A Quick Look At Makulu LinDoz 2025 Edition

so makulu Linux recently put out a new version and I haven't taken a look at makulu in a while so I thought about taking a quick first look at this latest edition of makulu uh taking a look at their website makulu linux.com I will say uh kind of a interesting website as far as you know most of these Linux distributions these days when I take a look at their website it's all flashy and a lot of whizbang effects you know very Ultra Modern looking this is a very kind of understate kind of simple WordPress site right at least I'm assuming they're using Wordpress here but yeah I kind of like it that they're not you know putting a ton of effort on the website necessarily you know hopefully that means the distribution is a lot better now they just released lindos 2025 so they have a few different versions of makulu that they put out sometimes they put out additions that are based on auntu sometimes they put out auditions that are based on Debian sometimes they put out additions that are based on sources from both Debian and a boond do this one lindos 2025 is strictly Debian based I went ahead and grabbed the iso and I've already run through a quick installation I did that off camera because the installation you guys don't need to see it it just uses a standard I believe calaris installer no real fancy customizations to the installer so I've already installed it inside a virtual machine so let's take a quick first look so I gave this VM 6 gigs of RAM I gave it two threads of my 24 thread thread r CPU I will say it's interesting that the grub menu It's kind of customized we got the makulu the M stylized logo here that's kind of interesting let's go ahead and boot into the system and we come to our login manager this looks like it might be light DM we do get an onscreen keyboard here let me go ahead and log in actually instead of me typing my super secure and complicated password I could use the keyboard here the onscreen keyboard if I needed to let me go ahead and and this is not really my password but let's say theoretically my password was DT I could type DT in here and then click log in but you know I'm going to go ahead do my real password and log in and we are launched into this rather attractive kind of strangely put together desktop environment here so makulu lindos they are using a very customized cinnamon desktop environment obviously they're using really cool wallpapers as well I like the wallpapers I like the stylized icons here you know this is kind of neat and kind of these artistic styled icons not bad just taking a quick look at the menu system here again the name lindos they trying to be rather Windows like as far as you got your standard panel at the bottom with quick launchers and the taskar and you got your start menu if you will you know it's set up so that a new to Linux user coming from Windows should be very comfortable on makulu I'm getting some notifications about certain things that could be updated you can see spices update so some extensions so they're using some extensions here to I guess customize the desktop environment some of that stuff does have updates available I could go ahead and take it if I move my head out of the way you can see down here in the cyst tray I have spices update and there are applets and extensions that need to be updated so let's see if I go to applets let's see if this will actually tell me what's going to be updated it will I've never used this tool but it looks like the icon here update all six updates available so let's go ahead and take that yeah and that was rather quick and simple and then we also had another update or did that take care of everything if I go to extensions let's see are there extensions to update update all extensions four updates available so let's also do that this ISO was released about um weeks ago 3 weeks ago so obviously there going to be some things that need an update and now that I've done that let's actually go through the menu system and see what kind of applications they have installed because uh just taking a quick look through the menu you can see there's a lot of stuff installed so a ton of applications so let's just quickly take a look at anything that looks interesting so under accessories a ton of stuff some of the notable ones would include something like coni manager you you don't see a lot of distribution shipping with coni out of the box or coni manager which is a way to uh manage your coni well they got the wobbly window effect here as well I was going to try to resize this window so it wasn't that big that way I could uh see the conies if I add any let's see make this a little smaller I turned on the black clock what would that look like that there yeah I don't really like that how about that one uh let me can I turn it on there we go yeah that one doesn't look good actually none of these look good these are very very plain looking conies I would probably go to the internet and choose some better looking cockies yeah these are just not terribly good conies I'm sorry yeah the red one oh I had two of them turned on at the same time yeah I don't think I'm going to actually add a cocky to this desktop also under accessories we had gnome pie which is an interesting menu system here if I go down to the cyst tray gnome Pi is sitting here I go to preferences let's see how to actually control this because it's been so long since I've used this uh contrl alt T is that what actually launches the menu Control Alt T it is okay so that is kind of cool applications though are control alt and a okay that's what I want control alt a control alt a yeah that did nothing uh tried to open some video in a video player uh bookmarks or Control Alt B I get bookmarks in a gome pi menu uh system patch restart required what was going on there and why is this opening I'm getting some weird stuff I'm hitting some key Bindings that are doing other things right so I'm getting yeah all of a sudden I'm getting a ton of things popping up I probably should not have hit all of those random key bindings but let me close out gnome Pi because I obviously don't know how to use it some other things that jump out at me are Electra AI calculator Electra AI editor Electra AI toolbox yada yada yada right Electra goey Electra terminal I don't know what Electra AI is there's a lot of AI stuff though floating around this menu I'm still getting these random popups I I don't know why I'm getting that uh we also had uh llm studio so large language model I'm assuming studio so yeah a lot of uh chat assistant AI chat assistant stuff here let's actually check out the electric AI calculator like what are we doing with AI in the calculator oh I I don't know I don't know why I need a AI calculator I don't even know what I yeah I'm