A Quick First Look AT iDeal OS

Today I'm going to take a quick first look at a Linux distribution I've never looked at before. In fact, I've never actually heard of this Linux distribution until I discovered it over on Droatch. This distribution is called Ideal OS. It's based on MX Linux and it comes with the KDE Plasma desktop environment. And if I take a look at their website at ideal-oss.xyz, we are greeted with uh three different languages here. Welcome, of course, is English. This is German and Benvvenu is a French. Well, that's Benvven Venui. This is Italian. So, you've got English, German, and Italian languages on the website here. I'm going to choose English, of course. And you can see there is a new release and that's why I saw it on Droatch. It's based on MX Linux 25.1 and Debian 13.3 Trixie with the KDU Plasma 6 desktop environment. So, what is Ideal OS? Well, they claim it's the alternative OS secure by design. So, how is it secure out of the box? Well, says the main goals of Ideal OS are privacy and security, yada yada yada. They really don't talk much about anything other than they have the ideal DNS switcher. So, I guess that's uh something. But other than that, they don't go into any greater detail. Protective uh you can protect your children from I guess uh certain things on the internet. So, I'm assuming that's being able to blacklist and whitelist things on the internet, but they really don't go into much detail there either. And after that, they really don't talk about security and privacy at all. They do have two editions. So, they have the emerald edition and the diamond edition. And the emerald edition is free. You just download the ISO and this is what you get. The emerald edition. If you donate to the project financially, you have the option of getting the diamond edition. and they say that turns your computer into a complete and powerful digital workstation with a wide range of professional tools. I'm not going to donate to the project. So, I'm just going to take a look at the standard Emerald Edition today. I'm going to download the ISO and run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. All right, I created a virtual machine. I gave it 6 gigs of RAM and two threads of my uh 24thread CPU. I'm going to go ahead and boot into the live environment here. And on boot up, I noticed there's several errors, bash errors where it looks like it's trying to run some shell scripts and they error out for some reason. I'm assuming that's some start jobs that are trying to start up that for whatever reason couldn't execute properly. And it boots us into the live environment, which of course is KDE Plasma for me. I'm going to go ahead before running through an installation. Let's go ahead and change the display over to 1920x 1080 for the screen resolution. So, let me go in here and get into the menu. Search for 1920x 1080. Hit apply and then tell it to yeah, keep that and close that. And now, let me search for the installation program. Here it is. The installer. I'm not sure what installer they use. I don't know if this will be Calamar or like the old Auntu Ubiquiti installer. It doesn't look like either one. It looks more like a custom installer. You can see it's checking the installation media. I'm going to press escape to skip. I'm assuming the installation media is okay. And then it says it's gathering information. Please stand by. And away we go here. So, we get some terms of use. Uh it's an independent distribution. Uh it's based on Memphis, which is released under the Apache license, yada yada yada. Let's go ahead and click next. And let me move the installer over a little bit so you can see the buttons. All right. And you know, I do like the fact that it's got two frames here. This left-hand pane gives you instructions in case you need to uh know what's going on on the right hand pane, but it's pretty obvious right now. We need to select a drive. I only have one virtual drive in this virtual machine and it's called VDA. So, I'll click on that. I will choose to tick on encryption. Customize disc layout. I would assume if you need to manually partition the drive, you could do that. Replace existing installation. You can see that's experimental, but that's fine. I'm not replacing an existing installation. And this is a brand new installation. So I won't tick on any of that. I'll click next. And then our encryption password. So let's give a strong and complicated password for the Lux encryption. And then click next. And the Ideal OS Emerald Edition installer will now perform the requested actions. So format the drive. It's just warning us one more time. Hey, we're about to format that drive. I don't know if this needed to be a second screen all to itself. A little popup box. A dialogue window I think would work better there. Just a little feedback. And then we get installation in progress. We get a little percentage and a bar here. This is kind of cool. Now, this is creating a swap. Do we want to swap file or do we want to enable ZRAM? I'm fine with either one. In a VM, I really don't need swap at all, but for purposes of this video, I'll tick off swap file and I will create enable ZRAM. And it's going to create ZRAM based on 100% of the RAM you have in your machine. In my case, 6 gigs of RAM. in this VM. I don't need a ZRAMM that big really. Again, in a virtual machine, I don't need RAM at all. But I'll do 50% for the ZRAMM. And then let me go ahead and click next. And you can see we still have our progress bar here at the top. That's kind of neat. Computer name. So this is the host name of the computer. I'm going to call this ideal-VM. What the hell happened here? Ideal dash. That is not a dash. What character is that? What's Oh, that is not an equal sign. What's going on with my keyboard? So, I hope when I entered my Lux encryption password, it actually enabled the the password I wanted. So, the key map is not English. So, whatever default key map is uh is set. It's not English US. So, let me go into the menu system