Tech Over Tea - Confronting A MacOS Power User | Linkarzu

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

The other week I was over on Linkarzu's podcast and today I've brought him over to mine to talk about his experience as a MacOS power user and his growing interest in Linux.==========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/@linkarzuWebsite: https://linkarzu.com/Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/linkarzu==========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 Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://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 well as your host, Brody Robertson. Today we're back for episode, I want to say, 280. That sounds about right to me. Um, yeah, well, uh, welcome to the show. How about you introduce yourself and we'll just go from there. Yeah. Hi Brody.

Yeah. People, I don't know, usually they don't know how to call me. Linkarsu is fine. My name is Christian, Chris. However you want to call me is fine. Yeah, I was on your show two or three weeks ago now, wasn't it? Something like that. Yeah, I don't keep track of time, but something like that, I guess. Yeah, I had a lot of fun when I was over there. And, you know, we mainly focused on sort of like what I was doing, right?

You know, my journey on Linux, things like that. But I was kind of curious about the state of like, you know, you're like a Mac OS guy. I haven't used Mac OS in so long. You're getting this interest in Linux as well. And I'm kind of like, you know, you're like a Mac OS guy. I haven't used Mac OS in so long. You're getting this interest in Linux as well. And I'm kind of curious, like, how all of that pieces together, like how someone who goes from being on Mac OS decides they wanna start branching into other things. The fact that you have such a very,

like you're a Mac OS power user, right? Like you've got a much different environment than the average person would have just running macOS like, you know, just out of the box. Yeah. I don't like the default macOS experience, you know, the apps that you get by default, binder, the bar at the top, what is it called?

The dock? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The bar at the bottom, the one at the bottom, the dock, the bar at the top as well. The menu bar. I just don't find it really intuitive for what I do, actually. Right. So I did a lot of stuff in Mac OS. I don't have any of the defaults actually. I don't keep the dock visible. The menu bar is not visible. I replaced it with something else. And the NeoVM is something that I do a lot in Mac OS.

So if you look at it, it's like you don't even know it's Mac OS. It's something strange. You think, I don't know, it's some sort of Linux distribution. I don't know. It's weird, but yeah. I think the only thing that tells me it's macOS, like I've got like one of your videos, just a random video open right now. The only thing that tells me it's macOS is the little Apple icon in the top left corner, nothing else here at all.

Yeah, I left that there so people know it's macOS, right? Because you're watching a tutorial and you're like, okay, I'll do this. And then you realize, you know, I don't know, 30 minutes in that it was not a Linux tutorial but macOS. So at least so people get to tell, okay, this is not Linux, this is macOS, you know, but I'm trying to make it more compatible with Linux right now, right? Because like you mentioned, I do want to give Linux a try.

That would provide more content to me if I install Arch as a Mac OS user, right? So that's one of the videos that I have in mind. I already have a computer that, you know, one of those mini computers, you know, I don't want to install it in a virtual machine because the experience is not the same. My key maps are not going to work, you know, it's no, it's not the same. But I have a dedicated machine that I want to try it on, see how it goes. But one of the issues is incompatibility between the tools, right? Because I have a keyboard mapper in Mac OS.

It's called Carabiner Elements. I do crazy stuff with it, right? A lot of stuff with Carabiner. Switch my scenes in OBS, switch between my TMUX sessions in the terminal, everything, you know, with the keyboard mapper. But that is not Linux. So my first step right now was to install another keyboard mapper,

which is called Kanata that I can use in Mac OS. And if that works, I can give it a try in Linux and see how it goes, you know. Mm-hmm. I do basically nothing special with my keyboard. This is an area I've never really looked at. Like when I do wanna do anything, I've got a Elgato Stream Deck here. So for me, anytime I wanna do,

I wanna control OBS, I wanna do things like that. Everything's just done through that. And then anything else that I do is gonna be something for controlling the window manager directly. And that I can usually configure within the window manager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like to keep that outside of the window manager. I could do it. Well, no, not with the one that I have because I'm using Yabai. I don't think I can configure key maps in Yabai, but Mac OS has another key,

another window manager called Aerospace in which you can configure key maps and you BI, but macOS has another key, another window manager called Aerospace in which you can configure key maps and you can do a lot of stuff. But again, that would not be compatible with Linux, you know, I'm trying to keep everything UNIX compatible. So if I switch between macOS or Linux, my experience is going to be the same, right? Actually, let's talk a bit about Yabai, because I think a lot of people are kind of unaware that there are these, like, like, tiling systems available for macOS. Like, this isn't just the Linux thing nowadays.

Yep, yep. There's, well, there's actually a lot of window managers in macOS at the moment. The ones that I would truly consider window managers are just to Dubai and aerospace. The other ones, they are for your features. Like there's a launcher, an app launcher called Raycast in macOS that gives you window managing abilities, right? So it allows you to put your window on certain section of the screen, but that's not a window manager, right? But there are two specific ones that allow you to do

basically window management. I don't know how it's done in Linux. I have never done it on Linux. So my first experience with window managers was actually in Mac OS, right? So yeah, By gives you two modes. You can use it in BSP mode, which partitions the screen, right? Usual way. Yeah, normal tiling stuff there. Yeah, normal tiling. Or you can also have it in stack mode, which keeps one application on the screen at a time.

That's the one that I use, one application on the screen at a time. That's the one that I use, one application on the screen at a time, at all times. So I just switch between my apps with keyboard shortcuts, right? So I need to go to my terminal browser, a keyboard shortcut for each one of them, and I just get there fast, you know? I'm not a fan of tiles, and that's a discussion I have all the time in this court with other people like but why tiles? I'd say two tiles Three maximum, I guess if you're really pushing it, but other than that to me does not make too much sense But that's just I put some yeah Right. No, this is why I've kind of migrated away from a Pure tiling model over to I don't know if I talked about this when I was on your show.

I'm using a... Oh yeah, the scrolling one. Yeah, yeah, Neri. Okay, yeah. For anyone who's unaware of Neri, basically, rather than a regular tiler where you just have your monitor, your desktop, and it will basically split up that space into smaller and smaller squares with Neri with a scroller,

basically, you have an infinite horizontal plane, and the windows tile, but they don't keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It just expands across that space, so it sort of eliminates that issue. It creates other issues. Don't get me wrong. Like, as I've been using Neri, it... You have to keep track of where the windows are, because if they're not visible you might forget which workspace you had it on because you have workspaces and also the scrolling so it does require you to like

really think more about how you want your windows to be laid out but when you have it in a way that makes sense I do think it works really well and And I think one thing with the stacking, there are definitely TILAs that do that. So that is a thing that is definitely replicatable on Linux. And if not directly with like a stacking system, a lot of TILAs do have a tabbing system, which effectively works the same way, right? Like it's one window full screen at a time and then there are different tabs and you can cycle between the tabs.

Yeah. That's one of the things, that's one of the differences in which I implement, you know, my window managing workflow in macOS is I could have an app on each one of the desktop. The difference between the two, the two window managers that are available is that Yabai takes advantage of macOS desktop environments, right? So it uses those. So you put your applications in the macOS virtual desktops, right? I don't like that. I keep all of the applications in a single desktop and I just switch between the applications with a shortcut. I don't need to keep them separate, right? Because I'm using a stack mode anyway, so I just switch between them and it's instant.

One of the complaints that people have with YAPI is animations, right? Because macOS has these animations when you switch desktops. It's annoying. I don't like it. You know, I just want to get to the app fast. I don't want to see any animations. I don't want to see anything, right? Just want to get there. So that's one of the complaints with YAPI. In order for you to do that, the animations, you have to disable, partially disable something

in macOS system integrity protection, so that it disables those animations. Right, okay, okay. And people don't like that. People are just like, no, I'm not going to disable zip. If you keep all the applications in a single desktop, you don't need to disable it, right? On the other hand, there's another window manager,

which is aerospace. The difference is that everything is virtual. It creates its own virtual environments. So it manages applications in those virtual environments. It moves them around, and you don't need to deal with macOS desktop, virtual desktops, actually. So it's an alternative, yeah.

And it's the most popular one. One of the most popular one. One of the key features I'm seeing here is doesn't require disabling the system integrity protection. Yeah. So wait, what is this system integrity protection thing actually doing? I don't know. Mac OS just enforced some security things so that you cannot modify, you know, stuff in the computer. So in case that you do want to modify those things, you have to disable it.

Otherwise you can't. Security stuff that they implemented, I don't know in which Mac OS version they did it, you know, it wasn't a thing, I think a long time ago it is now. But that's one of the problems with Yabai that you have to partially you don't have to entirely disable zip you have to partially disable it so that it can manage a few things like those animations that those hideous animations it takes care of them like there's shadows in Windows in Mac OS right shadows that are built in on each one of the windows you cannot disable those shadows but with zip if, if you partially disable it,

Yabai can take care of those shadows. You don't have shadows in the windows anymore. Or transparency. That's one of the features that I like about Yabai as well. Since it can manage things at a deeper level, it can make whatever app you want transparent. And it does it at the window manager level, right? It's something that aerospace cannot do, you know, because it creates its own virtual environment.

So you have to choose what do you want. I'm using Yabai at the moment, but I'm creating a video about aerospace. I'm going, you know, with a Discord friend, we're going over aerospace. He's guiding me through the process. And but yeah, you have to choose what you want, your BI or aerospace, basically. Is it easy enough to switch between them? Obviously, you'd have to like reconfigure the one you're swapping to, but if you're using something like, let's say you have a clean macOS system and you want to either

use aerospace or your buy, is it difficult to get either of them working or is it a pretty straightforward process? If you're in macOS, you're not gonna know about window managers. So a lot of the concepts are gonna be really new. Like move your mouse to the center. Why would you want to move your mouse to the center when you focus on

application, right? Or transparency. What is that? What is styling? If you already come from Linux, simple, you know, you just go to my.files, you grab my Yabai file. I have a lot of comments there. Everything is explained. I have guides, I have a blog post on how to install Yabai and all that stuff. And if you want to switch between that and Aerospace, it's not complicated. The only thing I have to do is disable Yabai so that it doesn't start at boot and then open Aerospace. Aerospace is the one that's going to be taken over. So I can switch between the two. That's what I did in the video. That's what we're doing in the video actually, you know, switching between the two.