not even sure what I would do uh in that other than just using it as a basic calculator we have Electra AI editor I'm assuming this would just be a plain text editor uh what else is here it looks very plain I could Auto correct submit a request generate image uh upgrade to makulu Linux Pro for this awesome feature okay so I guess you could tie this in to like some generative AI stuff generating images for example maybe eventually generating videos at some point I although that technology is still kind of weird uh obviously we have chat stuff I did notice down here is this a chat GPT logo it is that's the chat GPT icon if I click on it what does it do probably just opens like a chat GPT web app you know basically a browser window it's taking a minute to load though I'm assuming it's not supposed to just be a plain white window yeah I'm not sure what this was supposed to do but it okay when I resize it I guess it reloads itself it does look like it was a uh a web application but it's got some funny stuff going on because it's not centered in the window which would make this very hard to use you probably just go to the chat GP site in your browser rather than using this cuz this looks like it's kind of broken if I go back into the menu back to accessories one of the things I did want to just see what this is Electra goey I'm not I'm not sure what that program is going to be choose Electra interface guey or terminal well I that's weird Okay so under accessories we had electric gooey and electric terminal I clicked on the icon for electric guey but then it asked me do I want the guey interface or the the terminal interface but if I wanted the terminal interface I would have chose Electra terminal I I'm not sure why they made the decision that is an unnecessary step for me to choose again if I already clicked on like the gooey icon it should know I want electric gooey I nothing opened here was there was something supposed to happen yeah I may actually have to go to their website to figure out what exactly is going on cuz nothing launched there let me try the electric terminal or the Electra terminal not the electric terminal uh select a rooll for the AI so you have various categories informational normal anti-woke imaginative coder let's actually choose you know what let's go anti-woke you can communicate direct with via text below not sure what that sentence was supposed to mean it's kind of weird weirdly worded type CLS to clear clear the screen type box to open a text box okay type menu to return back to the menu so we got a a box here what am I supposed to do with this yeah yeah I'm just not sure what to do the instructions here are not terribly clear either to generate an image song or video just as the AI and she will comply create a random image okay we're thinking we're thinking for a few seconds okay I kind of see what we're doing it's basically something like chat GPT or Dolly if you want to use it to generate images I kind of find this interesting to have here it says the image was created and it was created online if I click on the Ping uh the URL here does it actually open the browser doesn't look like it's going to yeah I mean that's nice that you get the URL but if it doesn't automatically open the browser when I click on on it and that's annoying but I can uh contrl shift C to copy in the terminal and then I could go down here and open the chromium web browser and now contrl + V to paste that was the image it created for me that's interesting okay yeah let me close that out since I don't really know how to use that either I really like chat assistance though you guys know I'm a pretty big fan of things like o llama and even before all the free and open source tools were out you know Chad gbt I thought was interesting technology as well but now that we have open source Alternatives like llama you know I really I I don't hate chat assistants in fact I quite like them I know for some reason people find these things uh I guess off-putting and distasteful you should never have a chat assistant as part of Linux for me I think it makes total sense under the graphics category man there's all these electric AI stuff I am really surprised at how much stuff they have tried to incorporate AI into I really I mean I mean in their release announcements they did mention some AI stuff but I just thought that was all hype because these days anybody that puts out any new product not just Linux but anybody anybody that's putting out a new phone or a new car new toaster oven right well it comes with AI now you know AI is the new buzzword and everything just comes with AI built into it so I just assumed that this was just you know just Market speak but they actually did try to incorporate AI into everything uh let's go into Electra AI out painter I don't know what that is let's see it you can add an image you choose your aspect ratio you have a prompt here where you can tell the AI what to do with the image obviously I don't have any images to play with but I see what it is it's your basic kind of painting Tool uh you can do some image manipulation stuff and of course you could tell the AI exactly what effects you want to happen on the image that is kind of cool also under Graphics we have know standard applications like your PDF viewer we have noax which is a really nice free and open source image viewer I actually did a video recently about noax if I go and see what version they are on about noax this is noax 3.9.1 close the about information and then close the application under the internet category Chrome M we've already seen was the web browser that it shipped with out of the box they also includes some proprietary software such as Discord you see the makulu Discord here so that's obviously going to take you straight to their U Discord Channel which is probably their official support channel right so that's nice I always like distributions that do make it easy for you to get support right away so already having your IRC chat CL launch to your support channel is nice having Discord automatically launch you to your support Channel again is nice we have the Electra terminal here again I do want to launch the terminal one more time and other than all of the AI stuff I really just want a terminal I really don't want any kind of chat assistant cuz I really just wanted to enter some terminal commands maybe they have a different terminal for that um for example can I just type htop no I can't it's the chat assistant it's the large language model you know us thinking about what the hell htop means right let me yeah let me close all of that out um how about Control Alt t a lot of distributions Control Alt T will bring up a terminal but in this case it brings up good on pie so how about uh I don't know Super T alt t uh yeah let