Tech Over Tea - Friendliest Guy In All Of Linux | The Linux Experiment

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

It's been on my schedule for a while but Nick from The Linux Experiment is finally here so I get to pick his brains about things such as working out, linux and even the process he goes through for making his videos, I had a lot of fun, I hope you do to. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLinuxExperiment Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/web/@thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/TLENick ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode 125 of Tech of a T. I am, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we've got a guest that I've been wanting to talk to for quite a while. I just hadn't gotten around to sending Nick a message. I've been considering sending you a message for months. It's just like things kept happening, and then I had bad internet for a while. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey, welcome everyone. I'm doing fine, thanks. It's like 10am here and yeah, it's a very good day. Yeah, you were saying you got back from doing a workout? How'd that go? Yeah, I work out almost every morning when my ankle doesn't act up. But yeah, I do a little bit of uh of weight training in the house i don't go to to a like a gym because i hate gyms and uh and i tend to do a bit of cardio as well so i tend to mix and match i do about an hour of weight lifting and then about 30 minutes of running oh okay so you actually do like a full-on workout in the morning yeah yeah i

well honestly like if you can get your own weights it's way better off like get your own weights get your cardio gear it's gonna be way cheaper in the long run yeah absolutely i've got a um a set of weights sitting outside right now and i i don't have an elliptical but i've got a i don't know what you call them like it's like a i think it's called like a bike trainer you can mount a bike onto it and then you know basically pedal on the spot and that that does the job i've been pretty lazy to work me out though so i need to get back sort of get back into that uh it takes a lot of will and it's been like i don't know four years since i've been doing like these workouts very regularly and and even after four years some mornings I just wake up and I'm like oh god no please yeah yeah I definitely I

definitely feel I used to back after I finished high schools like five or six years ago something like that I every morning doesn't matter if it was raining or not I would be up and I do like a five kilometer run every morning and then i got lazy and the problem is that when you get lazy it's really hard to get back into it because oh yeah that first yeah and you lose your progress extremely fast as well yeah it took you like two or three months to to reliably do five kilometers and then in two weeks you're not able to do three it's just super weird yep absolutely um i don't

even know why i stopped i think i might have pushed myself too hard one of the days and yeah that i think i hurt my knee or something not like really bad but enough where i was like i'm gonna just you know wait on this for a bit just see what really happens and then you know i waited too long and then my habits fell out i think it happened during the middle of winter as well so i didn't want to be doing it in the first place yeah of course yeah i had so many instances of this like oh no i i hurt a little bit or oh no i i'm hungover i can do it today and then today starts transferring to a week a month and before you know it it's been four months since you did anything.

You're like, okay, I'm starting to get fat again. I need to do something. Yeah, I noticed that. I'd put on, I think, like 10 or so kilos since I last checked. It's not terrible. It's not the point where you're really noticing it. But once you see that number, you're like, wait, maybe I should actually do something about that. Yeah, at my highest point, I was like 90 kilos,

and I'm relatively short. I'm like a meter and 72 centimeters. So my ideal weight should be at around 70. And like 90 kilos, like you could really see it. And that's what motivated me to get, well, working out again. Yeah, yeah. I maintained that weight sort of. you could really see it and that's what motivated me to get well working out again yeah yeah i maintain that weight sort of there's still a bit of chubbiness i need to lose but honestly i'm fine with that it's probably better than the state i was in before because i there was a period i think

for like a two or three month period where i was doing keto and if you know anyone who's done keto you would know they lose weight like you drop off a lot of weight really quickly because you burn like a lot of that like water weight you have. So there was a period where I was probably a bit underweight. But there's a middle point in there that I do like. And now that I've moved back to where I grew up, there's this really nice cycling track. And I used to cycle because there's like, I think it goes, I think like there's a 20k cycling track and i used to cycle because there's like i think it goes i think like this is a 20k cycling track or something and there's another one that goes in the other direction that takes you all the way up to the capital so it's like a 50 or so k track you can go on and i used to

cycle pretty much every single day and i i do enjoy cycling but it's really nice yeah i have like a nice bike as well it's's just sitting in the shed, just collecting dust, basically. Yeah, it just takes that initial push to start again. And once you've done it one, two or three times in a row, then you're good. Yeah, I've sort of started back up again in the past like week or so. So it's not like I haven't started to like, you know, go running again. But that is something I definitely want to start pushing, especially before it hits, you know... We're in the good point of, like...

Is it still winter? Wait, is it summer? Wait, is it summer for you? Yeah. Yeah, okay, so it is winter. Yeah, I never remember what season I'm in. So it's getting to that good point of winter where, you know, it's starting to warm back up again

because we're sort of getting towards spring. where it's starting to warm back up again because we're sort of getting towards spring. So, you know, it's probably a good point to start before it gets to summer. Because here, you know, summer gets like 35 plus degrees every day. Yeah, and then at that point, you don't really want to do like 15 minutes of cycling or 15 kilometers of cycling

back then i i would like do it in the morning or like in the late afternoon then it it works out but you definitely i there are some people who are like you know what come rain or shine 35 degrees negative 10 i'm gonna i'm gonna get out there but i don't have that level of determination. Yeah, I don't either. Well, you know what? We can talk about exercising the entire podcast, or we can talk about what we do. So I guess we'll talk a bit about YouTube. Or I guess we'll start with Linux. When did you get into Linux,

and why is that something you were at all thinking of doing? I started using Linux, it was 2006, I think. I had just started college. I was studying, well, it was not college, it was like med school because I had two years of med school. And at that point, I had no computer of my own and I really wanted to buy a Mac because they just looked gorgeous. And at that point, you had Mac OS or Windows XP.

And so, yeah, of course, Windows XP looked like atrocious compared to Mac OS. But I didn't have any money. So I bought a basic like refurbished run-of-the-mill laptop, really super basic. And like one CPU core, two gigs of RAM, not even two gigs. I think it was one gig. A very crappy laptop. And I installed Windows XP. I tried to turn it into a Mac

and obviously it didn't work out well. I installed like customization packs, viruses, whatever. And then I looked online at other options because it just wasn't doing it. And I thought, I saw that thing called Ubuntu and people were saying, hey, you can customize it to look like anything else. You can have the real global menu. You can have tons of stuff. I was like, I'm going to try that. And so I started using it and I had a few

issues, but I learned to solve them. And after a while I was like, I'm just going to keep the default Ubuntu interface because I like it more and it works fine. And from then on, I just used Linux on and off there were periods where i didn't even have any computers for like two or three years because i wasn't interested anymore there are some periods where i used windows because i just wanted a computer for gaming but i've been using linux pretty much exclusively since i started the channel so so 2018 early 2018 yeah i was trying to find a picture of Ubuntu 6.04, and I managed to find one finally.

It took a while. A lot of the pictures were like... Yeah, 6.06, yeah. A lot of them were like really, really low res. I wanted to find something that actually looked good. I forgot how this looked. There was a while back where I did a stream going up between every major version of Ubuntu

and sort of seeing how GNOME and Ubuntu would evolve, it looked surprisingly good, to be honest, for the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like people in their heads have that image of Linux looking like Windows 95 up until like Vista or 7 came out. But that was not the case.

When XP was out, there were GNOME and KDE themes and desktops that looked way better than that. Yeah, like even, honestly, even like stock GNOME wasn't that bad. Yeah. It was just the icons. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

The stock GNOME icons for the time were just like, ugh. Well, nowadays, there's so much customization that is available now that if you want to like still have that look you can go so you go back to it you can have some you can turn you know kd you've probably seen all the themes for like turning kde into macOS turning into windows 7 window i there was one for windows 11 i don't know why you would do that but like you there's so much you can do with it now that any sort of

style is sort of available if you want to put that work into it so you started with Ubuntu and where did you go from there well I stuck to Ubuntu for a while I think the the first time I tried something else was like four or five years after I started using Ubuntu. I stuck to Ubuntu because at the time, it was the only one that ran correctly on the hardware that I had. Right. And they just gave that impression of moving super fast and having new stuff. Every six months, you had a redesign, a small redesign. You had, well, that new wallpaper, obviously, which was basically, at the time, coffee stains and brown.

But it worked well. I like it. And you had tons of new features. Yeah, like the Intrepid IBEX wallpaper, like the H.04 was one of my favorites. And was it? No, it was Hardy Heron, not Intrepid IBEX. But yeah, it just looked cool.

And they had some new features again and again and again. And when I looked at the other distributions, they just looked like, I don't know, more stuck. And they just didn't feel... Maybe they just didn't communicate as much. Maybe I wasn't following the right channels and stuff to see what they were doing. But Ubuntu just felt like it was moving forwards a lot more

than other alternatives. And after a point, yeah, I started dipping into Fedora. I started dipping into OpenSUSE. What did I use? I think I used Slackware for a while as well. Oh. Yeah, but it was just like small distro hubs that lasted for two weeks. And then I went back to Ubuntu because something broke.

Something wasn't working. I think I even tried Linspire at some point, which was like that small free version of Lindos, which was a commercial distribution that was trying to do something weird. I used a lot of things at the time, but it just didn't last. Basically, I stuck to Ubuntu and I switched between GNOME and KDE. I remember compiling KDE 4 at the time but it just didn't last basically i stuck to ubuntu and i switched between gnome and kde i remember compiling kde 4 at the time when it was still in alpha and beta i would come back every day download the 500 or 600 megabytes on my on my shitty connection and then it would like take four hours to compile anything and it wouldn't work it was just good days i loved it we've definitely come a long way since that point

that's for sure like i haven't been using linux that long i only started in i want to say like 20 it's on my channel because i did a video about it when i first i want to say like 2018 2019 something like that so i sort of started like it has improved since that point but you were saying you've had hardware issues that that's sort of something that i never really had to deal with i started on like with linux on a laptop i started with arch so if anything was wrong it was going to be wrong on arch and everything basically just works now obviously there's still you know issues here and there especially if you're trying to run certain capture cards, for example, like most things that Elgato makes,

or you're trying to run really specialist hardware. But when it comes to just the general user experience, nowadays, most things are just good. Yeah, it's just plug and play. You plug your stuff, it's detected. I just bought a printer because I used to print stuff when I had a real job, and now I don't, so I didn't have a printer. So I bought one.

I didn't even look what was compatible. I bought this HP thing, and I just turn it on, I connect it to the Wi-Fi, and all my laptops and desktops automatically recognize it and are allowed to print to it. Nothing to install, no drivers, no nothing. The experience is even better than on Windows for that printer. I would have had to download some stuff and I would have had like three or four pieces of shovelware stuffed in my face, so HP printing thingy or HP scan stuff or whatever. The experience was nice. And I mean, I never had like big

hardware issues with Linux. I had like Wi-Fi troubles because at the time that was really the issue. With a Realtek Wi-Fi dongles because my laptop didn't have integrated Wi-Fi at the time. Oh. I had to use a dongle. Oh, yeah. Right. I guess you said 2006, didn't you? Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. And I think it was like from 2004 and it was refurbished and I bought it in 2006. So it was just not a good device, really not. And so that dongle really gave me nightmares. I had to use like something called NDSWrapper, which allows you to grab the Windows driver, the Windows.inf file and use it on Linux. It just reads some values from there and automatically maps that to another driver. I don't exactly know how it works, but it was a weird thing.

