A Quick First Look of Refresh OS

So today I'm taking a look at a Linux distribution I've never looked at before, which is always unusual because I've literally looked at hundreds of different Linux distributions over the years. And you know, to come across one I haven't looked at before is rather unusual. This distribution though is Refresh OS. They just had a new release, Refresh OS 2.5. Uh this is a Debianbased distribution. Uh looking at their website here, they are Debian built with a focus on clarity, performance, and a smooth experience. Basically, it's trying to be just a normal desktop Linux distribution that comes with all the applications you expect to be there and none of the extra like Croft. Uh they mentioned that they don't ship snaps or flatp packs out of the box, right? They're just using Debian with the apt package manager, so native packaging only. They also include a full suite of desktop applications, including the Brave browser. That's nice that they actually ship a a good browser rather than Mozilla Firefox, right? Nemo is their file manager. They ship the Deepen apps. Yeah. And which some of the deepen apps are nice. So, they kind of mix and match the applications and they're just not sticking with like a default like KDE suite of applications because they do use a modified KDE desktop. They use the Calamaris installer. Looks like we're going to get the Libre Office suite. We're going to get get a out of the box as well. So yeah, I for me I can tell you I would be very happy with that list of software packages that are installed here. So I would be fine for that. Of course, I probably wouldn't use KDU Plasma myself. You guys know I love ting window managers, but it looks like a really neat Debian based distribution. So I'm going to go ahead and grab this latest ISO. This ISO, by the way, built on Debian 12, uh Debian 12.11, so the last point release of Debian. So it's based on Debian stable. Now, Debian 13 hasn't been released yet, but it should come out shortly. So, it'll be interesting to see what Refresh OS looks like once it's being built on Debian 13, but right now we're on Debian 12. So, I'm going to grab the ISO and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. So, I've created this virtual machine here and booted up the ISO. And I got to say, even in the live environment, you know, I really like the look and feel of this thing. Beautiful wallpaper. You've got the the dog here, you know, cute little dog. Uh really nice plasma theme as far as like your panel and um system uh menu here. It's got a little bit of blurring. Uh yeah, just really nice overall. I like the look and feel of it. Very traditional. I think people coming from Windows, for example, would be very comfortable with how KD Plasma is laid out here. I'm going to go ahead and click the icon here for install refresh OS, which I'm assuming is going to launch us directly into the Calamari installer. It does. Now, I'm going to quickly run through the installer. So, American English is the language of the installer. That's fine for me. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, so I don't have to do anything. It has correctly chosen English US for my keyboard layout, so I don't need to do anything. And then erase disc is what I'm going to choose. I'm going to give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine over to refresh OS. If I was dual booting, I would need to do some manual partitioning, but for purposes of this video, I'm just going to give the whole disc to refresh OS. For swap, I will choose swap file. For file system, I'll choose extend 4 because it's the default, but you do have other options. You do have butterfs if you prefer butterfs. Then I'm going to click next. Now, let me create my username. So, I'm going to call my user DT. Let's create a host name for the computer. I'm going to call this computer refreshos-v. That way, if I ever ssh into this virtual machine, I know which virtual machine I'm sshing into, right? It's the refresh OS virtual machine and then let me create a strong and complicated password for my DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password and then log in automatically without asking for a password that's ticked off by default. Leave that ticked off for security reasons. You always want to have to log in to get into your computer for privacy reasons. And then use the same password for the administrator account. You can tick this on that way. Your sudo password is the same as your user's password. In my case, the DT password is the same as the sudo password. That way, I don't have to remember two different passwords. Then I'm going to click next. We get a summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. Partition scheme looks good. So, I'm going to click install. And away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about 5 to 10 minutes on my machine. So, I'm going to step away, grab a cup of coffee, and I'll be back once Refresh OS has finished installing. And I stepped away for maybe 5 minutes to grab me a cup of coffee. And the installation is already completed. So a very fast installation process. Now to complete the installation, we need to reboot the machine. So make sure this check box here for restart now is ticked on. Then click done. And it should automatically reboot the virtual machine in my case. And I get a grub menu. So it looks like the installation went just fine. I really like the splash screen and the logo as well. Nicely done. And we come to our login manager. And the default session is plasma using whining. I'll leave that since that's the default session that should be fine in this virtual machine. Um on physical hardware, you know, your your mileage may vary, but for the most part, plasma on Whan these days