and go to system settings. So, we need to go into the plasma settings before we continue because we're going to screw some things up if we keep typing uh characters on the keyboard that are not what we expect. So, I need to go to keyboard here and then layout. Yeah. So, the default layout is D. That's the German layout. So, we need to add and I need to search for English uh English US and just the standard English US keyboard layout will be fine. And then let me remove the German layout because I want to make sure that is not enabled at all. And now let's see if I go back and type ideal dash. Okay. OS. Now it's typing the correct uh letters. Right. So computer domain example. DOM. That's fine. We don't need to change it. We're not really going to use this as a web server. We really don't need to set up a domain name. Uh setting up a Samba server for Microsoft networking. Now I'm not going to be networking with any Windows computers. I I doubt most people will. It's strange that this is default, but hey, it's kind of cool that they allow you a quick and easy way to set up a Samba server. Uh I don't know if again I probably wouldn't have that as a default. I'm going to turn that off. I don't own any uh Windows machines at all, so I I don't know anything about Samba. So uh and I know you can share files with Samba between Linux computers, but I think most people are just going to do that with NFS. You you're not going to use Samba if all you have is Linux machines. Next up is localal. So local uh United States and American English is the default. Now in this I I don't know if it would have been had I not changed the plasma settings earlier. Time zone. I need to go into this menu here. I need to choose America. Typically I do America/ Chicago. Uh I could search for Chicago in this list. Or you know what? I could search for the central time zone in this list as well. But let's go America/ Chicago. And yeah, I don't want to change to 24-hour time. It really doesn't matter. I'm comfortable 24-hour time or 12-hour time. It's fine. I'm going to go ahead and click next. And then our user, I'm going to call my user DT. We need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the strong and complicated password. And then root password. Yeah, sure. We'll create a root account. His password will also be strong and complicated. I don't want to auto log in and I don't want to save live desktop changes. I'm assuming that's setting up some kind of snapshot. Maybe something like time shelf. I'm not sure there but let's go ahead and click next. And now I'm here at the end. It looks like now I have to wait for the installation to complete and then I should be able to reboot the machine and boot into our freshly installed ideal OS. All right. And the installation has completed. Uh we don't get any kind of popup dialogue about the installation being complete. It just completes and you now have a finish button. I think to make it more obvious that the installation completed. Uh kind of like I mentioned, they should have a pop-up dialogue earlier in the session. I think a pop-up box here would also serve them well. Let me go ahead and click finish. And it should automatically uh reboot our virtual machine here. And it reboots. We get a grub menu. Old school kind of grub menu with that, you know, uh with the Norton Commander kind of blue screen there. Kind of neat. uh our disc lux encryption and why is it set to using a German keyboard? You see the keyboard there in de instead of uh enus. Um well, let's see if hopefully I I don't know if I typed my lux encryption password correctly because it's still using the German keyboard rather than the US keyboard. I I don't know what's going on there. Uh let's go ahead and log in with the DT user. All right. And we log in to our KD Plasma desktop. Now once again, I need to go ahead and change the display resolution. This will be the last time I need to do this because now that it is properly installed, once I change this time and tell it to keep changes, it will forever remember that this virtual machine uh that every time I log into KD Plasma, I want 1920x 1080 screen resolution. It did mess up the cocky placement. The cocky was supposed to be over here on the right hand side of the screen. But let's search for cocky and see if I can kill it or turn it off or restart it. Cocky. I can't even type cocky because what should be Y is Z on the keyboard. So, the installation did not correctly uh put me as English US for the keyboard. So, see if I can type. I can't type system because I can't type a Y on the keyboard. [laughter] Let me go into the menu. Luckily, we have a menu system. So, system settings and let's go to keyboard and once again add uh layout English uh English US English US. Hit okay and then remove the German layout and hit apply. And now let's see if I can go in the menu system and type conci. I can. All right. Uh, we have cocky toggle and MX cocky. I'm assuming MX cocky would just turn the cocky on. Cocky toggle would be turning it on or off depending on whether it's on or off. So, let's see. Yeah, that turns it off. And conci toggle again would turn it back on. And now it's in the correct placement after we change the screen resolution. So, let's take a quick look at what is installed out of the box. If I go into the menu system, you can see we have Kate as our text editor. Under games, we have board games, logic games, tactics and strategies. This is just some of your standard uh KDE games like K Sodoku and K Mines, K Majong. Uh under graphics, we have Digicam, Document Scanner, Gwen View, Ocular. Uh Ocular is just the image viewer for KDE. Digicam is your webcam program for KDE. And then of course, uh This would be hopefully the latest 3.0. Let's actually see what version they're on. This is based on MX Linux, which is based on Debian Stable. So, some of the programs may not be the absolute latest. Yeah, this is 3.0.4. I believe is actually on version 3.0.8 on my Arch Linux base machines. Getting back into