Yep. You, the thing you mentioned there about animations earlier, hearing that from the Linux side is actually kind of interesting because that, the lack of animations is one of the, the reason why Hyperland became so popular. So when people were swapping over to the Wayland side, the main window manager that was available is Sway, which is basically the Wayland version of I3, which is what Aerospace is based on. But it's very simple and the windows they just immediately move, you know, you swap workspaces, there's no animations. It's just immediately changed and

people in the Linux space really like to They like to have the like the fancy, you know Flashy animations like if you go back and look at the early days of Linux people would do things like wobbly windows We you grab a window and you shake it like what was around like jelly or you close a window and it burns. So there's always been that sort of interest in having the like extra flair. Obviously not everyone, that's why things like Sway does exist. But Hyperland came along and it added the ability to have you know, you know,

flowy animations between the workspaces so it like slides across or you open a window like slides up from the bottom or like you know expands out and things like that. So like I don't know it for hearing that from the Linux side is is definitely it's an interesting different perspective, I guess. I think the problem with macOS is that the animation that they have to switch between desktops, right? So if you want to go to the desktop one, to desktop two, like the virtual ones, there's this, I don't know, 500 millisecond delay that happens when you switch between one or the other.

And I think that's what people don't like. I have not experienced that too much, you know, because I have them disabled all the time. I just want to get there fast. I have seen the animations in Linux, you know, and as long as they're fast and smooth, then they don't get in the way. I think they're fine, you know,

but I think the problem is with the macOS animation switching between desktops, it makes it slow. Well, the nice thing as well with Linux is if the default speed isn't something you like, let's say it starts at 500 milliseconds, you could set it to 200, you could set it to 2000, you just have that ability there to configure it and tweak it to the level that you want it to be at. And nothing's going to stop you. There's no system integrity protection there. If you want to, if you want to have a 10 second animation every time you spawn a

window, you shouldn't, but you could. Yeah. I think you can configure the duration of the animations with the API. I haven't tested, you know, I just haven't disabled and that's the way that I like it. I just want them to jump fast, you know, I just want to get to the application. I don't want to see it, you know, I don't want to like they have the expose thing, right? When you bring all of the apps, I don't know if you've seen it, but you bring all of the apps to the front.

That's the way that I used to manage my computer and I want to touch on that a little bit, you know, before doing all of this, the way that I used to manage my computer and I want to touch on that a little bit, you know, before doing all of this, the way that I used to manage my computer is I had a 52 inch TV, you know, huge TV, a 4K TV. I've had four different people on this show use giant TVs for their monitors and every single person has a different reason for it. Before you go any further with that, can you explain why? Because I thought, man, I'm not productive in this small screen, right?

I had a bigger sized monitor, 27 inch monitor. I was like, man, this is not cutting it. I don't have enough space. I need more space. I need my obsidian here. I need my Slack here. I need my slack here I need my browser here and I need my email here whatever right? So that's what I did and I had four different applications on the 52 inch TV

Two desktops, so I I used to switch. Okay, my desktop one is for work related stuff desktop to my browser Right, so I had my browser and other thing there. Desktop 3 and I had it organized that way. I was like, man, this is peak productivity right here. And I spent like that for, I don't know, like two years approximately. But I started realizing that it was painful, man, because I had to use my eyes a lot. I had to go in and search. Okay, so where's Obsidian? Okay, Obsidian is here. Click on Obsidian.

Where's the browser? The browser is here. So where's the other browser? It's in the other desktop. Let me switch to the other desktop. Click on the browser. Where is Slack? Okay, Slack is in the other desktop.

Click on it. And it became a nightmare. I spent like that for a long time and I was like, there must be a better way of doing this, you know, because it was better because you have a lot of space and you can get to stuff faster in quotes, but I thought there must be a better way. So one day I just was watching I don't know a Vim video I was like, okay, whatever I'll give them a try for the fourth time because I hated Vim. Vim motions suck and I was like

But it's not gonna defeat me. I'll try Vim one more time one last time, you know And I'll make sure I get Vim and its motions and I saw this guy the Primogen and he had his I get Vim and its motions. And I saw this guy, the Primogen, and he had his developer workflow. I don't know, the video is from 2020. I don't know, it's like two, three years old, right? And I was like, he's captivating, right? Cause you know, the way that he talks and all that.

So I immediately became a fan, Neo Vim all the way. But in that video, he explains how he uses his Linux computer. So he switches between applications with shortcuts. So if he needs to go to the browser, shortcut. Terminal, shortcut. Slack, shortcut. Everywhere, shortcut. So it's faster.

And I was like, oh, how can I do this in macOS? So I started by using just a quarter of my 52 inch TV, right? Everything in a small section. I use Yabai. That's when I started with Yabai because I was like, okay, PrimeGen has a window manager. What do I have on Mac? I have nothing. So I discovered Yabai, configured it. So I was using it just in a quarter of the screen, right? In a small portion of the screen to get used to a small monitor. You don't have to use it on your entire screen then.

Because you can configure padding in Yabai, right? So I configured a huge padding on the top and a huge padding on the left. I only had a quarter of the screen and all of the apps were there because I didn't want to tell my wife, hey, you know what, the 4K TV was not such a great idea. Now I want to monitor, right? Because I needed to test first.

So I spent like that for, I don't know, three months making sure that it worked for me in that small portion of the screen. Once I realized, yeah, this is the way. I told my wife, I gave the TV to my mother-in-law, I think. That was a great move, you know? Let's give the TV to your mom and I can buy a monitor. No questions asked at the monitor. It's not an expensive monitor. It's just an Asus monitor. I don't know what it is. Pro Arts, you know,

60, no, 75 Hertz. Nothing special, nothing fancy, right? So I switched to the 27 inch monitor I think it is or 32, something like that. I don't know. And I've been using that method or that way of working ever since, you know, small screen, one app on the screen at a time. And I didn't look back. I like how you say 27 or 32 inch small screen because you were so used to working in a 52 inch TV Yeah

Yeah, but I have my viewers are like laptop users on like 13 inch laptops 27 inch screen is still a big screen Yeah, and That's one of the things that prime agent talks about you know That's one of the things that Prime Agent talks about, you know. The good thing about using Yabai in stack mode is that I can switch to my laptop. I just unplug the MacBook. I take it downstairs and my workflow is exactly the same. The only thing I need to do is restart Yabai, you know, and I have a key map.

If I type YAB on my keyboard, that's Yabai. You know, the the cord YAB restarts Yabai, organizes my stuff to adjust to the smaller screen, and everything is the same, right? On the other hand, if I would have two or three monitors and I just switched to my laptop, would be a nightmare because my workflow would be completely different. You know, I couldn't, I edit videos sometimes in the bed or in the couch downstairs, right?

So I just take the laptop, edit the video there, my terminal, everything is the same. So that's one of the reasons why Stack Mode is so important to me as well. Yeah, one of the issues I see people bring up when using a Tyler, especially on a laptop, is they find even just doing a single split for some people, the windows get too small. I got used to it. My first experience using a Tyler was on a laptop at the time. So I grew to deal with it. I think it was a 15 inch laptop. So it was a little bit bigger. But I understand that. And when you are doing everything full screen like you're doing, that completely eliminates that problem.

You just don't have to worry about it then. It obviously the windows are smaller than on a 27 inch monitor, but being a full screen like it's still going to be that full screen experience. Yeah, and I don't have to worry about space or anything, you know, it keeps the exact same way. Yep. So do you just use a single monitor now?

And everything is just that stacked in a single one? Or do you have multiple monitors on your desktop? No, single monitor all the time. I have my external monitor. That's the one that I use. And I have the laptop on the side, the MacBook, but it's always closed, right? Unless I have to record the video or stream or, well,

I don't stream too much, you know, record the video. I use the laptop as a monitor, basically, just to see what's happening in the recording. But everything is always on my main one. So the laptop is basically a monitor, but it's not part of my workflow. And I just move all the apps that I don't want to show when I'm doing a video to that monitor, right? So in Yabai, you can specify where do you want the applications to go.

So I just want password, email, stuff like that to switch to that other, to the MacBook monitor basically. Yep. Right. I was going to say like, I can't even imagine going back to a single monitor for making videos. That sounds absolutely horrible. So okay, you have the second one there at least for doing that.

More videos, yeah. Yeah, I couldn't do it with the... Well, I did it for a long time with the single monitor, the videos, but you cannot see what's going on, right? Yeah, I did it for a long time as well. It's just not pleasant to do. Like, if you're... You never know if you're recording... You're always like a little bit worried that you're maybe recording the wrong thing or you're on the wrong scene or maybe you forgot to press the record button.

Yeah, I did add something to my bar on the top on Mac OS which is called sketchy bar. That tells me which scene I'm on, right? So just to let me know, okay, so I'm on the main scene right now I'm on the guest scene I don't use it anymore because I'm using the two screens at the moment but that's something that I did when I was doing everything in a single monitor but yeah it's not a good experience that is the exception for me

if if if it's video related stuff to monitors you cannot go with one you could but it's not too too much. Hmm this. That actually might be an interesting idea to mess around with on my side like I actually adding like the scene I have to my bar like it would I, I'll just have to connect to the OBS web socket. Yep. Okay, I'll play around with that. I don't know if, I don't really need it, but it would be neat to just see if I can get something like that to work. You see, yeah, I have a script in my.files, which is the one that, it's a Python script that I use to switch scenes, you know, BS, so you can grab it from there. But obviously I use sketchy bar, which is the bar on the top. So yeah, that's only macOS, but you have, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of bars in Linux. And that's a question that I have, you know,

I have no idea on like, does Linux come with a bar? Because at the top where you can see, okay, I have this battery left on the computer. This is my audio source right now. This is the microphone that I'm using, the microphone level. That's what I use the bar on the top, you know, to give me useful information, not what macOS gives you, which is not useful at all. Right. But in Linux, you have a lot of different bars at the top. Is that right?

Or does it, is it depending on the, I don't know how it works. So in like the, the major desktops, like in KDE, like in GNOME, things like that, where it's, it's not just the window manager, it's a full suite of applications. They usually have some sort of bar included. If you're using a window manager like I do, some of them do have included bars, but most of them just rely on these third-party solutions. So in the case of Wayland, a very common one to use is called Waybar. It's a pretty standard bar. It's pretty easy to configure. It's not the most, um...