is pretty stable, so I'm going to go with it. And we're logging in for the first time. There some updates available. I'm going to decline taking those updates. The first thing I need to do though is change the display resolution. So, let me go into the settings um manager, the system settings for KDE, and let me go down until I find uh there should be like a display and monitor setting. Here it is. And let me change that to 1920x 1080. And now that I've got a proper 1920x 1080 screen resolution, I'll tell it to keep that. Now, every time I log into this VM, it should always remember that I want a 1920x 1080 resolution. So, let's take a look at some of the software that's installed out of the box. So, remember this is based on Debian. So, some of the software versions may be a little older, but let's start with the browser. Uh, the quick launcher is down here at the bottom. We have Brave installed. So, let's go ahead and open Brave and see what version of Brave we're on. Take a second to load. And let me make it full screen here. And let's go to help and about Brave. And this is Brave 1.79.126 the 64bit based on Chromium 137.0. Let's go ahead and close that out. Other quick launchers, we have our file manager which they mentioned they were using Nemo. Let me hit control H to show all hidden files and directories as well. Yeah, really interesting theme as far as the icon set. It's just like a black and white kind of grayscale kind of icon theme. I would have expected something a little more colorful cuz everything else about this is rather colorful. Uh kind of bland as far as the icon set. I'm sure you can change that, but I'm not going to on this video. And then we have the discover software center also as a quick launcher. So you've got your graphical software center. Remember no snaps, no flat packs. Everything is just native apt packages. Uh so that's good for some people that for whatever reason hate containerized packages, but uh if you want snaps and or flat packs, you can certainly use them. App images as well on Debian. It's very easy to get that stuff installed if you want to use it, but out of the box, none of that stuff is here. Let's just test make sure the software center does work. So I'm going to install something that's not already here. Uh let's install something that's small. For example, Genie is probably not here. So, let's go ahead and install Genie. I click on it. I don't do much with discover. Where's the install button? It's right here. Okay. And let me click install. I was expecting like a big, you know, a shiny button, but it's actually kind of uh not all that obvious where the install button is. So, maybe the KD guys and the discover guys should work on that. Let me give my super secure password. Of course, you have to enter a password anytime you install or remove software or update software on Linux. You always have to give a pseudo password. All right. And now that is installed. So, uh, let's launch it just to make sure that it works. And there is Genie. Genie is a text editor/IDE. Looks like it installed just fine. So, the software center does work. Let's go through the menu system and see if there's anything else interesting that is installed. Now, it's interesting how they've got the menu here. Is this just a a gigantic list of everything that is installed on the site? It does look like that's the case, which is fine. And I'm sure we could sort it by category, but we'll just go in this big list here. It doesn't look like it's like like a gigantic list of applications. We have Arc with a K. Uh that's your archiving tool basically for zip, unzip, and you know, tar and all all of that. So, your archiving tool, this KDE's application here, not something I used all that much u other than on KDE distros, right? It's probably not something you would install if you're not on KDE, but this is ARC22.12.3. We also have the Deepen calculators. Uh we've got the Deepen calendar here. They did mention that they were using some of the deepen apps. Let's launch the calculator. Yeah, looks like a standard calculator. Let's see theme. We could switch to a dark theme. That's nice mode. I'd probably want a scientific calculator and give me some extra buttons. Here looks like a very nice calculator. I've never used it, but I do like the look and feel of it just those few seconds that I was in it. There we have our contact ma uh manager. That's the K address book. We have a disburning utility XF burn. That's a XFC application. So, uh let's do about XFCES XF burn. This is 0.6.2 is the version number. There's just a way to burn CDs. Most people don't need to burn CDs anymore. Most computers don't have optical drives or disc drives. It's interesting they ship that out of the box. Also, in the menu system, we have Ocular. That was our PDF viewer here. Uh we have Kmail for our email client. They did mention that they had installed out of the box on this DRO. They're still on 2.10 10 because it's still, you know, based on an older version of Debian or Debian stable which has older repositories of software, right? So, it's not 3.0 just yet. They're on 210.34. Some other things we have, we have aggregator and that's aggregator with a K. That's our uh like a RSS reader. for uh this menu system really hard to navigate when everything is just one big collection of programs. And I can imagine it's going to get much worse as somebody uses it and installs more and more programs. It would be nice if this was uh separated by category as far as like office category, multimedia category, etc. Uh aggregator though, let's see what version we're on here. About aggregator, this is KD's feed reader. This is version 5.22.3. I've actually used this a little bit in the past. It's not bad for those of you that want a nice graphical RSS