A First Look At NebiOS (Ubuntu-Based Linux With Wayfire)

Today I'm going to take a quick first look at Nebby OS. What is Nebby OS? Well, it's an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. It's rather new and it uses some custom tooling. It has its own custom desktop environment that they call the Nebby DE, the Nebby Desktop Environment, which is based on the Wayfire Wayland Compositor. And if I go over to their website here, you can see the blurb here on the front page, Nebby OS, it's your dream OS. So what is some of the features that Nebby OS touts here on their website? Well, they talk about looking minimal, elegant, clean. They talk about being inspired by Apple's Clarity. So they're going for kind of an Apple-style look. That's not really mimicking the Mac OS desktop, but they want to be a well-polished, well-put-together, easy-to-use kind of operating system like the Mac OS. They talk about it being good for developers, good for gamers. They talk about privacy and security. They talk about speed, fast, responsive, effortless. For those of you that want cloud syncing capabilities, they have their own little Nebby Cloud app that they talk about. I'm probably not going to play with any of that stuff. They also do mention that they use container-based architecture. So I guess some of their apps are containerized. That's interesting. For me, I'm going to take a quick first look of Nebby OS inside a virtual machine. Now, do note that inside a virtual machine, this is not going to run all that smooth. In fact, on their website, they recommend you don't run this in a virtual machine. But I wanted to take a look at this on camera today, and I didn't really have an easy way to do this on physical hardware because I'd need to record on one machine and then do an install on a second machine and stream from one machine to the other. That's a complicated setup. It's not something probably most people are equipped to do. I could do it if I really put a lot of effort into it. But I think people need to know about this new distribution. So I'm just going to do this in a VM. It makes recording much easier. I've already run through the installation of Nebby OS. I didn't record the installation process because you don't need to see it. It's the standard Calamares installer. You've seen Calamares a million times. You know how the installer works. So this is Nebby OS now that I've got it installed. Now, if you're going to do this on physical hardware, note that they do have two different ISOs. They have your standard like AMD style ISO. And then for those of you that are Nvidia users, you have a special ISO you need to go get because Nvidia and Wayland is a little iffy and you just need a specific ISO. If you're an Nvidia user, for me, I grabbed the standard AMD ISO for installation in this virtual machine. So some of the things that immediately pop out about this particular desktop environment, we have these two buttons, basically Client Swap and Expo. Client Swap would be a window swap, right? Expo is for those of you familiar with the old Compiz window manager from back in the day on Ubuntu, which Wayfire is trying to mimic Compiz. They had a feature called Expo, which is a two by two grid of four workspaces. And if I hit the button, I'm assuming I would get, yeah, this is the Expo view. So I could move to a different workspace if I wanted to by using the mouse. Of course, there will be key bindings for all of that kind of movement as well for those of you that want to move around on the keyboard, which is typically the way I would do it. I'm not exactly sure what they have that binded to, though. And the Client Swap, let me open some windows. So if I go to the this is interesting. You just hover over the icon here and the dock slides out. I kind of like that. And that is pretty neat. Let me open the file manager here, see what file manager they're using. It looks like GNOME's Nautilus file manager, GNOME files or whatever they call it. And then the Lollipop music player here. Let's open that. So I have these two windows open. And now if I go to Client Swap, it's basically kind of like your alt tab kind of feature. And I could, you know, go back to the file manager, click Client Swap, go back to Lollipop. And I'm sure they've got this key binded probably to alt tab. Yeah, alt tab is the Client Swap. Alt tab. And then the arrow key, I'd move over to the file manager or the arrow key back to Lollipop and then hit enter. So all of this is pretty self-explanatory, especially if you've used the old Compiz window manager or even if you've used something like GNOME or KDE Plasma. I think you'd be comfortable knowing what these features are. Of course, you know what a dock is. I've got some standard applications down here, as well as the trash bin icon is down here. Then you've got this rocket ship, which I'm assuming is our main menu system. Yeah. And, you know, the animations are a little glitchy. This would probably be buttery smooth on physical hardware. So, you know, don't think that, you know, the issues here in the VM are going to be indicative of what you experience on real hardware. Again, this is really not designed to be run in a VM and it's a brand new distribution. It hasn't been in development all that long. So they'll probably get a lot of the glitches worked out. So those of you that want to try this in virtual machines, this will eventually work a little better. But you get this giant menu system with gigantic icons. So if you have like seriously bad eyes, you know, you've got, you know, these 8000 pixel wide icons or whatever. Like, I don't know why this needs to be this big. There may be a way to adjust it as well. But it's interesting that we have all of this here. Windows containers. We've got wine here, I guess, for gaming purposes. They did mention a lot of gaming stuff, though, on their website. Android container. I'm not an Android developer, so I'm not going to play with that stuff. Internet. This is the internet category. We have KDE Connect to sync to our mobile device. Mozilla Firefox is the browser. Giri is our email client. I'm not going to play with any of that stuff. We have a games category, which I'm assuming that nothing is here. And then a multimedia category as well, which we already saw. Lollipop was here. Easy effects is effects for both audio slash