Tech Over Tea - Maintaining An Arch Based Linux Distro | Dark Xero

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Have you ever wondered what goes in to maintaining a linux distro, well today we have the maintainer of Xero Linux on the show to explain exactly that. ==========Guest Links========== XeroLinux Website: https://xerolinux.xyz/ XeroLinux Github: https://github.com/XeroLinux XeroLinux Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Xg6T78ahtK TechXero Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechXero XeroLinux Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/XeroLinux ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode 123 of Tech for Tea. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robson, and today we have got an interesting guest. The first time I've talked to someone who does this, we've got a distro maintainer onto the show. Welcome to the show, Tech Zero. Steve, what do you want me to call you? Dog Zero, that's what I'm known as over at the Zero Limits server. You've got like three different names you go by so I wasn't sure which one you wanted to use. Dark Zero is the one. Okay cool, so how you doing? I'm good, how are you? Yeah, not too bad. Well we can sort of just get right into like why you're here or we can talk about the store that you're in or we can do really anything you want to do well let's talk about the state of linux first and then or let let's uh let's jump to that

later uh i'll just talk a little bit about zero linux first just to get it out of the way uh it's just uh zero linux is not a full-on distro as people think of it. It's just a means for me to give users an easy way to install Arch with KDE. Instead of having vanilla KDE, I prefer to ship it with a good-looking and well-optimized version. That's the whole point of ZeroLinux. Beyond that, it's up to the user to figure out how to get his or her hardware working and stuff like that. We do try our best to provide support but it's very difficult, especially when it comes to

hardware and media specifically. Well, with Nvidia there's only really so much you can do. You can make sure the drivers are available, and maybe give some extra documentation on, like if someone has to install a custom version or anything like that, how to actually go about doing that. But if there's a problem with it specifically, it's not like you really have any way to really address that. Exactly. When you don't own the hardware that people ask you to troubleshoot,

you cannot give them the answer. You can point them the right way. But other than that, it's up to them to test and see if it works or not. Our job is to point to the right direction. Other than that, it's up to them. So by putting out Zero Linux, I discovered that people sometimes expect the unexpected. They want us sometimes to hold their hands, spoon feed them how to install everything. I don't own laptops on which I can install Linux.

I only own a Macbook Pro from 2016. If they come to me, they tell me, oh, zero limits is causing my battery to drain faster. I can't optimize it for a laptop. I don't own one. So stuff like that. I don't want to go talking too long about it, but it's just like issues, simple issues related to stuff I don't own. They expect me to solve them all of a sudden. I cannot test them to say that this and this and this works.

I can only read. So they should do the reading and do the testing on their own hardware. But, yeah, that's the whole thing. Well, judging by what you said, you sort of, I'm guessing you sort of started this project as something for you, and then you felt like you might as well put it out there. This is how it started, yeah. I don't know if you've heard of Arco Linux.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it. Zero Linux at the core uses the Arco build scripts that he created for ALCI. I found that it's pretty easy and self-explanatory. All I have to do is swap some things with, like, for example GNOME with KDE and stuff. It was very easy to get it up and running and I made it for me primarily. And I shared it online because friends told me it's a

beautiful distro. It's really fast, it's really well optimized and it saves me from having to type a lot of things the arch way. I was like, yeah, cool. You want me to share it? I'll share it, but don't expect anything. They were like, yeah, we won't expect anything. Oh, no. When it's online, they will come at you with pitchforks demanding stuff to be implemented.

Like different WMs, different desktop environments, TWMs. I'm like, no, KDE, that's where it's... I tried. I tried GNOME. I tried XFCE, and I failed. And I'm alone. I'm a 42-year-old geezer, trying to do this. At some point, I found myself a slave to the

user. I'm like, no, that was not the point of zero Linux. I'm going back. Yeah. And this is what it is. You either, and now it's a disclaimer. When you click download, it will slap you with a huge disclaimer and user agreement. It will explain what the distro is and set expectations. You don't agree, click disagree. That's it. Don't deal. What does it say here right now? So, point number one, Zero Linux is a hobby distribution. Issue resolution is not always guaranteed,

but we will do our best. It just offers an easy way to install Arch Linux with a well-optimized and customized KDE Plasma. Point number two, we provide our custom repositories, and I can't... The final boss is always reading for me. And packages for better functionality We provide our custom repositories and

The final boss is always reading for me and packages for better functionality You can add your own later on. Zero Linux is not a full-on distro by any stretch of the imagination Nothing is nor will ever be forced on you The whole point of it is to provide you with a stable base that you can shape your way the easy way Right, that makes sense. That's the whole point. And I go on explaining in the troubleshooting, but the gist of it, troubleshooting, I provide them a link to Linux questions because that's a big community over there

and they're not elitist like they are on Arch. You can easily search for your issue. And if it's not there, you can post about it and they are on Arch. You can easily search for your issue. And if it's not there, you can post about it. And they are very friendly, and they will provide you with solutions. I can't, because I'm not a community. I'm one man. Or they can use the Arch Wiki.