And it meant that I had to write a script to restart, to kill the connection and restart it every 24 hours because if not, it would fail and I would have to reboot. Good times, really. But honestly, yeah, nowadays, I can't say I had any issues whatsoever whatever the hardware

there are some small niggles here and there like some fractional scaling issues or some nvidia related stuff but it's not like you can basically install any distro and any hardware and have it work 99 maybe not the fingerprint readers or stuff like that i actually haven't looked into i had a fingerprint reader on my old laptop but i know there are drivers for like certain specific fingerprint readers and it's like there are these really like small but dedicated communities of people around using fingerprint readers but it's not it's not something i've ever actually like really looked too deep into to see what our compatibility is actually like but if I was to do so I'd probably just want to go

and do it on something like Ubuntu or Fedora where it's probably just gonna I don't want to deal with setting it up myself I'm not going to try to do that on Arch I'm not going to do it on Void, I'm not going to do it on Gen do anything like that where I actually have to do it myself I will let the people who you know

want to go and maintain a distro deal with that for me yeah where I actually have to do it myself, I will let the people who, you know, want to go and maintain a distro deal with that for me. Yeah, nowadays the laptops I have are from Slimbook and Tuxedo and they have like a smaller infrared camera next to the main camera. And so you can install something called Slimbook Face which allows you to unlock your computer with your face and it works in the terminal as well. It works when you're trying to log in, it works every time there's a pseudo prompt you just need to make

sure that the light is okay because if you're overexposed or underexposed it won't pick it up but yeah it works really well and so for now fingerprint reader would make no sense for me because that's just way more practical probably not super secure i'm probably sure you can fool it with a picture or something yeah yeah well even even like i think it was a few generations back i want it was apple or samsung one of the major um cell phone manufacturers their um face detection was being fooled by a picture so i wouldn't be surprised if this you know much this much less R&D solution has that similar sort of problem.

But as a convenience feature, I like the idea of just signing with your face. I know it's not probably the safest way to do it, but I tend to just leave my laptop unlocked when I just have it out. So, you know, that's not secure either. Yeah, me too. And my disk is not encrypted.

Oh yeah, if your disk is not encrypted, it's just game over. If someone has hardware access, they can do whatever they want. Yeah, absolutely. They can grab anything they want. You just boot a live CD and a live USB and then you just grab anything. I don't consider myself to be the most valuable of targets though, so I think I'm fine.

You mentioned NVIDIA before, so I guess it's fair to say that you're using a NVIDIA card right now? Yeah, I'm using one on my desktop, which I'm on right now, and I'm using one on my main laptop, which is the Tuxedo Stellaris 15. It's got a 3060 Ti, I think. And and I'm using one on my main laptop which is the Tuxedo Stellaris 15. It's got a 3060 Ti I think. Okay. And so I only have one laptop that doesn't have Nvidia

which is the Slimbook Pro X14. Yeah. What's in your desktop? It's a 3070. Okay, okay. I've been in the market for buying a new GPU, especially with the prices coming down now. I don't know what it's like for you, but in Australia, we're seeing not MSRP, but like a little bit above where previously... So I was looking at the 6700 XT. Previously, they were going for $1,250 Australian.

Now, they are $700. Which is still a lot of money, but it's only like... It's almost half. Yeah, it's like $50 more than it should be, which I'm fine with paying. Especially because right now I'm running a RX 570.

570. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's not fantastic. Roughly a third of the performance. Yeah. Well, it's a good card if you want to game like a 1080p. Works well. I stream with it. It runs perfectly fine.

Yeah. You have a 580 on a very old Mac Pro, like a 2011 Mac Pro. The giant cheater one. And it still runs pretty well. Every time I boot it up, I'm surprised because it's like a 10-year, the giant cheater one. And it still runs pretty well. Every time I boot it up, I'm surprised because it's like a 10-year-old card or something. It just runs well. I don't know.

And as per graphics cards, the only reason I go with NVIDIA is because I use DaVinci Resolve to edit videos. And basically anything other than NVIDIA will be a nightmare to set up for Resolve on Linux. It just doesn't support Intel at all and for AMD you have to install the AMD GPU Pro drivers which also seem to have issues and crash a lot so for now it's just NVIDIA. Yeah a lot of people have asked me to look at DaVinci Resolve. I just haven't gotten around

to it so what is your experience with it actually been like? Well, it's like the most stable piece of software I ever used, like not just for video editing, but for everything basically. It just never ever crashes. It's extremely fast and responsive. I never have any stutters.

I can edit in 4K on the laptop with the 3060. It's got a playback at 60 fps with effects applied color correction applied with tons of titles and transitions on top of it it's still running at 60 fps it's just extremely fast and smooth it's super powerful like you can do audio editing video editing color correction you have a node-based editor for creating your titles your own special effects your own animations which i haven't dived at all into like the it's called fusion i think

yeah i never i haven't dived at all in it but i'm starting to use fairlight which is the audio editor which is like really really nice as well like just audio correction if you have a little bit of echo a little bit of stuff you have a super powerful equalizer you have a super easy to use compressor noise reduction tools it's just an all-in-one package that works well i bought the paid version though because like the free version on linux has abysmal codecs codec i heard something like it doesn't support encoding above 1080p or something weird like that there might be something like that uh but the the most most annoying issue is that it only supports the move container and WAV 16 audio and nothing MP4 based. So you basically have to convert

everything you record to stuff it into it. It's a one FFmpeg command line, but it's taking a long time each time. And I think it's just because they can't license the codecs on Linux because they don't have an agreement with the OS manufacturer. But the paid version has a lot more support. You still cannot use MP3 audio, I think, but anything apart from that works really well. So sometimes if you import an MP4, you're not going to get any audio, so you just have to convert it just to change the audio codec.

But it's not that complicated, and it takes like five seconds, because if you just convert the audio and keep the video as it is, it's just super fast. It's just a very good program, and I used Kdenlive before, which I really liked as well. And it was very stable for me as well with the flatback version. Oh, I was going to say. It didn't crash a lot. Yeah, it didn't crash a lot. Yeah, it didn't crash a lot. Yeah, the app image was horrendous.

I don't think it even started at some point. And the regular packaged version also crashed all the time. The only one that did the trick for me was the flat pack. Yeah. It just worked super well. But there's no GPU acceleration. And so every time you add like three titles on top of your video, it's going to stutter and the playback is going to be horrible.

And the export times are super long compared to Resolve. For Resolve, I export my videos. I export them in 1080p, 60 FPS. And for a 20-bit video, it takes three minutes to export. And Kena Live, it was 30 minutes. Yeah, it's just a big time save, especially when you review your video and you notice like, oh, crap, this title is not well aligned

or I forgot some B-roll here. If you have to re-export the video, it takes three minutes, not 30. So yeah, it's just a time saver. And Kdenlive's GPU acceleration is just... Yeah, there's a toggle for it. You have it. Yeah.

But it crashed all the time for me. It worked well in the editing part, but trying to render with any GPU accelerated effects crashed all the time. I just never managed to make it work. But maybe it was Nvidia related. I haven't had it crash render...

No, that's a lie. I haven't had it crash rendering recently. I don't think it was a gpu related crash so there was a period so kdenlive's it's such a weird program because for a while it went through this period of like one version it's great next version it's terrible and there was a period where the render queue broke so i couldn't the way I usually do my videos I I bulk record so I'll do everything at the start of the week and then I will edit it and usually I'll like render it all out so I just know it's done I

couldn't render multiple videos at once so I had to like open up multiple instances that was a pain but when I have to make some audio edits to this which I probably will because I never managed to like, you know Level audio properly when I'm doing on OBS This will take about I want to say Minimum 45 minutes to render I want to say something like that which isn't horrible could be worse An hour long video or something like that

Whatever ends up however long we end up going for. Yeah, it's... Well, it's not fast. It's not fast. It does... It's not fast. Of the open source solution, this is a sad thing. Right now, of the open source solution, it's probably the best.

Yeah, there's Olive olive which is starting to look good i've heard a lot of good things you accelerate it but it just lacks a ton of effects of color correction tools it's it's just very bare bones right now in terms of what you can do with it but it is gpu so it's apparently it's still in alpha i think but for an alpha it's still very very stable yeah people so this might be like the next thing that that comes in I think, but for an alpha, it's still very, very stable. So this might be the next thing that comes in at some point. But for now, yeah, I just need something that doesn't crash, that doesn't have issues. Especially when I moved to Resolve, I still had a full-time job and I did two videos per week. And I just could not have my video editor not working because I had like one afternoon to do like two videos.

So any single glitch would just throw me off and mean that every video would be delayed. So I had to add a reliable solution and Resolve was it for me. But I wish they had better support. I wish they supported like the basic regular AMD drivers with OpenCL. And so I would in an, replace those NVIDIA cards

because even though the drivers are pretty good on the desktop side of things, I don't have any issues on the desktop side of things. I don't have screen tearing. I don't have stutters. I don't have crashes. The drivers are just good right now. And they even work with Wayland now. I was going to ask you about Wayland. Yeah, it runs on Wayland pretty well. Now, I think it's just very recently. It's like the latest release, like 5.15 point something.

That's the release you want if you want to run Wayland. Anything before that will just have problems. But on Wayland, it runs really well. But on laptops like hybrid, NVIDIA, and laptops like hybrid nvidia and and and intel or or nvidia plus amd it's just it's just a nightmare like linux does not support hybrid well at all it's bad enough with xorg but i've heard nothing but terrible things with the way i had i've spoken people who just say they literally cannot boot into a wayland session i managed to do it on my laptop but I don't think it used the Intel card at all. I think it was supposed to be in hybrid mode, but the Battle Life, I think it would just use the NVIDIA card all the time. So yeah, I don't think that's ready. That's not ready.

But yeah, if Resolve supported AMD GPUs, I would switch in an instant. I would just move to AMD GPU gpus it's just less hassle you have you don't have additional drivers to install you know it's going to run well every time you know there's not going to be a weird release that crashes something and you're going to have to wait like two months for it to be fixed yeah it's just it's just simpler with um with olive i for while, was using 0.1. That was the really alpha version, which isn't being developed anymore. The dev is working on 0.2, and people keep telling me that 0.2 is getting really, really good. So I need to go and check it out again.