I guess not the most in-depth in how you want things to be laid out, but it's a pretty simple one to work with. If you are more of a developer mindset and you want to really make something custom, a lot of people have been talking about a project called Quickshell recently where it's basically just the framework is there to make a bar and you write everything in the, um, in Qt Quick, the like Qt UI language. Okay. The one that I use has two options.

You can configure all the different items in bash, which is what I do, you know. You can add icons, you can do whatever you want in there, right? But I use bash or it has a different option in Lua. The same developer created both options, bash and Lua. I guess he uses new of them. Yeah, definitely uses new of them. So that's why the other option in Lua. Right.

Yeah, there's a lot more bars on the X11 side because that's kind of been around a lot longer. But on Whalen we definitely have a lot of options that are available. It's kind of just a matter of how you feel comfortable configuring it, I guess. Like you can do a lot of stuff with all of them, but do you want to have a bunch of pre-made modules? Would you want to go and write a lot of stuff by hand to make it exactly the way you want it to be? It kind of depends on the sort of approach that you personally want to take

Hmm, okay makes sense. It's you know, right and that's something that I have been considering as well You know if I'm gonna create a video about Arch how to install Arch, cause that's gonna get me some views, but I don't think I will do X11, cause I'll be like in the eighties and an old, I don't know, an old man. So I think I'll have to go with, what is it, Wayland?

Yeah, Wayland. Yeah. Okay. I think, Yeah Okay, I think I Think it for the the window manager you'd want to use I think Sway is like the most obvious choice because it's that is the Waylon version of i3 Which is very familiar for what you've already been using. It's what you buy an aerospace are based off of

So that's a pretty solid option to go with. Otherwise, if you want to have a lot more sort of, not necessarily just visual customization, but just customization over the feel of the environment, I do think Hyperland is also a really good choice as well. Those are kind of the main Wayland window manager options right now. There are plenty of others. There's like little niche ones where they're, you know, maybe like one guy works on it and it's, they wanted to focus on a very specific kind of workflow. But I think messing around with either one of those two is probably gonna be your, they're the most well supported, they're the most well documented and

or they're the most well supported, they're the most well documented and there's a lot of plugins for them. A lot of people have done things with them already. So if there's something you're like, can I do this? Is there a way to make this work? In a lot of cases, someone's probably already tried to do that. It gives you sort of a baseline to build off of.

And what's the difference between Hyperland you said? No, Wayland and what's the other one you just... Sway, is that... So Wayland and X11, those are just the different protocols used basically to build the environment. Sway and Hyperland are two window managers that are available using the Wayland protocols. Okay, and the difference between Sway and Hyperland, if I want to use stack mode, you say Sway would be like the best option for me, right? Yes, Sway is the Wayland re-implementation of i3 and Yabai and Aerospace are both based off of i3. So it's like the most logical step to go with. You're basically using the thing that you're

already kind of comfortable with anyway. Um, yeah, the only reason I don't immediately recommend Sway is it tends to bely conservative in adding new Wayland functionality And we're still seeing a lot of heavy development new features being added sort of trying to iron out a lot of those issues During this transition process from the old x11 into Wayland Hyperland tends to be quite a bit faster in adding new things so Um, Hyperland tends to be quite a bit faster at adding new things, so... It- it- it's not like you necessarily need a lot of the new things being added. A lot of the, like, the core groundwork is there for a completely usable environment. It's just there might be some things where...

Maybe you notice there's, uh... There's something which doesn't play exactly nicely, and that's going to have a new feature added to it quite a bit faster. Hmm. Okay. Like, one example is, there still isn't really a great way to do, like, so with OBS, you know how you can like not be focused on the window and you can press whatever your keybinds are and control the window. You can use like a global hotkey system for that. Like that's a thing that exists on macOS on every system. Wayland... there's still like a work in progress to

getting that specifically working. But with OBS, because there is the WebSocket stuff there, you can work around it. I have a question there. Yes. Like the keyboard mapper that I use is Kanata, right? So Kanata, from Kanata I do everything. So Kanata calls a script, a Python script. That script changes my scene. So if I leave that out of the way,

I wouldn't have issues, right? So if from Kanata, which is my keyboard mapper directly, I interact with OBS, I think I wouldn't have a problem, right? Yeah, how does the script work? Does it just call the web socket to control it? Is that... The script is called...

What did I name it? Let me see. Scene. Switch underscore scene.py in my dot files. So I just call the script. I pass the scene name as an argument. I can do it in an authenticated or not authenticated way, because I retrieve the password from one password. But I just disableicated way because I retrieved the password from one password but I just disabled that because cannot sign one password, we're not getting

along each other well. So I just and I pass another argument, no aut, so that it does not require a password. Of course I have authentication disabled in OBS, right? So wait, where are the, oh wait, hold up. authentication disabled in OBS, right? So... Wait, where are the... Oh, wait, hold up. Scene, scene switcher? Switch scene dot...

Yeah, switch scene, switch scene dot py, yep. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's OBS WebSocket stuff. Yeah, that's totally fine. Yeah, all you would end up doing there is you would just be able to run the keybind from Hyperland. Hyperland can just do that or if you want to use some other system maybe to run the keybinds. Okay, yeah, Kanata is the one that I'm planning on using because I already have everything. So, well, I'm setting up Kanata right now.. Just, I, is that a thing that exists on the Linux?

Oh, it is, it's the only side. Yeah, it's Mac OS, Linux, and even Windows, you know, so. Hold on, is it a, it might just be an X11 thing, though. Oh, really? Yeah, so on, this is, this is one of the issues that does exist with um with Wayland right now so on Wayland there was this sort of heavy emphasis on security from the

start and there wasn't much thought put into some of this very useful functionality that's kind of always existed on like, you know, on computers. And there's a lot of there's a lot of initial development on Wayland where the people who were designing the early protocols, they thought about their own use cases and then never really thought about how other people use their systems. So it's kind of been like 17 years of trying to like backtrack some of those really bad initial design decisions. I don't know about this. I'm assuming it only works in X11, which I guess is kind of annoying for you. Let's see. Yeah, cause that's the reason why I switched to Canada

so that it's compatible with Linux, but I'm not sure. Let's see. I see a report. Maybe did someone fix it? I'm not sure if this, cause I saw a report saying it doesn't work on Wayland and then I saw a fix saying it does work on Wayland. Um, I'm not certain. I would, especially if you want to make use of that, I would recommend doing a bit of digging around to see if it actually does work on Wayland. Otherwise you could always use i3 on X11 and...

Yeah, it... Which kind of creates an interesting situation where a lot of people are trying to move away from X11 right now. If you're doing it on Arch, Arch is going to have the software available forever. But, you know, if you want to use the new, the new Wayland thing that everyone's using, it does create a problem. Oh, okay. I'll take a look. I was not aware because I thought, okay, so the keyboard mapper has nothing to do with the window manager

But it's so that most window managers have a keyboard mapper built into them because of this problem Hmm Yeah, okay. Yeah, I like to keep it separate. I like to keep my on x11 You could on x11. I used to use something called On X11 I used to use something called SXHKD, where it's just like a... It's basically the same thing as Kana To. Yeah. So that... I felt the exact same way, especially... I used to do a lot of switching between window managers, so I could just have that running in the background. I could go from i3 to BSPWM to DWM and the only thing I need to change are the window manager specific things like you know swapping between how the windows are placed things like that stuff that is

not generically controlled. Yeah that's that's the way that I have been doing it so far. You know, my mapper is completely separate from my window manager. Aerospace does give you that option to configure key maps, you know, but I don't use them and it hasn't interfered with Kanata. I think I haven't given it a try, but I'll see. Good to know that I have to keep that in mind when trying out Linux. It has to be one of the first steps I guess trying out Kanata and see how it works with Linux

Yeah, if you're on the x11 side it appears to work perfectly Wayland. I yeah, I Wish I had an answer for you There might be other ones that are similar But I can't really say and then it's a matter of whether they work consistently as well. Or yeah. Yeah. Fun times. This is the fun times of wanting to try out Linux in the middle of sort of this

transitionary tech period where if you are on Linux and you middle of sort of this transitionary tech period where if you are on Linux and you know how all of this stuff sort of fits together and you do things in a Linux way from the start, it's not really a problem. But if you're someone new coming into it and you want to try things out, there's a lot of sort of misleading information about the current state of things. Yeah, I would have been like, but why is this not working? a lot of sort of misleading information about the current state of things. Yeah, I would have been like, but why is this not working? You know, in case that it doesn't work, right? But now I know, OK, if it doesn't work, it could be because of the window manager.

But if you wouldn't have told me, I would be like, but what what's happening? Really confusing. But yeah, OK, makes sense. But by the sounds of it, everything that you want to do with Connoitur anyway, you could configure in hyperland. Like it has a, it has a hotkey system. You can configure the hotkey to just go and run that Python script and then it will go and, you know, do whatever you need it to do. Um, yeah.

Oh, like it basically does everything that you want this tool to do anyway. It's just if you then want to move to something else, you want to try out Sway, then you got to move everything over to that one as well. And yeah. Yeah. Or I'll be using both of a Mac OS and Linux. And if I want to switch to Mac OS, I'll have a configuration for Hyperland, another configuration for Canada, and I don't want to manage two configs.

You know, if I modify a script, you know, a key map in Kanata, I will have to modify it in Hyperland and that's not something fun actually, not difficult, but not fun. Well, I guess you don't have to worry about modifying your scripts because if you modify the file and you're calling the file in both of them, it's still going to point to the same thing. So I guess you could, it's not a great solution, but you could abstract a lot of things out into scripts. So you don't really have to think about it changing.

