Tech Over Tea - Anyone Can Use Debian, Even You!! | JustAGuy Linux

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Today we have just a linux user, he's just a guy, he's Drew from JustAGuy Linux, he runs a mainly Debian focused Linux but has recently taken up a series on window manages that exist in the Debian repos. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JustAGuyLinux Twitter: twitter.com/JustAGuyLinux Mastodon: fosstodon.org/@justaguylinux Github: github.com/drewgrif Website: justaguylinux.com ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we have, uh... I don't know, how about you just explain yourself? Because I'm sure most people probably haven't heard of your channel, but I think the videos you do are pretty cool. Welcome, JustLinuxGuy, otherwise known as Drew. Say something about yourself.

Uh, yes, thank you for having me. I am... have a YouTube channel called JustAGuyLinux, uh, focuses on Debian for the most part. And, um, I'm very happy to be here. sort of your introduction just into Linux and maybe even your introduction to tech because I did watch your like a bit of your video where you were talking about that and uh yeah I didn't see all of it though so just give me a brief introduction where do you choose somewhere along the timeline you want to start I was born no I'm. But I, you know, I'm quite a bit older than probably a lot of your guests. I'm in my late fifties. And as far as tech is concerned, I went to college late. I actually played soccer for a really long time. And then all of a sudden they wanted to put me in coaching and I'm like,

okay, well I haven't done my degree yet. So can I, can I go to school while I'm getting, well, you know, while I'm coaching? And they said, yeah, let's do it. So anyway, I got my degree in information systems and, um, but that's more of a business application type. It's not coding or anything like that, even though you have to do a little bit of that. But overall, I've been really kind of fascinated with computers from the 80s. You know, when I first started doing computers, there was no hard drives.

There was floppy drives. There was me logging into a server, a mainframe at one of the colleges that I failed out of. So, so it was one of those things where it was like, wow, I'm, I'm fascinated by this. And until the mid nineties, I, um, I was playing and playing soccer and doing um and doing coaching and then this guy says hey man i'd like you to come in and work at my software company okay so i said doing what exactly he's like i know you have a degree why don't you just see what we can do so anyway i ended up working for this software company that was uh that specialized in civil engineering design. And so I started doing their website for them. I started doing like multimedia creation for them. And this is, like I said, a really long

time ago. And then I moved on to another company that is web-based. For the most part, we focus on my job in particular is to focus on generating revenue for the domain names that we actually own. So we have like 3000 domain names that we own. But my job is to, you know, make money, make money off of those things. So it's kind of weird because my channel is not, does not have a revenue stream at all. In fact, I did not want the pressure of putting out really good content and have people go, dude, you suck at this. And so anyway, I didn't want that pressure. So anyway, I just started, I really believed in Debian.

And it was funny because I watched guys like you and several years ago, I think it was like, well, I don't know when you started exactly, but in 2016 is when i kind of made the jump to linux okay and started out like a lot of people do and using um linux mint and well especially back then mint was definitely a big thing people recommended it was either mint 17 or 18 i'm not sure exactly which one um but they had, you know, several like 17, one, 17, two, 17, three.

I'm not sure exactly where it fell in there, but overall I was like, you know, when you first get into something like Linux and you're a noob much like me today, you get to the point where you're like, is this the best there is? Because I want to use the best there is. So when you watch a lot of the YouTube, especially several years ago, I think there's more diversity now, but it was like arch, you know, arch based distros. Arch was like King for YouTubers. And so I was like, okay, let me, let me do that.

So I would try Arch for, and, and, and, and actually, um, I'm sure you probably know this guy. I don't think he's put out a video in more than a year or so. Uh, EF, uh, Linux made simple. Yes. Yes. I do know the name. Yeah. Um, Erano, I'm going to butcher his name, but, um, Ermanno or Erranno Ferrari. And I would like, he would put out these videos once a month that showed how to install Arch. Um, and it was like, Oh dude, he was, I was fascinated. So I would, I would copy him basically. And, but then I got to the point where I'm like,

I can't get my fricking, um, scanner to work on work on arch i can't and it's because it's a really old scanner i can't get my printer to work on arch and i'm like so i installed debian and it worked like that you know which version of debian was it at the time um it was what's before bullseye? Someone's going to comment it. Debian releases. Let's have a look. Buster. Buster. There you go.

So I was on Buster and everything worked. Not to mention, even Linux Mint worked as well as like Zubuntu and a lot of the Ubuntu-based distros, which are Debian. But when it comes right down to it, I just wanted something stable. I just wanted something that worked so that I could get my work done. And I was such a, I hated Linux,

I'm sorry, I hated Windows rather with a passion. So I was like, I've got to get out of here because i could not stand like the metro design and all that other crap it was just brutal to me so that's how i got started during windows 10 or was it late windows 8 oh i think actually they was it eight i think it was don't remember when 10 came out yeah 10 what was before that because i didn't like vista either for that 10 came out in 2015 yeah okay sure i didn't realize it was that old yeah so when i looked at um you know when i started thinking this is this is not for me i just can't do this anymore Especially the design got worse and worse and worse. So that's when I made the switch.

And I've been a big advocate ever since. When you had issues with printing and scanning on Arch, why didn't you go back to Mint? Why go to Debian? Because it was new. I think it was one of those things where I was like, okay, well, let me try something new. And in my head, I was thinking, do I need all these other packages? Because I want to stay as light as possible.

So I probably ended up very likely on XFCE anyway, you know, on Debian XFCE, because I didn't understand window managers at all at that point. And it was only until like, I am a big BSPWM fan. I knew that you were what, three years ago, maybe? I don't even know. Three years ago? I still like it. It's just, look, if I'm going to talk about how great Wayland is, you know, someone's going to be using it and going to be saying how broken it still is. No, I get you.

I just thought I couldn't remember. I mean, you've been on two or three years. That's about right. Yeah. But I still use BSPWM. I'm not, I'm like,

I switched between BSPWM and DWM right now. Okay. Between the two. And I'm, cause I've been, cause I did a whole video on DWM, how to install. And I did like six or six, seven packages, maybe eight. And I'm like, oh, this is great. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And it's really snappy.

I'm like, oh, this is great. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And it's really snappy. And, and, but at the same time, I really have a hard time not going to BSPWM for whatever reason. I just, it's just like home, you know? But I did do a video though on Hyperland because it's really challenging to do that with Debian and the older packages. So you have to go to testing you absolutely there's no way you can do it on debian stable which is where i live debian stable is like basically where i live so um the

only waylon you know you can run sway in deb stable. I think they have a Sway package, don't they? They do. Yes. Okay. Well, Sway's a lot more conservative with its changes. So it does, like, obviously Debian is Debian and it's very, very slow moving. You probably could run a really old version of Hyperland,

but you would be stuck on that old version for quite a while. And considering how slow moving it is, sorry, how fast moving Hyperland is, version of hyperland but you would be stuck on that old version for quite a while and considering how slow moving it is oh sorry how fast moving our hyperland is like you might end up just being stuck on a buggy branch for a really really long time the because a lot of times when i do an installation video like i did an installation video for Hyperland, I write a bash script that helps people kind of like go through and automate the process. Right. Right.

And so, you know, it's like, okay, you start with this, which is Debian testing, and then you download this script and let it run. And then it will install all of these dependencies necessary to run it.

But I had to pin it because I had to pin it at that point and i'm not sure exactly where we were in uh because i know that hyperline is up to like 40.1 maybe or 0.40.1 or uh yeah there's still a zero at the front yeah it's something along those lines yeah it's 0.40 something i think yeah zero it's on 0 40. okay so but i had to pin it to version 0.35 at that time in order to get it to work now i haven't even tried to do it beyond that because other people have said hey man you want to you want to try to do an update video on that and uh i'm like you know what? I think I'll stick to these like 15-year-old window managers on my channel for just a little while.

Because people, I really thought, I'm doing this like, I have six videos recently that are Openbox and JWM and so on. And I thought there's going to be like four views on them. You know, literally there's going to be like four people interested in 15-year-old window managers that are not tiling window managers, but basically, you know, floating window managers. So, or stacking, whatever you want to call it. And, but it's actually had, for me you know for me it's had a decent like viewership well there is a even if people don't run them there is a lot of people

that are that have heard about these window managers like rat poison rat poison still it's in that like weird middling stage where there are still people that use it obviously flux box there are people that use it but when you start talking about things like um jwm and ice wm i don't know if you were considering doing a video on it but you could do something like twm which is tom's window manager and there's like other random little window managers that have been around for some pre-date linux but still they have a very, very small community, but a lot of people are still aware of them. So they're like, okay, why, why would anybody use this? Like, what is the deal with this? What does it do? Is there anything it does better than

something modern? Because there actually are, what is it? Um scwm yeah scwm this is scheme constraints window manager i don't know if you've heard of this one because no one else has heard of it uh so have you played around much with window rules like on like bspw okay yeah for sure okay so scheme constraints window Manager is a window manager basically entirely based around window rules. So all of the window management is window rules. So you can do something like, and not just like basic stuff, but you can have things such as,

I want this window to be X percent size of this other window. When I move this window, I want the other window to move in this other direction. If I spawn this window, I want this other window to spawn alongside of it. Or like really, wow. It's stuff like that where if you don't understand it, it's like Vim, right? Where if you don't understand it, it seems completely useless. right where if you don't understand it it seems completely useless but if you have a workflow with it you can never leave it interesting yeah i i've been basically sticking to like i said window managers that happen to be in the debian repos i don't know that that one is no it's it's not packaged anywhere at this point from my understanding i'm thinking that i mean cwm is in the repos um twm uh fvwm oh okay i didn't know that i'm not sure which one because i know fewm came out with a version three and i'm not sure if three is in debian stable um so if it is then i may i may give that a shot yeah fvwm is it's

like a it's not a spiritual successor but it is like generally considered as its own separate thing because the original developer is not working on that anymore it's now taken over by another dev who i guess they really liked what fvwm was and wanted to keep it usable with modern systems and improve it um yeah i don't know where fvwm3 is packaged i don't know if they have a list they don't oh wait wait installation instructions you probably could get it installed on devian really yeah no i was just trying to like to say you know i was trying to sudo apt install that's what i normally start off with sudo apt install openbox or jwm or cwm all those will work easily and that way you don't

have to if there is anybody interested they don't have to go and like you know get a binary or you know run a make or anything like that. And that's cool. I mean, I'm okay with kind of sticking to that, at least because there's a few that are surprisingly in the Debian repos that I have not even touched. Like Herbsluff WN as well as Xmonad is actually in there as well. And I didn't know Xmonad was in there until very recently. But I didn't realize how old it was either, for that matter. Have you had a chance to mess around with OrsonWM yet?