pipewire, which I'm assuming they're using. They have a plugin pack for Jack as well, the Jack audio server. And then videos, that's your standard GNOME videos, video player. That's what I'm assuming here. Wow, that thing opened very wide. So let me close this. We have this button here. Minus, I'm assuming that's a minimize. Yeah, that minimizes down here to the dock. Yeah, it adds it right here. And then the X on the other side of the window closes. That's interesting that they have the minimize and close buttons on different sides of the window. I don't love that. I would actually prefer all of it to be on the left-hand side, like the Mac. I actually like that. But if even if all of them are on the right side, that's okay. Splitting them up where you have some buttons on the left and some on the right, I think is a bit confusing. Back into the menu system here, we also had categories for office. I'm assuming that's going to be LibreOffice. Yeah, your document viewer as well. I'm assuming that would probably be events, which is GNOME's PDF reader. We can verify that real quick. Let's open that document viewer. I'm assuming that is GNOME's PDF reader there. We have a graphics category with our image viewer and the document viewer once again, and then development. See what's in development. Looks like nothing there. Education, nothing there. So we've got some empty categories. Science. Yeah, not a lot of apps out of the box installed, which is fine. Settings. This is your standard settings kind of tools like GNOME disk is here. Firewall configuration, which is probably used to set up the UFW, the uncomplicated firewall that Ubuntu tends to use. We do have the bundle store. Let's actually go to their store. See what's going on with this. Taking a second to load here. And yeah, waiting for some stuff to load. Assuming it's pulling stuff down from the internet. It's taking a minute. Yeah, taking a long time for some of this to load. Now, I'm not somebody that would use a GUI software center anyway. I just do everything at the command line, but a lot of people would use this and they might be put off by the speed of this. This is a little slow. Let's search for application. Let's search for, let's do a free and open source software first. So I'll search for H top and see what gets returned here. And we wait. H top is here. If I click on it and it looks like it's going to install it using a app, I'm going to cancel that. I just wanted to see how that would install. And then let's do some proprietary software. How about something like a zoom? Just picking a random piece of proprietary software that they might have packaged in some way. And zoom is here. And I'm assuming that's not going to be in the apt package manager. You're going to have to do that probably as a flat pack or a snap. You're about to install the flat pack. So it's going to install that as a flat pack. They did mention containerized packages. So that's not surprising there. That will allow new users, especially to get some of the proprietary software that they expect. If you're coming from windows, you're going to want applications you're used to like zoom, Spotify, discord, all that proprietary stuff. And that's not going to be in the standard apt repos, right? The standard Debian slash Ubuntu repos. You're going to have to get that as a flat pack or a snap or app image or something. It looks like they're defaulting to flat pack here. One interesting thing about the desktop is we have these little widgets here. Now I'm not a big desktop widget guy, but I mean, we've got the properties. This is properties of that particular widget. Yeah. So you could play with some stuff here. I'm not going to play with it though. And then we've got, is this notifications or something about NebbyOS? This is obviously a media player. There's no music or anything, no video files or anything in this virtual machine. So I don't have any examples of, you know, anything I could play, but if I was playing something at some kind of media file and we would get some information here and then the sticky notes, right? I could, you know, write something here. So that is interesting as well. If I move my head out of the way, you'll notice that we've got the settings icon here. I'm assuming that would open some settings stuff. You know, this is your basic settings kind of stuff for like volume and network and probably your session, you know, power off and reboot and all of that. A lot of times you would expect to find that in the top right up here because they have the SysTray up here. So it's interesting that they've separated that. You would kind of expect all of that to be in one place instead of, you know, some of it at the top of the screen, some of it at the bottom. It's kind of like the decorations on the windows, some on the left, some on the right, you know, put all that stuff in one place. And that's the way I would want it. But you got your SysTray application. So this is networking. This is a key map. Wow. And then we get a A through Z. I guess we could search for every key map possible. Wow. Of course, I'm using a English US. I'm not going to change it. But that is interesting for those of you that do need multiple key map support. That's nice to have. And then we've got this here, Bluetooth, battery, all that. Clicking on it does nothing. Then we have a clock and clicking on that also does nothing. Now, let me hit the super key on the keyboard that does bring up the menu. And let me go to the settings. Do they have like a settings manager or some kind of control panel or something? How about control? Control center is what they call their control panel, settings manager, whatever it happens to be. And here we could set up Nebby Cloud. I don't have any cloud-based services to do anything with, but you could connect to all of that stuff. It looks like a similar kind of tool to what Ubuntu uses to connect to various cloud services that you may need to sync to. I'm going to close out all of that. Looks like closing out of Firefox there. And let me close that. You have other stuff here, customization and easy access. So you have shortcuts. I'm assuming this is our keyboard shortcuts. Yeah. So this allows us to get things, fisheye effect, super shift F. I don't know if this will work because I use the super key as my mod key on my host machine, on