The problem is, the way it's being released, there's a nightly build. You can try it out every day. When I last tried it it was great until i tried to render where it has a at least it did at the time i don't know if it's been fixed it had a memory leak where rendering a 10 minute video would use all of my system memory for the record i have 32 gigs of RAM and when it ran out of it when it ran out of memory it would stop the rendering that was not ready it the dev says like this is not production ready this is very much an

alpha so that's totally expected I'm not gonna use olive I was for a while in 0.1 0.1 was fine I'm not using 0.2 until the dev thinks it's ready but when it is, I'm very excited to see what it can actually do. Yeah, and I will absolutely give it a shot because my videos are not very complex. There's not tons of transitions and effects.

Every single animation that I make, I make it just by putting elements on the screen and setting keyframes for them to move. I don't use many of the features of Resolve. All I need is a few transitions, like things that move left and right, a few titles, and that's it. So when Olive

has a good stable release, I will definitely try it. And if it runs well, and if it can do what I need, I will probably move to it. If it's GPU accelerated, if the performance is correct. I'd rather use something open source than a proprietary software, honestly. Well, since we're talking about videos anyway, like what is your... what is like a... I guess... how would I say... what is your process for

making a video? Like from, I guess, your planning stage to like getting it on YouTube? I guess your planning stage to like getting it on YouTube? Well, okay. So I started by picking all the topics I want to talk for the month at the beginning, at the end of the previous month. Okay. I laid down all the topics, three videos per week, including the Linux news videos. And I just put them on a calendar, basically on a to-do list.

I pick all the topics. I offer a bit more than what I need to patrons. Patrons get to vote on the topics that they want to see. And then those topics, I start working on. So I try to do multiple script writes in the same week. So I have stuff in advance. I try to batch write, batch record, and batch edit as much as i can so i mean like one state of mind for every single step yeah i know the feeling yeah so i i write the scripts

in advance they're all fully written uh there's no like no improvisation in the middle of it it's all written uh even the jokes are prepared in advance. But yeah, I write them. It takes about like three to four hours, depending on the topic, to research, to find information, to test the things. Sometimes it's like more eight hours when you have something to try out really hard. Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

And scripts go to about like 12,000 to 13,000 characters, something like that. I try to limit them in that range because after that you tend to have like 20 minute videos and those. It's too long. After that I just set up the recording. So it's mainly in this room, sometimes in my sunroom but yeah the audio is not that great and sometimes you have to like the sun shining right behind you which makes it really hard to color correct properly. So I just record here. I use a sony uh i think it's an alpha

6600 something okay uh camera with a with a a prime lens which is basically an ultra wide 15 millimeter lens super basic no nothing to tweak or do it's it stays on the same settings all the time so i just set it i turn it i record, I set up the lights, I press record, and I get started. Yeah. Once that's done, I copy all the data to the desktop or the laptop. Recently, I've only been editing on the Stellaris 15 because I don't know, I really like editing on a laptop. It just feels nice. I wish it had a 17-inch screen instead of a 15-inch, but it's still good. And so I copy all the data, I put that in's still good and so i copy all the data i put that

in resolve and then there's all the process of normalizing the audio putting it in mono instead of stereo stereo uh like color correcting the thing cutting all the ums as and and weird things that i say because i'm not a native english speaker so i make a lot of mistakes don't worry i am a native english speaker and i make a ton of mistakes as well like sometimes i just like take five tries to to even get a sentence out i'm like come on just just say it and then once that's done i just store that for later i do all the videos like this. And then I just, on the next day generally, I take that edited A-roll and I record the B-roll and I put it on top of it. I put all the animations.

I export. I upload. And then I publish. I generally finish the export in the same day as I will upload and publish. Okay. I tend to finish the video on the same exact day just to make sure that if something has changed in the meantime, if there's something new that's relevant

to the video, I can add a small string of text to correct something that would be incorrect or just even re-record a small part to correct something. I try to not upload too much in advance except when I go on holidays. Yeah.

That's about it. After that, it's just a lot of planning beforehand. And after that, I just go through the motions. I have my to-do list. I know that this video needs to be done for tomorrow, so I need to record this. I need to write this. It's just pretty easy.

Wow. Every time I talk to someone about this, I realize that everybody has way more plans than I am. Well, that's also the style of your videos. Like you're like, you, you,

you're giving your opinions and like you pride yourself on not specifically having a well-detailed script. Like you have your talking points and you follow your, your mental process, which I think is another, another appeal to the video as well, because it's, it's just like a more genuine, I think.

Like it's not prepared, it's not planned. You have not like cut every single word to make that fit into a single format. You just say what you think. And I think that's also a nice way to do it. It does lead to me having to do a lot of re-records. Like if I was to... I have noticed that when I do plan out more, like I obviously I do a lot of research-records like if i was to like i i have noticed that when i do plan out more like i

obviously i do a lot of research on the videos but like i mean planning out in the scripting phase when i do like on the videos that i have done that those videos tend to go really really smoothly which makes sense because i know more about specifically what i'm gonna say but i just i don't know i i've tried it i'm not a really big fan of that style i kind of like the more sort of thinking on the spot i've got i've got my notes laid out in the like order i want to say them and then if you know sometimes i'll think of like a joke on the spot and I'll try to put that in somewhere. Whereas if I was to go purely based on the script, maybe that wouldn't fit as easily. It would sort of seem out of place unless I specifically wrote the joke into the script in the first place. Writing the joke in the script absolutely requires you to have a specific sentence before yeah after the joke because you

have to set it up you can just drop something like this so if if you if you write the jokes in advance you have to write the whole script basically it means that you have everything scripted which yeah it's it's it's a lot of work and yeah and it and it also forces you to go into a certain avenue like you can't think of something on the spot and rejig your script. If I wanted to do that, I would have to be, okay, no, this paragraph doesn't work at all. So I'm stopping the recording.

I'm sitting back down. I'm rewriting something. And then I'm going back to record that thing. And yeah, that's not as fluid probably. The only issue that I have is sometimes when I'm taking notes, I know what I'm thinking at the time. I come back to the recording, I'm like, wait, why did I write that?

What am I trying to say here? I've gotten, I try to expand upon things a little bit more because there have been plenty of times where I'd look at my notes. Sometimes I'll play in things a little bit more because there have been plenty of times where I'd look at my notes like sometimes I'll play in things like a month in advance like they just sort of like it's not something that's timely it's like hey I'm looking at this piece of software it can sort of happen whenever and it just falls further and further back into the list and when I get to it I have no idea what the hell I wrote yeah you have like a small bullet points with three words and you're like what yeah exactly and so sometimes i look at my list of video ideas because i have like a task list with everything i

i think about sometimes and sometimes i look at that i'm like what is this what what did i want to talk about exactly because there's like just three words jotted in a hurry and like I don't understand why that would make a video but for me I have to plan these I have to write these because as I'm not an English native English speaker if I try to go I tried the first videos I made were

like rambly I just recorded myself I blasted music super loudly and I just oh no I just recorded myself as I blasted music super loudly. Give me the prompt before I'm going to bring it up now. Oh no. I just recorded myself as I was trying something and I just noticed I was so nervous

and I just felt like I couldn't talk, I couldn't speak English well enough, so I was speaking extremely fast, I was talking extremely fast and I just like stumbled and mumbled the words and it just was not interesting or audible so i had to prepare the scripts in advance so i would make sure that i wouldn't get confused by trying to speak in another language and trying to convey

my point at the same time now it's been like five years so i'm more comfortable with it but uh but it took a while i think everybody goes to that problem of not really knowing how to speak on camera. But you've got, like, obviously the problem of not knowing English as well is going to be a big deal. But even, like, when I first started, for example, I think a problem that a lot of people don't realize is when you're speaking on camera, you can't really just speak on camera. is when you're speaking on camera, you can't really just speak on camera. The way that you talk into a microphone is... It has to be different from the way you normally talk.

Because I've noticed this with every single person. Their first videos, with the exception of a couple of crazy people, they sound really, really monotone, and they sound like they don't really want to be there. Like, go back to DistroTube's early videos, go back to your early videos, go back to my early videos. It's all the exact same. You know what you're trying to talk about,

but it just doesn't sound like a video. You don't really know how that works yet. And honestly, I think it doesn't even sound like the way you spoke the words because I think the microphone just flattens everything and normalizes everything. And when you try to record a video, you have to emphasize words. You have to put like a higher voice volume on some words. You have to do that to like separate the sentences to emphasize your point. And that's something you learn because well

when you start you're like hey guys this is nick and and it just doesn't work yeah it doesn't work for video it would work if you were talking to somebody face to face but but on a mic for a video it's it just feels like flat and it's not interesting there are certain people that work really well with like there are a couple of Twitch streamers that have a very particular voice where you sort of expect them to have that monotone way of presenting. But those are very particular people. Like there'll be some people that have like really, really like deep and gravelly voices

where talking in any other way would sound weird to them. But for the regular sort of person i absolutely agree you need to well the other problem there is you don't want to start like emulating the style of someone else like you want to sort of make that style of speaking on the microphone work for your style of voice and the way that you're trying to present the content like if you were trying to like if you wanted to present a video like mr beast would present a video for example it would seem really really out of place but absolutely like that's a style that works for that kind of content and for that kind of person but you gotta

find the thing that works for you and the thing that works for the way you want to the way you want to achieve your content i think that's something that i've only sort of recently worked out like i've tried different ways of presenting videos over the past couple of years and i would say it's not really till maybe the last six months to a year or so where I actually feel like I'm actually comfortable on the microphone not just I am talking here and it seems like I know what I'm doing it's maybe it's not something that people watching the video notice but it's something that especially when you when you're editing your own content and you hear your voice so many times, like you do hundreds. In my case,

I've done over a thousand videos. You really start to pick up on the way that your voice is changing, the way your presentation style is changing over that time. You have the exact same timeline. I think my videos have started really getting better when I got the Sony camera. Yeah. Because I was recording everything on a smartphone before. So everything looked really flat.

There was no depth. You made the correct decision. The colors were just super muted. So I went with something a little bit better. And at that point, I also decided that I wanted to change a little bit of the style. So I stopped sitting down and I started being up. So I record everything like standing up and I don't know it just gave me a little bit more of energy instead of being lounging in the chair

and talking about something you're up you're talking it's like you're giving some kind of a talk or conference and it just I think it just made my stuff more dynamic and now I feel really comfortable with that style it just feels like normal for me and i don't dread the recording part like i used to because before i was like oh no this is gonna be hard how are you gonna mumble this paragraph that you want to do facing the camera nowadays i'm just okay let's record boom i do it i whip it out in like 30 minutes for a 15 minute video and we're done wow basically i cut off half. Yeah, your planning does a lot to shorten that down. It usually takes me about an hour

to record. Yeah. But I guess you also spend more time during the scripting phase. Yeah, writing the script takes from two to six or eight hours depending on what I want to record. If I have to try something out, like when I review a laptop, when I review a small

NUC, when i review a distro i will just use that distro with a notepad i use my galaxy s8 with the stylus and i just jot down stuff as i'm trying things out things out and then i just collate all of that and then i write something and when i write the script i know which parts i'm gonna say uh face into camera and which parts i'm gonna put b-roll over which means that the parts that I'm gonna put beer all over I can just like grab my smartphone and read that and As long as you read it with enough and faces it just feels okay. You can tell that I'm reading something Yeah, but it just doesn't feel super different from when I'm just recording myself facing the camera How do you that that shaves off basically half the time?