It's not a great solution, but it will kind of do the job. It's an option. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Once you, once it happens. Yeah. Once you, like, if you get to a point where you're kind of happy on one

thing, it stops being a problem, but also it does make it kind of annoying. Like I want to try more things out, but every time I think about trying something out, I'm just like, I don't want to reconfigure everything. You know, this happened to me with Kanata. Everyone kept talking about Kanata. I use Karabiner and I have used Karabiner for like a year and it's wonderful. I execute scripts from Karabiner with key maps. I, everything that I did in Kanata, I did scripts from Carabiner with key maps, everything that I did in Carabiner,

I did it in Carabiner, right? And everyone was like, but you should try Carabiner, Carabiner, and I was like, I know, I know, but I know that it's gonna take me like a month. And I have been playing around, because I'm not just going to do something simple, basic, and just leave it there, no, I don't know, I have a, I don't know if it's a problem or what, but

I just wanted to work the exact way that I wanted to work and be stable and you know, and I have been playing with Canada for I don't know like a month now. It has been really painful. I have wasted a lot of time. So every time that I have to try something new, I think about it. I'm like, aerospace? I was like, man, I know it's going to take me, you know, a couple days, weeks maybe. So I just talked to someone in Discord, helped me out through the process, that made it way faster. But yeah, agree 100% with that. When I want to, when I need to try something new,

I think about it because it's a lot of time involved usually. Yeah, this is why when there are bars built into a window manager, I don't use them. I will stick with the bar that I have. So my way bar, it it's gonna work across everything maybe I need to change out that the the one thing that might break is the like workspace number system because usually that has to hook into like whatever That window manager is specifically doing but most bars gonna have a module for that So it's like change from the niri workspace module to the sway workspace module and

Everything else stays the same like all my configurations the same That's a lot less of a migration there the same thing. I was doing over on the x11 side I would just use the same bar everywhere, and I just don't really change it that much I there's there's people on Linux who are very into changing their entire desktop look every couple of months. And I don't know, for me, I just get very comfortable. And this is my other problem with when I swap to something. I end up just turning whatever I swap to into the thing I was already using.

Like nothing, at the end of the day, nothing actually changes. Yeah, definitely the same with me. And do you know, like, is there a reason maybe, you know, you have an idea like why stuff is moving away from being modular to like, then like a single solution, like you said right now, right? Wayland, I keep messing terms up,

but you mentioned Wayland and other stuff, but you mentioned that Wayland has this bar built in already. Like, I guess they want more compatibility with their stuff. So that's what they- No, I think you've, I think you're something can a bit confused there. Wayland doesn't have a bar built in. Some of the window managers have bars built in. Um, yeah, Wayland is the, the protocol set used to build the environment.

Um, I'm not, I'm not sure where, where I might've said something which kind of crossed some words there. Um, Oh, but there's a window manager that has a bar built in. Yes, yes, yes. There are some that do have their own custom bar solutions. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because I don't know, I just like things to be modular. Each thing is its own thing and you can make them talk to each other. That's fine. But thing is its own thing and you can make them talk to each other, that's fine, but I'm not in favor of just, you know, grabbing a lot of stuff and making it one because it removes a lot of flexibility for the user, right?

Yeah, no, I fully agree. Yeah, I will, I'm not going to make things modular to the point of making my life inconvenient, but in cases where I think there is some added value there, I will prefer it to be modular. Like if I could have my hotkeys separate to my window manager, I would have them separate. It just, it was so nice to have. It was very convenient. It's annoying not to have anymore but

I have learned to live with it. So you're locked into that window manager, right? Yeah. No. Well, what I realized is every time I swap to a new window manager, I especially if I've been using it for, you know, six months, a year, I add a bunch of hotkeys that I just never remember I ever added and end up having to, I go back through my hotkey system and it's kind of, it's kind of like I do a

spring cleaning every so often. I'm like, Ooh, do I need this one? Don't need that one. No, let's just get rid of that. And just, I ended up having a much more streamlined configuration anyway. So yeah, it's, it's not a great solution but there are still some benefits to come out of it no it's like a cleanup face yeah yeah so have you always been like a macOS user were your windows user at

some point in your life have you just always used a Mac OS user? Were you a Windows user at some point in your life? Have you just always used a Mac? Like how have you sort of got to where you are now? No, I was a Windows user all the time. Like most of us are. I guess I don't know if you were a Windows user at some point, but yeah. Windows when I was a kid, you know, that's what I used for quite a long time, all my life, basically,

until I joined the previous company that I was in, which is Logmein. They were like the owners of LastPass and Amachi. Oh, I haven't heard the name Logmein in a long time. Yeah. Well, they changed their name. It's GoTo right now. GoTo mentioned they better sponsor me. But when I joined there as a what was it like a field engineer? I used to do a lot of networking stuff. Then I was in the NOC team, you know, like an SRE type of thing. So you get a Mac, right?

In other positions, you don't get a Mac. They give you just a Windows. If you're like in customer service and all that stuff, you just get a greater Windows computer. But if you're in other positions like Debbie type of stuff, or if you're gonna be dealing with infrastructure, you usually get a Mac. So that's how I got a Mac and those were the Intel based Macs.

I hated it because it was hot. It was really hot. The keyboard used to get really hot. The fan used to turn on sometimes. I don't think Intel Macs were good at all. I hate Intel Macs to be honest. I wouldn't get an Intel MacBook at all. But since I started using that computer there, I just learned Mac.

It's difficult when you first start with Mac as things are really different, you know, the desktops and all that stuff, and then the magic mouse and the apps like this and going down. But that's how it all got started. And then I cannot go back to Windows. Unix, you know, I can go into the terminal, type all of the commands. I did a lot of stuff with servers, you know, so I like that. I like that if I jump into a server, everything is going to be exactly the same. And macOS is the same. On the other hand, if I'm on Windows, it's like, what is this crap? Like it's a completely different environment.

Commands are not the same. I have to install WSL, you know, if I want to make something. But guess what? The job that I'm on right now, I'm using a Windows computer and I'm using secure CRT, which is like a terminal, no TMAX, no WSL. So, you know, that's the way life is. That's the way life is.

But yeah, that's how it all got started with the previous job. That's how I knew Mac. I loved it and that's where I'm on right now, you know? I used to, so I started computing on Windows. My first, the first system I ever used I want to say We didn't it wasn't my family computer, but I knew someone that had a a Windows 98 system. I want to say My My original school they had XP system, so that was like the the main computers I had used at the time. We didn't get a family computer until computers I had used at the time. We didn't get a family computer until Vista. My parents, they grew up in like a farming background, they didn't know

anything about computers, we didn't have an internet connection until 2007, something around that range, 2006. I also, I did use a Mac for quite a long time my um my high school we had we had MacBooks so I used one from there up until I want to say maybe I was like 19 or 20 or so so I used a Mac for quite a long time and I haven't used one since then but When I went from Windows to Mac, I do agree that the transition was It was weird. It was it felt very like it felt familiar in a way, but different enough where Something just felt kinda off. But over time I got used to it and I just,

you know, when I eventually did go back to Windows for maybe a year or so, I just did not like it. The only reason I went back to Windows is at the time I wasn't using Linux, but my university, their options at the time were Windows or like Windows and Mac were the main things they supported. And I didn't have the money for a new Mac because I had the same MacBook Pro for about eight years at that point and it was starting to get a little bit, a little bit difficult to do stuff and it was it was it was a It was an Intel Mac from 2012 or something like that. So like It ran pretty hard. It was it wasn't a great experience

So I went back to Windows for a bit and it wasn't great eventually I I Saw one of my professors. I think it was in my Android development class actually. He was using, I think it was i3. Yeah, he was using the i3 window manager on Arch Linux. And I thought it was so... So weird and so cool. And I kinda just wanted to work out what this thing was myself and that's how I eventually made my way into Linux. I just delved head first in, I think it was

in like the third week of a semester which is the worst time you could ever change your operating system. Don't recommend doing that. I had assignments due in like three weeks from that point and I'd work out how a whole new operating system worked but I you know trial by fire, I guess I kind of had to learn as quickly as possible and I Guess learn I did Yeah, Linux is is tough I played around with Linux as well. I don't know. Let me think. Maybe like 18 years ago, at the university, I installed Ubuntu. I met a guy and he was like, oh Ubuntu, then they send you the disk to your house and the physical disk and I

was like, and it's free and I was like but what's the point and I installed it in my computer at the well booted windows and Ubuntu and I remember having audio issues I don't know I don't remember the name of the program to play music and I had to go into the terminal and was like what the is this you know yeah yeah um and I remember that the cube, right? You could move desktops, you know? Oh yes, okay. Definitely was during, yeah, okay, okay.

So what did you say, did you say 17 years ago? I would say around 17 years ago. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so the cube, that was a thing called Compiz and that's where like burning windows came from and wobbly windows and all of the, if you go back and look at like, you know, Linux videos from 2006 on YouTube, everybody was running stuff like that. Like that's, that's kind of what the selling point of Linux was at the time. Yeah, and it runs faster and I remember, okay, it runs faster. But I remember about audio issues and I was like,

I had to go into the terminal, paste in some commands and I was like, I don't know, I just left it there. I didn't continue, moved back to Windows, you know? But yeah, I did have my adventure with Ubuntu back in the day. Now I use it only on servers, right? Debian is my server of choice. I install all of my servers run Debian.

I know Ubuntu is what has most of the documentation, more support and all that. But I thought like, why Ubuntu? I'll just go to the source and I'll just use Debian. It has worked great ever since. But yeah, I do play around with Linux still a lot, but only in servers. No desktop environment at all. You know, just managing stuff that way. Yeah. And I guess the fact that you, you're in a fairly good position to be trying out Linux because you're not trying it from like a blank slate, right? You use Mac OS in a very Linux-like way. You make use of a lot of Linux software.

You're comfortable on the command line because you have that server experience. So like, you might sort of, you may not like the initial experience you get with some of the window managers you try, but it's not like you're gonna be entirely lost on how that sort of interaction model works, right? Like a lot of people get tripped up with Linux

where they're just not really comfortable using a terminal, not really comfortable using the command line and they just sort of freak out with that. And like, they don't really know how to read documentation and solve problems for themselves. But having that background there, like when I started using Linux, I was coming from a developer background. I was going through my software engineering degree

at the time. So it, I was in the my software engineering degree at the time. So I was in the right mindset to try out Linux. And that's a question that I have for you as well. Like if I won't, that's what I've been thinking. I'm not going to watch videos on how to install Arch because I want to go to the source. I always want to go to the source. If I need to install something, I always want to go to the source. If I need to install something, I always like going directly to the documentation.

So would you say the ArchWiki would be a good place to start? Or what is your advice there? Yes. The ArchWiki is basically the official installation guide on how to install Arch. If there are absolutely videos out there which will guide you through the steps and maybe some additional things you might want to do,

but the Arch Linux install guide on the Arch Wiki is like, that's the source of how to install Arch. And does it cover, because I'll reach a point in which I won't have a desktop. I guess it will ask me like, but does the documentation give you options like, okay, do you want to go with X11? Do you want to go with Wayland? Or that's something that you have to figure out on your own somewhere else

completely separately. I haven't looked at the docs in a while. Let me see where it ends you off at. else completely separately. I haven't looked at the docs in a while. Let me see where it ends you off at. Or do you have to choose before you install Arch? Okay, this is the window manager that I will use or... So when you go through the Arch install guide, it is quite a manual installation process, um, unlike something like, uh, you know, like a Buntu has, does the, um, I haven't installed a Buntu on a, oh, actually, sorry, Debian, you're using Debian on the server.

