Transcription

Okay, welcome to another video. Today we're going to take a look at an operating system that I've wanted to check out on the channel for quite a while now, and that is HelloSystem. So reading from the intro of the handbook, HelloSystem is a desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance and usability. Its design follows the less but better philosophy. It's intended as a system for mere mortals welcoming to switches from Mac. FreeBSD is used as the core So interestingly, HelloSystem uses something called application bundles to manage their native applications. Whenever possible, application bundles are used. XDG style.desktop files are considered legacy and should be avoided. And with this, it brings a number of benefits, such as easily move around the file system and relocate, easily delete by moving to the trash. And you can also do this without the need for a package manager. Now, as of just a few days ago, they've released a brand new version with a number of fixes and they've managed to shrink the ISO file size down to 1.27 GB. With that out of the way, let's jump into the live environment and get this installed. And here we are. So it took a little while for it to boot into the live environment, but we should now be good to go. So we are going to be installing this natively. But as per usual, for those of you who'd like to skip the installation parts of these videos, there'll be a timestamp down below, which will take you straight to the installed desktop. And here we are with the installation. So first things first, we're going to press continue. So we've got the license here, so we're just going to press continue for now. And now we're going to choose which drive we're going to be installing it onto. And we're going to use the Drevo X1 SSD. So this will erase all contents on the disk and install the FreeBSD operating system. Do you want to continue? We do indeed. Next. Okay, time for our user account. So we're just going to call this Cyler, type in our password, type it in once more. And for the computer name, we're just going to call it Hello. So now we can enable users to log in over the network. So that's with SSH. And we can set a time zone based on the current location. So I'm just going to enable both of these for now. This will send a request one time to locate your computer over the network. Continue. Yeah, that's fine. And there we go. As we can see there, it's found Europe, London, and we can continue to the next step. Okay, so I think that's it. I'll pause the video here and we'll come back once it's finished. And there we go. So the installation has completed and it took no time at all clocking in at just a few minutes on my machine. So let's reboot and check out our freshly installed Hello system. And here we are booting off disk for the first time and we've reached the Hello welcome screen. So let's quickly run through this and then we can start taking a look around at Hello system. Continue. So a system that works for, not against you. Privacy requires no activation and no IDs and no accounts. It does not spy on you and blocks tracking and ads by default. Comes with peer-to-peer technology built in e.g. for receiving remote assistance. Freedom lets you load software without restrictions. No signatures, sandboxes, and notarizations. Makes it easy to modify applications. No hardware vendor lock-in. Designed to run on machines that are no longer supported by the manufacturer with operating system updates. Security. Built-in end-to-end encryption where possible and has full source code available for verification. So that all sounds very cool. Continue. And that's it. Have fun exploring the system and please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version intended mainly for developers and testers. Right, so I think what we should start off with is just going through the desktop itself and seeing how it's all set up. Now I do believe the default window manager it's going to be using is Openbox, but as of this most recent version it can also be set up to use KWIM. Now we can see quite clearly the macOS kind of inspired look and feel of the desktop itself with the panel at the top with the system-wide global menu and clock to the right and then we have our dock at the bottom and even our icons are positioned to the right hand side of the screen. Now we'll start at the top of the screen with our panel so we have our clock here. So clicking on it doesn't really appear to do anything and that's with left and right clicks although it has actually activated the search bar so I guess clicking any free space on the panel will then go ahead and open up your search bar which we'll have a look at in just a moment. And then we have our global menu so we've got nothing open at the moment as far as applications so we can just jump straight into about this computer and we can see that we are using 3SV version 12.2. Okay now the dock itself it doesn't appear to have any sort of right click options to edit the dock but if we click on an application we can choose to remove that applications icon from the dock so I'm going to imagine it's the same if you've got a new application open you can right click and then pin it but we'll test that out in just a moment. Now right clicking on the desktop will let you create a new folder so we have full desktop kind of icons so like so and then we have our new folder right there and now we can just right click that and delete it by moving to trash. And now if we go ahead and open up our trash there is that new folder that we have just created so let's go ahead and delete that now to completely empty it from our system. Yes okay now we can also go straight into the desktop preferences here as well so here is where you can change your wallpaper mode so we currently stretch to fill the entire screen then you