I'm just recording myself facing the camera. So that shaves off basically half the time. How do you handle your script? Like, do you have it on like a teleprompter on a screen somewhere? Like, what do you do with it? It's on NextCloud Notes and I have it on my smartphone. Do you have that just sitting behind the camera?

Yeah. I have it in my hand generally. That's why you only, basically you only see one hand or the other moving because the other one is underneath the camera with the phone. And so either I memorize the thing that I want to say, and I just say it facing the camera. Or I just read it off the Nextcloud notes when I know it's something that's going to be covered with B-roll. Oh, okay. That makes sense.

All the audio has the same levels because I'm in the exact same spot with the microphone sitting in the exact same position. But everything that I know, I'm not the exact same spot with the microphone sitting in the exact same position. But everything that I know I'm not going to be looking at the camera at, why would I try and stumble and fail and rerecord if I know it's just going to be hidden? You're not going to see my face, so I might as well read it. Huh. That makes sense.

Yeah, this really gained me, I don't know, 30 minutes per video or something Yeah, when I started doing that, but you also lose so much time in the the The other player. Yeah, so like absolutely you gain this time, but you'll see lose in other places Either way like you spend a lot of time on I how how much time do you think you spend on each video you would say? you spend on each video you would say uh on a news video on a news video i would say like maybe four or five hours in total uh because well that's just the reading or the rss feeds like writing small paragraphs for each thing and the recording goes extremely fast and the editing is also super fast because it's basically automatic like put like a background you put the the article you make it scroll and

then you move on to the other one it's super easy for other videos it's more like eight hours i'd say eight to ten hours depending on on what you have to to test to try and to record if you're doing a distro review or you're doing you're looking at hardware yeah through a laptop review it's going to be like 10 hours and for a more like opinion piece it's going to be like 10 hours. And for a more like opinion piece, it's going to be six to eight hours. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

Oh, I guess a big chunk of that time is the script writing. Because when I'm like, most of my time is on the research. Like the script writing or the note taking and whatever you want to call it. like the script writing or the note taking and whatever you want to call it that's probably only like that's probably only like maybe at most an hour on most videos but then the research is probably like another like a minute if it's something simple like it's just i'm looking at a blog post or whatever that's usually an hour but some it'll go longer than that i would say overall yeah probably about the same for most of my content but if it's something simpler like if it's something where it's purely just my opinion on something like uh for example i'm getting a lot of these stupid comments with people not understanding what the word stable means.

So I talked about Debbie and Sid today, and I said Debbie and Sid is unstable. And it's just like, yes, because that's what it is. Stable can mean a stable environment or, you know, stable as in doesn't crash. And things like that, they usually happen relatively quickly. But when it's something like, the thing I covered the other day with the Microsoft Pluton coprocessor,

which on Lenovo systems is locking out Linux installs, there was a bunch of different articles I wanted to read on that. I wanted to go and dig into what that coprocessor was. That one took a bit longer. Because the way I saw a lot of people approaching that, whenever Microsoft is involved in anything, or Red Hat is involved in anything,

it's slowly becoming canonical involved in it as well. It's just instantly, this is bad. Not really considering what's actually happening. I actually want to dig into that and make sure that people have it if you want to hate it go ahead that's totally fine but i want you to have the fact i want you to hate it for the like why it's actually bad not just it's not because it's microsoft or red hat it's because yeah they did something bad and and you should hate it but yeah or you consider it bad and you want to hate it for that.

It's not just because it's Microsoft or Google or whatever. But yeah, people have knee-jerk reactions a lot. I was going to say in the Linux community, but I think it's everywhere nowadays. People just react instantly to something. They just make their opinion in a tenth of a second and they won't budge from that ever so that's yeah

you can see it in the YouTube comments I've noticed it's like it's mostly good I think if you structure your content in a healthy way that sort of fosters good discussion it tends to lead to people who want to have good discussions

getting involved in that but you're always going to lead to people who want to have good discussions getting involved in that. But you're always going to have the people who either have a bad day and want to just leave an angry comment. Or I guess there's someone new who wants to come in who wants to explain whatever it is that is their passion project for today. But I don't know. How's that like for you like your channel is much bigger than mine is what is your comment section generally like do you read the comments actually i do i do read all comments i don't answer every single one of them anymore i used to but now i just can't so when i see something that i agree with i just drop that little heart and when that's something when there is something that is utterly, factually super wrong and might even be detrimental for others, I answer that.

When there's something super positive with a good idea, I try to answer that as well. And everything in the middle, I will just either like or ignore. My comment sections are generally okay. It's mostly, well, it evolves over time. Like when you publish the video, when you first publish the video, in the first like maybe six or seven hours,

you mainly only get your subscribers commenting. And so it's generally very positive. They're like, hey, great video, even though they didn't even watch it yet. But hey, great video. It's been published since a minute. But yeah, great video. I always get since a minute but yeah great video i always get someone who comments first on every video yeah or first or i even get the second and third ones and

whatever but it's okay it's fine it's right yeah no that's cool do that do that i'm okay and and after a while when youtube starts recommending the video to other people then you start to see the tone of the comments shift somewhat uh Depends on the topic, obviously, but the more the video is up, the more chance there is that people are going to be really, really detrimental or insulting or negative. I don't have many

insulting comments on myself or my person or the quality of the video itself, but the content, yeah. Some people are people are like oh you don't know what you're talking about what's your experience uh you haven't tried that really you don't know yeah there's a lot of that but that generally happens after like the initial age even sometimes after the first 24 hours of publication. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Well, your content's not really focused about you as a person.

It's more focused on, you know... Actually, you know what, we're gonna see what your latest video is. Pop! West is special and... Okay, you know, I take back what I said. This video is specifically about you. Yeah, this one's specific. Let's go to the previous one.

Yeah. That was the Linux news and... That was... Yeah, it's generally opinion pieces, but it's not like hey look at me. I'm doing this Yeah, it's generally more like this is what I think about something, but it's not like I do this this way It's not my person. It's my opinion. And so people attack that opinion, but they don't attack my person. Yeah, that makes generally they don't attack my person yeah that makes generally anyways well people also like there's there seems to be people who want to just jump onto like it's one thing to not like the video like whatever go ahead that's fine if you think that i've said something wrong go ahead it's when you just jump on like the person themselves like you don't actually have anything to say about the content it's like oh this this about you is bad like i don't okay like i don't actually have anything to say about the content. It's like, oh, this about you is bad.

Like, okay, like, I don't care. I hate your voice. Oh, your t-shirt is too small. Oh, I don't like your plants. Cool, dude. I don't know why they wouldn't like your plants. Your plants are pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know.

Some people do. Or like, oh, no, another neck beard or whatever. Oh, yeah. Your left eyebrow moves more than your right eyebrow. This really happened, by the way. This is a real comment that happens often. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, it's okay.

I don't take it personally anymore. When I started, like, a single negative comment could ruin my week. I was like, oh, no, what did I do? I suck. People are going to stop watching now. It's terrible. Nowadays, I'm like, okay, well, you don't like it. You don't like it.

You disagree. You disagree. It's okay. And if you're willing to have a constructive discussion about this, we can do that in the comments. And if you're just here to attack and insult, well, I'm just going to ignore the comment and it's okay. That's something I've definitely been working on.

Early on, they tend to get to me. There are some that still do. The comments that do get to me aren't the ones that people think are the ones that get to me. It's not, oh, your opinion's wrong about this. If I'm wrong about something and I'm legitimately wrong about it, great, please tell me.

I'm not going to tell people what it is that annoys me because then they'll specifically go for that. They'll do it. Never show weakness on the internet. But I have been... I think the thing that's helped me actually deal with that is actually trying to get outside again and just get away from the internet.

Because I've slowly been working on, you know, getting hobbies outside of my computer, outside of content creation, because it's not particularly healthy to be inside all the time. So that's... No, absolutely not. That's a big reason why I've started, you know, getting back into working out again.

I'm a big fan of golf as well. So I want to do some more golf when it's not raining and, you know, I can be outside. But I think that's a big... You know, getting yourself interested in things outside of the channel, not staring at your analytics all the time, it's going to help out with your mental situation in that regard.

Absolutely. And this is also why I don't work on my videos more than five hours a day. Not that I'm going YouTube full-time. I try to have three or four hours of me time in the afternoon or in the morning to just watch a video, go outside, go for a run, meet a friend, just drive around and go somewhere,

go to the beach, whatever. But yeah, I was very afraid when I started doing YouTube only that I would just completely lock myself inside. Because you have your computer, you have videos to make, you have your work, and then you want to game maybe on that computer or on your Steam Deck or on your TV, whatever. Do you split up your hobby computer and your work computer or is it all on the same computer? They used to be. So I do not use my desktop computer to game anymore because once I'm done working,

I just cannot be in that room again. Yeah, that's good. No, I don't want to be here again. I don't want to be sitting in front of that screen. I've done that for like four hours. So I only game on the Steam Deck these days because the desktop is just way more powerful and it's a way better experience for a lot of games,

but I just don't want to. I should probably have another gaming computer. Maybe I'll do that with SteamOS when it's released, SteamOS 3 is released. Maybe I'll build a Steam console that I put under my TV, and so when I want to game, I game on that. But we'll see how that goes when they release it and how well that works.

Yeah, that's definitely... Right now I'm renting a room in my mate's house, and it's great because it's not as tiny as the last place I was at, so I actually can get out of my room, but I have all of my computer stuff in here. So when I'm working, I'm in here. When I'm gaming, I'm in here. So I'm, when I'm working, I'm in here. When I'm gaming,

I'm in here. When I'm sleeping, I'm in here. The only time, like for a while, the only times I was really getting out, cause I, uh,

I still do have a job. So basically it was going to work, which no doing YouTube stuff all day and then going to work. It's fine for a while but you realize after a while like wait i'm working like 70 hour weeks aren't i yeah absolutely that that's what i did for like four years and i i just could not take it anymore so something something had to go and honestly if the channel hadn't been like that successful well well, it's not like an insane viral growth or whatever. It's not like LTT, but it's enough for me to make a living.

And if that point hadn't been reached, I would probably have just like stopped making videos or just made like one each week or one every two weeks because I just could not maintain that rhythm anymore. I had no weekends. I saw my friends like once a month. I never got out of the house except to go to work. I was just completely stressed all the time because I had so many things to do.

I could not focus at work because I knew that I had a video I had to work on at the end of the day. And in the weekends, like Saturday, I woke up at 8 and I started working on all the videos to prepare them to have less work to do on the rest of the week it was just like too much it was too much that's one of the things now the rhythm is just way better that's one of the things i've been much better i was pretty bad at this when i was going through university but since then i don't tend to work on the channel on the weekend because i don't work full-time. I've got more time during the week to do stuff. So I can fit everything in Monday to Friday.