Does, when you do Debian on a server, is there like a, there's like a- GOOEY. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Um, but I have to do the steps manually, right? Like partitions, do I want to keep a swap partition, no swap partition and all that stuff.

Like that's what I use in Debian. Yeah, so with Arch, basically you're going to mount the ISO and then pretty much go through a bunch of manual steps to set things up, like setting up your, what's some random thing in here, like setting up your your internet connection, setting up your your time and date, doing your disk partitioning, things like that. I would recommend just having a read, even if you're not

installing Arch at the time, just having a, I guess a bit of a read through the art install guide Just to get yourself sort of familiar with the the steps It wants you to go through and then sort of bring it up as you want to install it So you're not going into the install guide Entirely blind so if there's anything in here, maybe you don't understand you can check it before you actually try to install it yourself But once you finish through the install guide basically you're gonna be at a point where you are just at the command line. It doesn't get you to install... there's a link at the end of the install guide for things you might want to additionally do like you know install

your graphical environment things like like that, but basically it's going to put you at a point where it's suitable to be running on a server, and that's basically it. Everything else, Arch, you know, Arch is kind of intended to be for people who know what they're already doing on Linux and have an idea of the direction they want to go. It gives you a very clean system to begin with and just lets you go wild with whatever you want to do. Oh, so you don't get a desktop or anything. You just end up in the terminal and you go from there. I have installed in Linux. I have tried well before chat, GPT and all that stuff, installing a graphical user interface in Linux servers, it's not complicated,

but I didn't know that there was a way, there's like a menu that you can, I don't remember, then sell something, right? In which you can install like a graphical interface and servers, but I did it the manual way a long time ago. I don't remember. It was so long ago. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't played with a Debian server in quite a while. So I have it. My website is, OK. My website is hosted on a Debian server, but I kind of just have it there,

and I just don't touch it. Yeah, OK. So I just end up in the terminal, and I go from there, basically. Yeah. And then if you want to install, let's say, you wanted to install Sway, for example, it's just one command.

You just use on Arch Linux, the package manager is Pac-Man, so you would just do sudo pac-man and then Sway. And then if that's all you want, you're basically good there, you have the environment. Oh, and I have a question as well. What if you mess something up or you want to look at it, right, and you want to recreate the whole stuff. I have heard about a script, something about a script, ArchInstall script or something.

Is that something that you should give a try? Yeah, so if you... Okay, so when I said the way you install Arch is a fairly manual way, there is also the option of using the ArchInstall script, which is something included in the like Arch image. So, when you like, when you mount that image, basically you have the option of going through the manual steps or just running ArchInstall straight off, like straight off the start, and that gives you a terminal like installer.

So it will let you go, oh, I want to, I want to set my time and date. I want to set this up, set that up. It's basically just a simple interface where you can just have it do everything for you. So if you want to have a less manual approach, that's definitely a way you can do it as well. Oh, but they call you a rust up for a furry. If you do that, like. I don't think they're going to call you a furry for doing that. I watch videos and I don't know, there's something going on with using the install script, like you're less of a man if you do it.

Is that right? There's definitely people that have this like ego thing about doing things manually. Um, some of it's a joke. Other people do take it a bit seriously at the end of the day, right? Like what I always say is it's your computer. And you know, I don't have any say on what you wanna do. I might have recommendations on things that I think are a better choice, but at the end of the day,

whatever you think is the best way to approach it, just go and do that, right? Yeah, I'm 37 already. So I already lived, not long enough, I already lived and I'm just not into starting from scratch and gathering all the stones and sticks and doing, no, if I can simplify my life, I'll do it. Yeah, I think- We'll see how that goes.

Yeah, it's, you know, if you're not really, you said you're going to do it on a separate system, right? Like just a... Yeah, okay. So if you do make a mistake, do something, like, you know, you're not going to lose any data by accidentally overriding a drive. I do recommend to anyone who is trying to install a Linux distro for the first time. If you're not fully comfortable, just unplug the drives that you definitely don't want to wipe and you just avoid any problems. Yeah, in case that you don't know which drive you're going to install it, let's say. Yeah, you choose the wrong drive at the time of installation, right?

I did that with my first Arch and Still where I wiped. My initial plan with Linux was to dual boot Windows and Linux. I accidentally wiped the Windows drive. So the dual booting didn't happen. I just went straight into Linux. Yeah, has happened to me as well, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And obviously if you want to use something even more streamlined to install it than Arches, obviously you know, most distros have like a click next to install it, like a installer like Ubuntu, Debian, pretty much everything. You can just like click next and it just does everything for you. So again, it kind of depends on where you want to go. Obviously you said you were interested in doing the arch stuff. So, you know, kind of again, it depends on it depends on what you're looking to do. I like scripting a lot like in my macOS computer, right?

I run a script when I deploy a new Mac, right? I don't do it often, right? But I have a script that runs through the entire process. It installs, even installs Homebrew. Then it installs all the apps that it needs. It clones my.files. It gets all of my configuration from the.files source system. And I just get everything installed.

So I'm a big fan of that. So I will definitely do that in Linux. So I think the install script, can I customize it? You can. Um, you can, there's like a, it's got like a Python API where you can set it up to do all of that stuff, but I was just, I was just thinking there is an entire Linux distro based around scripting your setup and making it very easy to deploy. I don't know if you've heard of it yet because they're going to find you if you talk about

this. It's a distro called NixOS where... Nah, I have heard but I'm not trying it. talk about this. It's a distro called NixOS where... Nah, I have heard but I'm not trying it. Yeah, because what you're suggesting is exactly the benefit of NixOS that people will try to sell you on as quickly as possible. I was thinking about Nix, you know, and I watched watched the video about I don't remember the guy's name Forest something and he just said Nick's OS is not for me. He released a video like

Oris night. What is his name? Let me see that rings a bell Oris Nick's just searching here forest eggs. Yeah, or is night I'm just searching here, Forrest Knight. I'm sorry, NixOS, I failed you. Maybe next time. I watched that video. He's not a noob, we could say, right? He's advanced.

He knows a lot of stuff. And I was thinking, Nix, because of the benefits that you get as well, because you can replicate your system, how often do you do that anyway? Right. Exactly. So. Once every, I don't know, two, three, four years. So is it really worth it? You know, and no, I'm not doing that, but I do want to have a script. Not something complicated, you know, that just installs that is basically going to do this stuff that I do manually,

you know, programmatically, right? Well, there are more modular ways you can do it that are not necessarily tied to one system that also can do a lot of that stuff as well. So maybe something like that would be more, you know, more up your alley. Okay. Okay. But that's through one install script in Arch or?

Um, so the Arch install script is mainly about getting your like initial system set up. I've never really looked at how much you can do with it. Um, so I'm, I'm honestly not the best person to really comment on how much can be done there. I know that it definitely, it can definitely be done, like set up to automate the installation of all of your software. Like when it comes to installing all of your dot files to where they need to go, I'm not sure if you can do that directly with ArchInstall. But if I am left in a terminal, I can create something in my dots that I can call, you

know, like arch.linkarzoo.com or something, right? A command that I can run and it's going to do everything. So I can go from there, right? After installing Arch, I can go from there. Yeah, you can always set up your own post-install stuff if you wanted to, yeah. Okay, yeah, makes sense, makes sense, okay. There is a section on scripting your own installation in the Arch install GitHub, so I would recommend just having a read through that and seeing what,

seeing what that lets you do just with that script by itself. Okay, okay, good to know. what, seeing what that lets you do just with that script by itself. Okay. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. I think I last installed my system. I don't even think the ArchInstall script existed when I last did my system. Yeah.

Cause it was only added maybe like two or three years ago. And I think his system is like maybe four or five years old. And I think his system is like maybe four or five years old. I don't, I am not the kind of person who swaps Linux distros or does reinstalls, anything like that. I kind of just, I've been on Arch since I started. For me, like, I see people jumping between Linux distros trying to find different things that they like about different ones. But I started on Arch, so I'm just like...

I know people that work on different distros and every so often they try to sell me on the merits of whatever they're using or whatever they're... whatever they're personally working on. Like I know some Fedora developers and Ubuntu developers, I'm just like... Yeah, but whatever I do on that distro, I can just do an arch anyway. Yeah, same here. I'm not going to be distro hopping. Well, maybe I get like a midlife crisis and I start doing that, you know, at this age, you know?

So, uh, but no, you can always go to Gen 2 and waste a lot of time over there. No, no, no, no. Maybe there. No, I don't know. Maybe when I retire, when I'm older. But how often do you really run the install script, right? The only reason, the last time that I installed it on my Mac, that I ran the script is when I got this MacBook, right? Which was like, I don't know, four months ago. I expect to keep this computer for three, four more years or more if possible.

And then I will need to run the script again, right? So I don't think it's worth it for me to try Nix at this point, yeah. No, I get that, I get that. I do think people sort of oversell the value, especially when Especially when I get it if you are trying out a bunch of different systems But when you're a single system person and you're telling me like how great it is for redeployment like have you ever redeployed? right

Like yeah, it's cool that you can but have you ever done so? Yeah, we over prepare that you can, but have you ever done so? Yeah, we over-prepare. That's what happens. Yep. So you've mentioned a couple of times, um, using NeoVim. I have never properly learnt it myself. Every so often, I've kind of done the same thing you did where it's like I sit down and try to properly learn it and never really, I never really got around to doing. So I use it as like my editor for modifying config files and things like that.

I've just never really gotten comfortable enough to, you know, want to do programming or anything, anything really substantial in it. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Um, what's because of prime, right? Before that, I'm not a programmer. I'm more on the infrastructure side of things, you know, I'm more on the Kubernetes Docker side of things and, um, all of that. But I do know a little bit of bash because I have to use bash, especially with AI nowadays, you know,

I do know the programming basics, you know, so I can tell what's right and what's wrong. If I don't know a language, I use AI to help me and I correct it and all that stuff. Right? But I was doing scripting in Microtik routers, right? Because I have two ISPs in my house. So I needed to create a script in Microtik before AI was a thing.