It's up to them. The Arch Wiki is a little bit too technical for the new users, so I put it second. Because the Arch Wiki, when you go to it, the new users, so I put it second. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Because the ArchWiki, when you go to it, it's like, do this, do that, and they go immediately into the technical details, the nitty-gritty of the stuff. It's a good place to learn, only if you're a nerd. If you can understand these things. But Linux questions, it's full of beginners who discovered the solution and shared it.

So I share it first, then the ArchWiki, and if they can who discovered the solution and shared it. So I share it first, then the Arch Wiki, and if they can't find the solution on either or, or they don't want to post on the next questions, they can use the search engine of choice. Yeah, yeah. It's the tried and true fallback. But other than that... I was gonna say, I think the Arch Wiki is... it's a weird resource, because it's a purely community-driven resource. Some of the pages there are really good and really well laid out. But I've noticed that a lot of things, especially on the Weyland side, a lot of the Weyland stuff is...

Granted, a lot of the Weyland documentation is very scattered anyway, so it's kind of hard to build up that community resource in the first place. But some pages are either outdated or just, they don't really always provide you with what you need to know. Like, on the Wayland side of things, I still cannot log into Wayland because I'm an NVIDIA user, KDE.

If I try to log in, it spits me back out to the login screen. There are ways around it, technical ways around it. You can just add a line to the grub config, and you're good to go. I just don't want to do that. I'm the kind of guy, if it doesn't come from the manufacturer or the developer himself, I don't like to use hacks.

Like they say, hacks. So I say I cannot use Wayland, so as a result, Zerolinux does not ship with Wayland enabled, the Wayland session enabled. I provided via my post-install tool, which uses Yad for now, but there's a button. You click are, and I do say this a lot, only if you are suicidal will you try that. So if you are suicidal and you want to deal with something that's going to cause you headaches, by all means, the option is there in the tool. And that's another point about Zero Linux. Zero Linux does not remove stuff without offering them as options later on in the upcoming tool. We have just recently got a new developer on the team. We're working on an all-in-one, the Swiss Army Knife tool that you get post-install. I'm getting rid

of the driver selection in Calamares, which a lot of people offer in their Calamares installer nowadays. I'm adding all I'm giving the choice of drivers post install so I'm using Mesa to begin with like fallback to get everything up and running and then post install you configure your system drivers packages themes Rises. Everything you need to get up and running will be provided via a tool post install. So, zero Linux is about freedom of choice. I will never force anything on anyone.

That's a promise I gave my users. I will never force anything on them. Even if, for example, you install zero Linux today and then I released a new ISO with new features or fixes later on, the tool will automatically detect that they are on an older version of Zero Linux. They will get offered the new fixes and options via the tool, but they choose which one of them they want to apply. They're not forced with them. Like for example, if I opted to remove PAMAC

and I opted to use Octopi later on, I'll offer them the option, remove PAMAC, install Octopi, or leave it as is. This is what users are starting to like about Zerolinux, that nothing is forced. So you enjoy it the way you want, you shape it the way you want afterwards i'm it's just a base i'm just a clean base so uh slowly it's picking up ground as a stable base distro that you can

shape the way you want and i'm happy about that some users don't like it but it's to each their own well i think it's a really it's a really different way compared to the way that a lot of other distros work, where it's sort of, hey, this is the way the distro is set up, and that's sort of how it is. That's the thing I wanted to run away from. Yep, yep, yep. No, I get that as well, because I understand why someone would want something

that's just working as is out of the box. A lot of people just... Customization isn't the thing that every single user wants. A lot of people out there will just want, hey, this just works, I install it, and it's basically good to go. But I feel like especially if you're using something that's Arch-based, the customization aspect is definitely a big part of that. Yeah, true. But what I mean by customization is you install your own packages.

To me, if I, for example, ship with a certain group of packages for video and audio editing and stuff like that, number one, the ISO is going to grow too big. Number two, users will have to sit around, pseudo-Pacman remove. So they're going to sit around removing this and that. And I realized that when I started, when I began with Zero Linux, I used to ship it with Vivaldi. And you can imagine the anger that I got. Yeah, I saw the DT's video and he covered it.

It had Vivaldi on it. Yeah, I decided since then to remove it to put the tried and true Firefox and then the user decides later on. I tried to ship with Falcon, the KDE default one, to be on the safe side, but unfortunately Falcon was beyond broken and unmaintained.