the menu, we have a help category with some information here. We have internet and under internet, our web browsers, Mozilla, Firefox. Uh it's typically the default browser on most Linux distributions these days, although many people are starting to abandon it as Firefox has uh kind of destroyed itself from within in the last few years. We also have BetterBird as our email client. Betterbird, I believe, is a fork of Thunderbird. It's just better, right? [laughter] I've never actually used Bitterbird. Most people probably don't need a desktop email client, but they included one here on Ideal OS in case you do need it. We have element which is a matrix uh client. So matrix is a a chat protocol kind of like uh IRC uh it's a you know much more modern than IRC. Let's use no encryption and let's actually launch matrix. I'm not actually going to connect anything. I just want to see if it actually launched. It did. It's sitting down here in the cy tray. If I click on it. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what is going on with element because it did not launch. Let's open new window. Yeah, I don't know what's going on here. I'm just going to quit out of Element. I haven't actually used Element in a few years. Uh I I played with it when Matrix uh first started becoming popular a couple of years back, but uh really it doesn't seem like too many people use the Matrix protocol or Element these days, and I'm not much of a person to sit on the internet and chat. Anyway, we have the ideal DNS switcher. So, this is what they were uh really touting for their uh security and their privacy stuff is the DNS switcher. And you have a little drop down here where you could, you know, switch to different settings here and different DNS providers. That's kind of cool. And you have a settings tab here where you could enable IPv6 DNS, restore system DNS. It looks like it's a neat little tool. Uh I got to give them credit for that. It's their own custom tool. And this is, you know, something that I like seeing uh a lot of these distributions that differentiate themselves by custom tools. Under multimedia, we have also mixer. We have a CD ripper. Most people don't have optical drives or the need to rip from CDs anymore. Like 99.9% of the people that install Ideal OS will never have a need for that program, so they probably could leave that off the ISO. Same thing for K3B. That's a disc burning program for people that still burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. Again, 99% of the people plus that install this operating system will not have the need to burn discs. So, they they could save some space by eliminating some of that stuff. Uh we do have VLC for our video player. It's really a audio player, too, if you wanted to use it as a audio and a video player. It's a full multimedia player. Let's see what version of VC they happen to be on. This is VLC 3.0.23. And let's go ahead and close that out. Now, we have a category here called MX tools, and it is filled with a lot of the custom MX programs, and I'm assuming this is why they base off of MX is because they like a lot of the MX tools. So, MX really makes uh customizing and configuring a Debian based system really cool. You can see we got things like chut rescue scan and boot options, boot repair, yada yada yada. Let's actually there is a system uh like a settings tool here. So MX service manager is that it there is one that just gives you the complete uh menu of these things. It's not that. Let me go back into the MX tools and oh it's MX tools. There we go. And this is the little control center settings manager for all the various MX uh tweak kind of applications. So we have our Charoot scan disc manager job scheduler. Job scheduler, I'm assuming, would be for setting up a cron job. So, yeah. So, you would give it a a a specific uh command to execute as a specific time or specific interval of time. Uh I've never actually used this tool, but if I hit the plus sign, yeah, the DT user on the system will execute at this time, you know, some command, you know, maybe it's a a custom script I write that I don't know, cleans up the system or something. So being able to set up cron jobs is kind of an advanced kind of tool that most users are not going to need, but those of us that do sometimes play with cron jobs. That's a nice little way to automate the process of setting that up. We have boot options. Boot options, I'm assuming, would be customizing the grub menu. So yeah, the menu timeout, enabling a theme. Uh I'm not going to play with that. I I don't advise you guys to play with the Grub boot options and theming it and boot repair. Boot repair is important if your Grub is broken. So, and this would reinstall Grub for you. Regenerate the innit RAM FS images, things like that. So, this is important if you need it. I wouldn't go play with this stuff though, unless your Grub is broken. The cleanup tool, I'm assuming, would clear like cache stuff. Yeah, clean cache thumbnails, clear the apt cache. apt, of course, is the package manager on a Debian based system. Empty the trash. Yeah, really cool tools here. Yeah, neat little stuff. So, uh, yeah, if you've never played with MX Linux before, MX really does uh do a lot of stuff to help u Debian be a little more user friendly. Under the Office category, we have Folate. Folate, is that a uh I can't remember if that's a PDF reader? Uh, let's see. Yeah, it's a a book reader, like a uh ebook reader is what it is. Okay, kind of cool. I mean, I I'm assuming you could also use this for uh PDFs as well. Let's see. Go to details. Does it tell us anything about what Foliade is? I've actually seen it before. I just can't remember what the program is. So, here on GitHub, yeah, read books and style. So, it is a uh e-reader essentially uh that uses GTK4 lib ada. Uh yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and close out of that. Under the office category, we also had the full Libre Office suite as well. Let me open Libre Office Writer, which is the