So if I want to do whatever it is I want to do on the weekend, maybe I want to go up to my parents place for the weekend and just get away from my house. That I can do. There was a time where I... When I was doing uni and I was working and doing the channel it gets to the point where it feels like every time you get to the end of the week the next week

is starting again and there's never a period where you can have a reasonable break so minimum, give yourself at least one day and let that be your rest day where you don't do anything don't check your analytics don't you know check your emails whatever it is just find some time to chill it will make everything go much much smoother

preferably find two days two days is quite nice because that's what i'm trying to do these days i'm trying to not work on saturdays and and i'm mostly succeeding but uh yeah and i try to not look at twitter i try to not look at analytics i i've just i'm really bad we'll see on monday yeah yeah it's it's really tough it's really tough like i i'm having a huge twitter detox recently because uh with everything that's happening, I just got way overexcited, like not on the Linux stuff, on the politics and abortions and whatever.

And I'm very, very annoyed at these topics. And so I started getting into Twitter fights with a lot of people that I don't know, that I will never meet and that I will never convince that they are obviously, obviously very wrong. So, okay okay it's okay I just decided you know what we're gonna talk about Linux about positive things in there and we're gonna stop trying to to intervene in discussions that you can never convince what

about and that has made a ton of difference on my mental health like I I am not stressed i am not angry it's just so much better and sometimes i read a tweet and i'm like oh oh this person is so wrong oh oh you should answer that and i'm like no no he's right he's wrong he can be wrong it's okay maybe he's not let's not talk about it one thing that is forgotten in like two seconds one thing we're a lot friendlier with recently is the block button yeah it's a nice button i like it yeah block and mute like those are i've seen a lot of views recently yeah yeah i i kind of got over my arguing with people that politics phase a couple of years ago and i there are times when it like bubbles back up like there are certain people that annoy me i'm like you know what no we're not doing this we spent so much time

like arguing people who are never look I don't even know if they're actual people considering how good some of the chatbots are nowadays I could be arguing with a bot I don't know yeah it's just and it's just time wasted because if you argue with a friend

about politics you can have a constructive discussion. But arguing online with 140 characters to try to carry like a specifically complex point of view about religion, politics, like body image, like gender, whatever, it's just not possible. And so you're going to leave out some details or some information to fit in that space. not possible and so you're gonna leave out some details or some information to fit in that space and then the people in front of you is gonna call you out because you left out something and they're gonna attack the little thing that's missing you're gonna answer that and then they're gonna attack the other little thing that's missing and it's never gonna go anywhere if you want to have conversations like these like twitter is just not the place it's not the place well what it devolves into is basically sort of gotchas like one person will say something and then you know someone

would they'll either reply be like this is why you're wrong although this is more annoying I don't know why Twitter even has this as a feature they'll quote tweet it so it like breaks the comment thread as well so like it's not even easy to follow at that point yeah yeah and they're gonna be like ah i got you on that little technicality because the word you use that can be interpreted in two different ways and i choose to interpret it in the other way and so you're wrong you're like yeah okay dude okay that's yeah it's no it doesn't work like that and so well it just helps to just not focus on that anymore it's just much much better, quote tweet is a great thing.

And the analytics is hard to not look at, though. It is very difficult to not look at. Especially when you've just uploaded a video. You're like, is this in the range that it should be? I have realized that if a video is in the range that it should be in the first two hours, it's going to be in that range. Just ignore it from now on. The number will keep going up.

Just, it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly the same. I look for it like the first 30 minutes to see just how well it's positioned in terms of the last 10 videos. If it's in the like one to six or seven range, I'm like, okay, it's good.

Because basically for my 10 last videos, they're in like a, such a small differences in terms of view. Like in the first 30 minutes, the first one must be at, I don't know, like 3.5 thousand views. And the last one must be at 2.7.

Yeah. So if you're in that range, you're good. Even if, as long as you're not like the last one, I'm not worried. And then I look back like one or two hours after that and as you said if it's in the right range i'm like okay that's good it's gonna do well let's forget about it and then you just look at the

comments from time to time and you look at it and it's a 10 and you're like oh yeah that's the word the channel is over i'm ruined yeah exactly you're like oh no what happened and do people not like the topic should i change the title should i change the thumbnail no it's too late it's too late you can't do anything it's 10 out of 10 you can't save it it's dead yeah it's dead it's just not gonna work and i mean some videos that i upload i'm like i know it's not gonna do well because i know it it's something that interests me i want to talk about it but i know people are not going to be super interested about it. It's okay.

I accept it. But sometimes you're like, oh, this one should be an interesting one. And then you're like, oh, people don't give a crap. Yeah, those are the weirdest ones because let's see, what did I do recently? Those ones did relatively well.

That's my last one. Um, those ones did relatively well. Uh, actually, I'm not seeing anything that surprisingly underperformed. Uh, well, I saw one that I knew wasn't going to do super well. It's just something I wanted to address. Like, I talked about, like, what the purpose of code licensing is, which, you know, there's going to be a small subset of people who actually care about that but it's something that i particularly want to talk about the weirder ones to me are the ones that do like exceptionally well and i don't know why

yeah well i've noticed that well it's not a secret i haven't discovered anything incredible but basically if you if your title or your thumbnail implies negativity towards something, the video is going to do well. Like if you say, why people hate this? Why I think this is not great? Even if you just say, I stopped using that. Even if the video says, you know what?

It's a fantastic thing, but I found something even better. Even if it just says, I stopped using that, people are going to click on it because they want to see someone cram on something else. That's generally what happens. Yeah. The video I made about the open source licenses also did terribly.

It's like one of the worst videos I made in the past. Which is hilarious considering the space around it. Like one year. Yeah, it's really weird. And laptop reviews, hardware reviews also generally don't do well on my channel. I love doing them, but they don't work well. I think that would be something that is very particular about the device.

Yeah. If you don't have something, it's super cheap, or it's extremely powerful, or it has an insanely weird Linux version out of the box. If it's a Steam Deck, of course it's working. Yeah. But if it's like your run-of-the-mill laptop, next month I'm going to get three devices to review, two from Slimbook and one from Star Labs.

Okay. And I know that these, when I review them, if I don't find a specific angle that makes them very interesting, I know they're not going to perform that well. This is the worst laptop you'll ever see. Exactly. And this would work absolutely well, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.

If I said, like, this Slimbook thing is just horrible, boom, like 80,000 views. If it's either the greatest laptop... The weird thing is that doesn't usually do as well. Greatest doesn't even work, yeah. There are some things where it's like weird particular things. Like if it... I don't know, what would even work? I don't... I know there are some edge cases where you can get that to function.

I can't even think of anything off the top of my head. When it's unexpected. Yeah. Let's say. People would assume that on Linux. Let's say. I don't know. Krita is the best drawing program.

And painting program. And you say. This is the best painting program. And it's not Krita. People are going to be like. What? And they're going to click on that. Yeah.

That's a good point. But if you do it on a laptop, I don't think that's going to work because it's so subjective. People need to want to look at laptops. You need to not have used that tagline before because it doesn't work if you don't read it. But if it's a bad laptop.

But if it's a bad laptop, people are going to watch it because they want to know what's bad about it and make sure that they can either disagree vehemently with you or just be like, ha ha, somebody made something that's bad about it and make sure that they can either disagree vehemently with you or just be like haha somebody made something that's bad it works but i tend to i try not to fall into that too much uh because well first it's well it's pure clickbait and uh and and it's a bit annoying as well i think for people to only have negativity all the time like this is bad. This is bad And then the video says you know what it's not that bad

yeah, one is something I've been trying out recently sort of Titling in a way that grabs people's attention in like things that they should hate like I did this video did really well Like when Leonard Pottering left to join microsoft people don't like lenart but if i can if i can sort of like i want that video to be a overall positive video and sort of explain you know who i actually like explain like who he is like what he's done over the years like the positive work that he's done like don't, I don't know why people don't like Len out to be honest, but I know that if I can sort of make it seem like the video is going to be negative and then sort of bring people back in,

in like a, hopefully get leave, let them leave with a positive impression of the topic that also tends to sort of do well yeah that that's the same thing i did for example with uh with my video on electron i said like why people don't like why people hate electron and i start by yeah you know what i even started the video by why developers like electron so it's like yeah there are some positives as well to that and then i explain what the negatives are and i explain my opinion on it. But the title can be a bit negative, but the whole video isn't.

It's just not just dumping and hitting something like this is bad, this is bad. I did the same thing with Ubuntu when I was like, I've stopped using Ubuntu. I don't recommend Ubuntu anymore. Or why people hate Ubuntu. There's been two videos like that. But it's not overwhelmingly negative. It's just explaining what people think is bad about this thing. What I think about those opinions.

And that's about it. So the title just works with the content of the video. But it still grabs people's attention. Because obviously it's a bit negative. And people like that. Yeah. I think one thing that people are very... I don't know if they're jumpy towards or like really hesitant about nowadays is clickbait like i remember when clickbait sort of

first started being a term that people were using that was back in the days where you would have it would be an article it would be like top 10 celebrity nip slips or something like that and then there'll be nothing in the article about that. Or, you know, you'd have a YouTube video where they would have like some girl in a bikini and it had nothing to do with the video like that. I think that's like objectively clickbait,

but I've done things where, you know, it's, it, it's not clickbait. It's just maybe some exaggeration, for example. Or maybe I don't say exactly what the video is going to be. It's attention-grabbing.

Yeah, it's attention-grabbing. It's not clickbait if you leave some mystery from the title and the thumbnail. If you say, I like this, but... Yeah, yeah. This is not clickbait. If you say, I hate this thing, and you don't say what the thing is, this is not clickbait. Clickbait is when you write a title or a thumbnail and say something that has nothing to do with the content of the video.

If I say, this is the greatest laptop I've ever used, and then the video is about a mediocre, weird laptop, and my conclusions are like, hey, it's not that good. This is clickbait. Yeah. If I say, I found a way to get Microsoft Office 365 running on Linux in one click, and then the video is like 30 minutes long, I'm going to use a VM. That's clickbait. Yeah.

Okay. But if you disagree with the opinion, or if you think that I left out a specific part just to grab your attention this is not clickbait and people have a hard time like understanding this or some people do at least yeah it's always like whenever i'm talking about this i think most people understand it but there's always these like the small loud number of people and these are the people that tend to like it shouldn't be the people that grab your attention there are certain people just being positive about the content like you look at the like to dislike ratio it's like 99 98 but there's this one guy and no matter how much like

you say it doesn't bother you there's still like a little part of your brain where it's like absolutely this person doesn't like it i've done something wrong yeah yeah and this person doesn't like it. I've done something wrong. Yeah. Yeah, and this person doesn't like it, but just doesn't say, I'm sorry I didn't enjoy the video. He says, this is clickbait. I watched the whole thing, and you never did this. And that's not the definition of clickbait.