my Neary window manager. So some of this may already be set to other things. So yeah. How about super Alt-M? It looks like that one is something. Super Alt-M magnifier. That probably would work if I didn't have other things going on with my super key. Super E is the primary launcher. So that launches the menu system, but you also have just super, but it's nice. They have a special key binding, super E because sometimes just tapping super itself could conflict with other things. So that's nice. They have two different bindings for that. And then we have the client swap and the expo, which we've already seen. Alt-Tab and super tab. Let me open a lollipop again. So Alt-Tab was the client swap. Yeah. Or you could swap between windows and then super tab is the expo, the workspace swap where you could swap between workspaces and then super tab again. And let me get back into this. Then let me close lollipop there. And control Alt-T would also open a terminal. I'm glad they kept that legacy binding there because that's Ubuntu's binding to open the terminal control Alt-T. But remember, they also had a super enter, which super enter makes sense for me. That's what I expect to be there on most window manager type systems. And of course, you have ways to add new custom shortcuts, key bindings if you want as well. Let me go to back. And yeah, we have the ricing center. This is something you don't see every day. That's interesting. A lot of times they would call this like customization or appearance. They call it the ricing center. Client side decorations and legacy clients. I'm not going to play with that stuff. Theme. So do we have a bunch of themes? Yeah. How about humanity dark? Right. And that actually changed everything. Well, I lost the icon here. I lost the icon here. Maybe a reboot would fix that. I don't know. How about breeze dark? Let's see if we get all the icons there. Yeah, we get everything. The settings icon is missing on breeze dark. Ubuntu mono dark. Let's see what this looks like. I want Ubuntu mono light maybe. It looks like it was missing all the icons in that one. So we better go back to the default flat skeuomorphism theme is what they were using there. And then we have default fonts, which we could change GTK applications. Oh, wow. Did you see that that just changed to the humanity dark GTK theme? I clicked changing that like almost a minute ago. It took a long time for the theme to change. Now, remember, this is a virtual machine, but I do like the dark theme, right? I do actually like dark windows and actually change all of this as well. Very cool. Getting back into the control center, we have a standard kind of Ubuntu light settings and settings programs for getting proprietary drivers, display information that would be your monitor resolution and all of that stuff. Privacy and security settings. Yeah, I kind of like this for a brand new distribution, especially one that's based on some rather newish kind of technology like Wayfire, this particular Wayland compositor that they're building this desktop around. I think this is well on its way. There's certainly some issues, right? I certainly could use a little bit more polish, but I'm pretty happy with how this looks out of the box. Let me right click on the desktop. Are there any cool wallpapers? Well, we have the option to do next wallpaper, so I guess there is a wallpaper pack and clicking next wallpaper. Am I going to have to wait a minute? I don't think that did anything. Yeah, I don't think next wallpaper did anything. I don't know if there are any other wallpapers. It may have just shipped with the one wallpaper. Searching for wallpaper doesn't take me anywhere. Maybe was it in the control center? Is there any kind of a wallpaper setter? Let me search. There's no way to search the control center. I guess not. Yeah, I don't see anything about wallpapers, so this might be something that they need to improve on to give me an easy way to change the wallpaper. Maybe install something like the Waypaper program or some other Wayland wallpaper setting program. One other thing I do want to do is right click on the desktop and other than the wallpapers, add widgets. Were there more widgets that I could add other than these? Yeah, there are. You could add a RSS feed. You could add a system monitor, a comic reader, and then a sticker. Why would I want a sticker? I don't know. Let's just apply a sticker somewhere, I guess. We could add a system monitor, add the system monitor, and then let me hit escape, or yeah, I guess I got to close this. It's still highlighting all of that. Maybe if I do a super tab, yeah, all of it's highlighted on every workspace. That is interesting. Yeah, I'm not sure why all of these are highlighted now, and I can't do anything with them. This is weird. Show hide widgets hides them. Show hide widgets brings them back. I wonder if I logged out and logged back in, would that fix things? Let me actually just log out and log back in. Yeah, and that solved whatever that weird issue there was, and now I've got my new system monitor widget on this screen as well. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, overall, yeah, I'm pretty impressed with where this project is going. Again, it's a new project. A lot of times, these new projects, we've got hundreds of Linux distributions that have appeared over the years. Actually, we've probably had tens of thousands of Linux distributions come and go over the years, and does this have any staying power? I hope so. It does look like it's under active development from what I've been able to gather, some of what I did before doing the video here, so I hope this sticks around. I think a lot of people will appreciate this particular Wayfire-based desktop environment. I think a lot of people on Ubuntu look fondly on those old Compiz days from back in the day, and I think a lot of people would want to try this. Now, before I go, let me give a shout out to the producers of this channel, and that is Matt, Steve, George, Darlof, Lee, Mark, Methos, Urion, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Roland, Wargentuin, Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at NebbyOS 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, these are all of 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 DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.