So I was like, which browser should I put? Okay, I'll put Firefox. I'll end it there. Yeah, this is the kind of thing that got me to realize if I ship it with nothing, let the user choose what they want and how they want to build it. They can either build it as a gaming

distro, they can build it as a production distro, they can build it as a 3D thing. They can shape it however they want. I just need to select the right packages that I will offer via my tool later on and that's it. The choices are there and I organize everything. And this is another thing is that I have I have a mild case of digital OCD as I call it because I apply it to my digital life not my real life like the packages that I offer I will offer in my package installer will be organized like video audio video you've got the audio converters, audio players, audio editors. Yeah, okay. Same thing for everything. So everything is organized even with that

alphabetically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So users know what they're installing, so if they check this tool, even though they don't know what that, the tool by name, because with Arch, I don't know why they call the packages weird names like for an email client there's an email client called Jitsu or something like that so I'm like that doesn't tell me that it's an email client but if it's under the category email clients yeah the user will know that it's an email client. So I go above and beyond to make sure that the user knows what he's installing. So I offer these. They can select whatever they want, and then they shape their computer perfectly.

If I don't do that, users are going to start installing packages here and there, left and right, and they're going to break their system, and they're going to come to me, oh, zero Linux broke on me. And it was because of your video that I switched to Pipewire. Oh. Yeah, I've been really liking Pipewire. Yeah, you installed confidence in me to do the switch. I was thinking about it, considering, but I didn't know if I

should, because people used to tell me Pulse is the tried and true. Pulse is... Who are you talking to that's that much of a fan of Pulse? I've never met them. I met a lot. They tell me Pulse, I've been using it forever, never had delay issues. And I explained to that person, it's because some distros like Ubuntu, you said that in one of your videos, they're shipping with the media session instead of Wireplumber for some odd reason. When you covered the beta version of Ubuntu. I don't know which version it was. Yeah, I've talked about too many things. I forget my own videos sometimes.

I remember them because you're doing a very good job. Thank you. So, yeah, media session is the wrong thing to, it's the wrong session to ship with Pipewire. If you do, it's going to be broken. You can make an argument for it, but I personally think Wireplum is a better option. Yeah, same here.

The only argument you can really make for the Pipewire Media Session is on certain configurations, Wire Plumber doesn't act the way it should. That is true. Especially older hardware. I've personally not had any issues with anything I've used, but

I think... I don't know. anything I've used, but I think, I don't know. If you don't care about the customization, it's probably fine. Like it's one of those options where it's not a terrible thing to ship, but there are better options out there. Like, for example,

I have on my desktop, I was trying, because I always try whatever I include in Zero Onyx on bare. Yeah, yeah. I have a separate SSD, a hot swappable SSD. So basically I tried with the media session, for some reason, whenever I talked to someone they told me, uh, have you swallowed helium? Right. I'm like, why? They tell me, uh, you sound like Chip and Dale. They tell me, you sound like Chip and Dale. Okay, so I kept messing around. I realized that wire plumber does a better job.

But in order to get a wire plumber to work, because as a distro maintainer, there's a file called packages x86-64. It's all the packages that will be included on the ISO. If you don't put wire plumber first and then you include all the pipe wire stuff underneath, there's a package, I think bluetooth or blues or something, that will ship as a dependency pulse. Okay. One of the packages, I don't know which one, I could be wrong, it's not bluetooth, but of the packages, I don't know which one, I could be wrong, it's not Bluetooth, but I don't remember, but there's one package on there that ships Pulse as a dependency. But if you have a wire plumber in the pipe wire section first and you include, and I created a meta package for pipe wire, and I added the other pipe wire packages underneath, lib32 pipe wire package from the multi-lib. WirePlumber will override that dependency of the other package. So that way I get a very stable and clean pipe wire inclusion in zero Linux. But we don't need to forget that,

we can't forget that Pipewire ships with Pipewire Pulse, a Pulse emulator. But when I use, for example, to record, I use Simple Screen Recorder to record my screen with my audio. When I use that, I have to make sure I am using either ALSA or Pulse. Yeah. Because for some reason, Simple Screen Recorder doesn't work with Firewire yet. Okay.

It works, but it sounds like a chipmunk. Okay, right. I don't know why. I couldn't figure it out. I don't use Simple Screen Recorder. I have no idea about that one. Yeah, Simple Screen Recorder, it's a very easy thing to record. I don't want to bother with OBS to learn stuff.