What are you saying? And you feel compelled to answer that person, but you shouldn't, because they're going to keep doing it if you do. I love the, I'm unsubscribing because of this oh yeah and i i don't know if you know if you've noticed this but you can't just on desktop but on mobile if you click on someone's name you can see their comment history a lot of the time these people haven't commented i never saw that

i don't know who you are man like what are you talking about yeah exactly if it's a name that some of the names in the comments I recognize some people that I interact with regularly and so I'm like hey I know this person if someone like that that's been following the channel for 3 or 4 years says I'm sorry dude

I'm unsubscribing I just can't take it anymore you're doing this and this and this wrong that's gonna affect me. If I see like alpha 22, 23 with no user pick saying, I'm unsubscribing because too many ads. Well, goodbye, dude. It's okay. Like you can install ad block if you want.

I'm not going to cry. But if you want to unsubscribe, unsubscribe. I don't know you. It would be like entering into a shop and saying I'm never shopping there anymore and going out Yeah, Cashew is gonna look at you like who are you? I Know that you have the Linode sponsorship in your videos quite often. How do you tend to approach? sponsors

Like what I never know. I don't mean not like that i mean like having them in your videos like how do you like do you have any rules you set out for like the way you're going to integrate them into your videos well i have like a very strict rule about the sponsors i agree to work with which is either i have to use the product or i have to try the product enough to make sure that it's good. I will never accept like any basic VPN dude or, hey, review our gaming chair and we sponsor your video. This I will never do. It has to have a link with the content I make,

not specifically the video, but with the channel at least. So it has to be privacy related, Linux related, open source related, or be an app that runs on Linux. I get approached by tons of people like specifically a company that I won't name which has like tons of products for video editing stuff

like that and they're like hey do you want to you probably know which one it is and I'm like hey I'm happy to work with you if you have a Linux version and they never answer back because they don't but they still come back often yeah and uh yeah i i just select the sponsors this way and and then i don't necessarily want to have a link between the content itself and what the sponsor offers it's better if there is one but i don't think that's necessary

like i think people who watch the videos have an open mind about various topics. They're interested in Linux. They're interested in open source, in various applications, in tech in general, in privacy. So if I talk about privacy in a video that discusses open source licenses, I don't think that's not a fit. I think that still works. And that allows me to have much flexibility in terms of where I place each sponsor, if I can switch out some topics from time to time. After that, I tend to propose all the topics that I have to Linode first

because they have been the first sponsor that I ever had. They pick the ones they're interested in. And then I divide the rest of the topics with the rest of my sponsors that I have. It's all regular sponsors nowadays. I very rarely have like one-offs, like somebody dropping in and say, I'm sponsoring just one video. In general, three to six videos at least. And the ones I have, like there's Safing, there's Linode, there's KernelCare. These guys have been here for like two, three three years four years in the case of lenode

they're really like recurring sponsorships and i've i don't think they're going anywhere like at least if they are they're not telling me but i think they're gonna they're gonna keep sponsoring the channel because i'll be honest i don't charge enough for these compared to what i should but that also allows me to have basically one sponsor for each video, which means in the end, I think it's more interesting for me financially to do that. And also, if a video doesn't perform extremely well, the sponsor is not like, oh, no, this video didn't work. I'm not for that because they have a baseline number of views that works all the time.

But I will try to stay very strict about what i talk and what i don't talk about i don't do fully sponsored videos anymore i only did two one for start page and one for proton and people just do not like them like you you you can make the whole objective review even point out some negative things but people are going to say you only did that because you got paid and either you don't say you got paid but that's illegal don't say you got paid, but that's illegal. Or you say you got paid and people just do not pay attention to what you say because he got paid. So obviously he can't be objective. And I understand that.

And so I don't do them anymore. It just doesn't feel, even when I write the script, I feel that it just doesn't feel right. You feel like there's a constraint on what you're writing. Because you're like, they're still giving you money for this you can't be that negative and you try to be as objective as possible but at the end of your brain at the back of your brain there's something telling you like you should try to be like nice a little bit and i just don't like that feeling so i don't do it anymore there was one company that came to me they were like hey we'll send you this laptop but it's gonna be a paid review like nope go away not happening not happening i'm happy to

review it for free yeah but it's gonna be an honest review but i'm not getting paid for that yeah absolutely yeah so yeah yeah i I sort of approach it and say, I don't really have sponsors on the main channel right now. I have the Linode affiliate, but I would approach it basically in the exact same way. Like that seems like a really good way to do it. I don't really think it's a big deal about like sponsor location. Like some people are really touchy about like having it at the start

or they'll only do ones having it at the start, or they'll only do ones that are at the end, for example. It doesn't matter, yeah. But now, I've said this before, but if you want to pay me to do stupid stuff, the podcast, I have no morals. I will sell anything here. This is the show where I... Mattresses.

Mattresses. I've said it before. Underwear. I don't care. I've said anything here. This is the show. Mattresses. Mattresses. I've said it before. Underwear. I don't care. I've said it before. If someone wants me to sell fleshlights, I'll happily do it. That's fine. Now, the main channel, I have morals there.

Here, I don't care. So Chinese game key resellers or like, no, NFTs I won't do. And maybe the Chinese key resellers I won't do. Because I won't do things that are like openly scams or like pyramid schemes or whatever. But like, you know, if there was a company that came, I wish they came to me like recently. It was a company that wanted me to sell coffee. It's like. Yeah, why not?

Sure. Not on the channel, but. That was going to be on the main channel. The only reason I didn't is they didn't ship to Australia. Like. Oh, yeah. I would happily do this. I like coffee, but you don't ship to my country and I can't taste it. I've been approached by a company that also sold coffee.

Maybe it was the same. And I'm like, why not? I mean, people who use Linux probably also drink coffee. They could be interested. and I would try it. Except I hate coffee. I find it disgusting. And so I'm not the best person to talk about it because I've already said in a few videos, I hate coffee and I don't like it. So I'm not going to be like, hey, this coffee is really good.

Even if I don't like coffee, I find this amazing. No, that's just not believable. So I was like, no, sorry, just it's not something for me. So I don't like coffee I find this amazing that's just not believable so I was like no sorry it's not something for me so I don't want to talk about it this means I just left out a ton of money on the table I've refused tons of VPNs because I just don't trust some of them I don't trust any of them basically

I've refused tons of mobile games I've been approached by Clash of Clans, by Raid Shadow Legends of course at some point I had two different advertising agencies that approached me for one video about Raid Shadow Legends, I was like

I could just make one sponsored video and tell each agency it was for them and get paid twice for it and I was like nah come on, don't do it. That sucks. But yeah, I've reviewed a ton of weird things, like reviewing, I don't know,

like robo, robotic, like mailboxes that you put in front of your house that you can open remotely so people can drop your packages in them. I don't even live in a house. What am I going to review that for? So many things that have nothing to do with the things I do. And I mean, if you're Linus Tech Tips,

you can get away with having a sponsor for a giant Jackery battery pack that costs 8,000 bucks. It's okay. You can do it. They have enough views that it can, even if they sell two of them at the end of the video, it's worth it. But on my channel, I just don't want to do that. I don't want to be like, yeah, take anybody, anything.

I don't care. Like bring it in as long as it's not shady or scammy. No, I want to have stuff that is related to what I do or that I can use. So yeah, it means that I'm not making as much money as I could, but it means I can sleep at night. So that's nice. When you have companies send you stuff stuff do you have the same problem of them sending you a lot of landfill no stickers bottles shirts all of this

stuff oh yeah they're like I don't know why they do this because do they expect you to just like cover your own laptop or the background of the stickers or wear their shirts like no it's yeah thank you for this it's it's goodies i guess why not but no that's i don't need this i'm gonna i'm gonna send it back to you afterwards most in most cases like i'm gonna resend you the t-shirt and the stickers as well as the thing that you sent me to review. Yeah, it's just weird. Linode sent me a shirt ages back. I only kept it because it was a fairly comfy shirt.

It was a good workout shirt if nothing else. Yeah. They never sent me a Linode shirt. I think I got one from Favivaldi as well at one point. I don't remember why. I think I was the only guy in the Linux space

that didn't openly hate Vivaldi. Well, yeah, I've never been positive about Vivaldi, but I refused to do a dedicated video about it. They wanted me to do a dedicated video. Not paid for, they were just like, I think it was when Manjaro KD added Vivaldi as the default browser. And they said,

in the wake of this news, would you like to review the browser entirely, etc.? And I said, I just did a video comparing most browsers at the time, and yeah, I'm just not that interested. I don't think Vivaldi is bad. But for me, it's just not a browser I'd want to use because there's just too much stuff

and that's not what I need my browser for. What are you running right now? I don't think I hate. Oh, I'm Firefox all the way everywhere. But it's not the best browser there is absolutely not uh but i don't want to run anything based on chromium because i i just do not like that google monopoly on on the web rendering engines i'm stupid like that so i accepted the monopoly that look google can take over the world it's fine i won't run chrome but will run yeah not Chrome yeah

well just because you accepted the monopoly doesn't mean you accept Spyware but yeah I'm sticking to Firefox and unless there's really like a huge huge performance gap or something or some websites that I use regularly that stop working with Firefox I will stick with it if tomorrow

like Chromium has an update that makes it it twice as fast and it does weird things that Firefox can never match, then yeah, okay, sure. At that point, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot every day. I'm going to switch.

But for now, I don't think the difference is just good enough for me to move on. Well, the web has sort of, over the years, it's gotten a lot more consistent across things. So there was a time, you know, Internet Explorer was the king. And because of that, you know,

you had sites designed around IE6 and IE7. Like there are still companies right now that have internal intranets based around it. And it only works on that browser. But when we're talking about the general web, the main problem we had over a lot of years was HTML. It was mainly HTML and JavaScript were not consistent between every browser engine. Nowadays, it mostly is.

There's still some like tiny tweaks you have to do to make sure everything's all good. But as for like general things, you don't usually notice a difference like the difference that exists now isn't fundamental compatibility it's hey does this uh have does this actually handle video decoding properly things like that yeah yeah is this browser able to display rounded corners or something or not? I've worked for the past 11 years as a product owner, project manager, and basically only web stuff. I did a little bit of mobile apps, but it was just websites, mobile websites. I started right at the beginning when smartphones started to be popular.

And so I was right in the middle of, we need to make mobile websites that don't suck and so i started doing that i i made web tvs with video i made like full company websites and with various textures but i didn't make them but i worked with developers who made them and yeah over the years as as AI faded out, and you just noticed that developers are not shouting against a specific browser anymore. The only one they universally seem to hate is Safari Mobile, because it has some quirks and it's not updated often. And it just doesn't support a few things. And it's not that it doesn't support, it's that it has weird behaviors that other browsers don't have.