And I did it in VS code, right? I use VS code all the time. So I created a lot of scripts for my Microtik router back then. And when I started watching Prime, I was like, okay, VS code. I did that everything there. And I started playing around with NewVim because of Prime and I was like I cannot do this in NewVim you know because you're crippled basically right you open NewVim and you try to navigate and it's

like just to go up and down left or right it's it's really painful it's it's horrible to be honest I don't know why we do it. But like I said at the beginning of the call, right? This is not going to defeat me because I used Vim in servers, right? If you jump into a server and you need to modify a configuration file, you have two options, nano or Vim, right? I used nano for a long time and I was like, Nano? But then you hear the jokes that Nano is for furries, right? So I just wanted to use Vim properly, right? And I don't know, I started with notes, with Markdown, because I write a lot of Markdown, I write a lot of markdown, I write a lot of notes. I used Obsidian back in the day, you know, for my note taking.

And I decided, okay, I'll start with notes, notes, notes. And once you go into that rabbit hole, man, but I started with the distribution, the LazyVim distribution. I was going to ask if how you handle your Vim configuration, if you built something from scratch, you'll use something that existed already. Yeah, I'm not gonna have a better configuration than what Volky has. You know, Volky is a pretty popular guy in Neo Vim.

He creates a lot of plugins. According to my personal opinion, the best, well, no, Volky and H.S. Knaapsky, those are two guys. Well, and a lot of other guys. I don't want to disrespect other folks, you know, but Fulky has this distribution called LazyVim. It's not going to get better than that. I will not be able to come up with the ideas because he switches between Neovim, he tries Helix, he tries other editors, Emacs, so he has a lot of cool ideas, right? So that's what I use. And if I create my own config in the long run, I will just try to mirror his configuration.

So I'm just using LazyVim at the moment. That's the distro that I use. I'm planning to try in my own config as well. I will come up with something, but for now, I do have my own, it's really customized, LASIVM distribution, which is in my.files. I have the instructions there to install it and all that stuff. But yeah, that's what I use. Yeah, I, the problem I've always found with any of these Vim distributions, same thing happened when I tried a couple of Emacs ones as well, is... I... I don't know. It's kind of like you're not even using Vim to an extent, right? Cause you're using, it's so heavily configured on top of it

where unless you understand the core basics of Vim, you don't really know what is part of Vim and what's part of the distribution. And I don't know, I think there is, I definitely think there is some merit in building something up from scratch, even if you do end up using a distribution, just so you sort of have an understanding of,

I guess how the pieces fit together. I don't know, I've always been the kind, maybe it's coming from a developer mindset, but I always like to know how things work. Yeah, that's a really good point there, because it was really difficult when I started with the LazyVim because it's a completely new world, right? It's like, what the hell is all this?

Talks about LSP's plugins, configuration files, how do they talk to each other? A lot of key maps, right? LazyVim has a lot of defaults, like hundreds of key maps right LSB has um LASIVM has a lot of defaults like hundreds of key maps and you're like so yeah it's uh it is really difficult using a distribution is not simple I would say is the quickest but it's really difficult because you have to learn all of the intricacies we could say and all of the small details about the distribution and trying to modify something from a distribution, man, it's like you want to be specific. I can do that right now, but it took me a long time to be able to modify.

I can modify it to my liking right now, everything. But at the beginning, if I wanted to modify the simplest thing from that distribution, it was really painful. So I don't know what to recommend to people where to start, you know, because you can start from the beginning, create your own config. That's going to take you a long time. It's going to look ugly. It's not going to be useful too much.

Or you can go with something like more VS code-y we could say because it's basically like that You know built-in a lot of stuff But yeah, it's it's complex complex topic Yeah, it's the same reason I often recommend that people don't use things like Oh My ZSH for the ZSH shell And instead just start from the shell itself and then add in the things you kind of want to it Because when you use Oh my ZSH it comes with lots of aliases and lots of stuff pre-configured And that's great right, but at the same time Especially if you're in a situation where you might have to you know

SSH into systems, I think it's actually a big thing with Vim. If you're in a situation where you have to SSH into systems, knowing what is part of Vim and what's not part of Vim, like you go from lazy Vim and you've only used that to a clean version of Vim, like, yeah, it's very, very different. Yeah, it is a hundred percent different. That is absolutely right. That's something that I've been wanting to do as well. Using NeoVim as your clients, we could say,

and you remote into a server directly from NeoVim because there's some plugins like remote that inim, I think is one of them. I haven't tested it. Oil.envim allows you to remote into servers and modify files so you can use your own config. But I haven't taken the time to properly go through it and set up a video in which I go, okay, so these are the options for SSH if you want to use your own NeoVim config, right? But there are some options, I cannot tell you which one is the best one because I haven't

tried them, you know, but yeah, that is completely right. If you go to a server and you're stuck with plain old Neo Vim, or Vim actually. It's like, oh, there's a few kidnaps that I don't have here. Or worse, you're stuck with Vi in some cases. Yeah, with Vi. Yeah. So that's, that's the thing. So depending on, on, on your work, I guess, if you don't work with servers, it's fine.

But if you work with servers, something you need to keep in mind. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it kind of depends on sort of what your workflow is and where. Like, again, it's like the NixOS thing, right? If you only use a single system, you can get away with not really having a good deployment system if you have a lot of systems. Maybe you want something.

And if you use a lot of systems, maybe you don't want to rely on something where your entire workflow is tied to a bunch of additional plugins rather than the core functionality of the environment itself, right? I know a developer. I don't know if he does this to troll people or he just likes pain. He writes code without any code highlighting and without any auto-completion in Vim. I- he- he writes C code like this. I don't know why. I don't know why he does this. It looks unpleasant.

Um, I know he does definitely do some stuff to mess with people though. Um, because there is a, there is a monospace version of Comic Sans that I've seen him use from time to time. Um, so yeah. Yeah, that sounds horrible. I think this guy, um, Mitchell, the creator of Ghosty, also doesn't like to use LSBs and all that stuff. I don't remember, right? I think I saw it in an interview. I'm not quite sure, but yeah, we're used to having our hand held, right? So I like to be guide. I like to be told, hey, you know, I am a visual guy. I couldn't do that. And funny thing that you mentioned about OMI-CSH, that's actually the way that I found your videos

many, many years ago. Cause I was playing with OMI-CSH, right? Cause that's what you're told, right? OMI-CSH, I installed it. Yeah, OMI-CSH is the only way to make CSH useful is what I remember hearing all the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I noticed that it made my terminal slower. The only way to make CSH useful is what I remember hearing all the time. Yeah. And I noticed that it made my terminal slower.

Right now my terminal is lower, you know, when I bring up my, my shell prompt, it's slower, but because I do a lot of background checks and I do a lot of stuff in there and it's intentional. Right. I did it. I know why it's happening and I'm fine with it. Right. But when I installed on my CSH, I noticed that small lag like a second when I opened it up

and I was like, what the hell is happening here? If I dug in Google, YouTube actually on my CSH, whatever your video showed up and I was like, and it was pretty What verbose. Don't use all my CSH. Yeah, it's not a good, it's an awful video. I, I need, I saw someone reference that video in a talk, in like, I think they were doing a talk in front of like a big audience about CSH

and like my thumbnail was just giant on their presentation. Like that's such a bad video. I kind of want to go back and remake it. But hey, I'm glad you got yourself, I'm glad you got something out of it. Yeah, I think it was a really good point. And I was like, cause you're confused and I was like, but what is on my CSH? And I was like, okay, so I have not a lot of idea about, you know, terminal tools and all that stuff. I was like, what is it then and why is it slowing me down?

I uninstalled it. I installed Starship, you know, which is, you know, I configure Starship to my liking, configure my CSH RC file to the way that I specifically want my history, scrolling, all that stuff. So yeah, it's a good option, but I don't use it and I wouldn't recommend it either at this point, to be honest. Depending, right? If you want something out of the box, could be, but I personally wouldn't use it.

Honestly, my main reason for not recommending OMI-ZSH is like, it's kind of the aliases, right? I think that the value of aliases is you understand what they are, they're shortcuts that make sense to you. If you're just given a bunch of someone else's aliases, at least for me personally, they don't stick as much and I kind of just ignore them and never use them Yeah, same here So one thing I did want to talk about is you make use of a split keyboard Yep, a split keyboard. I don't know if you can see it. Let's see. I cannot see myself. There we go

Yep, I I cannot see myself. There we go. Yep. I've never really sort of, I've tried them, but it's never really clicked with me. No, why not? I don't know. I think it's kind of that I have, I think part of it is I have bad typing habits. I was never really taught proper typing form So the way that I press the keys and the way that I use my fingers

Doesn't actually, you know make sense on like how you should use a keyboard and I think a lot of that comes down to like Bad habits that have been developed from playing games on PC, right? Like, primarily I'm typing with my left hand because my other hand is going to be on the mouse. So my habits for using a keyboard just... They're not typing habits is the best way to put it. Hmm, okay, I see. Yeah.

I didn't want to go with a split keyboard. I just did it because I had to, you know, because I love the Apple's keyboard. It's the Magic keyboard is what it's called. It's a pretty low profile keyboard. It's really soft, you know, for furry hands, right? If you're a furry, you definitely love that keyboard because it's, I could type really fast in that keyboard, man. And it, it didn't get in the way. I don't know. I could type really fast on that keyboard, man. And it didn't get in the way. I don't know, I loved it, you know? But my hands were crammed like this the whole time. I don't know if you can see it there like this. So this part of my arm started to hurt the forearm. And that was pretty painful actually. And I was worried and I was like why is this happening? I was

using hyper a lot back then and hyper wasn't my pinkie. I used hyper for everything. Hyper, A, and to switch applications, to switch hyper like the hyper key. The hyper key was escape in my case. What is the hyper key? When you send the the four modifiers control, alt, what is, wait, it's, when you send the, the four modifiers, control alt option and shift, right? I've never, yeah, okay, yeah, I've, I've never heard, I've never heard the word hyper key before. Oh, but yeah, it's just when you send them the four modifiers, um, shift command control

option at the same time, I had caps lock modified as hyper. I was just in a lot. So that cost, I think that's part of what's caused the issue in my, in my forearm. So, um, I started in, I don't know, figuring out what keyboard I should go with. Um, if you look for ergonomic stuff, you're gonna find split keyboards, right? So I just had one chance. I couldn't go to my wife and tell her,

I'm gonna buy this one first. And if I don't like it, I'm gonna buy another $400 keyboard. She would have said, just get out of the house, right? Right, right, right. So that's why got the the GloVe 80. But now I have too many keys, right? Because it has 80 keys.