can fill with just a background color stretch to fit center and tile and then just beneath it is where you can actually choose your own background image and there is the color selector as well as the label text and then in the advance we have the window manager show menus provided by window managers when desktop is clicked and then we can change the location of the desktop folder itself. Okay cool let's close that one off so what I want to do is just open up a couple of applications and see if we have side by side snapping by dragging it to the other sides of our screens so we don't appear to so let's close that off now while we've got nothing open if we open up the tool section we can also open the terminal straight from the global menu by either clicking that button or as well as pressing F4 will do the same thing. Now we can also go to help Annabelle and now let's test out this search bar so I'm not too sure what our actual file manager's called so we're going to test this out with the web browser which is installed out of the box which is Falcon and as you can see it's just dropped a little label down below letting us know that Alt and Space will activate the search bar for us as well so let's go ahead and test this out with Falcon now and there we go it's going to go straight to the Falcon application and while we're in here let's just type in something like file and see what options that gives us as well so it gives us some applications options to find the android file transfer tool with mtp or we can also get info or go into tool and find files itself okay that's very cool let's close that off and then we also have the option to find files here using ctrl and f so I think what we should probably go ahead and do is have a look at some of the default applications installed out of the box and start playing around with things so pressing on system we've got all of our applications categories and then hovering over them we'll then expand it to show you the rest of the applications inside that category so in just applications we have Falcon which is of course our web browser Featherpad, Elektor and QPDF View. Now in 3D printing we have FreeCAD, PrusaSlicer, Ultimaker Cura. Now the last time I checked out HelloSystem in a virtual machine a lot of these applications weren't actually installed and I'll show you just what I mean in a moment. Now for audio we have Audacity and LMMS which is like a digital audio workstation and in developer we have Line IDE, PyCharm CE, QHexEdit, QtCreator and Zil and then in developer preview we have and these are all development sort of preview applications that aren't quite fully ready yet but we'll check some of them out so we have Disk First Aid and we have their own disk utility app and as you can see here this application is a preview for developers and is not fully functional yet so do expect to run into the odd problem. As we can see here it's a pretty simple and standard way to manage your drives and partitions not too dissimilar from applications such as GParted and while we've got this window open we can see that we have two buttons we have a maximize button and when we do that the dock stays on the screen so I don't think we have any auto hide working as of yet and then the other button is just to close so we have no minimize button so I'm going to imagine what we're going to do to minimize it is click the applications icon on the dock and then that's going to go ahead and sort of put it back there and then clicking it again we can then restore the application and there's a nice little sort of phase transition as it comes back and repaints the window now as we've got a disk utility open let's right click on it and see how easy it is to pin the application to our dock so as you can see there we can now keep disk utility in dock like so and now when we close disk utility we can then just relaunch it straight from within here however we appear to have run into a problem with that so we could not launch the applications developer okay that's interesting so let's just remove that from our dock for now then and we won't worry about that right this second now as well as disk utility we have energy saving let's have a quick look at that again it's giving you the warning about being a developer preview and here we can see just a very simple application to slide to a different time interval to choose when to turn your display off very simple stuff let's close that off and see what else we've got in developer preview we then have our network we have a screen cast tool let's have a look at how this one works again we've got the warning okay so it appears that this little icon right here is the recording so we can click or right click and it's going to give the option to start or just straight up quit so let's test out of a start so it doesn't appear at the moment to be giving us any indication that the recording has begun but now we can right click it once more and press stop to end that recording okay let's keep going so that was developer preview anything else in here we might want to take a look at so we have simple browser which is going to be another web browser simply called a simple browser and of course we have falcon which i do think at the moment is set up as your default web browser okay let's close that off and see if there's anything else i want to see in developer preview we're going to have the start disk application and this time it is going to ask you for sudo privileges so we're going to go ahead and press okay and here we can see the order of the start disks and we should just be able to click on things and move things around and then restart but we won't worry about that and let's keep moving so that was everything apart from disk first aid and network and now let's jump down into graphics so as you can see it's quite a lot of