So you have to make specific tweaks for Safari a lot of the time. Yeah, that's fair. But it's not as hampering. It's not something that's going to drag you down as much as IE did back in the day. It's just like a few lines of code to just tweak how it works on this specific user agent. It's not horrible. I was in a really weird spot with smartphones. So the iPhone came out, what, 2006?

2008, I think. Something like that. Whatever. I was in primary school when that came out. So I was in, I think, mid-high school before smartphones actually started, I guess, becoming a popular thing. So I mostly miss that being a problem.

And my sister's a couple of years younger than me, and she was starting to like, she was in that group that, that first group that sort of had smartphones throughout the entirety of high school. Now I have like my younger nieces and nephews who are like seven, and they've got smartphones already and it's really really strange to me like how how that's changing the way that people actually interact with each other yeah well my first phone i had when i was 16 uh i just started like med school i started med school at 16 and my first phone was a like a foldable clappy thing with just

regular basic cell phone it was not a smartphone at all and my first smartphone was the iphone 3g i think which i got in 20 2009 i think something like that or 2010 and since then i only had smartphones but but i grew up without a phone not without, but I grew up without a phone, not without a smartphone. I grew up without a phone. We did stuff without phones. Like we use like landlines. And nowadays, I don't even have a landline. Why would I?

It serves no purpose. And it's weird to see like kids that grow up and have never known a world that didn't have the internet, didn't have phones, didn't have smartphones. And yeah, it's just really changing things a lot. You can see it in the way of interacting, in the way of planning things out. When you wanted to go to a friend, you didn't have a phone.

He didn't have a phone. You just called. You were like, okay, I'm going to be coming at this hour. OK, good. And then you had to note the address, look on a map where it was. OK, I'm taking a left and a right and a second left. And then I need to ask him for the code for his building because there's a code to enter the first front door. have that beforehand because if i don't when i'm before the door i have no way of calling him to ask him how do i open the door you had to plan things out and and this i think worked in a lot of ways and not just for like planning a trip or you had to plan things out beforehand before calling someone before going visiting someone before going anywhere nowadays you just slot your phone in your pocket and if you're lost you google maps you call somebody you text them you basically have something that saves you from making mistakes and you didn't have that before and i think that changes the way that people interact or just

generally experience the world in general and i think it's way better now honestly yeah people will spit on smartphones they're gonna be our smartphones are destroying human communication now that they're just changing it. It's not worse. It's just different. I had my first phone a little bit earlier than you had yours. I'll send you a picture of it. Here is what I had as my first phone. It's a SOTY Ericsson J108i.

Nice. It still looks good to this day. Yeah, it was a cool little phone um i think it had like i want to say it had like snake pre-installed maybe tetris pre-installed i was so this is weird considering how much of a techie i am now i was so late to the smartphone game so my sister she had a i think she her first phone was like a galaxy s2 so the way my mom did it is every time like her plan ran out she would hand the phone down to either me or my sister um she got that phone i i don't think i got my first smartphone until maybe it was like the galaxy s5 or something like that because i yeah i just saw the concept of a smartphone like

this is dumb i have a laptop why would i want to i want to i want a computer in my pocket that's so stupid and now i have this thing which doesn't leave my side most of the time yeah well if you didn't grow up with a smartphone, it's easy to not see, not envision the various things that you could do with things to 3G or 4G. Like just looking at a map, getting directions, like being able to just look something up really quickly without opening a laptop, booting it up,

opening the browser, typing things. If you want to look at something on Wikipedia, confirm a date, confirm something, just enter an appointment on the go. But you didn't think about these things because you couldn't do them. So they didn't exist. And so you never really thought about them.

And so at the time, yeah, a lot of people thought that this phone is stupid. Why would you want to buy a smartphone? Have you seen how expensive they are? They were costlier than most laptops at the time. Because we weren't yet in the ultrabook period where everything is at least $1,000 if you want something good. It was like $500 or at least euros in France, 500 euros for a competent laptop. And so an iPhone costs 700 euros or 650.

It was more expensive than a normal laptop. So of course people were going to ask questions like, why would I want to buy this? What does it do specifically that warrants this kind of money? And nowadays people will happily pay like €1,400 for the S20 Ultra with a pen. And it costs more than every other device they have in their house. They're going to be like, oh, I want a non-expensive laptop. Like, $1,000 is too much for a laptop.

But their phone costs twice that. I have never bought an expensive phone. So this is a Realme C5 from, I think, four years ago. It was $300 new. And that's as much as I want to pay for a bike yeah well i have the s21 but i bought it uh after the s22 release so it was like 450 bucks or something yeah yeah i tend to not buy the latest and greatest anymore unless there's something that absolutely woos me like like sweeps me off my feet yeah there's no way i'm spending a thousand bucks on a phone i i barely use the thing i never call anyone i i text a little bit but not that much i use maps

and that's about it youtube analytics and twitter and that's it that's it i don't need a super flagship to do that do you remember how old you were when you first got an internet connection? Because I do. I think I was like 10 or 11. When do you reckon that was? What year? I was still living in a very, very

small town. I don't know. I think I was I think it was in two in the 2000s something okay probably year 2000 no it was after that so 2002 i'd say okay 2002 2003 and it was uh it was a 56k connection it was with the 56k medium everybody had dsl at the time but my parents really really late to the to the internet so we had minitel in france which was our in-house solution and that worked well enough but it didn't age well i didn't get a connection until

dsl was a thing so when i was a like real young kid I was living in this very rural town, a small place called Glenwood in Queensland. The nearest town was like 30 minutes away. My school had 50 students. It was a very, very small place. So if we wanted a connection out there, it would have had to have been dial-up. My parents didn't know what a computer was. They didn't know what the internet was they didn't know what the internet

was they didn't care i remember getting an internet connection we moved back to south australia and i've told the story a bunch of times but i'm going to tell it again um my cousin was set up the computer because my cousin is a software engineer and she still is now, he set up the computer for us, we had this DSL connection, this was like 2006, early 2006, and he showed me this website, and he's like, this website is called YouTube, and you can watch videos here, I was like, you watch videos? What? On a computer? What are you talking about?

a computer what are you talking about this would have been like months after youtube first came out and yeah that was that was how i got my my uh my first connection and then you know a year after that i got addicted to playing runescape and was playing an mmo all the time which is a problem but that's still my experience has been really weird with the internet because my parents got a computer when I was nine, I think. So it was like a long time ago, 25 years ago. And it was like super late. Everybody had computers, but my parents just didn't see the use. So they bought one and it was supposed to have a modem. And at the time we had, in France, they distributed like CDs

with like installers that let you start the dial-up connection. And you had three minutes. You had like 33 minutes or two free hours with this thing. And so we stockpiled the CDs because we couldn't really use them because we didn't have a computer. But we knew we were getting one. My parents bought one and it had a modem. The problem is the modem was disabled in the BIOS. And we did not know what a computer was or what a BIOS was.

So the modem stayed disabled for about two years until I started experimenting and looking at stuff and getting interested in the computer. And at some point, I pressed F2 at startup. And I pressed it just to see what it was. And there was this scary blue screen. And it was like, modem disabled? What is that? And I enabled it. And then I inserted one of the cds and i just shouted in the house like mom we've

got it and she was like you don't use it it's gonna cost money and so we finally grabbed some some kind of subscription which was like i don't know 10 hours per month. It just costed like 100 euros or something. It was extremely expensive. It was more expensive than having DSL. But my parents just didn't want that. So we had to use that. And after a while, that started my interest in computers, like tinkering and starting looking at stuff, how it works,

and trying to optimize things and playing some games. at stuff how it works and trying to optimize things and playing some games but yeah i never really got into youtube for for a long long time for example like i think i think the first videos i watched on youtube it must have been like 2010 or something i never really used it a lot before i started the channel i i think the thing that really got me like actually into watching videos and discovering what the like this was early days like understanding what a YouTuber was before you know people were getting paid I think it was RuneScape guide videos

like leveling efficient leveling or money making or something like that I was just like how how do I do this well and I guess for whatever reason I decided to look it up there and i started discovering uh just random channels i think some of them might still exist which is

kind of crazy that there's still some people going from like that early yeah it's like what youtube is what 20 years now 15 um it's 2006 it started. So going on 16, 17 years. Yeah. I don't know if I'll still be doing that. Like I started like five years ago, four and a half years ago. I don't know if I'll still be doing YouTube in 12 years. Like imagine doing videos for 12 years. I don't know.

It's weird to even imagine. What made you want to go full-time in the first place? The freedom. The freedom you have to organize your work. I've been working as a product owner for a while, and while it's a job I love, the evolution of that job I don't like. So basically, when you're a product owner or project manager,

you become a manager. That's the logical step, and that's what i did after four or five years i became a manager and i chief product officer for a while as well at another company so i had a team of about 12 people i think and i just hated that job i didn't want to do that management just sucks for me i hate it it's you you lose your skills because you can't practice them because you're not supposed to have your hands in the technology. You're supposed to watch other people do it and make sure that they do it well.

So after a certain point, you're trying to tell people how to do their job, but they're better at their job than you are. So it just feels weird. And you also end up only managing the problems. You can't really take credit for the success if you're an honest person because the success comes from your team, not from you. You just help them achieve that.

And you have to take credit for all the blame if something goes wrong. And every time something goes wrong, people are going to go to see you. And so you only deal with negative things all the time. And I just didn't like that. So I decided to stop being a C-suite executive, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what the term is, but what we'd call a director in France. I was a directeur produit. called a director in France.

I was a directeur produit. And I decided to go back to being chief product officer, to being like a regular basic product owner. And the problem is after three years of that, I just got super tired of people telling me what to do.

And you had to have an opinion, but it wasn't respected because, well, you're just a product owner. And so you're like, I don't think this is the right way to do this i think like ergonomically this is bad or i think that in terms of business this is not super clear and they're like i don't care we do this and you apply it and then you have

to work on that project that you don't believe in and you don't like right and so having that opportunity to move on to youtube meant that first I could like tailor my weeks however I wanted I can start at any time I want if I don't want to work in the mornings I have to if I want to work up until midnight I can and there's nobody to stop me basically it's super fun I can do whatever I want I can take breaks whenever I want and as long as it keeps like allowing me to make a living there's no reason i would stop because that's a job i love because there's also that component it's just super fun it's fun you wake up you're like hey i have this idea about this video i'm gonna work on it and you start writing

you start recording you do your things you edit and then you giggle stupidly at your little joke that you put i like this one and it's nice i like like it. It's just a fun job. And of course, like all jobs, sometimes you're like, I really do not want to edit videos today. But yeah, that's a job. But going full-time was just an opportunity to free myself from the regular,

normal nine-to-five job, which I really didn't want to do anymore. Or at least I didn't want to do it in the function i occupied before yeah if if youtube stopped and i had to go back to a normal nine to five job i would probably change lanes completely i would not go back to be a product owner i would yeah i would like i don't know how you would say it but i would completely change ways and yeah something do like some sort of career shift exactly that makes sense um there's something there's something i

was gonna say in there and i lost it um oh right that level of freedom it's great if you have the sort of discipline to lay out your day and decide when you're actually going to do stuff but a problem that i found especially on days where i i've gotten much better at this because i've A problem that I've found, especially on days where I've gotten much better at this because I've forced myself to do it. But if you have that freedom, it's very easy to let time slip by from you. And something that's supposed to take an hour takes two hours. Something that's supposed to take two takes four. And even though you should have all this free time, if you don't have, at least least for me having some sort of schedule there things tend to fall apart but judging by the fact you said you want to make sure you have

time to yourself every day i'm guessing that does help out with that so you're like this is when i'm gonna stop i'm gonna do whatever else now well i don't work based on a number of hours. I work based on what I want to accomplish. So I have per day, I know that I need to record the air roll for this one, write the script for the next one, edit this video, or write a Linux short and publish it, or just send the topics to the sponsors or whatever. I have that to-do list, and I need to accomplish that in the day.

No matter when I start, when I end, but I need to have this done at the end of the day so this this lets me focus on being efficient on doing that but it also allows me the freedom to start working when i want to start working but it is tough to just get out of the couch honestly you i work out then i go home i take a shower and then generally i sit on the couch for 10 minutes just to relax a little bit before working. And sometimes this 5 to 10 minutes turn into 3 hours because you're like, hey, I like this thing.

Oh, I'm watching a live stream of Legend of the Apes playing Total War 3, and that's great. And then you're like, oh, God, it's noon. Oh, no. And you look at your tutelage and you're okay well i'm gonna eat first and then i'm gonna start working and then it's 2 p.m and you're oh no and then you you're in a rush and you do things in a way that is not optimal so it it can be hard and i try to force myself to to not stay inactive for more than an hour like every time I just lay down on the couch,

if I still have something else to do, I put a timer. I have a timer for an hour tops. And after this hour, I get up and I do something because if I don't, I know the day is going to get away from me and I'm going to not do anything. Yeah.

No, I absolutely know that feeling. There have been so many times where I know that it might just be a short week Maybe I got everything I got everything done a little bit early and there's only a little bit left But you know Hey, this one of my mates is streaming or like hey, maybe there's like a new video from someone Maybe I'm gonna watch that. Maybe I'm gonna hey, maybe there's, like, a new video from someone.

Maybe I'm going to watch that. Maybe I'm going to go for a walk. But, you know, maybe I'll go for a bit longer of a walk than I was planning to, which, you know, may not be a bad thing in that case, but when you've got stuff to do. But, you know, I'm of the same mindset where I try to get, like, I try to do, like, a lot of the same thing.

I don't know how people do, what was to get like, I try to do like a lot of the same thing. I don't know how people do, what was it like? There are these like different like scheduling methods and like timing methods where you're like, I'm going to do this for 30 minutes. I'm going to do this for 30 minutes.

I'm going to do that. Like I can't do that. Like that just doesn't work for me. Now my brain works on a task, task based system. I need to accomplish a task. It's not a matter of time. And that's also probably why I never really liked the 9-to-5

because sometimes you're just done. And you're like, I still have two hours, but what am I going to do here? I should go home. I should stop working. But you can't because you're supposed to leave at 5. And my brain just works like that. I need to finish a task. And just working 30 minutes on the task task might as well just not do it if i'm not gonna start it at all that's why it's it's

light manual labor but that's why i kind of like manual labor to i work in a supermarket i fill shelves it's chill it's not like you know hard manual labor like digging holes or whatever but i show up i do my thing i have no responsibilities if the work's not done as long as i've done everything i need to do it's not my problem it's fine and you finish tomorrow yep and honestly if i have to grab a real job after youtube when i'm i don't know when i'm bored with it or when YouTube doesn't work or if my channel has a problem or whatever, I'll probably go do something manual as well. Because maybe, I don't know, like crafting tables or chairs or woodworking. I don't know. It's something like you're producing something in the real world and you can just focus on your work. You don't have

specific responsibilities. You just need to be there. To do the thing. And then you go home. And you can forget all about it when you're home. I think that's one of the things. Because I don't. I see people. I have a mate who works in the mines.

He goes there. He does his job. He's a fly in fly out worker. So he's there for a week. Or two weeks. And then he comes back. And can see like the the level of relaxation that happens from just i'm done with work now you just like kick off your boots you're just chilling do whatever else you want and i i kind of see that with like my parents were both um my dad was a nine to five uh factory worker my mom uh she was a aged care worker doing you know basically the same sort of schedule.

And I can see that even if you don't enjoy the job, there's some level of maybe, I guess, it feels nice after doing something you don't like to just chill out and just relax. I think that's something you miss by... It's good that you enjoy what you're doing, but you sort of miss that, that sort of wave of relaxation you get from something like that.

Yeah. And with the jobs I did, like managing projects and managing teams, you always think about the next day because you know, you have to do this thing in advance and you have to prepare this presentation or you have to go take a plane to get there and and give a talk there yeah it's just always something and so you're never relaxed during and you'll never relax during the weekend you're never completely off or during the holidays because you know there are expectations you know

the emails are piling up you know that, you're not there for two weeks? Well, good luck when you're going to be coming home because everybody's going to dump their problems on you because you weren't there to solve them. And all of that makes it really hard to relax and disconnect and just feel like, okay, I'm done with the work. I'm stopping working. And I think, like, of course, some other jobs are way harder, like manual labor, like are physically harder. But at the end of the day, when you come home, in a lot of cases, you can just like put your feet up and you're done. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to dread tomorrow.

You don't have to anticipate. You don't have to keep working at home. You're just done. And that's something I'm trying to do with YouTube as well. Like when I publish a video, look at the stats, and then I'm going to do with youtube as well like when i publish a video look at the stats and then i'm gonna do something else i'm not gonna look at it i'm gonna completely relax and i'll come back to it tomorrow yeah that disconnecting it like i've issued disconnecting from the channel as well like i know that it's there i know there's things i could be doing i know there's comments i could be reading i you know whatever it is that's involved like i could be trying to schedule someone for the

podcast but that's something i'm definitely trying to work on as well and i don't really have a good solution for it but it's it's a work in progress it's something i know i need to improve on and i'm trying to make it work but i think it just comes down to accepting that what you've already done is good enough you don't need to do more you don't need to always do more always push it always like go further you can accept that what you've done for the day is good enough and it's super hard to do because that's not something that we're trained for uh in well like western but would we consider australia western society because from where i live it's not western at all it's super eastern literally south of japan but i usually we consider we

consider part of the West because we have basically America at this point. Exactly. So let's say Western society, we're always pushed into doing more, like the grind, the hustle. You have a side gig and you need to grow and you need to buy a bigger house and a bigger car.

And so resting on your laurels is just considered being lazy it's not considered a just reward it's considered lazy if you're not working you're being lazy and that's a problem because like for me now i don't work eight hours per day on youtube i work like four to five hours per day and sometimes i have days when i'm like oh dude you're really not doing anything today. You already worked. You did all you had to do. You even have like one video planned in advance. You're good to go. Like you don't have to be stressed out. But intellectually, my brain still says, you're a lazy bastard, dude. Get up and do something. But I don't need to. Some days I just don't need to. And it's hard to accept that. Like you're done. You don't need to some days I just don't need to and it's hard to accept that like you're done

you don't have to work more all the time you can just stop if you feel like it sure do it but you don't have to no I definitely know that feeling I I don't know it always feels weird to just

especially when I get stuff done early like but there's this like all this time when I get stuff done early, like, but there's this, like all this time that I should be doing it. But like, I know that I should also just, I've got this extra time. I should just use it to relax and,

you know, just do something else. But it's like, but I could also just like not do that. Just keep, keep hustlingling keep grinding yeah yeah i could write another script or i could record another video oh yeah i could just i've recorded and planned six videos this week but i could do eight couldn't i yeah yeah exactly that's exactly it like sometimes i think hey you know what if you good enough, you could pick back up your gaming channel, dude, and start gaming, like live streaming every afternoon. And I'm like, do you understand what kind of work rhythm that would imply? Like, I would have to wake up at six every day, work out until eight, then start working at nine, then finish at 1 1pm and then at 2 or 3pm

you start live streaming for 4 hours you're going to explode you have to have some time off and what a lot of my friends don't really understand as well is that working on a video is mentally taxing in a way that other jobs are the jobs that I did before

are not when you have to write a script to record to edit and to publish, you can't do anything else in the meantime. Like you can't like a video and write a script. It's pretty hard. You can't record a video and watch a video at the same time. Edit, you're entirely focused on your edit. It's i think it's mentally you're hyper focused and so for me at least four or five hours of working on videos is more exhausting than eight hours death job that i had before i also needs to be taken into account i think i don't really edit a ton so i can like half pay attention but the rest of it like even like i know some people who

work really well listening to music like they can i know people who like did their like final year thesis listening to music the entire time i i'm not a music guy while writing i i can't do that maybe i could do like possibly like classical but if there are any lyrics i i can't touch it my brain just like jumps either no lyrics or lyrics in a language that i don't understand no lyrics in language i don't understand like that doesn't help for me i i try to understand it okay there's no way i understand anything they say so it's just background noise and so that's okay but lyrics in english or in french i'm done i just cannot do anything else in the meantime my brain just gets all the way no that makes a lot of sense well that i think

is as good a place to end as anything we're actually closing it on two hours right now yeah i i don't know if you had like a amount of time you wanted to go for or whatever no specific schedule no okay well good well i think that's i usually aim for around two hours anyway so that i think is um pretty good then uh where can the people find you um mostly on youtube so the channel is called the linux experiment or on twitter at the linux exp or on Mastodon with the same handle. And I'm also on PixelFed, which I think is Nick at the Linux EXP,

something like that. And that's about it. I'm also on Odyssey for people who are on Odyssey. And yep, that should cover it. Any fun projects you got in store that you want to mention or nothing out of the ordinary? I'm still trying to work on building a Steam console, but I tried it using a laptop, which has so many issues that it just would not work well. But I still have that project in the works and I will probably make a video once I manage something good using HoloISO or something else.

Well, I guess you got nothing else? I'll do my stuff then. Yep. Cool. My main channel, Brody Robinson, I've got the gaming channel, Brody Robinson Plays. I stream twice a week there. YouTube shorts go up basically every other day. If you are listening to the audio version,

the video version is available on YouTube at Tech of a T. The audio version, you'll find it anywhere that there are podcast feeds. There's like iTunes, whatever. There's an RSS feed as well, so if you use anything else, you'll find it there. Yeah, I guess I'll give you the last word. What do you want to say to the people? That's a good question.

I never tell anyone they get the last word, and it want to say to the people that's a good question i'd never tell anyone they get the last word and it always surprises them yeah um yeah keep using linux keep using open source and just have fun with your computers it is just a tool remember it's just a tool and it's just there to have fun and to do some stuff awesome uh well then see you guys later bye