Now the same thing that happened with the TV is happening with the GloVe 80. If you look at the keys, let me just show you real quick. You're going to see that some of them are blank, right? I'm only using 40 keys. Uh-huh. I don't know if you can see it there or not. Yeah, that's showing up just fine. Yeah.

So on each half instead of 40, because each half has 40 keys, I'm using 20 keys on each half, right? So 2020, I'm just using 40 keys and I'm modifying my configuration in Kanata to adjust to that. So the next step is to go with the corn keyboard, which only has 42 keys, right? So that's sort of where I'm at right now in the keyboard. The idea was due to ergonomics, it did help, but now my fingers hurt a little bit, you know, I don't know. I don't know what's happening, but I got softer switches like a week ago and it's,

it has gotten way better, but I want to try a different keyboard, you know, I guess once you go into that rabbit hole, it's, I don't know, it's something else. Right, right. I think for me, because I do play a lot of games, like, it's just never really made any sense for me to really learn how to properly use a split keyboard because a split keyboard's just, it's gonna feel really awkward for playing games on. I don't really want to have multiple keyboards. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't have pain in your forearm or in your fingers like I would say why and the adaptation period is tough. It's not easy, you know, when you because

these are the keys are vertical, right? The normal keyboard keyboards are staggered, right? So adapting to that and it is really painful. And then you have to adapt back to a normal keyboard, right? Because you get used to this one, then you have to relearn the other keyboard. But then eventually you learn both of them and you can switch between them. But first you have to adapt to the vertical one,

then you have to adapt again to your your own keyboard, because it happens. But then you learn both. Right, it's the same reason I haven't really ever gotten around to learning other keyboard layouts, right? There's people that are big fans of Workman and other things like that, Dvorak fans. I'm just like, yeah, sure, it's cool. But my concern is, let's say I got really comfortable

on Dvorak and then you put me in front of a QWERTY keyboard again. I'm just gonna be like, like just typing like I'm 900 years old and I've never seen a keyboard before. Yeah, the Primeogen uses the VORAC and it's one of the reasons why I considered maybe switching to an alternate keyboard layout. But I said it's been enough, that's where I drew the line and I was like, no. And because of the exact same reason, right?

Imagine I have to teach something to my daughter in a computer, in a QWERTY keyboard, I couldn't do it. So no, I'm not doing that. Or everyone in the house, including my wife and daughter, switch to the Dvorak or I don't do it at all. Yeah. And that's not going to happen. Right.

And then like, let's say you're using a laptop, right? You're not getting a laptop with the Devorite keyboards. You've got to either deal with Qwerty or carry around a keyboard when you want to use a laptop and... No. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I'm not in favor of other keyboard layouts. I don't think I will ever be.

I don't think I will ever be. I don't think they make too much sense. If the pain is way too much, probably would be worth considering the Vorac, but I would search for other alternatives before even thinking about switching the keyboard layout. That would be like my last option. switching the keyboard layout. That would be like my last option.

Yeah, a split keyboard is definitely a lot less drastic of a solution because at least it's still QWERTY. Like the layout's gonna be, it's gonna feel a bit different because your hands are spaced differently, but it's not like, oh, the keys are entirely in random different locations that don't align. Like you can... I imagine the swap back from a split keyboard to a regular keyboard is considerably easier there.

Uh, the audio just died. Discord, are you okay? Um, hold up. I don't know if- I don't know if that's me that died or you? Uh... Give me one second. I'm gonna leave the call, rejoin, maybe Discord just did something weird. Hello. You're still silent, so it's definitely on your side.

How does this happen? Why is Discord like this? Okay. Oh, there we go. I just reconnected. I think it was my microphone. I just reconnected it. And what happens to my camera?

That's working, right? Yep. That didn't change. Oh, still works my camera or? Yep. Yep. Okay. Okay.

So I'll continue in the question you asked. Well, I don't know if you're ready. No, you go ahead. I didn't stop the recording. I was just cut that section out. Yep. OK, OK, OK, OK. Oh, you asked about if it was easy to go back

to a regular keyboard, right? Yeah, so it is pretty simple to go back to my computer keyboard. And actually I remapped the laptop keyboard so that all of the keys, so I only use 40 keys on the Mac keyboard. Using Kanata, I don't use the arrows. They're mapped to anything like the F keys and the number row. They are not mapped at all. So if I press those on my Mac keyboard, they don't do anything because I want to have the same

flow in my, you know, GloVe 80 as in the laptop keyboard itself. But yeah, once you get used to that adaptation period, you know, switching from the GloVe 80 back to the regular staggered keyboard, once you relearn that again, it's pretty simple. You learn both of them and you can switch between them quite easily. Mm-hmm. Okay, okay. I don't know. It's something I would definitely be... It's like... I would like to try it. there's a lot of things I would like to try, it's just a matter of am I willing to put the time into it, right?

You know, there's so many things out there where it's like, I would like to try this but I also, there's other things that are much higher priority that I would much rather spend my time on. Oh, yeah, and a keyboard is gonna take away away a couple of months of your time, for sure. You know, because you're going to be remapping keys. You have to adjust keys. You will be switching them around. It's yeah. Just keep that in mind that you're going to spend a couple of months in a keyboard.

But I can give you more content as well. Right. But yeah. in a keyboard, but can give you more content as well, right? But yeah. Yeah. It gives me a content, but then also slows down writing scripts for the other content I want to do. So yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to have to be with what I've got. Like the biggest change that I made is I have a 10 keyless. I don't have a number pack. That's as much change as I need in my life. Okay. Because in my case I do use the F keys. I do use the arrow keys. Like I want all that stuff to be there. It's nice. It's just something I'm... I'm used to swapping between windows using the arrow keys.

I use the windows key and the arrow keys to swap between the different tiles I have on my screen. I like that as an option. Yeah, and that's one of the problems with this split keyboards because arrows, you will not have arrows like in the glove 80. For example, the arrows are down here in this bottom row you have two arrows on this side and the other two arrows are on the other half of the keyboard so it's really difficult to get used to the arrows so I just remove them completely and it doesn't matter if I'm on the glove 80 or if I'm on the Mac keyboard to use my arrows

I just leave caps lock pressed which is like my navigation layer so I just leave caps lock pressed which is like my navigation layer so I just leave caps lock pressed and it's a JKL right the motions those are my arrows right so the motions all the time in it and the workflow is the same the club 80 and the Mac computer right or if I want to select stuff like the way that you select stuff in Ward, right? You want to select wards to the back or wards to the front. I use Caps Lock as well, but instead of H, J, K, L, I use the keys on the top, which are Y, U, I, O or U, I, O, P. I don't know those four keys, right? So to select stuff. So yeah, getting used to a split one

and the arrows in different places is difficult. So I personally think that if you keep the same workflow in the two keyboards, it's just gonna make your life easier. But you won't have to do a lot of remapping and a lot of stuff. So it's more work, but I don't know, complicated. A lot of decisions you have to make mmm yeah no I think it's cool right as I said I think it's cool but it's just like I'm good I

I like I will go and watch someone's video about why split keyboards are great why Dvorak is great and hey I can I can live vicariously through their experience. I can spend 15 minutes learning about how great it is and then never do it myself. Yeah, you feel like you accomplished it, right? I did it. Let's move on. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'd much rather focus on trying out new window managers and things like that. Things that like, in an area that I, the area that I'm willing to give myself some experimentation room for and just try new things out there. Yeah, makes sense. I think that's part of the reason I don't like distro hopping as well. I don't like upending my entire system. I want to stay on Arch, I want to use the same software, but I want to change out something, right? I want to change out one thing which will disrupt my workflow a bit, but not enough

where I need to relearn everything for an entire month. It's mostly the same, but like it's enough of a change to be exciting. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don't like changes. I don't like changes. Well, my wife tells me that all the time, you know?

I tell her, yeah, I'm open to change. And she's like, you don't like change at all. So it seems that I don't like change at all. I like stuff to keep consistent. You know, that's why I just keep Mac OS the way that I keep it. I just want it to work. I don't like to be modifying it a lot. I do it because of content sometimes, right?

Like create my own NeoVim distribution or use kickstart.nvm. That's something that I'm planning to do. Try Aerospace. I was not planning on installing Aerospace. I'm good with Yabai. I have been using Yabai. It works for me the exact way that I want it to work. But it's content. That's the only reason why I, you know, try other things nowadays most of the time.

But if I wouldn't be doing content, I would stick to your buy, stick to the stuff that I know and wouldn't change stuff around at all. Sure. No, I definitely get that. I would definitely be a lot less experimental with stuff if I wasn't doing that. And I think for me at least, it's been kind of good because it has a lot of the stuff I try out, I don't stick with, but some of the stuff, I feel like it actually was a good thing to sit down and give it a shot because it did ultimately improve what I was doing. Mm-hmm, yeah.

So what made you wanna make videos anyway? Cause like, you know, you could just like Because you could just not do that at all. Play around with your macOS system, do your regular job, and just not do this. What made you want to make videos? Because I noticed that there was a lot of content. All of the cool and nice content and all of the nice looking desktops or setups were Linux only, right?

Windows, there's a few maybe out there that create good Windows videos, but there was not a lot of stuff related to macOS. Josh Medesky, that's the way that I learned about Yabai because he had a video about Yabai. There were some things that I had questions about and that I figured out on my own. So I was like, there's a lot of macOS content, you know, but there's not a lot of, you know, applications like the difference between this application and the other one, and Finder, and just stock stuff, you know, boring stuff. I just wanted, you know, to put out content there for the stuff that I discover and that

there is not a lot of documentation. There is readme's in GitHub, right? But people don't like going into GitHub, going through a readme configuration files. It's tough. So I just wanted to make it more accessible. And the end goal is to get some money. I'm just getting pennies, right? It's not, no, it's not. But that's like the, that's what keeps me going, you know, that eventually it'll start, you know, producing some money and we'll see what happens.

But yeah. So you just felt like there was this, I guess, gap in the market. There wasn't really anyone making the sort of macOS content that you wanted to see out there. Yeah. Terminals, any of them, macOS, you know, Windows managers in Mac OS, how to customize Mac OS like the real way. There were a few videos, but developers that, you know, create their products and they just

share one single video and you don't see them ever again, right? But they don't create more videos, you know, they're developers, they're focused doing other stuff. Sometimes they share their setups in a single video, every once in a, I don't know, once in a lifetime. So I just wanted to have more content out there related to Mac OS and making it look good and useful. You know, cause it's a useful operating system if you configure it the right useful operating system if you configure

it the right way and if you learn a lot about the different stuff that is going on in macOS, it is actually quite useful, good for editing stuff, you know, for video it's awesome. But the default stock experience, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. You know, this is not even Mac OS. I'm just using the hardware that Apple provides and I like their Unix base, right? And I just built on top of that. So it's not like too much of a Mac OS computer anymore, basically. Right. You basically have the, you have the Mac compatibility,

but with a more Linux-like experience. That is correct. Yep, exactly. Yep. Which, you know, that does... that does sound kind of compelling, right? I get it. Because there's a lot of like, you know, like my stream deck here, right?

Like the Elgato stream deck, it has software to work on Windows, it has software to work on Mac, but on Linux, like you kind of got to rely on some third-party community implementation for it, and you know, it works great, but it's not the official supported stuff, and that's what you get with a lot of pieces of hardware, where it has official support on Mac and Windows and then you kind of got to hope that somebody out there has made a like a third-party implementation a third-party Configuration software like my out my Logitech. I've got a couple of Logitech mice here

I got a what is this a G35 my main ones a G600 There's no Logitech configuration software on Linux, but people have made software to configure it and it works great, but not every mouse brand has support for software and has third party solutions. So you kind of got to think a bit more about what you're going to buy. Oh, yeah, you have to think about the equipment. Yeah, that is true. That's something that I like about it as well. Doesn't matter what I buy. I know that it's going to be available on Mac.

I just bought a camera, like a webcam, 4K Chinese webcam. I got it yesterday. I wanted to give it a try and it has the little tool that, you know, it comes with like the to modify the color and stuff like that. Windows and Mac OS, I don't think I saw Linux in there. Right? Yeah, so compatibility is something that I do like a lot. I did create music back in the day, and I do like a tool that Mac OS has for making music.

It's, it's called Logic Pro X. I have used a lot of other ones. I have used FL Studio. I used Pro Tools in Windows. I used Cubase and other ones. And man, to be honest with you, Logic Pro is to me, you know, on a different level. I do like that a lot. So I'm not making music right now. So that is not going to make me stay on macOS. But compatibility is a major one for me. But it's getting better in Linux, right? You just have to think about

what you're going to buy before you buy it and make sure that it's compatible. Yeah. Yeah, and some areas have a lot better support than others. Like, you can... If you don't need to configure a mouse, like, I... The reason I configure this is, it's like a... It's an MMO mouse, so it's got a bunch of buttons on the side. But if you're just plugging a regular mouse in, right, it just has two buttons, has a scroll wheel. Literally everything's gonna work. It's just if there's additional buttons on it, maybe there's not configuration software for it. You know. Like the baseline stuff is all good. It's usually a lot of that stuff on top that may be a little bit...

stuff is all good. It's usually a lot of that stuff on top that may be a little bit, maybe not necessarily be there. And then there's just random areas where things work really well because there's just a hyper niche dedicated audience for it. I went on a random research tangent looking at simulation racing and all of the really popular like racing gear just works on Linux. There's a really dedicated community that has made like made sure all of the the popular racing wheels just work and I had no idea that anyone had even done this. I had no idea that anyone had even done this. Yeah, the community is wonderful. They do a lot of stuff, right? So, yeah, yeah, good community, you know, a lot of projects that are created there and maintained.

Yeah, I'm concerned a little bit about as well as what's going to happen like for example with Neovim, right? Volky is the one that manages or maintains Neovim. What's going to happen when he decides I'm done with all these guys? They create issues and they ask a lot of dumb questions and it happens a lot, right? And you go to the repo, you're going to find a lot of, man, he's really active and he closes a lot of men, he's really active and he closes a lot of issues. He is not sweet because he's just tired of it, right?

Maintaining that and dealing with a lot of people is, I guess it must be exhausting. And I guess what's going to happen when these like single maintainers just, I guess someone else is going to take over. Right. It's usually what happens. What have you seen that happens in those cases? It really depends on the project. Like some projects, they have a big audience behind them and hopefully when someone... So there's a term called the bus factor where basically it's... factor where basically it's how many people involved in a project could you know suddenly be hit by a bus for the project to continue surviving and there's a lot of projects out there where if one person's gone there's no project right like it's it is one person developing

it it may be a lot of people use it but no one's really gotten involved in the project. Like if you look at- Like TMUX. TMUX for example. I was looking at the commit history in TMUX. Nicholas is the main guy, you know, maintaining TMUX. I guess there's another guy. I don't know if it's just a couple more guys, but TMUX I think is a project maintained by

mainly a single person, if I'm not mistaken, which is Nicholas. Where's the contributor history? There's six contributors on TMUX? Wait, six people? How in the world? What? I would have expected this to be way bigger. Yeah, but look at the commit history. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna see NCIM, which is Nicholas. You know, he's the most active one. The other one's just a few commits here and there, right?

So it's only two basically, right? Nicholas and Thomas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thomas a lot more in recent years, but like T-Mox development kind of slowed down a lot. There used to be another person like 10 years ago who did a bit of work, but nowadays, yeah, wow, I had no idea. Yeah, it's a huge project that's extremely popular, right, who doesn't use T-Mox, right? And if someone's going to take over's extremely popular, right? Who doesn't use T-Mox, right? And if someone's gonna take over, who knows, right?

I don't know. Well, considering how little work's kind of done nowadays, I'd imagine it generally considered feature complete. Yeah. But there's a lot of other projects out there where they're fairly healthy projects, right? Like a great example, the Linux kernel, there's hundreds of people that write code for it every single day. If one person disappears, like maybe maybe some subsystem doesn't really have the amount of work it needs, but the project as a whole is going to survive, right?

Like that's a really, really healthy project. But I guess, Carol's another great example that's like really, really important. And the majority of the work is done by one guy and he's been doing it for the past 30 years. Mm-hmm. Oh, so we're similar to what happened to Vim, right? Like- Yeah, yeah.

Committee took over and it's still being maintained, I guess. I don't use Vim too much nowadays, but yeah. I guess it continues to be developed, right? Yeah. Like the majority of the work was being done by one guy, but like Vim at least had a big community around it. I, it really, it's odd, right?

Like I had no idea about TMUX. I... You would hope that people would come along and pick up a really big project after someone either dies, steps down, for any other reason has to leave a project. But there are a lot of cases where things kind of just, they just kind of stop at one point.

Like no one picks it up. People move on. Maybe there's other things that do a similar job and I don't know, code bases just get left in the past sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it is what it is. Yeah.

I don't think Tmux, that would happen to Tmux because way too many people use Tmux. I don't know. I don't know what would happen. People would start a revolution or something if Tmux is not maintained. A fork would come up quite quickly if you're not given access, if no one else is added there, you know, to contribute, I guess a fork would start quite fast and yeah. Yeah, I would imagine.

That's the good thing about it, right? Forks and contributing, so yeah. I think we should probably be ending off the episode sometime soon, we're coming up on the two hour mark. Okay. Yep. Yep. So, uh, let people know where they can find you.

Okay. So, um, if you go to YouTube, you're going to be able to find me there. I'm going to share the link with you. I don't know if you leave it in the description or something but um, yep youtube And my blog post is linkarzoo.com all of my links are there in my blog post. So Either or you know, I did have social media. I didn't have twitter. I didn't have tik tok instagram I just uninstalled everything like I don't know a month ago because I noticed that I was spending way too much time. I was switching between TikTok and then I would switch to Twitter, then to

Instagram, then back to Twitter, then to LinkedIn, then to the YouTube studio app and I spent like four or five hours doing that and it was hell. So I just uninstalled all of them, including LinkedIn. I said F them. I only have YouTube now, all of them, including LinkedIn. I said, F them. I only have YouTube now, you know, and that's what I do watch YouTube videos because at least I feel that I'm learning something, you know? Right, right, right. Yeah. But yeah, just go to my blog post and or my YouTube, you know, there's links to

my dot files. My dot files are pretty popular. They have like, I don't know, 800, almost 900 stars. I have a lot of stuff there. Mac OS and NeoVim related mostly, but all of the tools that I use. Awesome. What do you have going on on your channel right now? What do you got coming out? I did see you have these videos on Apple containers that are currently marked as members first mostly. Yeah, they are catching up in Docker because in Apple you couldn't run containers directly. You have to install Docker desktop or other tools like Podman or Kalima.

Like in Linux you just install Docker you run your containers that's it right in Apple you could not you have to install third-party tool so 10 15 years later I don't know when containers started they're catching up now you can run containers there is limitations because you can only run them if you want two containers to communicate with them with each other You cannot do it in Mac OS 15. You have to upgrade to the new Mac OS version, which is 26 Which is the glassy one. So that's that's what I'm doing right now Canada Mac OS 26 coming soon

New of them related stuff as well. Those are the main topics, you know, macOS, Niovm, terminals, stuff like that. Awesome. Nothing else you want to mention or? No, I think I, if you, if you get to my links, you'll be able to find everything there. Awesome. Awesome. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream there as well, depending on how I feel. I've got a gaming channel, Brody on Games. I may have finished the stream games I'm doing right now.

If not, I'd be playing through Kazan the First Berserker and Ori and the Blind Forest. If you want to see the video version of this, it is available on YouTube at Tech over T. The audio version is on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed as well. On Spotify we have video, which is cool. Now, how do you want to sign off the show? What is your final word? What do you want to say? I would say don't drink and don't do drugs, you know, because I did it when I was way younger.

I spent way too many years doing hardcore stuff. I'm sounding like an old man and people, it's the end of the video anyway. Nobody's watching, but if there's someone out there watching and you're considering doing all that stuff, just don't do it. You're just going to waste your time. And that's it Brody. Really appreciate you inviting me over. Absolutely pleasure. Thank you, man.

Whenever I ask people to sign off the episode, I don't expect to hear an inspirational message. That's the first, we are 280 episodes in. You are the first person to do that.