GNOME's epiphany browser. I go to the settings here go to Go to preferences. We do have some preference stuff It really doesn't tell me if it's based on epiphany or not I thought I would get some kind of about information, but Yeah, I'm not sure But we're just gonna roll with the web browser here Whatever this happens to be what I want to do is I want to go to flat hub dot org Since they're using flat packs You probably want to try to use flat packs as much as possible because chances are it's gonna respect elementary's dark theme and light theme and you know things that Snaps may not respect app images may not respect as it's not that snaps and app images won't respect it It's just the elementary guys probably haven't worked on those package formats to get them to respect how elementary does things So it's best probably just to go to flat hub dot org and like I mentioned I was gonna Install gimp. There you go. And if I click install Will it actually install it automatically here inside elementary? I don't know. I would assume it would automatically Open the app center and maybe try to install it See what's going on here. It says I downloaded org dot gimp dot gimp dot flat pack dot riff. I Double-click it Do we want to install a untrusted app? Yes, I do So I understand I guess the risk install anyway and there you go It's installing gimp as a flat pack. So that's probably how you would go about Sideloading programs that aren't in the app centers for us flat packs that aren't in the app center go to flat hub dot org and search for those flat packs and then just install them from the browser and it finished installing that It's asking do I want to open the app? I will open the app But I'm gonna open it from the menu system because I want to see if it actually Put that in the menu system already. Yep. It's here under applications And let's see how the gimp looks. I'm interested if the gimp respects the dark theme that we set globally It does not look like it does now. This is a problem. Obviously the elementary's own apps They respect elementary's choice as far as a light theme or a dark theme But these extra programs you install they don't really respect that and that kind of sucks But let me see if elementary's own programs all of them Do respect the dark theme the calendar does the music player did? By open the email client, I'm not going to set it up But the email client looks like it supports a dark theme and we had the photos application All of that stuff looks like it respects the global dark theme But I guess anything you install yourself any third-party packages. I guess it doesn't matter whether they're dibs flat pack snaps Whatever they're probably not going to respect the the appearance settings for elementary and that's unfortunate Let me open a terminal one more time And let's get a listing of all the flat packs that are installed on the system just to see Yeah, it looks like all the elementary apps The standard elementary apps like the web browser, which is GNOME web. It's epiphany events Which is the PDF reader all of this stuff is packaged as a flat pack the camera app the calculator the screenshot utility And then of course gimp which we installed ourselves now being based on a boon to a boon to usually has a Snap installed by default or enabled by default and sometimes snaps installed by default I don't know if elementary uses snaps or not if I do a snap list Snap is not installed. I'm kind of curious if I do a sudo apt install snap D Let's install a snap and see how it looks with the theming So we just installed snap D, which is the snap daemon is what you need to install before you can actually Install snap packs and already created the sim links and everything so we're good to go I could do a sudo snap installed name of package now to install anything as a snap And I think one of the things I want to install is a better terminal emulator I don't know this terminal emulator, but it looks ugly. It has scroll bars It has a tab it has a tab open even when there's only one thing open I don't know that's that's completely wasted space and it doesn't make any sense And I don't think you can turn that off because you have a settings menu Which allows you to change the background color and to zoom in and out the text and that's it That's the only settings right click does nothing so I can't disable the scroll bar the tab bar I can't do any of that like you can do and almost every other terminal emulator known demand So let's do a sudo snap install and I know alacrity has a snap So let's install the alacrity terminal emulator and it looks like alacrity is a special kind of snap by default Snaps are confined packages meaning they don't have access to certain parts of the system for security reasons But because alacrity is a terminal emulator it has to be able to break out of that confinement It's what's called a classic snap and to install these you have to add the dash dash Classic flag to the command. Don't worry. It's not a problem with alacrity as far as it's not Insecure or a potential security issue all terminal emulators, of course need access to everything on your system I mean, that's what you're doing with the terminal is you're running these commands that can change system setting stuff So that's why alacrity has to be one of these classic snaps rather rather than the standard snaps which are sandboxed Probably why you really don't see terminal emulators packaged as flat packs because I don't think flat pack I think every flat pack is containerized as sandboxed and a terminal emulator Just doesn't work in that kind of strict containment and it took a couple of minutes for alacrity to install as a snap And now let me close out whatever terminal emulator This is elementary's own terminal emulator, which I really didn't care for at all just a few minutes I spent in it and now alacrity as a snap does not show up in the menu system So I'd probably probably have to log out log back in or maybe reboot the machine for it to show up But if I just type alacrity the full word and execute alacrity Yeah, it launches just fine and this is alacrity as a snap pack and once again It doesn't respect the global dark theme So really other than elementary's own applications everything else is still using a light theme Even though we enabled the dark theme globally, so that's kind of annoying It's been this way for the last few versions of elementary and I don't know why this can't be fixed because