news feed reader. Moving on, we have Infosenter. This is one of the KDE applications, but I do want to check this out because I would like to see what version of KD Plasma we're on. KDE Plasma 5.27.5 KDE frameworks 5.103.0 version 5.15.8 kernel 6.1. And of course, we're using Wayland as the display server, but that's because we logged in to the Wayland session. If I had logged into the X11 session, this would say X11 rather than Wayland, of course. Let me close out of that. For media players, it looks like they're going with VLC, which makes sense. VLC, very nice uh audio/ video player. Uh most people install it as a video player. It plays all your video formats. Plays Blu-ray even, but you can also use it as a audio player. So, it's a great all-in-one solution for audio video playback. Uh, this was which version? Version 3.0.21. We also have Libre Office installed. Libre Office Calc is the spreadsheet version uh or the spreadsheet program that's part of the Office suite. So, basically, you can think of it kind of like uh Microsoft's Excel. Libre Office has calc. And this is Libre Office 7.4.7.2. Pretty nice spreadsheet program. I've played around a little bit with calc in the past. Couple of other useful applications to know about. The terminal is lx terminal. Matter of fact, I use the terminal often enough. I would like it pinned down here. If I right click on the uh icon, pin to task manager. Now I've always got the terminal here because I would use it enough. I want a quick launcher for it. So now I have that. And let me make it full screen. Let me zoom in. We've already checked the uh kernel version, but let's check system resource usage with htop. HTOP is not installed. So let's install it. This time I will do this at the terminal. So let's do a sudoapp install htop. Give it my sudo password. htop's not a very big program. So it should install in just a couple of seconds. And then let's run htop. We're using about 1.4 gigs of RAM of the 6 gigs of RAM I gave this VM. Now I opened a lot of programs here in the last couple of minutes. So, I may have affected the RAM usage a little bit because that is a little high for KDE Plasma. But again, got a lot of stuff going on. Actually, if you look under my head down at the cyst trait, we've got a lot of stuff running down here too as well. So, I could get that number quite a bit lower by closing out some of uh these programs. Some of it is stuff again I opened uh before running that. So, I've affected that number a little bit. Let's go ahead and get out of the terminal. So, I'm going to exit out of the terminal. One other thing I wanted to check was the plain text editor. Now, I installed Genie earlier myself. That was also here, but that wasn't installed out of the box. They're using text editor Pluma. I believe that is the text editor that comes with uh either Mate or Cinnamon. Now, Pluma is the one that comes with Mate. Yeah, Plum is a small and lightweight text editor for the Mate desktop. You can see this is Plum 1.26.0. Perfectly fine plain text editor. One last thing I want to check. Let's see if what kind of wallpapers we have. So, if I rightclick and choose configure desktop and wallpaper cuz I really like the default puppy wallpaper. I'm just wondering if they have any other stuff. Wow, they really like dogs, especially beagles, which is interesting because when I was a kid, um my dad loved beagles. We had a whole slew of beagles for hunting dogs. We used them for rabbit hunting especially, but they were the best dogs. So, I am if you were going to pick a breed of dog, I got to say they picked the one that I am most partial to because I do love beagles. Just amazing animals and they've got a lot, right? They've got a lot. Actually, these are really nice. And some of the ones that are not pictures of beagles. I like that that light bulb picture there as well. And of course, you got a lot of abstract art. Some of this may or may not be like default KDE wallpapers. I'm not sure. I know KDE does ship a lot of abstract art as part of their default wallpaper package. I do like the wine corks coming out of the wine glass. Yeah, I like that. Nice minimal kind of uh wallpaper with not a lot of color. Could be interesting as well. Here's one that's got a lot of color, right? A little abstract art. Well, not really abstract. I got some pencils with a like a textured background. You do have some nature photography as well. That is actually a gorgeous mountain scene with the uh like cruise ship in the foreground there. Yeah, really cool stuff. Yeah, I think I think I'm going to go back to one of the Beagle wallpapers though. What was the default one? I believe it was this one. Yeah, I think they made a smart choice there because uh yeah, that's the one I'm going with. So, there you have it. A quick and cursory first look at Refresh OS. Looks like a really nice desktop Linux distributions. based on Debian, so you know it's stable. Really like the suite of applications. It installed all of the stuff that I think makes sense, right? The Brave browser, Libre Office, uh like you know, some of the other applications that made sense. Like I I don't mind Nemo for the file manager, right? I the deepen calculator even looked good. Like they were really smart in picking and choosing which applications were a part of this DRO. So job well done to the refresh OS team. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, 40mm, Capcave, Man, Garoff, Lee, Jersey Killer, Mark, Methos, Aron, Paul, Peace, Arch, Vidor, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, War Gent, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Refresh OS would not have been possible. The show's 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, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.