No, but everyone had said that that has to be one of my next ventures. Because, like I said, I've been using BSPWM, DWM, i3. I did Sway. In fact, I mentioned you in my video on Sway. Oh, yeah. Because you did a community post on your YouTube channel that basically, and I don't remember the actual specifics,

but it had to do with Waylon, obviously. And I posted something, I only have like three posts on my community YouTube thing, but it had something to do with, are you using Debian and Xorg, non-Debian Xorg, then you know basically the you know the different kind of um yeah there's four different things uh the one from like two months ago yeah okay literally it's just five of them okay that wasn't difficult to find okay yeah i know so basically uh you know i kind of looked at what you did and i'm like huh because i had very i i knew for a fact that your viewers were going to be heavily on the whalen side you know arch you know arch slash whalen side and i thought from my own perspective i thought my viewers my 110th or 112th of your viewership basically

was going to be like debian xorg but i was surprised and yes it was weighted towards that but there was like a 25 that were non-debian and whalen type users and i'm like oh wow that's surprising. That's really surprising. I've had people watch my channel who are Mac OS users and Windows users. And those people confuse me a lot more than just they watch someone who does Windows. Because a lot of,

like when you're talking about window managers, right? I guess, yeah, you probably, had you already started doing the window manager videos by that point? I think my first video ever was on i3 okay you know well a lot of the stuff you talk about here isn't necessarily debian based obviously you do have specific things about like upgrading different versions but yeah when you talk about things like thunderbird or now that you're doing the window manager stuff a lot of that window manager stuff is applicable across different systems. I don't know if all of this stuff is

packaged on places like Ubuntu, but there definitely are packages on Gentoo, on the AUR for Arch, uh, on... there's probably packages in like the... what do you call it? The, um... Ubuntu's third-party repos, um... at the um abundante's third-party repos um i'm i'm like what yeah i know what you're talking about i can't remember um yeah or or copper for fedora like all of this stuff is still packaged somewhere so if people want to try it out they can still absolutely try it out on those systems as well as well even though you know your focus you know, doing this on a Debian based system. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, I, yeah, I recognize that. I think that I don't steer away from Debian except actually I did one video on a Linux Mint Debian edition,

um, where I did an install and showed people how to use like butter FS, how to set up butter FS on Linux Mint Debian edition. But yeah, you're right. I mean, you know, I did a video on Jeannie, you know, the text editor and yeah, that's, that has nothing to do with Debian. That's not a thing to do with it. It has everything to do with how cool I think it was, you know i can't use vim for shit so you know when it comes right down to it um or neo vim i have a neo vim configuration that i'm very proud of i just don't happen to use it right right that's fair what is your like your go-to text editor then do you use like some graphical editor do you just use

whatever happens to be there nano i use if i'm in a terminal i'll use micro okay um but if i am doing something generally i use genie for very much everything, including Markdown, because I like to do a lot of, I like to document a lot of the stuff so I don't forget. In fact, I joke that that was one of the reasons why I started my channel is just because I wanted to remember how to do something. Yeah. When I was doing a lot more of the tutorial and like software stuff i said the exact same thing like four years ago as well i i know exactly how you feel there well i was like how did i do that butter fs uh thing how do i get the time shift to work correctly oh god let me put that in a video because i just don't remember all the time you know even though that is by far my

you know there's been more views on that particular uh video than any other by a mile I think there's more than 50,000 views and for me that's a big number that's a big number so ah and the second place is xz okay that that makes sense because that was just everybody was getting used on that one yeah i i kind of feel a little icky about that i it just makes me um i don't know it's kind of like low frank low hanging fruit you know and what i do for me at least you know it's like i'm not i'm not technical enough to understand the intricacies of that. But at the same time, I was, I felt very, I felt very good about Debian and their cycle so that none of the stable, you know, no, none of the stable users were affected at all by that exploit.

Yeah. So there is some benefits to using really old software. Yeah. so there is some benefits to using really old software yeah i think i i've had this thought recently about the way software packaging is done i don't know if you get like you see any of the conversations that are happening but there is this i guess argument brewing about who should be doing software packaging whether it should be the distro doing it or it should be the upstream developer with things like flat packs, app images and snaps. And I'm absolutely of two minds about this because I see cases like XZ where this only got stopped because there was a long cycle before it

made its way into stable. It did make its way onto Arch, but Arch didn't ship the patch that caused it to happen, and nothing else, like Fedora also has systems in place, it hadn't made its way into stable yet. That's one of the good things about it. But then there are cases like recently, i actually just put this video out today for anyone just uh i don't know whatever date it is today for anyone listening this will be out in a couple weeks 14th of may yeah something like that uh i think it's the 15th here yeah 15th yeah yeah because i'm in the future um yeah but the keypass xc package which is a password manager the maintainer of that decided that

instead of having a single package that has all the functionality, he split it out into a minimal package as the default package, and then the optional package is the full package. This led a bunch of users to see, like, random things just don't work. Like, their YubiKey didn't work, and they couldn't access the password database so in cases like that i absolutely see the value in the upstream packaging because you know the developers are going to package it the way that they want it to be shipped but i don't think there's any clear answer about who should be doing the packaging here and i don't think anyone by the way yeah i think anyone who who has who thinks they have a clear answer,

I don't think they've thought about the problem long enough, I'm being honest. I think that's fair. It actually fascinated me because I was a KeePassXC user for a really long time. I mean, several years ago i used um um google drive to have my database for my keypass xc and i was i was just like oh okay well this is this makes perfect sense i can move from one from one machine to another and still have my same um password database. Since I've, like you, I think I've switched a bit, Warden,

but I was very interested in that particular discussion. I don't know that I have an answer either for that matter. It seems to me that the contributor kind the that the uh the contributor got a kind of got shafted in the uh by the community um more than anybody else but the um but i understand i understand the maintainer's viewpoint you know that's just yeah i just don't have a very worldly view of the subject you You know, it's just... Yeah, yeah. I think the main issue is there just wasn't any communication before it was done.

Like, any time a change like this is done, I think you need to discuss it with Upstream because if they had put systems in place where, say, as I mentioned in that video, if a feature was missing, they could have a little dialogue there that says, hey, contact your distro about this feature missing, or something like that, install the full version of the package. That, I think, would obviously, it

would be annoying, but people who were affected by the problem, they would see, oh, there is an issue here, rather than just the feature they were using was just silently removed. I think that's the real problem there. And sometime down the line, you know, like two, three years from now, it'll be fine. You'll have people that installed the wrong package and think, oh, okay, installed the wrong package, got to install the other one. The issue is the people that are being transitioned over, who didn't realize that they were being transitioned from the full package to the minimal package and are now just left kind of confused yeah i if i remember from your video correctly though it only affected

testing and testing yeah yeah yeah well there you go beyond stable well the problem is it's eventually going to make its way to stable no i get that i was just kidding around but um hopefully it gets rectified by the by the next cycle though you know when when trixie comes out summer of 2020 2025 you know a lot of this stuff should be kind of like you know streamlined so there's not going to be that kind of uh thing which is you know which is one of the things that, you know, I get comments all the time. It's like, listen, you know, what should I do about, you know, should I go to testing? Should I go to SID?

And I'm like, dude, that's a completely personal thing. I mean, if you can get your work done using stable, then just use stable, you know, cause for me, I don't even care. And I don't have to have the, I was telling you before we started recording, you know, I don't even, I don't use Caden live. I just, I don't have a need for the latest and greatest software. I just don't. I know when we talk about bspwm i don't even think it's been touched in the last five six seven years let's have a look that sounds close to right um there was a patch made nine months ago. A patch, a singular patch. Oh, okay, now there are a couple of patches. There were one, two, three, four,

about seven or eight patches in 2023. Oh, wow. But releases, I think you are correct. When's the last tagged release? 2020 is the last tagged release. Okay, because when I went to look at um the debian packages and i look and see what um what bulls i had and what bookworm have they're exactly the same yeah they're they're the exact same version so and that's three years ago, basically. You know, when you look at the release of Bullseye,

it was three years ago. So, you know, same. Yeah, the patches, pretty much from what I can see here, are very minor things. It's cleaning up some of the code, cleaning up some of the documentation. It's pretty much it. There's not really any... there's okay there's one bug fix I think. Yeah but that's a project that it had a goal and then it got to the goal and now it's

just in maintenance mode. I think the problem with a lot of window managers is they don't know what they want to do and it just forever in this development cycle yeah so i looked at it in terms of um like open box for example you get to a point where it's feature complete right right you know and so i think it's very similar to bspwm for example feature complete um and and and strangely i i didn't think i didn't know this but until uh fairly recently but i3 is still being i think they have a 2024 release in fact uh february believe, they had a 2024 update. I haven't touched i3 in a long time. Let's see. October 2023, yeah. Okay, all right.