me just do a quick search in the cinnamon menu here terminal here it is gnome terminal xfce terminal which one do I want it really doesn't matter both are fine all right now that I've got a proper terminal now let me do htop I just want to check system resource usage now I have a ton of stuff running on this because I've launched a few programs and some of them are running down here in the Cy tray for example Gom pie is running let me quit that we do have spices update still checking for some things we got a notification Damon running we've got weather running there's a lot of stuff running down here and of course that's going to affect RAM usage it's using 1.6 gigs of the 6 gigs of RAM I gave this virtual machine that seems high but again there is a ton of stuff running so I won't beat it up too badly on that we want to see how many applications are installed if I do a APT list-i it says command line option I is not understood with the other options I assumed that maybe if I did the long form-- installed no well just app list and valid operation is apt even installed where is app apt is here so so that's kind of weird it's a Debian based distribution so it should use apt apt is installed but for whatever reason apt is like some of the APT commands just don't work wonder if I did a Pudu appt update you know just just syncing the repos would that actually work yeah mean that command works fine I'm assuming pseudo apt upgrade would also work as well sinking the repos here I will say is kind of slow I paused the video there for about 30 seconds 60 seconds these last few mirrors here yeah it's taking a long time you know what let me cancel that anyway I really wasn't wanting to take an update I just wanted to see if the APT package manager actually worked maybe they've got some other package managers installed if I did a where is flat pack flat pack here it is flat pack list let's see what is installed as a flat pack nothing so I've got flat pack installed they got no flat packs listed um let's do a where is snap d uh snapd is here so Snaps are here as well if I did a snap list there are no snaps installed either so flat pack can snap both here but there's none already installed so if you don't want to use them you can always just uninstall flat pack uninstall snapd I think most people probably on a distribution like this would be fine using both flat packs and snap so I'm kind of glad that they include both out of the box it makes sense I do a un name- R just check the kernel version 61110 let's clear the screen and I think I just want to go ahead and exit out of the terminal there and back to the menu system very quickly just to see if there's anything else that's interesting uh I obviously with so many programs here I'm not going to play with all of these but for an office suite they do include one it is the uh calbor office I don't know anything about this particular office suite also in the menu system we had a programming category which is going to have some stuff here uh yeah wow lots of Electra AI stuff sound and video got your standard MPV movie player VLC is also here which typically is a movie player you can also use VLC as a music player as well uh so it really handles all your multimedia stuff under Administration wow lots of administrative tools here as well including things like G deie which G deby is a goey that allows you to install a Deb pack like a thirdparty Deb in package that you go find on the internet you download that Debian package G debie will install that on your system for you also under Administration uh you had the grub customizer tool if you want to customize the look of your grub menu you had light DM GT greeter settings for changing the lightdm login manager theme you have the synaptic package manager which is a guey package manager front end to the app to package manager so synaptic is a standard application that's installed on most Debian based distributions or at least it seems like it is anyway I don't know if it's on most post but synaptic package manager great little gooey package manager right is basically lists all the packages in the repo you just go and search for a package click on it Mark it to install and Away you go one last thing I want to check out before I get out of here I want to rightclick on the desktop and I want to check out the wallpapers and oh one of the cool things is random wallpaper so if I click on that would it just change to a random wallpaper yeah it takes a few seconds but it does oh well actually it turns on random wallpaper does it is it going to keep changing it it changed the wallpaper twice for some reason not sure why it did that that's a little bit of a bug but let me select wallpaper yeah I really like these yeah so a lot of these are photographs yeah a lot of landscape photos really beautiful stuff I mean this is good stuff here I am a sucker for a good wallpaper pack so no matter what kind of faults makulu may have yeah I love the wallpaper pack I might would even install this on physical Hardware just for the wallpaper pack of course I'm halfway joking here but this is really a great wallpaper pack I'm just going to quickly scroll through these something maybe not so busy something a little more minimal maybe or if I wanted to how about one with a kitty there we go I don't know what that's supposed to be but I'm going to go with it could I escape out of uh that uh how do I get out of this here yeah I'm not sure I'm not sure how I get out of this am I stuck in the wallpaper picker select wallpaper if I right click and hit select wallpaper again it goes away that's kind of odd too yeah there's some peculiarities with this distribution yeah it's got some quirks overall though I do think makulu lindo's 2025 is rather interesting obviously you know there were some issues but I do love the fact that they have chosen to incorporate AI into everything like literally everything right and obviously it's not where it needs to be right now but going forward this distribution I think is ahead of the curve because you know I don't mind having you know some of these large language model chat assistant incorporated into for example my image editor my video editor my text editor especially obviously I mean that one goes without saying but even you know incorporating it in the terminal or whatever it happens to be I think makes total sense now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Matt Steve armor Dragon cap caveman dof deas George Lee methos Aran Paul p archor real forist red profit Roland foru and auntu and Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at the recent release of makulu lindos would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and freed open source software subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys