Tech Over Tea - "Gnome good, KDE Bad" by BabyWOGUE | Niccolò Ve

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Recently Niccolò Ve decided to go to war with BabyWOGUE and I just had to talk to him about it but before that happened I had to pick his brains a little bit about KDE and why he's involved. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://youtube.com/niccolove  Twitter: https://twitter.com/veggero  Instagram: https://instagram.com/veggero  Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/@niccolovespoetry  Github: https://github.com/veggero/  Chess Challenges: https://lichess.org/niccolove ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I am as always your host, Brody Robertson, and today, this is episode 119 of Tech of a T. And unlike the way I normally do this, we actually have a guest here today, and as BabyWoke would say, some KDE dev. Welcome to the show. How about you give yourself a proper introduction? how about you give yourself a proper introduction yeah so mostly in the linux court my word is my work is related to kde i actually just started a couple of years ago but i really got involved especially in visual design nowadays i mostly work on the kd panel and as an example in the last plasma release which is coming in just a few weeks, I made sure that you can make the panel floating, which is something that only Lattedoc used to have. So I work on that sort of stuff. I also do promotion work, and in my personal life, I just do anything.

I study mathematics, I write poetry, all sorts of things. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know you did that. Sorry, where I was going? didn't know you did that. Sorry, the... Where was I going? I was going to say something. I forgot. Right. The way we use... The way, like, both of us use Linux is kind of, like, really different.

I'm sort of like a... Mainly a window manager guy. I use a fairly minimal system. You've gravitated towards using KDE. And, you know, you live inside of a desktop environment. I kind of want to know why. Well, firstly, when did you actually start using Linux? I started using Linux about three years ago,

maybe four. And it was actually mostly out of curiosity. And even back then, my reasons were not very that. One of my reasons why I was actually scared to start using Linux is that I thought Linux was just Ubuntu. And the UI of Ubuntu didn't seem that pretty. But of course, that's not a good reason to actually not try it. And probably the reason why I chose KDE is that it's so customizable.

I actually went ahead and tried some window managers, but when I actually started doing development, I always try to be that user that isn't very experienced with Linux. So I try to like use this cover to do updates to see actually what the user would see, because I do want Linux to be as user friendly as possible. So I should see what the user who doesn't know how to use the command line

would actually see Linux as. Yep, yep. Did you initially start with... So you said you tried out some window managers. Did you start with KDE and then go to window managers or start on the window managers and go to KDE? What did you do there? I actually started with Ubuntu Unity back then.

So that would have been what version? I don't remember. It was, yeah, I think it was the version just before they dropped it. So, yeah, okay, right. Yeah, like 17, 18, something like that? Probably, yeah, four years ago. Yeah. 17, 18, something like that? Probably, yeah. Four years ago, so it makes sense.

And then I actually switched to GNOME and I used GNOME for a month at least. And I was actually pretty happy with GNOME. And then I just thought, I mean, if there's like Unity and GNOME, what if there's others? So I started trying like LXDE, that sort of stuff, until I tried KDE. First time I saw KDE, I was like, this looks bad. I'm not going to use it. But then I discovered that you could customize it. But since back then, KDE has improved a lot. I don't, like, before I'd even used

Linux, I don't think I'd ever even seen KDE. Like, I was sort of in the same position you were where I saw Linux as basically either Ubuntu or the command line. I feel like that's the way most people sort of see Linux

from the outside. Yeah, and with such a niche market share it kind of makes sense. It's not necessarily that bad because I do think that Ubuntu is doing a good work in actually having clean defaults that would make the user want to try it and when you get a new user into Ubuntu, then they also probably will discover about other desktops as well. But of course, if KDE Plasma as well was more acknowledged in a wider user base, then I would only be happy.

While I use Window Managers myself, I don't particularly have an issue with GNOME or with KDE or anything like that. I just tend to like sort of building up my system basically from scratch. I'm not here to, you know, offer the, I guess the, how would you describe it? Like offer feedback on the basic user experience you get on like one of of those desktops i'm sort of here showing you what you can do with linux if you want to step outside of those like not necessarily cages but those like defaults that a lot of users are going to sort of stick with

yeah and arguably kd is probably kd plasma It's probably the desktop that allows you to get as close as possible to an experience when you can customize everything. Which is why I think it's such a nice choice for so many people who are actually able to do their own thing. I've seen plenty of customization. But of course, if you want build your very much your own thing you can start from scratch and that's really fun i never actually tried a lot with that yeah because of the reasons i said before but yeah well you've got like actual things you want to get done i've sort of turned wasting time building stuff on linux into like the thing that i'm doing yeah yeah it makes sense i've spoken to a lot of people that

like show up in my discord or my youtube comments things like that who will use kde but they'll also just swap out kwin for something else like they they want to have that that yeah so not the experience you're gonna have but they'll take kde they like the general kde experience then they'll like stick i3 or something like that in there. And I didn't actually know it was a thing until like a year or so ago, really. No, it's possible to do that. I actually tried back then, but since I didn't know very well how to use Windows Manager, I actually used a KWin extension that did window tiling, but it's not the same thing. I think you probably know,

what's the name again of the latest one? I don't remember. Bismuth, which does tiling in KWin. And yeah, but I mean, KDE is modular, so you can do a lot. Like it's very funny also to see how much of KDE you can use, KDE Plasma you can use in GNOME. You can bring KRunner, LatteDoc with you.

It's a bit of a mess, but it's really fun to build your own thing. Yeah, the only concern is if you care about things theming together well. You can get it working if you want to put that extra level of effort in. But when you're crossing, like, what's the word? GUI frameworks. When you're crossing GUI frameworks, you end up giving yourself a lot more work to do to get those to line up well. Yeah. giving yourself a lot more work to do to get those to line up well. Yeah, I got to say that if you're doing some customization, you, well, probably I think 99% of the users have to use apps

from Qt and JTK, so they have to get involved with that anyway. KDE does a lot to make sure that JTK apps look native in KDE Plasma. I'm not sure if we'll be able to maintain that with Libadwaiter, but that has been a goal, surely. And I think we did a good job. I mean, it's not me that worked on this, but the people who worked on this did a good job. I've heard a lot of people talk about Live Adwaiter.

And I just, it was one of those things which I sort of, I saw the controversy going on. And I just didn't pay any attention to it. Because the way people were describing it didn't seem like there was anything really wrong with it. Like, it seemed like they were changing the way that theming was being done. Because theming just didn't really exist before and the way it was done was like kind of a hack that broke a lot of apps but I don't know

if you have an opinion on that yeah I actually haven't followed it much either mostly because I'm mostly focused on KD Plasma theming and I don't know the discussion around it seemed so toxic I didn't quite want to get involved so I don't have a clear opinion either well yeah you don't want to get involved

in conversations about anything involving Red Hat either or anything involving Canonical either because they're not generally they're not helpful discussions people just are screaming at each other just this is this is the only correct way to do it it doesn't matter what anyone else is saying my way is the correct way yeah i've seen already enough discussion about like kd is the only good way to use linux and or no gnome is the only good way like no no just don't say that. Well, speaking of KDE, I think the first time it got a lot of really big attention, obviously with the Steam Deck now, but before that, a little bit earlier with the LTT Linux series, which I know that you talked about back back when that was happening. Yep. And inside of KDE, there was like,

oh no, LTT did a video about us again. And most of the stuff that LTT said was negative. I think it was parts of the video. He tried to make the video positive again. I'm not really angry or anything to LTT. I think he was doing its job. And if my operating system had uninstalled itself while I was trying to install,

what was that, a Discord? What was that again? I think what happened was Pop!OS, because Pop!OS is that weird semi-rolling thing, and it doesn't line up with Ubuntu. So the version of Steam needed to roll back a dependency and that dependency rollback caused a dependency unravel which basically nuked everything yeah I mean just imagine that happening to a Linux user using Windows yeah like you just install something

on Windows and Windows explodes we would making so much fun of Windows and that was a bad start. When I actually started using KD Plasma, it was a bit better. Some of the criticism I didn't agree with, but at least we got a lot of attention and that's surely good. I think that's probably the best thing that came out of that i i did hear from a

lot of people that even with the sort of opinion that linus gave i guess luke gave a much more neutral opinion about it i guess because he had some experience using linux in the past using in like a development context but i still heard a lot of people saying that even with what linus said they were still interested in checking it out themselves to just see if it actually was going to be, you know, a mess of an experience or if the problems were just, you know, Linus specific problems, especially with how weird of like of a setup he's running himself. Um, you know, not just the Nvidia cards but just everything with this setup where he had, like he wasn't even, he didn't have a computer in his room it was running over a thunderbolt connection or something and just trying on like a normal setup just to see if it actually was going to be like what the experience

would actually be like yeah no i think the overall result is good like it was some good advertisement again I'm not angry with LTT at all yeah it's just some of the criticism made developers go no I can understand that from a developer perspective especially when some of the feedback you're getting

may not be may not be structured in the best way and may not be, it may not actually be a problem. Like there might be something that the user thinks is missing or thinks is a problem here, but the way they're interacting with it isn't the way the dev had initially intended.

But I think even that kind of feedback can still be useful because i like i haven't done a ton of um professional development but i i do know that uh from what i have done you can get yourself into a mindset as a dev where you think that this works and this is the way to do it until someone besides you actually tries it and you realize wait that actually makes a lot of sense like why didn't i think of that as an interaction method yeah yeah no that happens a lot sadly it also happens a lot that users think that they know like how KDE should work. That's not an issue until you actually get in development chats

and stop other people work saying, okay, now do my idea because my idea is the best. And we've seen that before. There were like three or four people that got into the visual design room and they wanted to redesign all of KD Plasma, like all of it. And as much as I can understand the idea, that's not going to happen from one day to

another. And they really wanted to start working on it, making mockups, which is fine, but there's no guarantee that we'll ever use them because currently we're improving Breeze. We like Breeze and we're working on that so we it's very important to actually read the feedback from the users the developers actually read like our kde the subreddit and stuff like that but there's also that moment where you step back and say okay but this is the user i'm the developer. I know how this works and the user doesn't. And of course, the idea is to get the user involved

when he wants to. And as far as criticism that doesn't quite work, a good example is BabyVogwe. We are going to get into BabyVogwe, that's for sure. There's no way we're going to skip out on that. Yeah, it's not very constructive usually at all i think one with the user feedback i think users are great at pointing out where there is a problem but not necessarily what the actual solution for that problem is because sure you can, you can say that, like with the, one of the things BabyWog pointed out, the little mute icon on some of the things in KDE,

I think you could make an argument that maybe it should be easier to see on the icons there or something like that, but just throw it away because I don't use it like that's not really a bit of that's not really helpful yeah that's true also sometimes users do see a problem problem and that's intentional because you can't actually support all of use cases that That's something that KDE has tried somewhat to do in the past, but it leads to so many options that you're not able to actually maintain them.

And in the past, I've actually written comments saying, okay, please don't add this option because it's too much work. And of course, on Reddit, users come and say, this is KDE, you've got to have all the options. And like, no, and I get downvoted so but I think that's where it helps to have a powerful plug-in system because there may be use cases that don't fit the the default and what the general user is going to want to have let's say you know back when um there are a lot of people on GNOME who want to have. Let's say back when there are a lot of people on Gnome

who want to have a global menu, and Gnome does not have global menus. At a time, back when they broke it, by making some changes, there was this plugin to add in global menus and for the people who wanted that feature,

they could go and use that then. Yeah, the issue with... Right now, KDE has a theming system that many of its components are designed to handle a theme, which could be plasma theme, a color scheme, anything. A plugin system is different. It actually goes and edits something

that's not really meant to be edited to add a certain functionality. And obviously that's much more prone to breakage when you update the system. If somebody wanted to implement, like as an example, the floating panels, people wanted an option to

make it more floating, which is understandable. And I actually offered one in the Plasma theme. And I think that's the best approach because if you do want to see your panel more floating, you actually go and edit your theme. What they wanted is a UI option directly in panel settings. But there's already so many options and you just can transfer everything from the Plasma theme to the panel. Yeah. If you wanted to edit something completely different, which not even the Plasma theme

covers, you would need to patch the Plasma panel code, which changes at every release, which means that your patch has to be rebased at every release. So that's even more complex to make it work. Yeah, okay. Now that makes a lot of sense. I know that it would be a... It's always nice to have certain things in your system, but some of those aren't always going to be realistic.

I'm sure if you had a team of people that came along, you're like, you know what? We are going to be... We would like to develop this powerful plugin system and then maintain it going forwards i'm sure that you would like it would be something that would be you know much more on the table but just you can't really take on this extra level of work without also compromising other parts of the system if there's no one else to help out with that work? Yeah, there is some discussion of improving the theming system for Plasma 6. There's lots of nice ideas and that in theory should make it much easier for users to actually edit your theme and do anything that the thing currently does but um that's far in the

future as far as i know lately nobody has worked on it so it might be that plasma 6 comes and there's nothing really and we have to delay it yeah yeah so i know why you're using kde but most people decide to use a desktop environment k KDE, GNOME, Xfce, it doesn't matter what it is, don't then also go and decide they want to actually, you know, develop it and help out with the community. Like, why did you decide to move on to do that as well? Well, it started as me seeing that KDE was very customizable. So I started actually doing themes for KDE. And if you go to my post history on error slash Unix board, I actually started doing some crazy customizations.

And after I actually got enough skills to do a Plasma theme, I was like, well, if I'm able to do a Plasma theme, why is the default Plasma theme broken? Because in my mind, it was. And one of my very first batches was completely changing the shadow, which is not like the main point. Yeah. But I actually did that two times. And I think I spent like six months total working on the shadow of KD Plasma.

And I even did a video of like 15 minutes explaining how I worked on the shadows of Kini Plasma. So I think I'm a shadow expert at this point. And it's a minor detail, but I think it was wrong before. And that's kind of how we got me started. Like I'm annoyed at something that's the default. I know how to change it. So I get involved.

So what we usually tell users that want to get involved is try to take something that annoys you personally, which is very small, and you go ahead and try to fix it. We can help you and hopefully you're able to. Yeah, I think that's a good point. A lot of people will try to, it doesn't, not just a desktop environment like KDE, but no matter what they're trying to sort of help out with, they'll try to take on something a lot larger than you'd expect as your first entry into that system. And then you see some people be surprised when their massive change doesn't get accepted. They have no experience working with that project. Maybe they have no experience with many other projects either,

but they've got this idea and maybe the idea actually is good, but it's not, you can't really just jump straight in with making something like that as your first thing. Yeah. I always suggest before doing anything, discuss it with a visual design group, which is probably the most active one. And luckily, when it comes to very big changes, usually you either know how to do very big changes and then the result is kind of good.

Or you don't and you get like scared of editing so many files. So it doesn't happen that frequently. Luckily, when it does happen, we try to be as constructive as possible to actually make sure that that feature goes in unless it goes against the KDE Plasma like IDS and goals. So we just can't accept it.

Sometimes happen and that's part of the development, sadly. So always ask the vdg first so if someone wanted to make a like a maybe not even just a big design change just some sort of design change to the way kde currently functions what would be the process that they would actually go through to do that so they should join the vdg which you can do it through either Telegram or Matrix. There's links if you just search for the KDE VDG.

And you say what you want to do. People there will tell you if that's either currently planned or being worked on. Maybe that's something we want, but nobody's actually working on it. So we would be very happy to see some development. Usually we give out tips on how to do things and then you can actually get started. There's many repositories. You pick the right one, you see the code

and I mean, you get started with a coding session. That makes sense. Yeah, okay, that's simple enough. i didn't think it would be a super complex system but i personally have not been involved in the kde project i my my experience with kde is fairly limited i typically like when i i set up a vm to test out something on stream i will use gnome because it annoys people in my chat but if i was going to actually be using a desktop i probably would at some point use kde i just had no idea how you'd actually even contribute to it yeah yeah we have we've actually made like many web pages trying to

explain as nicely as possible because i i talked about like code changes yeah there are so many ways to contribute even without writing any sort of code if you go to kd.org and you click with on get involved there's a list of like 15 different things you can do to name another one i do a lot of working is promotion you need somebody doing videos and writing announcements, getting the word out, actually going to events representing KDE. And that's just another example. So we've actually written wiki pages for each of these things, also translation as an example. And you can just go there, read through them and see what's more appropriate to you. That's actually a really helpful thing to have here because I've seen a lot of projects

where people don't really know how to contribute if they're not a developer. Like the Linux space has no shortage of good developers. Like there's too many of them. You don't need more developers necessarily on projects. They are helpful, obviously, but there are other places where they might be lacking, especially translation. If you do know a second language, a lot of projects will appreciate someone who can actually translate it well. Yeah. And another aspect that probably needs a lot of work and expert hands-on is accessibility,

which is something that KDE Plasma in particular, I think, does not very good job of. But if I were to actually work on it, I wouldn't quite know even how to get started. So maybe writing some good guides on accessibility and stuff like that would be super helpful like i can i can obviously think of surface level things like you know um colorblind modes and making sure you have the correct level contrast for different types of colorblindness and ensuring that screen readers work correctly but that's basically as far as i personally would be able to get down something like accessibility i'm sure there's much more that you could do about if you were someone who was specialized in that environment yeah yeah there's probably stuff like making sure that you're able

to navigate the ui through um keyboard that's usually brought up and that's already quite a difficult task to achieve, sadly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially with how complex a lot of UIs have gotten nowadays. Coming up with a way to effectively navigate that without then also stripping down the functionality of the UI can certainly be complex. Yeah, especially if you consider that many laptops nowadays like mine are touch screens and you should support that, which means that you have an application that should support mouse input, keyboard input and touch screen input. That's not always very easy to actually achieve all of that, which is why KD actually worked

on Kirigami, which is a toolkit to make UIs that work nicely both on phones, tablets, desktops, and actually feel native even if you're on a phone or on a desktop and you can use whatever input method. What is the state of touch support on KD? I've not even remotely thought about touch support anywhere on Linux. I'm very much interested in that. The state of KDE touch support is improving fast, but it's still behind most competitors. As far as the shell goes, you're able to navigate most of the shell through touch screen. KD Plasma shell is so much bigger.

Like it has so many functionalities compared to other shells. So it's very complicated, but it's not very intuitive. There's lots of places where it can go wrong. I tried a bit ago. As far as apps go, usually the newer ones with Kuregami works super nicely because that's what they're meant to do. The older ones like Ocular Dolphin have been brought to some touchscreen support to some extent, while other apps like K-Money, I think it's called as an example, obviously never

even considered that. So they're not meant for touch at all. Luckily, there's much improvement going on with the Plasma Mobile project too, but it's still not in a very good state, sadly. Yeah. That is... Touch support's a weird one like it's a it's such a different way of designing application compared to desktop support like

the level of accuracy you get with a mouse is very different from you know you know fat fingering everything on your screen you have to have a different way of designing the buttons you can't just have hey here is this tiny little radio button or tiny little check box you're not really going to be able to effectively use that for the most part yeah and in my opinion this is a bit controversial but in my opinion you cannot do like a touch u and a normal keyboard UI either, because for a normal laptop with a touch screen, it always can jump between a keyboard usage and touch screen one. So your UI should be always kind of 3D

to deal with both inputs. Kiri does have a touch mode, which makes the button bigger and stuff like that, which actually also activates when you start touching the screen. So that's useful to some extent. But even if you have touch mode disabled, your app should be usable with touch, I think. And when I see people saying that gnome is like a

mobile shell nowadays uh i totally disagree with that but even if it was like you have to design with touch in mind to some extent and you can do a different shell for touch users that won't support the keyboard yeah yeah well you could just go fully down the way that Windows 8 did. It'd just make everything massive. And then it worked perfectly on touchscreen. And, you know, it works fine on keyboard and mouse, but it's maybe a bit too far. I remember Windows 8, it was not a good...

Yeah, that was back when Microsoft was also trying to push the Windows phone. And they're like, let's just use the same UI on both. Yeah, I mean, it could work. I've seen GNOME do incredible effort on that part, but Windows 8 was not doing it right at all. I wasn't happy at all to use Windows 8. 10 was much better. Yeah, I think they could have made it work if they did like 8.1 when that came out and it actually gave you the option to go back

to something a bit more reasonable i think if they didn't push the change so quickly people could have adapted to it but making that massive leap especially from from 7, where 7 was... People still... I still talk to people today who are still using 7. Don't... Anyone who's listening to this, if you're using 7, stop. It's a security hazard. It hasn't been supported for years. But

coming from that, going to then 8, it is a really jarring experience. And I'm sure that's one of the things that KDE doesn't want to, when it does want to push out these changes, doesn't want to make massive sweeping changes between versions, like completely uplifting the way that you would use your system. Yeah, we have no intention of doing that, simply put. Even for Plasma 6, you shouldn't have any massive change. Yeah, we have no intention of doing that, simply put.

Even for Plasma 6, you shouldn't have any massive change. It's mostly work behind the scenes of bringing everything to Qt 6, reworking APIs, the theming system, if we get the chance to, that sort of stuff. Now, I've always asked the VDG to at least have something for the promotion team to actually talk about for Plasma 6, but it shouldn't be something that completely changes the nature of Plasma. We99 that becomes like 6, but with the changes behind the scenes. I think there has been some big changes in the past,

but I wasn't actually there to see them. So I can't quite comment on that. Well, you want to talk about something that doesn't have, you know, massive changes between versions. A couple of months ago i was doing a stream where i went back and looked at um ubuntu 4.10 which shipped with gnome 2.8 and if you use gnome 2.8 like you can clearly see that there have been changes over time but it's still that you can go back and use gnome 2.8 and it still is that same sort of general overarching experience,

but with a lot more polish to it. And I think that's what a lot of people would prefer with their system as opposed to, you know, as I said, with Windows 8, just changing everything. And GNOME has done that fairly well, I would think. changing everything. And Gnome has done that fairly well, I would think. Yeah, I actually very much like how Gnome is developing lately. The major releases that they've put out lately with a new overview as an example, I think has been properly conducted. And I've also done some videos looking back at very very old KDC stems and I was

quite impressed to see how much I actually recognized off KDPlasma and newer things like there's the desktop toolbox which was very old apparently and it was kept until Plasma 5 dot something when it was finally removed. And I was like, oh, it's the desktop toolbox. I didn't know it was that old. And it sometimes happened that I look into KDE Plasma panel code, which hasn't changed much. And I see the code, which is like 2008. So 14 years ago, something like that. And I try to understand what something does.

I ask the author who's like, that was 14 years ago. I don't know why they wrote that. So sometimes there's some, yeah, Kiliplasma inside some parts of it are very old too. Obviously those changes do need to happen. I think one of the places where you can really help out with the users uh i guess getting used not getting used to like understanding these changes and knowing why they were made i think that's where the

promotion side does get really really useful where you can actually say you can sit down and show this is the new feature like the floating power panels, for example. Like this is why we've made this change. This is what this allows you to do. And if you don't like it, then, well, this is what you can do to maybe go back to the old version. Yeah, there is a lot of work in promotion to actually get the features that come in. Sometimes I think that there's actually not enough time

between when the development stops and the new release is published. You usually get around three months, I think, of development on a new version and then roughly one month to actually put all of that together into an announcement. And it's always like around against time to actually do the video. And as an example, now it's the 9th. Release is on the 14th. I don't know when this is going to be published.

Next Thursday. So the 16th? The 16th, which means that it will be after the KT Plasma release and I have no idea if we'll actually have a promotional video about KT Plasma 5.25. Check if there's none. You know

that I'm very sad inside. If there is one, I'm very happy. I don't know yet. I tried to work on some parts of it. Another contributor did some other parts, but we've got exams and you also got six. Yeah, yeah. Well, here's your promotional video.

What is the biggest feature that's being added? There you go. Tell us now. There's so many things. Like the 5.25 is the biggest release I've ever seen of KD Plasma. You've got the new overview, which is finally officially introduced. You've got one-to-one gestures. You've got the floating panels.

You have the touch mode. Everything. Like, there's a significant improvement. And, like, Wayland has improved so much. And it's not even on the announcement because everything else is so interesting. And actually writing the announcement page was such a trip. I was like, when it's going to end, like another feature, another feature, another feature, it's a super long list.

And then you actually have to do videos about all of that stuff, screenshots, and it took a while. Well, actually, I did want to ask you about wayland i have been trying out wayland recently with sway and i wayland is a really weird one for me i can it feels like it's this really great protocol that has giant gaping holes in it that really stopped me from using it. Yeah. Wayland inside of KDE is considered what we want to move to. And the X11 version of KDE Plasma was actually froze for new features. Then it was unfroze when a maintainer changed, froze for new features than it was unfroze when a maintainer changed.

But it's clear that Wayland is what we're moving to. When you have like this big holes in it, it's always either like KDE or other kind of specs that are shared between desktop that try to address that sort of things. Overall, I think it's a better experience because Wayland actually allows KDE to implement some features like one-to-one just source, which sadly can only work on Wayland. They only work on Wayland for GNOME as well. I don't know if elementary managed

to get them working on X11, maybe they did, but it's the kind of features that are meant to be on Wayland. So you should, you imaginary kitty user listening to this should try Wayland. And I only switched to Wayland on January, I think, of this year. And it went much better than I expected. Before that, it was a mess. But with the latest release,.24,.25, much, much better. And currently I'm on Wayland, except when I have to use OBS

because I haven't yet figured out how to record with OBS. Okay, so that's actually one of the big things that was a mess and why I hadn't tried it before because it wasn't... You couldn't capture it. Like, you couldn't capture it unless you were using... I think it was a tool for Gnome. Like, they had their own capture system.

I don't know if KDE had their own or... Yeah, there's... I don't remember the name, but there's the screen sharing thingy that now kind of, that now works. Also, I think through, what's it, a pipe wire, I think it is. Yeah, the way it's done now is through pipe wire with desktop portals.

Yeah, I mean, now in theory it works, but you either get it out of the box with a distro, which I hadn't. Setting it up is kind of difficult and I haven't managed. I, for the most part, have had a good experience using the OBS Flatpak. And then yesterday I was using the OBS Flatpak and then it crashed.

And then I opened it and it crashed and it crashed then it crashed and then I opened it and it crashed and it crashed and it crashed and then I couldn't use it so yep and my my biggest uh fear in changing OBS version because I actually have the packaged version from Ubuntu and not the flat a flat pack one yeah is that I spent three days getting the hardware acceleration working. I don't want to spend another three days figuring it out

again. What GPU do you have? Good question. I am doing a video. No, it's the Intel semi-dedicated one. I can't help you there. Yeah. But I mean, it has improved my recording significantly.

So I want to keep it. Yeah. But I know maybe exporting profiles, I should be able to import it back but i'm scared yeah my my main problem with recording on wayland is it slows down my uh the way i record so i don't know how you use obs but i've got a lot of hotkeys set up and you can't use them in wayland because they don't have the global i i did talk about this recently on my channel there's been some work done to get hotkeys uh basically a hotkey management system inside of desktop portals it's very much a work in progress not sure when it's gonna actually come out but it's one of those things that

it it's one of those major blockers for me first it was capturing then global shortcuts i think once those are done those are the main things for me that stop me from actually mainly using wayland once that's done i'd be more than happy to use it yeah it. When I record videos, usually what I do is, well, mostly what I would do with shortcuts is cut certain parts of the videos to actually stop and then play again. Or what I actually do is I just record the whole thing and then I just cut the parts where there's complete science silence sorry and when i need to cut a certain part i just shut up and do whatever and then when i start speaking again i know that the the auto editor is going to pick that up so that's what uh when i have to switch from one scene to another i just shut up wait a second go to abs change the scene

go back and then start talking it works it's probably not the most elegant way to do it but it's simple that's what i go for well speaking of it just working we'll get to the baby woke stuff but firstly what is going on with all the flickering in your videos? Have you worked that out? I don't know. I have no clue. And it's very funny that sometimes I get comments saying, oh, no, to actually fix it, you need to go and change that settings. And then I go there and it completely breaks my system. And I know you just have to disable hearing protection.

It doesn't work. I have no clue whatsoever. I am trying to figure it out, but I think that what's going to happen is that I'm switching to KDE Neon in some months, so that's going to fix it. I hope that's going to be.

It doesn't happen on Wayland. Only on X11. I guess you got to use Wayland then. But I don't know how to record on Wayland. Yeah, that's the problem. What you do is you buy a Raspberry Pi and then you use that as a capture PC. I do have one.

If you've got an extra PC lying around, just do a capture PC. I do have one. If you've got an extra PC lying around, just do a capture PC. Right. It's not a good solution, but you know. Yeah, I have no idea what's up with the flickering. I just hope that it's not the deal breaker.

Was that happening before recently, or is that a recent thing? It is a recent thing, and i have no idea what caused it okay um i i have weird problems with um my camera flickering sometimes but i realized that was just a weird cable i've never seen like the black flickering like you've seen on no captures No captures. No, no. It's part of, I guess, compositing of Kili Plasma. I guess that's it. Maybe BabyBorg's right. Maybe she should use GNOME then.

Well, I spent three months recording on GNOME, actually. I talked about this and I got a lot of people triggered. You call yourself a Kili developer and you're using GNOME? Yeah. Yeah. Just checking it out, see how it goes. It went pretty well. KDE might be a great desktop environment.

It doesn't mean everything about it is perfect. And maybe there's something that GNOME's doing that would fit with the way that KDE wants to approach things. It's not like all of these different projects are just enemies with each other and can't take things that are beneficial to the users and bring them all together. Yeah, not at all. There was this very representative merge request from a KWin developer

who introduced what's called the blend effect, which is another feature of 5.25, which is when you switch from one theme or color scheme to another, now there's a transition from the old to the newer color scheme, which looks significantly better than just all of the components updating their color. And it was implemented just in the same way that GNOME had just done like the week before. And the merge request was like, this feature is inspired brackets copied from GNOME.

And I was like, it's not like GNOME is going to come and complain. Yeah, just, they actually, there was this feature thread of the holder actually explaining how it works. So it was very nice. But when he switched to Gnome, KD Plasma didn't have the new overview,

didn't have one-to-one gestures and Gnome did. So that was a significantly, a significant step forward. Now that 5.25 has those things, I can safely go back to Plasma without any regrets. Well, let's get into the main thing then. Baby WoG. So I...

I saw the first video you did back on Baby WoG. Whenever that was? I don't even know when you first... The Montecomondi. Ah, yes, the very first one yeah the first way way before the current war yeah uh our relationship and kitty's relationship with gnome has always been weird did you know about babyogue before that video came out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We very much did.

Well, before I even had a YouTube channel, BabyVogue was doing videos about KDE and it was very much known in the KDE developers chat and not in a good way at all. Every time a new BabyVogway video would come out, somebody would type, oh no, a new Baby Evogway video without the link. Because if you post the link of one of these videos to a kiddie development chat, you're going down.

So you shouldn't do that. And I actually contacted baby Evogwe many times before starting my YouTube channel, asking, are you really sure about your latest video? Isn't anything you'd want to change your attitude, stuff like that. So I we actually discussed in a friendly way. And I always hoped to make his videos a bit more friendly. And to some extent, he improved on that to some extent. And I'm always a bit sad whenever I have to go out and say, no, this video you did isn't appropriate.

Because I always hoped that his channel would become a good channel of positive things. And most of the criticism that BabyVogue does is potentially good for KDE. But developers are not even going to watch it if you phrase it like an insult to developers. So that's where it doesn't work. No, I think that's actually really fair. That's something I've noticed with the way that I approach certain videos as well.

Like there have been... Like back with... It was the the back when Arch first added its user friendly installer this was like a year or so ago I do feel like I was so back when it first

came out it shouldn't have been shipped with the ISO it was you could enter like the wrong character and it would just crash and it would like delete everything you did with your setup and it would just crash and it would like delete everything you did with your setup and it was just a mess it should never have been shipped but i feel like the way that i approached it back when i did initially talk about it was was a little bit overly aggressive but i when i whenever i am really critical of some project that i'm looking at i tend to try to focus on

what's good about it and you know i'm not going to hide from the fact that some things may not be working properly but i tend to like to to focus on what makes the project good and why you should like why it's still worth using even with these problems. Yeah, I agree. That's what I usually try to do as well. And I think that it could be just as fair to actually only do videos about the criticism that certain projects have if you want to do it.

That's not something I would do, but it's something that could be done to actually highlight the issues. But it has to be done with a constructive attitude. If you bring up an issue and say, you know what you should do? You should delete all of your code and start from scratch. That's not going to get you anywhere because that's not going to happen, obviously. scratch that's not going to get you anywhere because that's not going to happen obviously

and that's not uh make the developers any more like willing to put work into actually fixing the bank you raised yeah we have a bug tracker for that and baby thankfully actually filed uh some bugs that we did fix so that's how it's supposed to go not doing videos saying you know what you're doing well you know what KDE developers are doing? They are doing parties and they don't care about fixing actually the code. BabyVogel did videos and videos with these

segments of people dancing, saying this is KDE developers. I was like, why? KDE is brokenD developers. I was like, why? KD is broken by design. And yeah, you're not going to make developers willingly put work into fixing anything like that. Yeah, yeah.

No, I totally get that. One thing that... One thing you did bring up in one of i one of the episodes you did on the baby boy war um was about bringing up criticisms in the video and not filing bug reports i i don't necessarily think because you said if basically you should always be filing bug report if you notice a problem like that paraphrasing but that's effectively if is that fair to say what you're basically saying you should always file a bug report uh if you want you can also do other kind of like videos and stuff but you should always at least do the bug report yeah because uh kd developers can't

follow like third-party videos to know what's wrong with their software. They're going to wake up, open up bugs.kde.org and read the list. That's how it's going to work. They're not going to read articles and stuff. Or if they do, they might forget about them. So you should always at least do the bug report.

Right, okay. No, I just want to make sure that we're on the same page there. I think generally that's a fair place to be. I think it sort of depends on what your approach to the... approach to looking at the software is. I think most of the time you probably should, but I think if your goal instead is to be pointing out,

I guess, the problems with it in its current state, like how users can approach these problems, I don't... Maybe I'm wording this really badly, but... I don't even know how to say this properly maybe i should have thought that one through a bit more um i think obviously you probably should be reporting the bugs when you notice something major but a lot of the time i will i don't necessarily report every single problem that I find in, like, when I'm looking at software in these videos.

Because a lot of the time, I don't think a lot of these things are major problems. And sometimes they're problems that I'm having, but not necessarily problems with the software itself. Like, sometimes it's a problem with the way that I'm approaching the software. Or some use case I'm trying to approach the software with where maybe that's not what the developer had initially intended. I hope that made any amount of sense. Yeah, no, I would suggest still making the bug reports. Worst case scenario, it takes 30 seconds for a developer to mark it as intentional

and actually explain why it's intentional and the bug is being closed down just for that. And, but it could happen that something that one person thinks is intentional is not, and it's really easy to fix if it's a very small thing. So in five minutes, it could be fixed. It happens very frequently that there's a bug report that's about a very specific and small problems that can be fixed quickly. And that's very much helpful to actually have.

There's people who, like, submit hundreds of bug reports about everything they see wrong. And that's actually useful to actually see the least of everything that could be done even the small smaller things which require less time so in general i would suggest always uh try to take the time to back report what you see wrong worst case scenario it gets closed down that's not it's better than not reporting a potential bug no that, that's totally fair. No, I've definitely started to report a lot more of the problems that I've been seeing. I just wanted to hear what a developer's perspective on that was, really.

Because I haven't got myself involved in... I've done little things, like packaging some applications here and there, but I've not really got myself involved in... deeply involved in any sort of open source project like this. Oh! We lost him.

Are you back? Yep, I should be back now. Okay, did you hear anything I just said? I don't know where you disappeared. Except the last five seconds. Okay, um... What was I saying? I just said. I don't know where you disappeared. Except the last five seconds. Okay. What was I saying?

I have personally gotten super involved in many open source projects. What did I say? This is why I need an extra guy that's back here to tell me what I was saying. I don't know what I just said, um, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna move on from that, um, what, okay, simply what,

oh my god, is he gone again, no, no, what is happening, oh my god, okay, you know what, uh, I'm gonna go on without him for, actually, I don't have any topics to go on without him for a moment. I don't know if that's my side or his side either. I hope that's not my side. No, it can't be because I'm connected to Jitsi right now

and it's publicly being hosted. Uh... Okay. hosted uh okay uh okay while he's gonna come back i'm gonna talk about something fun that i found yay internet oh he's just completely gone now it's double me here we go um so i was So I was on Twitter earlier and I found this. Oh, is he back? Hi. No. I don't hear you now. I don't know what happened. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it was on my side.

For some reason, I usually connect to Wi-Fi through an hotspot from my phone because my house Wi-Fi is so slow. And I don't know why, but sometimes after one hour, it just goes very slow for a few seconds. Sometimes it happens. And when I'm streaming, it happens that the stream just goes down because of that. So weird. I'm moving in just three months. So hopefully, that's going to improve things.

Hopefully. Surely, it can't get worse. Surely. I mean, I'm still able to do at least one hour without any issues. So that's good. Well, that's enough to upload videos. So, you know, it's fine.

Yeah. What I was saying before everything fell apart is why did you decide to you know you can always have this guy who seems like they're annoying the project and everyone sort of sees them as this like they freak out every time that he posts a video but why did you actually decide to basically go to war with baby wog okay so there is two reasons the first one is that i don't think that you should have the platform to say things without any actually taking any responsibility on what you just said if you have 20 000 subscribers and you say something that's completely untrue you should have somebody on the other side side saying no what you just said is untrue and i hope that with some of the videos i would be able to call out on some mistakes that he did on these videos like when he complained about the inconsistency of

using radio buttons and check boxes which actually wasn't an inconsistency that was by that was by design so yeah that was so bad yeah when i when i first saw the video i thought oh yeah it's an inconsistency but then i actually tried it and it was not it was by design yeah it's technically inconsistent but it's inconsistent because they don't do the same thing yeah it's not like consistency is everything is the same thing that they were of course not that would be harmful to the user yeah yeah and yeah obviously the second reason is that with exams I needed some very easy to do content that would do well. Yeah. And that was it.

Yeah, I know that feeling for sure. Like I've had, actually, what has been the reception you've had from this? Because, you know, some people will freak out. I don't know if it happens with a channel at your size, but as you get bigger, there are more and more people who want you to do things a certain way. And the second you diverge from that, they don't know what to do.

Suddenly everything's terrible. Well, I've received some comments saying that they disagreed with doing these videos because they said that I shouldn't give any visibility to baby Vogueway and I'm like, is twice as bigger as I am. So I'm not sure I'm the one giving any visibility, quite the opposite. And, but I can just look at the numbers. Like people are going to say, you know,

don't do this kind of videos. But then I actually see the statistics, and they did super well. They got twice the average view length of usual videos. So it's not people clicking on the videos and saying, oh, no, it's boring. Close it. No, they're actually watching the whole video. So there is interesting there is interesting this so as much as some comments might disagree this is something that is interesting for my subscribers well this goes back to the thing we're talking about before with users don't they're good at pointing out a problem but they're

not necessarily good at pointing out the solution like if you're not someone who is making videos if you're not a developer you don't you can say that here like this is a problem this is something i don't like about it but you don't necessarily have that that knowledge to actually come up with what the solution should be then yeah it has up and to um just regarding channel, people saying that I should post other kinds of things other than the Linux world. I've done a couple of chess videos, a couple of poetry videos. Nobody watched them. Don't do that. They have no idea what they're talking about.

Oh, is he gone again? No. Yeah. That was a terrible approach. Okay, you're just again? No? Yeah. That was a terrible approach. Okay, you're just frozen. I'm back. Can you see me? Yeah, I could hear you for a little bit,

but your camera goes... Nice. Okay. I actually see you nicely, so... It's great that my internet's not a bad one today. Let me actually... Yeah. It's still frozen? No, you're good. You're good you're good it's okay okay yeah uh i forgot what i was saying too um you were saying chess videos and pottery

yes yes they nobody watched them and uh it's very fair to i tried and there was actually one video that kind of went well which was a chess match between a KD developer and a KD designer because a designer also played chess and that was kind of fun to do but I mean that's clearly not the type of content that my subscribers want so I didn't follow up on that I made a separate channel called Nikolov's Poetry for that. Yeah, the reason why that one did well is because it still fits kind of into your niche. You are like

I guess you could still cover things that are happening in general Linux but you are very much mainly KDE. It's like this is KDE news, this is some project that's using KDE and things like that. So the chess one still had some, like,

tangential relation to KDE because it's KDE dev versus KDE designer. So even though it's not your regular content, it's still in some way fit to the niche. And YouTube really, really emphasizes channels fitting into some sort of niche. Yeah. Now I'm slowly trying to back out a bit from the KDE niche to a more general one about desktops and hopefully then Linux. Because also being the KDE YouTuber, as I've been described, he's harmful within the KDE community

because my channel is not a KDE channel, but it's so close to KDE activities that sometimes I get rightful criticism for things like having advertisement. Like KDE is against having advertisement in their videos. But even though I'm not part of KDE is against having advertisement in their videos but even though I'm not part of KDE I'm so close to it that one might rightfully assume that I am my channel is part of KDE too and something that I wanted to emphasize lately clearly is that it is not and I would like to

move away a bit and talk about desktops as a whole. And I actually wanted to start a podcast in like three months or so about desktop in general, what's happening in KD Plasma, GNOME and so on. That's actually a really good idea. Like, I feel like the Linux space is, it's kind of lacking in podcasts. There is certainly a couple of news podcasts, and that's pretty much it from, like, the Linux podcast stance. Like, there's no one,

there's just not really that many, to be honest. Like, there's a ton of Linux YouTubers doing desktop Linux stuff and all of that stuff, but when it comes to you know the really long form just discussion content i can maybe name like one or two like i think they changed the name but big daddy linux is like the only one that really comes to mind i know like destination linux but that's mainly more of like a news show at this point i've also been in the the Linux for everyone one which is a bit inconsistent and likely in there so right now it's on hold and I agree on that but my opinion is that we also need I do see some of that and for podcasts I think it's also useful to have a podcast that's in the shorter format which is maybe just 10 minutes but it has all of the news that you would need.

And I listen to a lot of that kind of podcast. So my goal was to make something that is actually published every weekday. So five episodes a week of just 10 minutes of what happened the day before on linux desktops and i've received many comments saying there's not enough stuff happening in the linux desktop boards for a talk show every 10 minutes and i think those people are completely wrong because there is so much that's actually happening when we speak so yeah i'm not even covering just like updates that are happening and i've had people telling me oh you're gonna run out of content one day like do you know how

much stuff is happening you have no idea what you're talking about yeah like the only way that i run out of content is if like open source software is made illegal. Like, people are constantly making things. Yeah. And not everything is covered. So I think there's always some room to. Yeah, I found so many, like, really small projects that do some. It's just, like, one really cool thing. It's, like, why don't more people know about this?

Like, I've had people tell me, like, this is something I would like to do. And just like, there's a thing here. It does it. Like, use this. Yeah, I've seen many of that kind of projects, especially in KDE where everything is so customizable. You've got like scripts that work on your color scheme, getting it from the background, which is, by the way, another feature coming in 5.25. Do you mean PyWall or is there another one that does that? I know that was one of the ones.

The one I used was called Material Colors something, KD Material Colors. And it gets the accent color from the background and applies it tinting the windows background color so you got like everything is blueish or yellowish but now that's included by default in KD Plasma. That's actually really cool. I'm not much of a... people have seen my desktop know I'm not much of a theme guy like my theme my theme if Google was talking about it is a material design what it is is everything is black and there's one accent color but yeah i do get it people want to have like really nice looking desktops my my android is a pure black i just it makes sense on phone.

I've personally never really gotten into the Android customization side. I've had people talk to me about, like, hey, do you want to try out using the Pine phone with this desktop and this desktop? You want to try out some of the

custom ROMs for Android? And for me, my phone, I don't really care about my phone it just it's there i i'm sure there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it but my focus is just on my desktop yeah i usually try to spend time customizing my android phone with the goal of something that actually helps me out in the long term. As an example, a very stupid one is the vaccine care codes that you have to show in Italy to get inside of things. I actually took a widget to show it always on my wallpaper, so I would just have to unlock it.

And I was always the first one getting into any building because I always edit 3D as an example. But also stuff like- Sorry, I was gonna ask, do you guys have like a QR code to show that you've had a vaccination? Is that what you mean? Yes. Okay, right, right, right.

And also stuff like to-do lists. I have my to-dos in two lists on my home screen. And I've got my diary stuff, my habits tracking apps, all on my home screen. And that actually helps me see what I should do. I just have a launcher that gives me folders. Like really nice folders and that's all. And I just change my font.

And that's basically as far as I go. Like I get it. I'm sure you can make your phone far more efficient. But my phone is basically a glorified MP3 player for the most part. Yeah. No, I use it a lot. So I kind of have to. Most of my life goes through the phone. Like when I think about it, like just Telegram, I spend a lot of time on Telegram.

And then there's Twitter and TikTok I actually use a lot. And so the part of actually getting new content comes a lot from that. There's also listening to music, as you've said. And I use it a lot also to track myself, my habits, and that sort of thing. So I always have it. Like right now, my phone is ticking a KD channel, no, Linux Linux channel, I called it task, and there's a Pomodoro timer to actually measure how much time I spend for each task. And I do all of that on the phone.

Well, you're way more organized than I am. I have to be organized. No, I get that. Sorry, what were you saying? I work on like 10 things at the same time yeah I've had people in my life tell me

that I like you're like really hard working you're always making videos you're always doing this I don't I don't do anything like I sure maybe I work like 30 40 hours a video an hour 30 or 40 hours a week on the channel. That's not that much.

Like I don't do like, I don't do uni and make videos and develop KDE and do this and do that. Like I'm chilling. Yeah. Most of the weeks I have to set a time span that's going to be used in making videos. Yeah. And usually it's four hours.

Usually I have top four hours a week to do videos. And I have to fit all of my content inside of that. That's not always easy. So I have always to find the tricks to make it as efficient as possible. So removing the silence automatically as an example. That's the kind of stuff that actually saves time. That's also why I don't do

many live streams anymore because they take a lot of time and they reward very little in terms of views and subscribers. I have to optimize my time sadly. I think live streams can work depending on what you're doing

but if you're just going to turn the camera on and just talk I think your time is better spent just doing videos. Yeah, probably. I know there's actually a lot of people who like to like people who mainly know mainly do development who will use streaming as a way to i guess keep themselves focused on the development so rather than you know if you're just you know i'm bad with time so i might be like planning out

a video and like oh i'm gonna check twitter i'm gonna watch this video i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that but if you're if you're streaming everything you're doing, you sort of have to keep yourself focused on, like, oh, you don't necessarily have to interact with the chat there, but you have to keep yourself focused on what it is that you're supposed to be doing. Yeah.

And that's actually something that I investigated when I, after doing my first live streams about coding, that is, is there a way to safely bring this to other aspects of my life to assure that, of course I can't live stream me constantly, that would be impossible, but one of the solutions that I found is to actually always have a timer when I'm doing something so that if I have to like check Twitter, have to actually stop it check Twitter take it back and that's a disincentive I've heard some people talk about Pomodoro timers I actually never really looked into how the system actually functions so give me like a basic rundown of the way that you use it at least

in theory they should be used that you spend a certain amount of time, complete focus on a task, then there's a pause, and then you get back to focus, and it's like, I don't know, 45 minutes of focus and five minutes of pause. I don't use it like that. What I do is I just use it as a time tracking way. So when I start doing something, I start the timer with a certain tag about what I'm doing. And then when I'm done, I close it down. And then at the end, I have all of the data of what I did during the day. Usually what I try to do is I try to be productive, which actually also means like reading or playing chess that also counts as productive

for 12 hours a day that is my goal and yeah but it also some some of the lighter stuff is in there yeah yeah yeah it's easier than it sounds and uh and to actually do that you have to have almost no pause between the things so that helps me when I'm done with something, I immediately jump to the next thing. And it's kind of stressful, but when you get used to it, it's actually helpful in my opinion. That does sound pretty helpful, actually. I want to get myself better at time management.

And every time I try to do something, I will keep it going for, like, a week, two weeks. And then something comes up where it disrupts what I was doing. And I've got to just change things up a little bit. And then everything just starts to unravel. And I just fade back into what I was doing before. It's a problem I have to... It's not like I'm lacking time to get everything done. I get everything done, I need

to get done. But I feel like I could be more efficient with the way that I'm approaching things if I actually sat down and gave myself a system for it. Yeah, the very difficult part of it is remaining consistent because there's really

no use in having a day with 16 hours of productivity instead of 12 if the week later you're going to burn out and not do anything yeah so consistency is a key part of it and it's super difficult if you have like exams and stuff yeah usually i i do differentiate between weeks i'm able to be fully productive and the weeks I burned out. And that also counts. I have many systems to try to keep me in line. Not only like I record my time, but also every Sunday I actually have a form that I print

out and compile with everything that I did the week prior and everything I want to do the next week. Jeez, you are really, really planned. Yeah, I'm super organized with these things because they actually help me a lot. So I slowly made it always more complex as more time progressed. I started years ago so well yeah I'm I just need to take those first little steps and then stay consistent with that and then build on top of it but I don't know that I'm one of those people who, if you give me less time to do something, I get more done. Like, that's why I know that if I was to set out my scheduling properly, I would get everything done I needed to get done way quicker.

Like, if I... Because I've got a day job as well. If I start earlier than I normally would start, I still get everything done I was going to get done if I didn't, like, have that start time there. It's just... Yeah. I'm one of those people

who tend to work better under under pressure so i need to give my i need to sort of force that pressure onto myself even when there's nothing else doing it for me yeah i agree you should always still be careful with how much pressure you can take over a long period of time before burning out because that's a key factor too and usually what i suggest as a first step is to start using an application called u habits uh i think it's just called habits on the play store but you can find it as you habits it it's open source and everything it's nicely done and you can start with just one up one like habit that you want to get and you said you either see it if you've done it that day or not you can set a goal of how many times a week you should do that or you can also have a more advanced counting like

how many minutes or hours you work on that thing or for me as an example when i study i have some cards to study and i actually write down the number of cards i have studied and there's also that option you can set a goal and if i have like a couple of these things as a good way you just have to set whether you've done them or not. And it's a way to start. You've mentioned your exams a couple of times. What are you actually studying? Mathematics.

Currently, this exam is Geometry 2. I was always good at math, but I never had teachers that were good at teaching it, and I never enjoyed it. It's one of those things that I know that nowadays I've found, knowing how much great content there is on YouTube to learn about maths, I definitely enjoyed it a lot more, but during my going through regular schooling i i hated it no matter how good

i was at it yeah i think we do have a serious issue with how mathematics is taught in elementary and like middle school yeah yeah because i i see so many people that are actually scared of mathematics. And I know many people would cry if you give them a mathematical problem, not because they can't solve it, but because that recalls the pressure during tests and stuff. And also the fact that mathematics is so much associated with smartness, like intelligence and when it's not really like anybody can study mathematics and be proficient at it and there's no requirement of like being smart or anything and all together these things make it so that there's a lot of

pressure and you just end up saying, I'm not good at math just because you're afraid to fail and you don't actually end up learning anything. And I do think that we should, in my impression, we've got a lot of teachers that are good at math, but bad at actually teaching it. Yeah. And I think we should make sure that maybe it's fine if math teachers only know like calculus one, but they have to know how to teach it to students that are young. So as I said, I think that's where a lot of the online resources get really,

really helpful. There are a lot of people out there who are really invested in mathematics, and not just that, like science and everything else, that actually have a fun way of teaching it, and not just a fun way of teaching it,

an engaging way of teaching it, that still gets all of the points across. Yeah, and I think the only issue is that we don't have enough. Because I've seen some 3B, 1B videos.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. They're very good. The only issue is that there's not enough to cover mathematics that you should learn as a whole but they've helped me a lot when studying like linear algebra their course on linear algebra is really good and i think that we should put effort into taking that kind of content and trying to produce more that's very similar and helps you understand mathematics without any stress of actually seeing

numbers like my end goal would be to take something and teach it without any kind of numbers in it because at this point we've got so many students that are just scared of numbers existing i think that's also like one thing i have a lot more experience with is with programming. And when I was going through my degree, there were a lot of things that just the way they were teaching them just didn't make any sense. They were so tied to the language they were using. Like I was doing, I went through a C++ course and a lot of it was focused on,

there was a lot of search algorithms and sorting algorithms. And one of the sections was focused on A-star. And if you teach A-star, focus just on the algorithm itself, it's like, you're just saying numbers at me. Like, what are you, back up a little bit. There is a more abstract way

we can actually look at this. Yeah, I always, always suggest Back up a little bit. There is a more abstract way we can actually look at this. Yeah. I always, always suggest when learning something and mostly when teaching it, to try to give the best geometric intuition of that concept. And like as an example, let me do actually a practical example for linear algebra. If you're teaching the determinant of a matrix, you could just say, yeah, you just take the multiplication of the diagonals.

But what it actually represents is the ratio of the area before and after the transformation. The 3B1B videos explains that super nicely and it's actually a much better way to understand it because if you know that the determinant is zero then you know the area becomes zero which means that the whole function is collapsing into a lower dimension. That sounds cool if you don't know what that is. I have no idea what you just said

but yes that does sound pretty cool. It's not as cool as it sounds. I stopped studying math at the end of high school so yeah like I yeah whatever you just said does sound cool

I'm sure if that's the way it was addressed to me I'm sure it would have stuck a little bit more yeah linear algebra I think is not in the curriculum of high school so most people don't actually meet it but it's just after high school yeah yeah us uh here i think we did have like the way um in high school works for like your final grade is that they're like at least with

my school in like my state, sorry, uh, they break down the math class and like five different, I guess, types of math classes. So you've got like your, your basic,

uh, whatever their basic is. I think that was mainly focused on like statistics and graphs and things like that. Then there was like a step up from that. And then a step up from that. And I think the step up would then go into things like linear algebra, calculus, things like that. Okay, yeah, makes sense.

Like they don't go obviously as deep as you would in a university context, but at least introducing you to the concepts. Yeah, that's that hits you so how i would argue that i would argue that's calculus uh at university is one of the toughest things to get used to so how far are you into your study? I'm currently the second year of university. How many years is that for you? I mean, three plus two technically. Yeah. So five. When I look back on university, I did enjoy...

When we'll say like your university years years are some of your best years, I think there is definitely some merit to that, but I definitely didn't see it at the time. I don't know how you feel about going through it right now, if it's something you're already missing your first year, and how you feel about it. I don't know, because the first year has been a mess, not because of university itself, but because of the pandemic. How you feel about it? I don't know, because the first year has been a mess.

Not because of university itself, but because of the pandemic. In the first year, I've actually been into university for only one month, and all of the lessons were via Teams, Microsoft Teams. Oh, fun. That's such a bad... like, I hate Microsoft teams. Do teams work on Linux? Yeah, it does work, work, for some definition of work. But, I mean, it was actually really, really hard for me

to actually follow lessons from Microsoft teams. But, I mean, mean, I'm happy. I'm doing fine in general. Surely not because of university, but having the actually, you have more independence and that also shows in university, like not having to ask to go to the bathroom like that was the per minimum now i actually get to the bathroom without asking i luckily just managed to skip out on on the pandemic i it started in my final year um in i think my final semester actually so there was there was some plans initially because i was um the way it worked with my degree is uh my final year we did a big uh big industry project so you'd be working with some company and they were initially planning to fly me and uh my group member at the time

uh out to the state they were in which was was not going to happen because, yeah, everything went down, borders all locked down. Yeah. I've spoken to my younger sister about the way education is being handled now and it's not great. Like, some things work fine online, but others, not so much yeah um in general i think that

uh well when the pandemic hit i was still in high school and it was the last part of high school we do have a test uh at the end of high school, which is pretty important. Maturita is called here. And honestly, the six months before that were horrible. The worst year I've seen in the school because nobody knew what was going on. Everybody was completely going against the rules. And we were having fights with other students all the time. It was terrible.

And I see so many people saying that because of course this exam couldn't happen the way it happened before. So they had to simplify it. And a lot of people nowadays say, yeah, it was easier because they simplified it. And I was like, it was not, it was a complete mess and nobody actually knew how to prepare the exam. But as soon as I got to university, it was much better there actually compared to before. And I'm

not necessarily against having the option of seeing lessons from teams. And I do think that the university should have kept that kind of thing. And luckily it didn't. It just shut down any kind of distance exam or anything. But it was an option that was actually helpful to people not in Genoa, which is my city, or that had to travel to actually get there. So I think that something does, to travel to actually get there. So I think that something does, the digital world can actually help university and schools. My parents are both teachers. And my father in particular, focuses a lot on how to get teaching done better through the use of technology. it has stuff like text adventures through google forms that are related

to high street topics to actually teach those so it can be helpful but not if you do it terribly which is what we did it yeah which is what no one really knew what to do that was the problem it was just like well we either don't have any education this year or we just take what we're doing in person and put it online and just see what happens yeah and the teacher most of the teachers didn't know at all what they were supposed to do in my opinion and that showed we've had like tests that were like normal tests but via google forms and uh and like if you have a computer and you have a test you you can just google the stuff you can just write messages with your that's not going to work you can't do like reliable tests like that through like these things that's where you start using some root kits like the lockdown browser

yeah no you should like what we had to do for university exams was we have the computer with the exam on the screen yeah we have to be recorded by the computer. And we also have to have a phone on the other side of the room that records the screen and us working and our workspace. Wow. And the microphone should be on all of the time. So I heard all of my classmates actually like any sounds coming from the rooms. Wait, it was being sent to people doing the exam?

It wasn't just being captured? No, everybody had to be captured during the exams. Everybody had to be on a Microsoft Teams call, both through computer and through the telephone. And you had to have all of the microphones on, so you heard everybody. Just record it and then give it to the teachers. What?

Why did you be in a call? That's so dumb. Yeah, they were scared that we would Google, so we had to be recording in five different ways. No, that's what I mean. Like, record it it but don't have everyone in a call together like because that's just

distracting the way that my uni was doing, I didn't have exams my final year luckily so I didn't have to deal with this but some of my friends who were in a younger, earlier year they would record themselves and then give the recordings off

to the university staff and then they would go and review it check if you've done anything wrong yeah i don't know i guess they were scared of some maybe you do it one time and then you do it again with game i don't know yeah maybe they went with that. And it was not a pleasure to do that. I think one of the things that has been an improvement out of this, though, is by default, record everything. So record lectures, record classes. If you want to go back and review it, I think that's just perfectly fine. Obviously, it's not a replacement necessarily for a good teaching experience,

but I don't think there's any reason why you shouldn't record every class. Well, you should know that I am also a university students representative in my university school. And we've had this discussion between teachers and all most of the teacher if if not all actually voted against recording lessons at all because they said that that was going to like um they were scared that students would not follow lessons because they have the recordings and then they have like all everything before the exam. And so we actually disabled recordings completely. So we don't record anymore. And that was something that got me pretty upset

but I couldn't even complain because it was coming from the university director. And I'm not that much of a school students representative to argue with them. Would they have gotten angry if you opened up OBS and recorded them and posted it to the students? But it's not even streamed. No, I mean like when you're doing the,

like when you were just in calls. Oh wait, how are you doing your classes then? Wait, my misunderstanding here. In place. No, no, now it's in place. Okay, right, right, right. Now that we are in a place again, they're not doing any kind of recordings, which is, in my opinion, a terrible idea.

Like not lectures or anything, just nothing. Yeah. Like not lectures or anything, just nothing. Yeah. And when it was actually over Microsoft Teams, the thing was to keep it, but only for one week. So you had one week to actually see the recording of it and then it was removed. Because otherwise you get too much time to, you know.

You guys have got a weird system we like my my university always had lecture recordings like they they just literally have a a recording setup in every lecture hall the other classes weren't recorded but wow that's i guess it makes sense like if you if you want to make sure people are actually paying attention, but I don't know. Sorry, I was going to say, I always like to go back and review before the exams happen. Yeah, I agree.

And I would do that too if I had the possibility, but technically speaking, we are not a telemathic university. And so there are like laws against doing it so apparently everything we did during the pandemic was actually illegal and we just did it because nobody was going to complain because there was a pandemic going on so it is complex as a topic here but it got me pretty annoyed that we can just keep the recording system to actually have the lectures. Well, I guess they're going to stick with their system,

but you know, the only thing you really do then is, I guess, uh, advocate for change to happen really. And hopefully with enough people requesting it at some point, they will, they will realize the value in letting it happen

yeah yeah i agree well actually for one one little bit i want to get back to what we're talking about with baby wogue um i do pre-watch the video like pre-watch his videos before going into what you're talking about them with them? Or do you just go along as he says things? Well, usually if I want to make a reaction video, I don't watch it before to actually have some kind of natural reaction to the video. Baby Vogue's video, most of them, I had already watched them before starting the channel when they were first published so i knew about them but yeah and how many videos i i don't know how many like videos you're planning to make on this but i presume you've gone back and checked how much kde content

he's got so you know how much you can do he has done a lot of kitty videos for now i just decided to do three videos of mine and i'm just kind of waiting to see if baby vogel is going to answer because after three videos i've actually done a poll on my youtube community page asking if i should do more and there was like 55 saying yes 45 saying no so it wasn't very positive i thought okay maybe i should stop and then baby vogwe actually did a poll as well on his youtube community saying should i do more videos about nicola venerandi as well and 95 percent were like yes so oh yes i'm looking at it now it's at 83 percent right now that's that's amazing i actually expect now something to happen i guess look if he does a video on you you have to respond well he has already done two uh about me specifically this one would be the third and i would totally respond because i mean i i actually have my own like personal dislike of

baby woke because like this this is just the most petty thing two or so years ago he made a community post uh about he made a community post about me granted I'll agree with him that my videos were not good back then so that's totally fair but his argument was that based on some paper

that he didn't cite people prefer the sound of text to speech voices and therefore my videos are bad, basically. He didn't cite anything. He's just like, well... And see, you keep asking him for sources on this thing about KD or this thing about Gnome.

Stop asking for sources. That's not how we work around here. Yeah, I've seen so many of his community posts that are cringe to say the least so yeah but i i don't know what to expect at this point we'll see we'll see i think in the last year yeah i i think you're taking what he says too seriously i think that's the that's the main problem here yeah but i mean some things ah. And in the last video he has done, he talked about the floating panels that I implemented. And he was like, yeah, I should say thank you.

Sorry, not thank you, but good job to my enemy. And he was like, this is his first big contribution. I was like, what do you mean first? Like, I have been at Developers for years at this point. Well, he didn't know your name when your name was on the screen. So look, it could be from his perspective, the first one. Yeah.

And then there was the video where when I first joined GNOME, actually using it, it had done a video saying, welcome to GNOME. Now you have to become a GNOME, actually using it, it had done a video saying, welcome to GNOME. Now you have to become a GNOME developer. Please join the GNOME community. I was like, nope. But to be honest,

and he also done the Father V video. That was such a trip. I don't know if you watched that one. Oh, I don't think so. The Father V thing. That was so weird because it wasn't actually about me. It was this fictional story and he actually got my profile picture and he called me Father V and he actually took some of the videos from my poetry account and he photoshopped a kd logo on me while reading poetry

and as a subtitle he made like weird latin noises or stuff like that and in this super weird video i was like performing a satanic ritual to make somebody switch to KDE. And that was the weirdest thing ever. You should totally watch that one. I will have to go and check that one out. See, this is what I'm saying. Stop taking him so seriously. He makes videos like that. Like, sure, I totally

get from the dev perspective, like, a channel with 20k subs saying these things about KDE, but a lot of what he's saying just it's humor that is going way over your head yeah yeah

that one was funny to watch but I think that we should remember that you can be as joking as you want but you still have the responsibility of what you're saying. No, that's totally fair. Yeah, if I did a video of, I don't know,

Nick from the Linux experiment, which is much bigger than I am. Yeah. And I just took his videos, edited them, and then added some sentences that he never said, I would get sued, hopefully. Like, that would be such a not nice thing to do. Well, I've got him coming on the show next week,

so I'll ask him how he feels about that. Ask him if I have the permission to actually Photoshop videos of him. I'll make sure to do that. Well, this has been fun. I definitely enjoyed this. Me too. We've gone for an hour 45 so far.

I don't have much else to say. I think I've covered basically everything I was going to talk about. You got anything else that you want to bring up? No, I think we're good. Well, before we end, when you disappeared,

I did get something fun to talk about. I just want to show you this exists because it's just cool. It has nothing to do with KDE, but it's just cool. Let me see. Someone made a 60 FPS e-ink monitor. A 60 FPS?

Yeah. Let me actually see it in action. That is smooth. Does that actually work? Yeah, it's insane. I've seen some crazy e-ink stuff coming out Yeah, it's insane. I've seen some crazy ink stuff coming out, but that's incredible. This looks too good to be true.

You know, I am like, I like ink monitors, which is why, by the way, I'm so waiting for a pine node. Like, I just want one. And I like them. My father is super passionate and follows everything. So I'm just going to send him the link and see what he says because that looks really smooth. I didn't think it was real either,

but he's going to this big explanation about how it works. Yeah, if something like this can be done, it's going to this big explanation about how it works yeah if something like this can be done it's going to be totally i mean it's going to be expensive i think but i mean it's going to be absolutely a great step forward for this kind of things i don't know what you would use it for because even like being great for readers, but, like, what would you want to use a 60 FPS E-Ink display for? I mean, as, like, a monitor

and as a tablet, everything that's currently done, and there's a lot to like into having a, like, fully Android E-Ink device. Right now, the main issue is the refresh rate. And it is very good for anything like even reading articles or scrolling through Twitter, writing, reading ebooks, obviously, but not just that.

Anything that actually involves getting content that's not maybe in the video form, actually reading it on something that doesn't have lights coming to your eyes is easier to actually do. As an example, playing chess on a ink would probably go much, because when I do a serious match, there's hours of chess matches.

And on a screen screen after a bit it gets tiring on a ink it's already much better so there's a lot to like into such monitor and I would totally buy one one of the guys in this thread mentioned it might be good for coding

yeah probably anything that have cut out again be good for coding. Yeah, probably. Anything that have... Could be cut out again. Tag is probably... You're back? Yeah. I mean, you lose syntax highlighting.

Yes, that's true. This has to be said. But if you're okay with giving up colors, it's a step forward. I have seen, this is way further behind but there are some like three color ink displays yeah

they've always been a bit colors are a bit shallow and the black also ends up being not as good as a normal ink. But it is an interesting direction. Right now, I'm mostly

focused on the white and black ones. Yep, yep. Either way, it just looks cool. I like cool tech like this and even if it's right now an absolute hack together job to get it functioning, I still think it's cool.

Yeah, it's very impressive. Well, anyway, that's going to be basically it then. How about you let people know where they can find you? Yep. In theory, I have a website which is actually broken, but you can still find unlikely, uh, I forgot to configure Caddy correctly. Uh, however you can find me on YouTube as Nicola B. Uh, and I make videos about KDE Linux in general.

You can find me on Twitter. And I still mostly talk about Linux stuff. You can find me on Instagram as Vigero. Yes. And there I do actually poetry videos in Italian. I'm also on TikTok still for poetry videos as Nico Loves Poetry. And on YouTube as well, same nickname, always for poetries.

These are the kind of things I do. And for other kinds of projects, I have a GitHub with my Python. Mainly, I do like text adventures, this sort of stuff. And if you want a more general thing thing you can go to my older website which is called nicolo.benerandi.com well i'll put all of that in the description if you remember anything that you want me to add um you already listed off a bunch of things but if you remember anything else then uh just send me a link i'll go and put it there that's all the social networks i have set up and that i regularly use okay okay are you sure you're sure you didn't have like some other one with outside of that 10 list of things i mean technically

speaking i also have mastodon obviously right right But I don't use it enough, so... I have my Mastodon basically just synced to my Twitter, so everything I say on Twitter just goes over there. Yeah, I think that's a good approach to actually make sure it's active. Well, yeah, I've enjoyed this.

For me, you guys can find me over on my gaming channel, BrodyRomsonPlays. I've got my main channel, which you'll probably hear from, BrodieRomson. I do Linux videos, all that fun sort of stuff. If you're listening to the audio version, the video version of this is on YouTube at Tech of a T. The audio version, if you just look up Tech of a T on anywhere you have a podcast listing, you're probably going to find it.

And yeah, that's it for me. I'll give you the last word. What do you want to say? Thanks, everybody, for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell, that sort of stuff. I mean, at this point, at the end, that's what I usually say. You know what? I probably should come up with some outro,

but I just let the guests do it for the most part. You should have worn them, though. No, no, not going to happen. I never worn them. They're always surprised. Yeah, that's fun. Well, that's going to be it then. See you guys later.