Yeah. Yeah, I... Oh, DWM was the one that I think... They're at version 6.5 now. Right. And I think that was February of 2024. Ah, okay. 6.5 now right and i think that was february of 2024 if i'm okay but maybe that's what i that's what i remembered where download here we go wait what is uh i hate the suckless websites okay here we go here we go i found yeah 6.5 uh march 2024 okay march all right

so that's that's pretty recent you know that's pretty recent so yeah that's why sorry that's why i did a um a video on it because i wanted to say you know it's like okay well they don't they don't come up with a new version every six months or anything like that. So I don't even remember the last time I patched it. It could have been like 6.2 maybe or something like that. So I've been working with the same version of DWM, even though I don't use it every day since, you know, for quite a while so it's not like you know when i do six or seven um patches people are like oh that's cool man you can get that much functionality and then i'm reminded that matt from the linux cast he's like i need to have 27 patches on dwm to get it to work. I'm like, dude, really?

I gotta give him a little bit of grief. Yeah, look, I I've never actually done the whole DWM thing because my thought process is I, like, I could, like, why would I patch it when I can just use a window manager

that has the first features already in it? That's my main point. And AwesomeWM is just a fork of DWM that does what I want from DWM anyway. Okay. Is that what you went to after... Because I know that, like I said, I knew that you went from BSP to WM to something.

Yes, that was awesome WM. Okay, all right. Yeah, it's basically DWM with a bunch of patches that they maintain themselves and a Lua scripting system. So if you don't know Lua, that's the entire configuration file. You're going to have to learn a bit of Lua. Well, I mean, like I said,

I have a neo vim config that uses lua i so when when i was gonna say when the um the the switch from or the uh support for came in for neo vim people like hey brody when are you going to convert your your neo vim config i've still not done it it It's still running VMRC. That's fine. If it still works. It still works. I probably should convert it at some point. Yeah. I like

it. I just can't use it. Man, it looks great. When you see guys like the Primogen do wizardly stuff in NeoVim, I'm i'm like geez that's just different level that's just different level he's been doing it for quite a while though like i when he talks about it and he'll talk about it as if it just makes sense like oh i i press like

this 20 key combination and does all of this stuff can you slow down for a second why does that work what does that do I've just never bothered to sit down like I use Vim and I use like basically surface level functionality of it I've never sat down and properly learnt the in depth of like

text formatting and how to jump around the same sort of ways I'm sure it would be really useful i just i i just don't have the time to do it really the dude types it like 150 words a minute or something too i mean it's just sick you know if i can do 35 i feel like i'm doing good i have not tested my typing speed in a while I know it used to be really bad but considering how much typing I do now surely it's gotta be better

no I'm sure it is too I mean I see you do when you know it's like oh let me look let me get that up really quickly and uh you know it seems very fluid to me so you know uh I hit the backspace key a bunch of times

so we just forget about that all right fair enough so what is it you like about our dwm because i as i have not actually properly used like why what sell me on dwm I don't know that I can, other than the fact that I think that it's really, really snappy. And I think I like the rules. But again, like I said, I fluctuate so greatly between home, which is BSPWM and DWM. I'm forcing myself really to try something other than BSPWM. It's really what I'm doing. And even Qtile too,

I've been trying to like push myself into that. But at the same time, I really believe that there is a slight resource savings by going into something that's been, and I don't know if this, I don't have any documentation to back this up, but basically it's my, it's like, oh wow, that was fast. You know, DWM written in C, BSPWM written in C, I believe. Qtile written in Python.

And so I think Python definitely gets a bad rap. But when I, you know, with only a minor number, you know, like I said, six or seven patches to get some functionality that's not built into those 2000 lines of code, that's, you know, that is the suckless way, 2,000 lines of code that is the suckless way, gives you a really good experience. Not to mention, I think that the SL status bar is pretty darn good when it comes right down to it. And granted, with BSPWM, I'm using Polybar, but with DWM, I'm using SL status. And back in the day, people used DWM blocks and a bunch of other stuff. I forgot that existed.

Yeah. But right now, I don't know if I can... I mean, is this something I can share with you at all? It might break my overlay. Okay, then I won't do that. But basically, it's a really sparse bar. I don't really need a whole lot when it comes right down to it. I have like 12 workspaces.

I have a CPU readout, a RAM readout, the date and the time, and a sys tray, and that's it. So, I mean, that's all I really need you know I don't think I don't know that anybody needs anything more than that but people people pimp out their bar you know whether it be

I mean I always am impressed by Hyperlands bar too I think that's pretty pretty saucy. Well, it doesn't have a bar built in. People are using... Oh, Waybar.

Waybar, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I did a configuration of Waybar too. Well, there are... Basically, I think... Sorry, go on. No, no, no, you go. I was going to say

there are other bars that people use that you might have seen. Waybar is... There is some configuration you can do with it, butuko. I was going to say there are other bars that people use that you might have seen. Way bar is... There is some configuration you can do with it, but a lot of people like to use EWW. That's another really popular one. That has a lot of configuration people use. Some people make use of...

I've not heard of this one. There's one called Hybrid. This is GTK bait. It's GTK based, but written in Rust. Okay, sure, whatever. For a Weyland compositor? Yeah. That's weird.

Yeah, I don't know. I've not heard of this one, but EWW and Weybar are definitely the most popular ones, for sure. Yeah, that makes sense. I do have a configuration for hyperland i just like i said i have to run testing in order to use it and so i don't do that on production machine at all i just won't do i just won't stray from that because i don't know debian packages on testing and sid have been kind of twitchy lately and And like, can I install like OBS Studio?

Not all the time. Can I install all of the Genie plugins? No. Can I, you know, so there's a lot of things that, you know, will go into the repos on testing and Sid and then back out when they're not up to standard or what have you. Either they're being repackaged or something. And so you don't necessarily have all the stuff that you want at any one time,

which is why I kind of stick to the stable branch. So with DWM, what patches do you run? That's a good question. Let me, I'm going to have to pull that up real quick. Do you have like a repo that has a collection of them? me, I'm going to have to pull that up. Like a repo that has a collection. Yeah. I'm looking at it really quickly. Uh,

I can fig. Yep. Okay. So I use always center. Okay. Um, auto auto start so that I can put in PyCom and stuff. Okay.

Fix borders because I have rounded corners on my borders for the windows that are open. Kind of like, I mean, move stack because I want to be able to move things around. MoveStack, because I want to be able to move things around. RestartSig, which allows me to hit a keybind for... Is it Ctrl-Shift-Super-Encube, which restarts DWM? I know, it takes a lot to do that. I was going to say, because every other window manager just has that. This is what I mean, right? Features that i feel i feel

dwo in some cases is just too simple something like that i don't know is why it's a separate patch no that's fair in fact when i look at it i think you know i don't know exactly how many lines it adds but you know when you're only restricted to 2000 lines of code for your window manager. Sometimes an extra 15 lines gets moved in there. 32 is the answer. Okay. I use status 2D SysTray. Okay. And vanity gaps and window follow.

Because when I want, like if I move something to like a tag tag to for example i want it to follow to that because a lot of times it you know if you do it by you know if you're using dwm not patched and you send something to a different tag it doesn't follow automatically it just you just have to use another key bind to get to that tag does that make no that makes sense that makes sense yeah i don't know i i like to just have them separate anyway i i send it over and then follow manually so i guess that wouldn't really affect me no right no i know there's certain like even with the bspwm it's it's a rule you. You have to set up a rule that says follow.

Right, right. So with DWM, I kind of... And you can actually turn it on or off depending on whether you... So I have it on by default. But once you install that particular patch, it's off by default unless you use a key bind to turn it on or a mouse click to turn it on.

Right, right. Or you set it in your configuration to be on by default. So... Right, because what I'll sometimes do is I'll be rendering something in Kdenlive and I just throw the window on another desktop because I just don't want to see it right now. Yeah, well, that makes sense.

I mean, I try to open... I don't know that i am the one to i have my workflow everybody has it's very personal you know and it comes right down to it's like okay so when i open up obs for example it goes to workspace 10 you know when i open up discord it goes to workspace 9 when i open up g, it goes to workspace eight, you know, and I open up Genie goes to workspace four, Thunar goes to three and so on. So I know where things are. Um, but, but when it comes right down to it, uh, if I'm physically moving a window to another, either tag or workspace, I want it to go. I want to follow it. That's, but you know, what's interesting is,

um, are you familiar with DK window manager? DK window manager? No, I think you stumped me there. That's a new one. DK window manager is, uh, Nate Maya is the developer for it. And he is one of the lead devs on, um, arch labs. Oh, okay. Yep. And so he developed DK Window Manager, very similar in, it's kind of a hybrid between DWM and BSPWM.

And he's, I've asked him actually, it's like, hey man, are you going to have a Wayland? Are you going to make a, you know, port it over to Wayland? I don't know that he, I don't remember if he responded or not,

to be honest with you, but DK was really kind of cool because he actually set up a configuration. So if you, let's, let's say you want to send it to workspace six, you just, you know, super shift six.

But if you want to follow it, you just, it's the same key bind. But if you want to follow it, you just, it's the same key bind, you say super control six and it automatically follows. So you have a choice, you know, it's like, okay, sending it to, or sending it and not following it or sending it and following it. So, but I liked it.

I think his, I think his window manager is really nice. Really, really well-construct well constructed well constructed i feel like like i don't know i'm surprised you managed to find one that i wasn't aware of i i feel like i i have a pretty good grasp on just random window managers that nobody else has heard of but somehow like linux cast covered this jakeob linux covered this i've never heard of this i've i covered this you also covered this yes yeah a bunch no i like how do i not hear about this he's a good dude too this guy you know with arch labs he's really good really good dude anyway i think it's an excellent i think it's an excellent window manager, and I used it as my

primary for a while, actually. It was really good. But not in the WN repo. You have to actually build that one. I wonder if it's on the AUR. DK window manager AUR.

I kind of feel it would. Yeah, I kind of feel it would because of the you know the the tie it has to arch lab yeah it's he put it there yeah okay that makes sense yeah no that's good it's good stuff so when you try out something like qtile you said you don't have like you know a programming background or anything like that. Do you like when you tried Qtile had you already messed around with writing Python before or was using Qtile your introduction to Python? That's exactly it. I was trying to get and I can't write a code to save my life, but if I see something on a page,

I say, Oh, okay. That's, that's how that works. Basically. You know, I understand what the intent is for specific lines of code.

And then sometimes I'll, you know, you know, Google is your friend in this particular case, because if you say, I want to do this and you'll say, you know, somebody has done it already.

So people that have been so gracious as to put their.files on GitHub or GitLab or something like that, it's really, really helpful to see what other people have done and been successful at doing. That's why I try to keep things on my GitHub as well. Because like I said, I write a lot of my configurations. We'll put them there. But when I'm doing an installation like DK, for

example, there is a script that installs DK window manager for you in my bookworm scripts directory or at GitHub, so that it's easy for someone to say, okay, those are the packages that I need to use to install that. But yeah, I don't have, I've been pushing myself to learn more and mostly it's in the world, it's in bash.

I push myself to do bash scripting and stuff like that. Well, as long as you know how to use a terminal, writing bash stuff is pretty straightforward. There's a couple of extra syntax things that you need to know, but as long as you're not trying to do something crazy, like writing Neo fetch bash is pretty simple. Yeah. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. I understand my limitations. In fact, I was doing a Linux users group

and I was participating in it. And one of the guys after the user group was complete said, hey man, how do you do this? I have no idea. I'm listening and I'm trying. It's listen, this is beyond my skillset. It really is. I think people, I think he appreciates me being honest

and say it's just not that's just not something i can help you with which is um which is why i really appreciate the comments on a lot of the videos because they'll say you could have done it this way and it would have been easier and i'm like right, that's good information. That's something that I didn't know how to do, you know, like, um, you know, setting up a virtual environment for installing Qtile on Debian, not straightforward, you know, that is not straightforward. So I, I did that in one of my recent videos, how to do that. Uh, but somebody said, hey, why don't you just do it this way? And I didn't try to do it the way he described, but I will. I will because I want to make sure that I'm telling people the right thing to do too. I'll make another video simply just to say, yeah, I screwed that up.

I think it's better to do it this way. It makes a lot more sense to do it this way. Yep. Yep. Yep. So that's one reason. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. You were saying something. I was going to say, so that's one of the reasons why I don't have a revenue model for my channel because I don't feel like as, as just a guy who makes it very clear that I am not an expert at anything, you know, I don't want you to come back to me and

go, Hey, that you led me astray here. Like I've had, I've had people comment before in a, I don't remember what video, but basically it was something like, why should I listen to you? What is your, what is your background? Why are, why should I listen to you? And I just, my response is I'm just a guy and it's free. choose to what listen or you choose not to that's up to you you know it's free what do you want don't worry this never changes i have exactly the same people like what is your you're not a i always love that you're not a programmer it's like no i'd literally have a software engineering degree shut up um i have literally done work as a programmer shut up um but they're like oh what do you what do you know about this subject like oh why are you talking about it's

like why are you here go away yeah like there's so much stuff i don't know why so many like why anyone feels the need to just comment on something they dislike right it's one thing you know you're trying to be funny haha that's that's cool but like people who clearly are just not enjoying their time there and especially when I don't know if you had these but you get like a big a big essay explaining everything that's wrong with like I don't know your voice your I guess you don't show a camera normally so like anything else with the content and it's like during this time you could have just found another video to watch yeah no i i feel like i've been very blessed in that

regard i don't feel like i've been trolled to the, to the degree that other people probably have. I think by and large, people have been very complimentary, very, um, very appreciative. And I appreciate them. And I really do.

I appreciate it. You know, there are a couple of people that go, you know, like I said, and we've been talking about window managers for a lot of this, you know, a lot of this episode, but you know, one guy is like, I don't like window managers.

I'll never, I will never like window managers. Okay. Fair enough. Moving on. You know, it's like, well, I mean, there's really no reason for you to watch this is there yeah but but but like i said like you know 90 something percent are giving me the thumbs up and and that's that's that's that's fantastic i that's that's it makes me feel really appreciated and um and and i and like i said i feel like if i didn't have fun i wouldn't do it at all you know i mean i i think i make a decent enough living not doing this so

i don't have a problem in like taking a week or two or a month off sometimes in between videos. But sometimes they get on a roll like I like I have been recently, even though it's been like five days since I put out a video. But but, you know, there would, you know, in this one series on floating window managers, it's like one after the other, after the other kind of thing. Like, oh, I'm on on a roll let's just keep going yeah i think that's that's the important thing right just if you're gonna be making videos on something you need to just find something you enjoy and whether that be i don't know covering random window managers that five people out there use or whether whether that be, like, I really enjoy digging into random issue trackers and just looking what's actually happening behind closed doors, because

most people don't actually know what's happening in these issue trackers, especially issue trackers like Weyland. They'll hear things like, oh, this protocol's taking, like, three years to merge, but I like to show why is it taking three years to merge but I like to show why is it taking three years to merge and usually it's because people are arguing about something stupid because that's what people do and it's it's fun right like I enjoy what I do and I've had some people complain like oh your contents changed over the years used to do because do, because I used, I think some of the first videos I had that popped off were BSPWM configuration videos, like, actually setting up

your bar and things like that, and I like doing content like that as well, but I don't know, right now I'm just enjoying, I'm enjoying this, and I'll chuck in some more like tutorial-y videos here and there when I feel like I have something to say about them, but I'm not gonna just like... I don't see a point in just doing a video about like how to install this package when it's just in the repos. Obviously if it's not in the repos there's more to say there, or if you're going to be configuring it or you're going to be using it like there's more to say there but at least right now i i don't know i'm just happy doing what i do and i'm gonna keep doing what i do basically that's that's that's everything you know that's that's the whole that's the whole reason why i

think that you're successful is like if if you, if you, if you came across as like just mailing it in, or it's like, I got to put a video that, and I'm just, it wouldn't work. You know, it just wouldn't work. You know, I watch, um, I won't name names, but basically you see some videos of guys that are just like, I've got to put a video out. And it comes across like that, you know, it's just like, wow, dude, you should take a break or something because it's coming off like, like, you just don't care. Like you really don't. And but if you're interested in something that that enthusiasm that you have in talking about, you know, you know, like that key pass XC issue.

That was, I mean, that was fascinating to me. So yeah, it should make, it makes other people, it draws other people in is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And I don't use key pass XC myself, but I don't think you have to be using something directly and like directly involved with it to find it interesting right like i you know i don't really what's what's it gonna go i'm believers i don't care about my car right i i have a 2013 impresa it gets me from point a to point b it drives i probably should take it in to get serviced,

because it's been a while, and the oil probably needs to be changed, but I enjoy watching car videos sometimes, like, I don't really understand most of the, um, most of what they're talking about, but I still enjoy the content, and I think, I don't know, I think it's good to also, I guess, learn about things that you're not already interested in, right? Because it's one thing to become an expert in one thing, but I think you become a lot more of an interesting person if you have, obviously, one thing that you're really interested in, but a wide breadth of breadth yeah no yeah breadth is that one depth yeah a wide breadth of knowledge of of various different topics yeah no i'm with you yeah i you know you know jack of all trades master of none type thing you know when you can talk intelligently about a lot

of different things that makes it's more you you know, you become able to relate more easily to people, you know, it's like, okay, so we can talk about soccer. We can talk about, you know, American football or, or, you know, a number of things, you know, my, I know I have, I'm a dad. So, I mean, we can talk about having a kid and stuff like that. So, I mean, we can talk about having a kid and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, I know my son's 21 now, so he's not even in the house. But he's going to see this video and he's going to go, yeah, I saw the cup. Oh, I didn't even realize what the cup was saying to me just now. He's going to say, Dad, I saw the cup.

That's the extent of his interest in this particular video right right right you know which is you know but anyway he's uh you know he thinks that i talk a lot basically so it's one of those things where it's like oh yeah you know you need to let other people's talk. You know, I'm like, oh yeah, you're right. The less I talk, the better on this show. It's great. You know, if people think of it as like, oh, you're such a great interviewer. Oh, look at you asking.

No, I just let the guest do the talking. I will start them on a direction. They can run the show. That's fine by me. Yeah. I watched the primogen and when you interviewed him and i was like wow that's tough because i don't know that he's as like i don't want to say giving that's not the right word but basically he's kind of letting

you run the show and that's more challenging i think than somebody that's like like steve you know like steve from yeah yeah yeah zero yeah from zero lennox you know that's just go boom let me have he can just he can just give it to you like for half hour straight you know but uh but man that's that's's challenging. That's got to be challenging. Yeah, that was... Especially because his viewership is so big, too. You know, it kind of makes you feel like, I got to do a good job here. You know, I got to do a good job.

That was definitely a weird one for me because I've had people like DistroTube on in the past I've had the Linux experiment on but I think I think the Primogen one like that's the first one where it was like outside of just the Linux space and the viewership on that that video really could tell because his audience just like Crowded to that episode and that what i that's

like by far my biggest episode is not at all my channel that did that like it was entirely his i think that was like 80 or 90k on that episode which is not what that channel does at all like normal is like two or three k well when you will i mean if you see him on either i mean because he's doing live on twitch and youtube and both of them have like 20 000 views viewers each you know it's like oh wow that's and live that's crazy that's crazy anyway yeah well i don't know look i i yeah well i don't know look i i think this is fun as well i like the chill episodes where i don't need to worry about i don't even worry about like how many people are gonna watch it i'll just get to i just get to chat about i don't know ice wm or whatever yeah let's talk about ice actually one thing i did want to ask you about is and this sort of goes back into the thing I was saying before

about having a wide breadth of knowledge. You've messed around with a bunch of different window managers. You've messed around with some tiling stuff. You messed around with some floating stuff. What is your preferred model of doing window management now? I mean, I like tiling i mean that's that i mean that's just i think it makes a lot more sense in my workflow i think that other people i mean i was i've been curious as to why certain people will go from a tiling window manager back to like kde for example i hate it here you know what do you mean i'm using kde right now

i don't like the fact that i i i'm so excited for cosmic to come out and i have i can finally stop using floating because i really don't like floating is that right i but from a yeah like i said from a works flow perspective, it matches my workflow, but I think I've tailored it too, to make, to match that workflow too. So like, um, you can get a floating window manager basically to behave the way you want it to, and to tile to one side of the screen and so on like open box and um flux box and a lot of these other floating window managers if you got the right key bindings you can make it like more usable as a as a tiling manager preferred you know if you are if you like tiling window

managers you can get it to basically behave that way. But it's going to take a little bit extra work to do that. But overall, like I said, tiling window managers, for me at least, just matches my workflow. And I've talked to Matt about this at the LinuxCast too, because we both have this really, really, um, deep appreciation for XFCE and what that did for me as a noob going from, you know, from a full desktop environment to a window manager, setting up the XFCE key binds, even though they're in two locations,

one for windows and then another one for, you know, for starting applications and stuff like that. They're in two different locations in the XFCE. They're bifurcated, which is kind of silly, but that's just the way it is. Allowed me at least to be able to gain some muscle memory and like okay i

want to open up thunar i want to open up whatever i want you know a terminal and so on and so forth and by doing that in xfce where i was kind of like okay well i've got you know i got my muscle memory kind of squared away now. I was able to move on to something a little bit more sparse, like a window manager like DWM or BSPWM, where I did not have to install the entire suite of packages associated with either GNOME or KDE

or XFCE in this case. So I liked that. I was i was like okay how many packages do you actually need out of debian to install bspwm two you know there's bspwm and polybar oh no three xxhkd yeah you probably want that one yeah that's it though i mean that's really it if you have everything kind of else you you know, if you've got Xorg and you've got LightDM, those three packages and you're ready to go. That's it, you know.

And, you know, Dunst and, you know, if you want to add some, you know, Pycom and Dunst and stuff like that, then yeah. But at the same time, you know, do I need to install the entire suite around KDE? no i don't so that's that was really the tipping point for me is like i want to get away from everything i don't want you know all

this other packages that don't that just kind of like are there that aren't even used. Right, right. So I want to get down to like, you know, on Debian, you can get around 1,000 packages and you're like singing. You know, you're just going from one thing to another. Whereas like if I installed KDE or something like that, I'd be at 2,000 packages on Debian or something, you know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's right or not.

I have 2,093 packages installed on this system. How often do you, like, restart? Like, do you format your drive and go, okay, let me reinstall Arch? About four years ago. Okay, all right. I need to do so at some point. It's gotten really bad

because that's one one thing i don't i don't i i like okay my first hint of trouble and i'm like starting over again yeah yeah you know i'm like i'm just like forget that man i'm not even gonna try to fix this i'm just gonna reinstall even though. Even though Debian 12.3, 12.4, 12.5 were not good updates for Debian. I don't believe they were because in particular I had up until very, very recently an NVIDIA card in my production machine and 12.5 basically broke the driver for nvidia so yeah it's fixed

now but you have you had to actually go to the bookworm updates know where to find it for these legacy nvidia um drivers in order to fix the problem, which was silly. It should never have happened, basically. And now they've basically decided, because of the XZ exploit, they had 12.6 on their calendar. Not there anymore at all now. They're taking it really slow now. As slow as Debian is, they're taking it even more slow now. I get why they're taking it really slow now yeah as slow as debian is they're taking it even more slow now like i get why they're doing it right because debian was one of the ones that

would have been like really really affected badly and debian has this reputation of being very secure like i don't think they've ever actually shipped malware in the repos anything serious at least yeah well i think the servers would have been the bigger issue i mean you've got i mean i mean you're talking about server debian servers which is massive much more so than any desktop user much more and you know and yeah sid and testing affected. There's no question about that. And so they had a quick update that had to be done. Actually, it was a rollback. It really wasn't an update.

It was a rollback. But yeah, I mean, that's why I think when you're talking about servers and Debian stable, at least there's that two-year cycle where you can say, you can hit this thing with a bat and it'll be fine, you know? But overall, I feel like, you know, as far as that particular exploit, Debian stable, we didn't have any issues at all. So-

For anyone who's, before they try to correct me in the comment section, just let me say something. I'm aware that there have been security issues in Debian packages. I know about the OpenSSL stuff. What I mean is something that is blatantly put into the code to be malicious. Yes, there was the issue back in 2008 where SSL keys were not unique. There was like 20,000 different SSL keys were not unique. There was like 20,000 different SSL keys.

Yes, that happened, but XZ was different. XZ was intentional. That was someone who made a stupid patch. Yeah, for sure. That's weird that, I think it's about 17 years ago or 16 years ago, you're talking about the SSL thing. Whoa.

I've got this video coming out soon, actually actually so it turns out a couple of people well not a couple of people a couple of really big companies cisco uh oracle github a couple others were actually using these known vulnerable keys from 16 years ago today on their email servers. So there's a system called, this is just like TLDR, there's a system called DKIM. This is used for basically authenticating that the sender address of an email has not been forged. Yep.

What do you use for your emails? I use ProtonMail. Okay. I don't know if ProtonMail does this, but on Gmail, there's a thing called BIMI. This is Brand Identified Message Indicator. It basically lets companies attach a logo to their emails.

And on things like Gmail, it'll show a little avatar next to the email. Now, turns out, even though BIMI has a separate key that could be used to authenticate this, that key's not being used. So it's just the DKIM key that's being used to make sure that it's from that company so if you have the dkim key you can just send an email that shows up as if it's from that company and uh yeah so you could just send emails that look like cisco or look like oracle or and look actually another one was in trust which is the company that sells bimmy certificates yeah ssl right yeah wow yeah fishing on that would be

really really easy you know yeah the guy who discovered this he did report to the companies and it's all been solved except for one provider who didn't believe him that the key was still being in use wow that's great a loser job over that one somebody needs to lose their job over that I always find things like this fun like you know I think my the most fun videos I've done are the ones where I just go back and look at some ancient ancient

weird issue like um one of the famous ones that I have a video coming out eventually on is the can't print on Tuesday bug I'm not familiar with that so there was a bug with a dependency of the printer drivers um where it actually the the program the program was file file is used to identify the file type, right? So for some reason, when it was a Tuesday, the file was, the program used to parse the file to detect the file type,

it parsed it weirdly and didn't think the file was postscript. So it didn't think it was like a printer like print file and that caused it to error out but it errored out silently so nobody had any idea what the problem was but it was also weird because that uh that field to indicate the date was an optional field so some programs didn't include it so i think libre office uh that didn't include it so that no that did include it that did include it so that didn't work but then other things like printing from firefox didn't include it so that issue didn't happen there and people were just going down this giant list of things like what could this possibly be because no one is going to think it's You can't print on Tuesday. They're like wait this update fixed the problem, but okay wait I did another update and the update broken now like what's happening here and

Eventually someone went and manually checked the file and realized oh Specifically Printing on Tuesday is going to generate a weird file that gets paused weirdly and it breaks everything that's crazy that is crazy wow

there are so many cases like this in the history of Linux and yeah as I said they're very fun to go and dig into that's crazy wow yeah I don't know how to you know like I said, they're very fun to go and dig into. That's crazy. Wow. Yeah. I don't know how to, you know, like I said, my understanding of Linux is so, like, narrow

when it comes right down to it. So I know how it affects me as a user. Right. But beyond that, I don't know that I have like that. You know, that that knowledge that other people have, you know, that are more historic or historians of the of the, you know, of the, of the project, basically. So I know that when I've watched other people talk about this, but you're really good at it. But you know, when I've seen other people talk about this, but you're really good at it. But, you know, when I've seen other people talk about like historical, it's always fascinating to me because, like I said, I have a narrow view of how it affects users or me as a user. And it's interesting, too, because when I, you know, as a user, I'm really only interested in whether I can get my work done, you know, and, and when it comes right down to it, I have a job that I need to get and slam through as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Why I, you know, you know, so having a YouTube channel is just fun day for me. You know, it's like, all right, well, this is cool. I like having, you really, really knowledgeable, like your interview with Neil Gampa is just like, wow. The amount of information in that guy's head is just unbelievable. We just scratched the surface. There's like 20 other things he's involved in that he didn't even list out. That's crazy to me. that's just crazy to me so i appreciate i appreciate all the you know these contributors it's just amazing to me that this

um that free and open source software is even available that that we have choices. I am very, very pleased with how I think the overall project has evolved because even when I was kind of, and I don't think I'm a long-time Linux user. I think that I fit in somewhere in the middle, I guess. But you needed newer software basically back in even four or five years ago, because there was so many kind of bugs in your desktop or your desktop wasn't nearly as developed as it is now. I mean, even people complain about KDE,

for example, you know, and say it's buggy and this, that, and the other thing. And then, you know, GNOME is this, and it's only for certain types of people, for certain types of workflow. But since Debian 12 came out, people, I don't think, are as, they don't need to necessarily have to have the latest and greatest software. I think we're at the point with desktop environments and with software in general, that you can get away

with older packages, like, like in Debian 12, you know, whereas whereas before i don't know that you could say that you know i don't know that you could go to that level where you could say yeah but i need this functionality and it's just not there yet or it's just not developed enough yet but i think i think we're there now to the point where it's stable i mean we're where we don't have to be waiting on that next version to get the most out of either that desktop environment or that distro or what have you. We're good.

We are good. In fact, I thought to myself that when Debian 12 came out, this might be the most important version of Debian for desktop users than there has maybe ever. Because when you think about Ubuntu and a lot of the distros that use Debian as their core, they're basically taking that and then running with it and making it desktop. You know, they're all about the desktop. I mean, Ubuntu does have server, obviously, but, you know, but there's a lot more, um, there's, there's a lot more development for the desktop user as opposed to Debian where I don't know that they are. You know, when it comes right down to it, I use Debian and I use Debian for my starting point, but I don't know that everybody has that.

I don't, you know, you're getting vanilla everything when it comes right down to it. You know, when you're a newer user, you're going to go the way of Linux Mint, Debian edition, or just Linux Mint. You know, I always say that it's like, you know, if you're a Windows user,

go do that. Go, go to Linux Mint and put this, put Cinnamon Desktop on and see if you like it. Because that is your easiest transition point. No question. If you're asking me, because Gnome and kde are not going to

be as i don't know it's not it's not the same transition that you would from windows to those to those gnome is a very different model like they're it's explicitly a different model and kde looks kind of similar but it has a lot of customization that it it like if i'm being honest it does a really bad job at separating out how to say it separating out the simple user experience with the advanced user experience where it's all just if you know how kde works it works relatively well together but there's a lot of things you need to like look at if you're just trying to find basic things yeah i'm not like i said i have tried to use kde i've tried to use gnome and and and yeah that was a while back. And so I haven't really given it another shot. I mean, I guess

I did one video in Bookworm for KDE Minimal because there's different packages for KDE on Debian Stable. There's Minimal, there's Standard, there's the full Monty and all that. But at the same time...

I heard that's why they kill the package. It's that. But at the same time... I heard that's what they call the package. It's not, but... It's minimal... No, it's called Plasma Desktop. And then it's standard. And then there's something else. Oh, just the task cell. It is task cell KDE.

So you have those, you have those options basically. And so you could, you can get really minimal when it comes right down to it. In fact, I did the minimal install for KDE on one of those videos. Um, and it was, people were saying, I can't remember what, is it called Conqueror? Conqueror came as a package with that minimal install. And people were like, is Conqueror really a part of the minimal install? I said, yeah, I mean, that's the way it is. Yeah. But as far as, but as far as like, like I said, I've tried to help other people make that transition from windows or even

Mac OS for that matter. And say, listen, if you're really interested in doing this, don't mess around. Just try to use like mint and cinnamon and see if that's something that you can, you can work with, you know, because, and then, and then go in because, because they're looking at like, they're looking at a DT, for example, and he's using X Monad and he's like, Oh my God, that's fantastic. And, or, you know, and I'm like, don't, yeah, don't do that. Don't, don't do, don't do that, you know, or even me trying to show them what,

it's like, this is what BSPWM is like. And they're like, wow, that's really cool functionality. I said, don't do that. Just do something simple and then make that transition. If you're that interested, you're gonna find your way. You really are. Because you'll have your workflow that can be modified and then tweaked and tweaked and

tweaked and then and then you're going to be like a convert you know you're going to be like you're going to be like one of our uh new four percent um desktop users you know yeah i i'm also a bad example to follow because i started on Arch I3 like that was my first introduction you can do it right but I went into it with a programming background I had watched a bunch of videos beforehand I knew what I was

getting into if you don't know what you're getting into and you're not fully aware of what it means to configure a window manager use something like arch or debbie and sid just don't just don't do that yeah no i'm i fully agree with that that's especially i mean like i said there's a reason why these window users are looking for something else you know and it could be something simple like they got old hardware or they just want to be stable

or they just don't like like the fact that windows or microsoft is trying to sell them something constantly make it make it easy on yourself you know and so i think i think that um i think that a few of my friends have made that transition and they're very appreciative, but, uh, but I wish, I wish there could be more people that have, that would follow into that category because I know I have a lot of friends that are like, I start talking about it and they go, yeah, I'm not doing that ever. I've just not, you could talk to me about Linux all you want. you could talk to me about linux all you want i don't care you know all right fine i'm trying to help you out man earlier you said you started using linux what was it 2016 2017 was the year yeah somewhere in there yeah so when did you become aware of linux was that around then or had you heard of it earlier

yeah probably actually i mean i think that i mean at work i was on this terrible windows machine that crashed every like 30 minutes it seemed like and um and i'm like i can't work like this this is terrible either they're gonna have to buy me a new computer or something's going to have to happen. So, um, I wanted to make sure that my resources were going to be used better than they were. Cause I think that the more you upgrade with windows, it's the harder it becomes from, you know, hardware, hardware becomes more of an issue so i was thinking i got to do something different here and it was hard for me at least because i didn't understand what an iso was at that point you know i didn't understand what it would take to

take to burn an ISO to either a CD or a DVD and then start from that point? And can I, you know, can I do this successfully? Because I, like I said, I need to work. So if I screw up something, I need to be able to like switch quickly. So I, I took it, I took a chance um on on doing that so yeah i i took a long time in deciding what distro i wanted to try first you know and yeah granted i think that a lot of people fall into that same category they say i'm going to start with lin Linux Mint because it seems easy or Ubuntu because it seems easy. You know, I did obviously try Arch for quite a while, actually. And in fact, tried Manjaro, tried Arch Labs, tried Arco, tried. Well, Artix even, you know, and that was an interesting thing because of the, uh,

not no system D, um, right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That was something that was really kind of,

it seemed like it seemed like it worked really quickly. Like it was like very responsive. Um, but it also, I could, like I said, I couldn't get a lot of my peripherals to work correctly. So I need a scanner.

I need to have stuff that scans really easily. And so I was like I said, I couldn't get a lot of my peripherals to work correctly. So I need a scanner. I need to have stuff that scans really easily. And so I was like, well, I'm just going to go back to something that works. So anyway, I, I been using Debian for a really long time now, but I really, really, I really enjoyed trying all those things, you know, like I would have like on my desk, you know, I would have like a lineup of all these USB sticks. And with like, I would write the name of each one of these distros, you know,

and be like, this is Arco, this is Linux vid, this is, you know, and so on. I would just like have, and then just put them in the right spot. Don't you wish the Ventoy was around back then? Oh my God, that would have been fantastic. But I had like, you know, like I said, a half dozen to a dozen USB sticks all the time

trying different distros at any time. Because, you know, I think we're all kind kind of like we come to this point where we're tinkering and we want to say all right well what's the best you know it's like if i'm going to make this transition what's going to be the best thing for me you know so you might as well try like arch and i mean i've never really done like something like Gen 2 or anything like that. But what hardware do you have? Well, I'm looking at a Dell 5050 over here and a Dell 7050 over there. But I was telling one of the users recently, I was like, I've got a Threadripper in the other room that I don't even use because it's

just like, I know, I know. I feel like somebody needs to, somebody needs to have a talk with me about that. But I know it's like a $2,000 thing. That's not just sitting there and like collecting dust right now. But yeah, I'm actually, I was talking to somebody on discord about that and he's like you suck and uh i'm like yeah you're right that's bad i'm gonna go pull that in here and start you know put something on there just to get it you know just to get started even if it's something like a home lab. Because I know that a lot of people that are doing videos that kind of like me are using virtual machines, and I'm not.

Everything I do is on hardware. So when I look at a testing machine, I wipe that one testing machine, it seems like, every other day because I'm trying something completely new um well i think doing it on hardware in unless you're doing really good pass-through vms is the better way to do it because there are some there's some uh desktops that don't behave correctly inside of a virtual machine so it's yeah it's it's probably best to do it on hardware if you can and you have that dual captures the dual pc setup anyway so it works just fine for you i need to do that myself at some point i've said i'm going to do

it for so long and just haven't yeah i mean so like you said before, I don't do, I don't capture my face ever in any video I've ever done. I've never done like one where I'm a talking head. But I use a, what is this thing called? An Elgato HD60S Plus. Yes, yes, yes. yes yes and i the output from that test machine goes to a usb that goes into my recording machine which is what i'm using right now my basically my production machine and then and then i have one microphone that plugs in to that recording machine and that's it and i think know, we were talking about this before. I don't use Kdenlive. I just record a segment, you know, like a minute and a half, 30 seconds. And I just rename it 1.mkv and then 2.mkv. And then I know. All right.

So and then I use something called MKV merge. Uh-huh. I say MKV merge dash O output dot MKV. And then I say one plus two plus three plus four. And that's how I build the video. So I like the video that I did for some of these window managers are 20 segments long. So I just string them all together and merge them. And that's it.

So that's the extent of my editing. So if you trip up on something, do you just rerecord that entire like minute segment or what do you do? Yeah, a lot of times. I mean, I usually know where i'm going if i stumble it's usually in the first five seconds it's like uh you know so i'm like oh forget that i'll just you know i'll start again and so i will but there have been times yes where i have said something really really stupid in in in in the sixth segment and I'm at 20 already.

And so I have to redo the entire thing in order for it to make cohesive sense. I said something really dumb. I'm not even going to go with that. But basically I had to rerecord a big chunk of one video. But that's okay. I mean, like I said, it's one of those things

where if I had to use Kdenlive, I've tried, I'm just not good at it. And so I just choose not to use it. I'll just go ahead and spend a little bit more time in recording what I think. And again, I make mistakes, but I don't really edit out the mistakes, you know, where like, uh, or, you know, or something silly, like, uh, you know, like a,

kind of a awkward pause. Right. I'll just leave it in, you know, I don't really care that much. I'm not that worried that someone's like, Oh, am I going to get a, am I going to get fewer views because of it? I't care i just don't look if i'm being honest with caden live i do pretty much the same thing anyway but i do like to cut out the just pauses that don't need to be there i used to be a lot more aggressive with the cutting and would cut out like when i take a breath and i found that just, it made the video way too quick and just, it felt really weird. Now,

if I'm trying to like think of what I'm going to say, if sometimes I'll leave it in just because it is, it works as like a joke or it works as some sort of like connecting bit there. But when I'm genuinely like, I don't know what I'm going to say next. I will sometimes either just stop the recording there or just take a moment to like, think about what I'm going to say and then just cut that bit out.

Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I don't, I don't really, um, I don't really feel like I want to learn how to do it.

Uh, you know, as far as Kaden live at concern, I just, you know, what I'm doing how to do it. You know, as far as Kdenlive is concerned, I just, you know, what I'm doing is fine for me. And if that's, that's fine.

You know, that's, that's just, that's just my process. With your videos, do you tend to take notes for them? Do you script them? How do you handle it?

I used to do more scripting but i felt like it didn't i don't think it translated well i i just think that i was able to when i try to script something out it just made it seem robotic almost so i try to be more like fluid about what i'm talking about like i'm talking to you right now, you know, I'm like, I'm talking to the microphone, like, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to edit this stupid file and this, this, this, this, this, this, and then I'm able to just like feel okay about that. Because if I, if I tried to, if I tried to script it, I just,

I don't think that it would feel as fluid so no i don't i don't i don't i i think i tried that once or twice and it just i didn't like the result right do you tend to take notes to make sure you're hitting on like the main points though sometimes yeah sometimes in particular if i'm doing something more technical that i want to remember how to like okay so i want to make sure that i am not steering somebody in the wrong direction for um you know when it comes right down to an installation of debian um when we're doing butter fs because out of the box butter fs on debian we all know this is not not very easy to do you know

you have to stop the installation you have to put you have to go into fs tab and make all these modifications during the installation process it's not like other you know it's not like other distros that do it right out of the box like fedora does or, you know, so yeah, I want to make sure that I am looking at notes when I do that. For the most part, I think I could do it blindfold at this point, but, but just for my own like insanity, I don't want to skip something and then have to go back and go, Oh man, I messed up that. I messed that part up but you know but i also but i also have been trying to like i said before i'm

trying to document more things too uh so i've been learning how to make markdown look really nice you know so that i can like document and put pictures in and and so on and so forth that way um that way because i know one guy said to me very recently said um hey you know that video you did for uh for uh installing qtile on debian you should put a show note in and i'm like okay let me try that so that was the first time i've actually done show notes before on a video and i put it like a link in my um in the description for that so that people could kind of like follow along um okay are you look i don't know if you're looking yeah yeah i'm looking at it yeah yeah yeah Yeah. So it basically talks about, you know, the, you know, setting up virtual environment and

stuff like that and then installing it from the get. Anyway, that was, I thought that was a really, really good idea. And I'll try to do that more of that maybe in the future. But it does take a little bit of time to to you know to put a document like that on on github especially especially but but i think it also would help other people that's that was really the the purpose for that well i don't know if you've done this but i would recommend you just make this into a template that would be the easiest way to do it because a lot of things you talk about are going to have this same structure they're going to have a table of contents

they're going to have an introduction they're going to have an installation and rather than just remaking everything from scratch every time i would just have a version already set up that already has all the headings there and every all like the the boilerplate that needs to be there yeah okay that's good info but I guess with your like when you're doing something less technical when it's just like talking about using JWM and talking about using

rat poison I'm going to assume those ones are more just talking about it as you get to things yeah pretty much because like I said I have not used those before just talking about it as you get to things? Yeah, pretty much because I, like I said, I have not used those before that video.

Okay. So some of it was when a lot of it was like exploring, Oh, that's how that works. Oh, that's how that, that's how that configuration goes. And so like two of them,

like open box, for example, you know, uses XML as well as a couple other, I think actually three of them, like Openbox, for example, you know, uses XML as well as a couple other, I think actually three of them use like XML as their configuration file. So is that right? I don't know.

I've not used them. Yeah, I'm thinking Fluxbox as well as JWM uses XML. But I don't know if that's, I don't wanna make sure I'm talking the right thing, but anyway, so I would go and figure out how to make it look good. So a lot of it's just modifying what, that vanilla installation to make it look good,

plus incorporating key bindings to make it more usable for at least for me so i even put like i even said in one of the videos it said i feel like i'm covering the same thing over and over again um i'm modifying these these stacking window managers to fit my specific workflow. And I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not. But then there were some comments that go, I like what you're doing because I see that you're tailoring it for your workflow. And then I'm making the modification to tailor it to my workflow so uh people are saying yeah just keep doing that because now i understand how you're changing it

i'm going to change it the way i want to so so i'm like okay cool that's that sounds good to me because if you are you know everyone's key bindings are going to be different, you know, like, you know, a lot of people are like, you know, I remember, you know, I've for the long time, I was like, you know, super shift C to close the window, you know, because that's what DT did, you know, that, you know, I'm like super shift C's close or, but now it's super Q is what I use for, you know, super Q quit, you know? So I guess it's all, but it really depends on what you are, um, how your workflow is tailored for you.

So key bindings. And, um, and so I look at it like, um, I'm making it mine. You make it yours. A lot of my bindings are very i3 inspired. And that means oftentimes I have to really, really convert whatever is there by default on anything else I use. But at this point, when some people ask me about some of my bindings, I don't actually know what they are. It's just I know where my hand needs to be placed on the keyboard.

Yeah. And sometimes I have a moment where I just forget about it. Like, wait, what actually was that binding again? Oh, man. Yeah, let's check the config. So I thought you were using kind of Hyperland exclusively, but you said you were using KDE now? Yeah, let's check the config. So I thought you were using kind of Hyperland like exclusively, but you said you were using KDE now? Yeah, yeah.

So I swapped to KDE when Plasma 6 came out because I wanted to try it out and just, you know, all that stuff. I don't know. I might go to Hyperland. I'm back to Hyperland again at some point. I left it because I was having some capture issues with their portal, leading to my desktop crashing.

Apparently, that problem's been addressed now. But also, System76 has their Cosmic Desktop coming out soon as well. So I definitely, definitely want to try that out because it's a desktop environment that has native tiling and I know the guys at System76

I've spoken to them personally and they do actually care about tiling, everything I've seen from it shows that they actually care about tiling and I'm curious to see what they've put together I might go back to hyperland after that i don't know but i definitely want to try it out because i i that's not an alpha

yet though right it's not even an alpha yet it's like pre-alpha the alpha is coming out soon i'll probably look maybe the alpha won't be stable ready i know they are like dogfooding on their own system so it should be fine hopefully we'll see it could be it could be really unstable we'll see but yeah i'll try that out and then i don't know maybe i go back to hyperland i don't know hyperland right now is is probably still the best w roots based compositor um yeah they actually most popular it's definitely most popular yeah yeah yeah have you tried or seen WDL or DWL sorry my okay I mean it kind of falls into that category that you said like I don't want to patch anything you know when you were

talking about not really wanting to patch DWM it kind of falls into that category right yeah but my main reason for not wanting to use say like it's same with sway dwl sway effects wayfire any of these so when i do these podcasts i do a window capture of my browser window that I can show on my overlay. Now, capturing on Wayland is still very immature. It still needs a lot of work. And on Wroot, currently you cannot capture individual windows in OBS. You can capture your screen. So I could kind of hack it to make it work uh but it's just annoying to do I see huh have you ever I mean this is I won't even ask the question but if you were to record using Xorg but then you know basically you know

would that be something that you would consider doing I know that you're all in on Wayland oh I could absolutely go back and do that I'd have that for a capture PC for sure yeah yeah what would you use if you were to use Xorg at this point what would you use as a

either Tyler or would you go with a uh either tyler or would you go with a full desktop i'd probably go back to awesome okay all right i do still have my bspwm config and that would work great as well i still have awesome installed and there's been a couple of times when i have had to go back to it for a couple of things but i've been using wayland consistently for probably at least a year year and a half now and it's definitely gotten better there's issues for sure but yeah this is it's not perfect anyone who thinks it's perfect is delusional at this state um right let alone the issues with like accessibility which are still big issues that a lot of people you know there's people out there who simply cannot use the wayland version of gnome or the wayland version

of kde because things like screen readers don't work properly for example and a lot of the accessibility stuff they were used to having in the past just doesn't work anymore and they physically cannot use the computer but i don't need that so for me it's relatively easy to switch back and forth it's just a couple of very minor hang-ups like the capture thing yeah did you ever use i mean i know that you put out a video several years ago on pre-selection on bspw is that something that you used or that you were just demonstrating is that right am i right about that did you put out a like a video on pre-selection it's been so long yes i did do that what the hell is pre-selection? Four years ago. This is what I mean by making videos.

Same thing you said. Making videos so you don't forget what you're talking about. I don't remember what a pre-selection is. Okay. You're basically going to spawn the window in a specific area that you've pre-selected. Oh. Oh, it's basically a window rule i see okay yeah yeah pretty much yeah okay okay okay right oh right right no no you could select where in the tiling tree it was gonna be right now i remember yes okay okay um i did do a little bit

um it was mainly demonstration though yeah i i like i saw that video and i'm like i don't know that i would use that you know because i was just like because again my personal workflow is I'm using an ultra wide monitor. So I want things to actually tile vertically everywhere. I don't want it to stack, basically, like master and stack. I know i3 is the king of tiling vertically and stuff like that, but I it to actually and i know i3 is like you know the king of tiling vertically and stuff like that but i wanted to use bspwm so i just set up a rule that says spawn to the east i want it to go east and so everything goes to the east i forgot it does it will be southwest what'd you say i forgot that's how it does its directions that are up down left right

yeah so i just say spawn east and it goes to the east and so that way it stays vertical everywhere anyway yeah i i don't believe i actively used it i i i know i did a lot of stuff where i would spawn certain windows on certain desktops. I always like Discord to be on my second monitor, for example. And I like Thunderbird. I generally have Thunderbird spawn on my second monitor as well. Because the way that I have it set up is I have my main monitor where my main stuff is. I have a vertical monitor off to the side.

This is usually where discord is obs is things like that and i actually have a third monitor that is basically a glorified teleprompter that sits next to my camera but half the monitor you can't actually see because the only purpose it has is being a teleprompter i see i should just get a 4x3 display if i'm being honest but right yeah it's did you set it vertical like did you set the monitor vertically okay yeah yeah yeah yeah all right um i've got like monitor arms here so it's nice and easy to do yeah i thought about doing something i thought about putting like a vertical monitor so that i could read stuff like in that kind of aspect ratio

you know vertically but it was just like ah forget it now you know i got i'm just using one monitor and it's fine you know especially because like i said i'm blown away by how cheap ultra wide displays are now it was just just like, holy crap. I have not looked at prices in a long time. Let's find out. Ultra-wide. You got 34. Just the 34 is like less than 300 bucks, I think.

Yeah, there's still some that are ridiculously expensive, but let's have a look. Okay, monitor price ranges are wild. Okay, I see what you mean. Yeah, so $449 Australian, which is Monopoly money. $289 Australian. Wow, okay. Huh.

I've actually never used an ultra wide myself. I like the ultra wide things weird, right? Because it makes, it makes video capture weird because you've got to. Oh yeah. If you're going to do that, if you're going to capture your screen,

then absolutely. It's weird. Yeah. I only, I use 1920 by 1080 for my videos. Right. But I, but my main production machine is, what was it? 3440 by 3400 by 1440. I see. So it basically, I'm just like, you know, like I said, when I'm tiling, I think I saw you use the ultra wide in one of your videos though.

Like a DW. At least one. Yeah. At least one, which is weird on YouTube because, um, people always comment that when they see a, uh,

you know, that aspect on YouTube, um, it, you, the, and they're looking at it on their phone. There's no black bars because they're looking at it on their phone and they turn it sideways and they're like, it's like full screen, you know? So it's, it's kind of, they always like, oh man, that's really cool. I'm like, ah, I know I don't really care about it, but I'm just trying to demonstrate something on, because I know Matt from the Linux cast said, I really liked the video you did

on your full screen wide on the ultra wide monitor. I'm like, okay, cool. Because a lot of people are using them now and you're showing your workflow around that particular aspect ratio. It's wide, so not everybody has that. I think for cases like that, it makes a lot of sense. It definitely doesn't make sense for normal videos because you're going to have to, if you want people to be able to read any text you're showing, you're going to have to, like, if you want people to be able to read any text you're showing, you're going to have to zoom in a lot more.

Yep. But, yeah, I guess if you're just trying to demonstrate a workflow on it, I don't thought of doing that. Yeah. No, like I said, 90-something percent, I'm on just regular 1920 by 1080 and then just doing that and capturing that. Um, but that's, that's for, I mean, cause I think that YouTube, I mean, you know, better

than anybody, but you know, YouTube likes that particular type of, um, that, that type of ratio, you know, it's, uh, it makes a lot more sense. There's something, Oh, that's what it was. You can't, when you do something ultra wide, you cannot edit like in screens or something like that. I can't like add in screen, like an in screen, like, you know, subscribe to my channel or, you know, something like that at the end. I think that's, i think that's i

think that's right yeah so i'm like oh i don't care that's fine i don't really need it why is there no end card option for wides for ultra wide huh yeah people have talked about this for like six years ago yeah okay i was not aware of this yeah like I said I don't really you know I don't really ask people to you know subscribe or anything like that a lot of times I'll just like

I appreciate when they do but you know I've got 5600 subscribers at this point that's seems like as many as i really want i don't know that i want to go bigger than that it makes me very uncomfortable just don't think about the number it just it's not never think about the number yeah i i try to avoid it myself like i look at the, like, even the podcast channels closing in on 10K.

I'm like, how? Where did you people come from? I still remember when my main channel had, like, 800, 900 subs. I was talking about BSPWM. I was doing, like, Vim plugin videos at the time and I think it would have been around Christmas that time where

Luke Smith, one of the big YouTubers at the time, I don't know if you ever watch his stuff UWM he found my channel on BSP my videos on BSPWM and made a shout out video for that like those videos and i got like a thousand subs overnight and that sort of just caused it to go up from there yeah i honestly when i and it had no intent and no foreknowledge about this. But when I did that one video for the XZ, it was like, holy crap, I'm getting a lot of new subscribers for that.

That's crazy to me. I was that was definitely not my intent. But I don't even know. I have to go back and look at my my analytics to see if that. Let's see why is your channel showing up on social blade that's weird yeah hundreds of videos i mean hundreds of subscribers for that particular video that's that's a lot that's a lot for me yeah yeah that's a lot for me oh that'd be a lot for me as well like that's crazy why is that not showing up on social blade that's really weird i'm trying to search

search for your channel on this site that's not coming up huh um i don't know uh yeah no that's crazy i think it's because you broke out into like the more general Linux audience there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't do that a lot. You know, I don't think that, I don't know that I'm that interesting when it comes right down to it, but you know, if I could, if I can demonstrate something to you or, you know, teach you how to do something that that's more my lane,

then it would be for me to say hey let's let's uh let's review this distro you know no i'm not gonna do that i mean what do i know so look to be fair most distro review videos are just there's not much to say in them anyway it's like oh look at these wallpapers but don't they i mean don't they do well though i mean they do do well you are correct there yeah especially if it's a like a big release like an ubuntu or something like that yeah or like a mint yeah like a ubuntu 24 to 04 140 000 views uh nick's video 100 100,000 views. DistroTube, 50,000 views. That's kind of low for a DistroTube video.

Was that the one on Cinnamon? Like you've been to Cinnamon? No, that's 22k. That's a different one. Maybe it's the title he gave it. Yeah, like Fedora is it 40? Is that the next one? Yeah.

These used to be a lot more popular. Like, yes, they still get quite a few views, but I remember back three or four years ago when that was sort of like the YouTube meta. That's the thing that everybody did. And, you know, you're getting like 200,000, 300,000 views on distro videos and i i think it's just that people got bored of them because there's really not much to

say if you if you did a video on 23.10 and you did a video on 24.04 what's really different the answer is there's some newer versions of some software there's a different wallpaper maybe they've changed some defaults around and that's pretty much it. Don't you think that if people are like, back even two years ago, maybe three years ago, I think people were looking for their home, when it comes right down to distro home.

And they're like, okay, so what is this really about? And I think that people were, at least from my perspective, I thought I'm looking for someplace that's better than where I am. And so I would watch these videos thinking, oh, that's, that's what I, that's where I need to be. So I'm wondering if that's really kind of the, um, the reasoning behind watching a lot of these reviews, because people are looking for their, you know, for someplace better than where they are.

Right, right. And I look at, and I look at now, and I don't know that that's the case anymore. I think people are kind of like starting to feel a little bit more comfortable. I think there's less converts now. Let's put it that way. I think that people are, is that fair? No, I think there's less converts now let's put it that way i think that people are is that is that fair no i think that's fair i i was gonna say i i would hope that i've had like a small part to play in this where i've made it clear that the distro in most situations

just really doesn't matter like if you have one experience on fedora with kde plasma 6 it's going to be pretty much the same experience on anywhere else you use there's going to be some different defaults and maybe they've packaged things a little bit better and they have some packages installed by default but if you get into the weeds you can get anything working on any distro pretty much yeah no that's i think that's i think that's very fair i think that people are more comfortable where they are you know and i think that like i said if you want stability then you're going to be in a couple different distros if you want to have more

the latest and greatest then you're going to be in those particular distros and that's, and you can do whatever you want at that point. You know, you can use XFCE or KDE or Wayland or Xorg or what have you. But you know, when it, when you are, um, you know, it all depends on your personal preference. That's, that's, that's just, It all depends on your personal preference. That's just the facts. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end off the show. We're just past the two-hour mark now. Yeah.

Sounds good to me. So let people know where they can find your stuff. On YouTube, I am JustaguyLinux. um on youtube i am just a guy linux and um i have a mastodon on uh foster don is that i don't i'm not very good with social media but same thing just a guy linux on um foster don or linux rocks online um so that's it all right then sure um i guess you also have a twitter but i don't know if you want to send people i do have a twitter i just don't use i like i said i'm really i might be the worst social media person yeah that's that's good for you don't don't be a social media person yeah i just not i just not good at it i don't i haven't looked at i know this is going to age me in a significant way but i don't use facebook like my contemporaries use facebook and i don't use i mean like yes i know what instagram is because i have

a son who's 21 years old and um you know but know, but I don't really use any of it. Look, it's probably better for you to not, um, just keep in contact with the people you want to keep in contact with. And there's no point getting involved in social media drama. I, yeah,

I have no choice, but to, to do that. Cause I don't, I don't know how to, I just don't know how. Is there any other shows you want to send people to? Or is that pretty much don't know how to. I just don't know how. Is there anywhere else you want to send people to or is that pretty much it?

That's it. Got any videos coming up that you want to mention? Actually, by the time this will be out, the videos will probably be out. Yeah. I'm going to do a video on Awesome because you convinced me to do so. Good luck with the lure.

Have fun. Enjoy that. I will not. But I will learn something significant about it so yeah you definitely will have to have to learn a bit it's gonna take it's gonna it's gonna take a bit to wrap your head around because python's pretty easy to learn uh you've not done xmonad yet have you no yeah No. Yeah, Haskell's going to be... I tried Xmonad like a year ago, and I failed miserably, so... Lewis is more of a syntax issue.

Once you wrap your head around the syntax, it's fine. Haskell is a whole different way of programming, so good luck. Good luck. As for me, the main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Go check out if I've got myself into another drama.

Enjoy that. If you want to see my gaming stuff, that is over on Brody on Games. I stream on Twitch and YouTube twice a week. I am currently playing through Sekiro and I might be doing a Pokemon stream with Ren, so check that out as well. And if you want to see the video version of this and you're watching the audio version or listening to the audio version, you can find the video on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you want to hear the

audio, it is available on basically basically every podcast platform i've done this 200 times and still can't do the outro properly and yeah that's pretty much it so give me your final word how do you want to end us off i thanks for watching i don't know what else to do that's fine we can end it like that yeah