stuff here for creator to use especially like blender and gimp inkspace critter scribbus and scanlight now like i mentioned beforehand all of these applications are actually fully installed and ready to go so for example if you wanted to go ahead and use gimp we press the icon now gimp needs to be downloaded before it can be used do you want to download it now yes it's going to ask you for your password and then we're going to give it all the privileges it needs and it appears to have just disappeared let's see if that's installed or whether it's run into a bit of an issue no so let's try it once more so we're going to go and type in a password again press okay so if we're going to show details we can see sort of the status of where it's at and it appears to be struggling getting past this part here where it's updating the repositories i'm hoping that's not the case for all of the other applications but we'll we'll check that out now so i think what we'll do is we'll skip gimp for now and keep it moving so now let's go back into graphics and test it out with a different application let's go ahead and test it out with inkscape and what we're going to do is hopefully if this does install it should also work with the system wide global menu out of the box without no intervention needed so again we're going to type in our password okay so this time it appears to be working so as you can see it's got past that point where it's updating the repositories and it's now installing the packages for us so i'll pause the video here while this is installing and come back once it's finished and there we go gimp is installed without any problem whatsoever and as you can see we have the full global menu support for all of the sort of settings you might want to go ahead and use perfect i'm very happy that that just works without any need to sort of mess around with things that's very cool let's close in fact let's test out the pinning to the dock with inkscape and see if this time it will actually launch the application once it's been closed so let's try that again and there we go so i'm not too sure what was going on with the first one but perhaps maybe it's because it was a developer preview but that appears to have worked absolutely fine with graphics and inkscape so let's close that off and go back into the applications now again for graphics we're not going to worry about installing any of these other additional ones it's a shame we couldn't get gimp working because that's the one i use the most myself out of those but now let's go into office so we do have libra office let's go ahead and do that again it's not going to be fully installed yet so we're going to run through the same process that we did before with inkscape and i'll pause the video once more and let this install libra office okay so our libra office application has installed without any issues whatsoever so we can now go into our office applications and go ahead and launch libra office and there it is with the nice little icon there in our dock and of course we can always go ahead and choose to keep that in our dock itself and while we're in here let's jump into the writer and then as you can see we have the full global menu support working absolutely flawlessly let's close that one off for now and keep it moving so moving over to preferences now we have boot environments let's open up this one select the environment the computer should start into boot environments are bootable clones of snapshots of the working system create a safe fail back boot environment before upgrading or making major changes to the system note the boot environments by default may not cover all locations such as home so that is something that could be very useful let's close that off and keep moving now we also have a desktop which is going to be the same applications when we right clicked on the desktop and went into our desktop preferences like so we then have keyboard settings it's a super simple little application here to change the keyboard layout it's currently on the wrong one so we want english united kingdom let's close that off and go back into the preferences let's see what else we've got so that we then have mouse print settings screen settings and it's a very simple sort of screen layout editor will work for multiple displays and as you can see we have actuary active primary active primary resolution or orientation let's close that one off and see what else we've got in preferences we didn't have sharing which if you remember during the installation part of this video we set up the sort of remote access with ssh with our computer name of hello but here's where we can also disable it and we could also enable screen sharing from this simple little application called sharing we didn't have shortcut keys let's go ahead and open that and here here is all of your shortcut keys to let you know the keyboard shortcuts to open certain things so for example control alt and a it's going to open up your applications in the actual folder view which we will get into in just a moment as well so we'll close that one off for now but there we go there's all of your sort of keyboard bindings that you might want to go ahead and check let's close that off and keep moving in preferences we didn't have sound users and wireless networks next up we have the utilities so we have the android file transfer mpt build notify calculator and i do believe it's a super simple little calculator there we go but it does fit and themes nicely with the rest of the system now let's go back into utilities and again the calendar i do believe is a similar story super simple calendar application now what else have we got in utilities so we can create live media we have a hardware probe help logs and q terminal which is your default terminal and like we said at the beginning we can just close that off and access the terminal anytime we want by pressing f4 or just going into our global menu going to tool and then opening up open terminal what else do we have in our utilities so we have the remote application and then we have sticky notes and zero confs now sticky notes by default has a little welcome message here from hello system and if we can have a look now in the top panel we have this little sort of collage of different notes and if we click on that of a right click we can then do a new note toggle activities show all or reset positions etc we'll quit that off for now and keep it moving now in video we have obs studio and shot cup now i don't think either of these are installed but i think what we will do is install obs and test it out with a screen recording and see if we run into any issues right so we've got obs installed so we're going to do a quick little recording test i don't think it's going to be super smooth though i can already see it's dropping frames without anything really happening so we've added a screen capture and it should start to save the file on the desktop so let's press start record and there's the .mkv file so that is recording like you can see though performance wise it isn't amazing but again all very new stuff here let's just move the window around a little bit and now let's go ahead and stop that recording and then double click on this and see what it opens it up with okay so it's opened up the video file with mpv but minus the sort of frame skipping there it does appear to be working out of the box with obs doing a simple screen recording we can see a little bit of screen tearing there as well so you might want to mess around with your sort of drivers and exorg file to get rid of any screen tearing that might be present on your system but there we go so let's go ahead and close up freebsd and what we're going to do now let's have a little run through of the sort of file manager and the application folders now if we go back into our global menu under system where we can find all of our applications listed with the categories here what's cool about this is as well as being able to launch all of our applications from here each of these categories is interactable so with a single left click it's then going to open that up into our file manager and we can browse and sort of manipulate the applications as we see fit from here and actually this little icon on our dock here as well for preferences clicking that will do the same thing but then take you into the preferences folder which is this one there so now if we close preferences off we'll see we've got a few applications that aren't in any directory and we can actually go and right click on that and open in a new tab because each of these applications are more like folders of everything you need so as you can see there it's falcon.app and inside it we have falcon file we're going to have resources which has askpass.py executable falcon.png and packages now what's cool about that is we should be able to actually move these anywhere we like on our system and still be able to launch these applications let's give that a go now so we're going to do it with falcon so we're going to do a right click and go to copy and we're going to paste it straight onto our desktop like so and now we're going to do a double click test and make sure that is going to go ahead and open up our web browser perfect from the new location of our desktop and to manage your autostart applications as you can see in the applications folder we have a folder here called autostart so much like all of the other applications we've checked out we can just do a right click and go and open a new tab you'll notice that each of these have a little arrow on it symbolizing that these are just kind of like sim links so what we can do is just remove that entirely from our sort of start folder and now sticky notes should no longer start up so what we can do is we're just going to move this to the trash so now that we've removed the sticky notes application from our autostart folder we can go ahead and log out check out the login screen and then log back into the desktop without the sticky notes application launching and here we are the login screen this is the first time i've actually seen the login screen for hello system very simple not too much here going on so we've got our username input box and now we can also go into the password and get back into our desktop and we should see that the sticky notes application no longer starts up not to worry though it's not like we've removed the actual application itself all that we have gone ahead and done is remove the link so if we go back into utilities we can see that we can still launch the sticky notes application without any issues so i think that is where i'm going to wrap it up with my first proper look at hello system based on freebsd all in all i've really enjoyed it now i do really like the idea behind this operating system now i know it's still very early days and there's a lot more that needs to be done before this is ready to really be a sort of main operating system but i definitely think the potential is there and i like the fact that one of the main focuses is sort of simplicity and keeping things quite simple and easy to understand i do think this is one that will make mac users that are making the switch feel a lot more comfortable as well now if you're going to give it a go yourself i do recommend just going through the handbook a little bit to get yourself sort of prepared for the way the system does work and operates but other than that thank you for watching if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe and if you've really enjoyed it you can support me on patreon join the discord there's a link in the description below i'll see you on the next one bye-bye