word processor that is part of Libre Office. We'll close the release announcement there. And about Libre Office, this is Libre Office 25.2.3.2. Uh, and again, because we're based on Debian stable, I bet Libre Office is probably a couple of minor releases ahead now. And then we have a system category with your standard system settings. Uh, we do have time shift here. So, there was that option in the installer to set up uh time shift backups, I believe. And if you wanted to, you could use rync, which if they're using the extend for file system, rsync would be what you would use. If you were using a Butterf FS file system, you would you could choose Butterf FS as the way to do these snapshots. And let me close out time shift. If you're wondering what file system you're using, you could always open a terminal. Let's open a terminal because there's a few things I am curious about. Let me zoom in first. Let's do a lsbk-f to get the file system information. And our file system right here, our DDA2 partition here in the virtual machine. That's our main partition. and it is an extend 4 partition. For those wondering whether this plasma session is using x11 or way, we could actually echo u xdg session type to get x11 or way and it returns whand. So this is plasma on wh to get kernel information we could do a username-r. The kernel is 6.12.63 and of course being debian based it does use the apt package manager. I'm wondering, do they have a graphical software center? Do they have Synaptic? Yeah, they have the Synaptic package manager installed. A lot of Debian distributions do install Synaptic. This is a nice uh easy graphical way to install software, remove software, update your system. Very easy to use. You search for a package, you tick on it, and then you click, you know, mark all upgrades, give it a sudo password, and it installs programs for you. And other than that, I think to wrap up this quick first look, let's actually take a look at how would I activate the Diamond Edition. Now, I don't really want to financially contribute to this project because I'm not going to ever use this distribution, right? I'm just taking a look in a VM, but how would I activate to the Diamond Edition? So, it does have a little PDF on how to activate. I'm just wondering what it gives you. So, if you donate, you get a couple of different uh KDE themes, new global KDE themes. You get two of them, diamond light and diamond dark. And then it gives you a link to follow to take care of that. So, uh, all of that is nice. And then let me right click on the desktop and let's see what kind of wallpapers I have to choose from. Is it just standard like abstract art from the standard KDE Plasma wallpaper pack? I do like the KD Plasma abstract art wallpapers, but no, they actually come with some nice photography as well. I do like nature photographs. So, here's one that is Ideal OS branded. So, Ideal OS, that's interesting. One thing I will uh also advise, Ideal OS, their logo very much resembles Mangaro's logo, right? That stylized green M that's got three bars essentially. They might want to change the logo. Uh it's not exactly the Mangaro logo, but it is kind of confusing. Like, you know, when I'm looking at the menu here with just the icon, like if I was looking at a screenshot and that was all I had to go on, I might think somebody was running plasma on Mangaro rather than plasma on ideal OS. So, they should make the uh the logo a little more unique, I think. Here is the Tokyo Tower uh wallpaper here. That's neat. Teton Sunrise. Yeah, I do like mountainscapes. They got some nice stuff. Here's one with a squirrel. Yeah, playing in the snow. That's kind of cool. Uh oh, I really like this one. Algen Park, N. I'm assuming that's Ontario. Uh yeah, really cool. Alstrom Point. You know what? I think I'm going to go with that one for now. Let's apply that. Yeah, pretty cool. So, there you have it. A quick first look of Ideal OS based on MX Linux using the KD Plasma desktop. Overall, I really like it. Right there. It's a brand new distribution, so there were a couple of quirks, you know, like the uh keymap layout, right? It kept putting me on a German keyboard rather than a US keyboard, but I won't beat them up too bad about that because honestly, it's a new project. I've never heard of it before today. So, and that installer, I really love that installation program. That was a really good installation process. I like some of the the custom tools, of course. I like the MX tools that they're also incorporating into the distribution. Overall, yeah, I got to say job well done. I want to congratulate the devs of Ideal OS. I think they're doing a fantastic job. Now, before I go, let me thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, George, Darloff, Lee, Mark, Methos, Uran, Peace, Archador, Roland, Warrento, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at Ideal OS 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 because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.

Today, I'm taking a look at the latest release of iDeal OS, based on MX Linux 25.1 and Debian 13.3 Trixie, with KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment. REFERENCED: ► https://ideal-os.xyz/ WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW 🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi 👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube DT ON THE WEB: 🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube 📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1 🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube 👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/ 📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE: 🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/ 📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/ 🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org 🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ 💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ 🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!