for me It doesn't matter. I just want my applications that I need I don't care how they look but a lot of people are really OCD when it comes to appearance and having some Applications using a dark theme and some using a light theme. That's really going to tick off some Computer users so the elementary team really need to work on just Getting the theming right for their applications So this is alacrity if I did a snap list now We can see that now we have three snaps of the snap D Damon the core which is needed So those are just installed when you enable snaps and then the one snap that we actually installed alacrity Of course, I can install Firefox as a snap and gimp as a snap All of those are also available as flat packs since elementary is basing on flat packs I probably try to use flat packs where possible, but if for some reason you can't find something as a flat pack like alacrity I don't know. I don't think they do terminal emulators as flat packs. You go grab that as a snap So let me open up a terminal again now. I could do super tea, but it's going to bring up that other Terminal emulator that I didn't like so let me just execute alacrity one more time from the run launcher And let me zoom in in alacrity and is H top installed by default on elementary It is and what kind of RAM are we using I gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM It's using 850 megs now. We've opened a lot of programs here in the last few minutes So probably what I should do is actually what I'm going to do is I'm just going to reboot and see what H top is on a cold Boot and get our login manager All right, and we're back here once again alacrity now has an icon So now it actually shows up I'm going to do a x-ranger to get our screen resolution back to 1920 by 1080 And now let's run H top on a cold boot Yes, 626 megs of the six gigs of RAM. That's rather light That is in the same neighborhood as something like Xfce KDE plasma, which are kind of middling Middle of the road desktop environments as far as RAM usage typically Xfce is using I don't know 500 megs KDE Plasma 5 600 megs elementary's pantheon desktop environment looks like it is Not using that much RAM not using it is using a little bit of CPU 38% of the CPU I'm in a virtual machine though. Well, actually that settled way down I'm assuming that CPU spike where it was using a whole lot of CPU was it doing the automatic updates because that really spikes the CPU when it has to sync the repositories and check for updates And of course, it's going to do that probably immediate upon logging in So that's probably what that was and you saw though that it settled back down to using about three four percent of the CPU That's pretty normal. Let me right click on the desktop And I'm going to change wallpaper because let's take a look at the wallpaper packs because honestly Elementary comes with some of the best wallpapers out there. I really like the default wallpaper But they have two variations on the default wallpaper They have the darker one here which would look great with the light theme and of course you had the lighter one Which would look great with a dark theme, but that's that's really nice They have two variations on the same setting and that is rather cool. Some of the other wallpapers since I'm using a dark theme I think actually this black and white photograph would look very nice Yeah, I could use that or this here is a black and white with a little bit of red accent That would look very nice with the dark theme Yeah, really nice wallpapers. I'm going to go back to the default there Overall, you know elementary is always looked rather clean and polished. It's very professional It's kind of its own walled garden like Mac OS, right? They present Limited options limited options which for somebody like me the power user I couldn't use elementary OS because I've got to do other things, right? I would have to go install other package managers I got to go install snaps and app images and things like that And I'm going to go get software that maybe doesn't look quite right with elementary's pantheon desktop And it's eventually going to frustrate me enough where I'm going to install another desktop environment or window manager and use that instead of elementary's pantheon desktop environment, which it's pretty much all they work on right if I strip away The pantheon desktop environment and all the elementary apps or another desktop environment with other apps Then why am I using elementary OS, right? That's that's not the right distribution for me to use at that point But for many people with basic needs if you're a basic computer user Think about people that know nothing technical about computers All they know is how to sit down and open up a web browser and surf the web and that's all they do They don't change themes. They don't change icon sets They don't even change the default wallpaper that comes on their computer And there's millions and millions of people out there and for those kinds of people Things like the Mac OS is great for them and things like elementary OS is great for them because it's really good out of the box You know this small little suite of software actually works I mean you can pretty much get everything done you want to get done inside elementary OS and for the power user They're probably gonna want something like one of the Ubuntu flavors of the standard Ubuntu with Kenoma or even Kabuntu with KDE Plasma Which has a million customization options or Linux Mint Cinnamon is a very nice desktop environment It's highly configurable. You're probably better serve putting people on a distribution like that rather than elementary If they're a tinkerer if they want to get under the hood and play around a little bit They're not gonna have a good time with elementary now before I go. I need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Absi gave James Mitchell Paul was a commie Ellen Chuck Kirk David Dylan Gregory Heiko Mike early on Alexander peace arching for door polytate raver Red Prophet Scott Steven and Willie these guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick first look at elementary OS 6.0 codenamed Odin it would not have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names You're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like My work and want to help support me. Please consider subscribing to distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace Maybe I was a little harsh on that terminal