I'm just shooting a virtual machine of myself installing Zero Linux and creating an install guide. That's it. And it doesn't skip when you launch a virtual machine because if you use OBS, somebody told me. I didn't try it yet. But if you're launching a virtual machine because if you use OBS I somebody told me I didn't try it yet but if you're using it launching a virtual machine and you have you're recording your audio via OBS it will skip when the virtual machine will launch because it's switching from from the host to the to

the guest yeah yeah so with simple stream recorder it doesn't do that so that's why I kept using it okay sure i didn't know it didn't do that i think i've had that problem show up during a stream once and i wasn't sure what was causing it but that actually makes a lot of sense yeah because it's switching between the it doesn't know if it should record the guest or the host so it's normal it's a normal behavior but simple screen recorder is dumb uh the way others call it it's a dumb video screen recorder so it doesn't feel anything happening it sticks to the host uh so i'm good with that that's why i use it but yeah audio as a whole like we always say on the dt cast uh audio and gpus are the two

main things that are iffy on Linux. Yeah, yeah. It's unfortunate. It's unfortunate. I would like to throw capture cards in there as well. That's more of a specialized thing, but capture cards are generally fine if they are v4l. If they are not, good luck. Like, I've got my Ava Media down here. This works great. Elgato makes

a couple of cards that work well. Most of what they put out though is absolute junk, because it doesn't have the drivers specifically needed for that card. I've heard people have issues with that, and as a capture card I have one but

it's currently in it's a $700 card it's a four-way black magic magic design yeah yeah for it it's got four in for inputs for four different cameras because I got it for church but they didn't pay for it. It's still mine. So because we're using security cameras in church to capture all the mass and everything. We have four different cameras. So we need the core inputs. But I don't think there's a... Well, they say that Blackmagic works on Linux. I haven't tried it.

I've heard that. But I also don't want to spend $700 to find out. Yeah. So I was hoping Church would pay for it, but for now they're still delaying, delaying, and it's been a year. Yeah, audio is a weird one. Audio, I think a lot of the people I've heard that don't like Pulse Audio, a lot of the arguments that I think were started because of that is the way it was initially shipped. Like back when Pulse Audio was first being brought in and we were first starting to migrate away from doing Pure Orosa, a lot of distros back then

were basically shipping broken configurations, like it was shipped a little bit too early and that was my worry with distros starting to ship pipewire. It seems like it's basically, like, ironed itself out, and the distros that have started are pretty much fine, and now that Weyland is also starting to become a thing, the logistics are shipping as well.

It seems like it's going relatively well, but, yeah. They're still working on it. Yeah, yeah. The issue with Pulse was between Pulse and Pipewire I think it was a sample rate misconfiguration but I think they fixed it in the recent update I think I'm not sure like yesterday I got an update for Pipewire yeah so I don't know maybe they

fix it but everybody I talk to that uses zero Linux they say for my configuration, specific configuration, I have to go into the pipewire account and fix the sample rate and then they come back telling me it took me an hour to figure out which pipewire.conf to apply the fix to because there are 16 different ones in the system. Aha, yeah. So I'm like, okay, so pipewire tells you to edit pipewire.conf, but they don't tell you

which one. So it's up to you to start going on a pipewire.conf hunt. I'm like, okay. I don't know what's worse, modifying like pipewire or Pulse Audio stuff or modifying XOR configurations because there are just as many, just as many files for that and it's just as much to retain. Well, like you brought up a subject related to XOR yesterday, you know how Arch releases a monthly ISO? We rely on that. As distro maintainers, we rely on updates

that they push to apply to our... Since we use Arch ISO to build our distros. So what they decided out of the blue to do is no longer use system reboot for booting the ISO for UFI systems. They chose to use

GRUB. Wait, they switched back to grub? They switched back to grub in the UV. And here's how they did it. Here's how they did it. Yup. It's a precompiled grub CFG that you cannot modify because you need to generate one yourself. But you can't generate one for the live ISO because there's no way to generate one yourself. But you can't generate one for the live ISO

because there's no way to generate one. All you can do is edit the name of the distro and the flags, like the cow size, the temporary folder size, and modify the flags for free and proprietary. That's it. That's all you can modify. I tried to use a

theme or whatever. It broke SDDM. It broke SDDM. I couldn't log in. Even in a virtual machine that has nothing, I was getting a black screen. So I was like, okay, roll back to systemd and all is fine and all is good.

Don't know why they decided that. Sometimes, I was going to say, sometimes it feels like the Arch, the Arch devs just make changes like you'd make changes if you're trying to like keep yourself employed,

where they'll just change things for seemingly no reason. It's like, why did you do that? And then just change it back like a couple of months later. Like, why?

What was the purpose of that you remember on april 1st what they did i don't know if you noticed but on april 1st as an april fool's joke arch updated their arch iso build environment to include a pc speaker beat pac-man beat i didn't know about that one no uh. So whenever you booted the ISO to install Arch, it would play the Pac-Man theme using your PC speaker. And they reverted that a week later. But I kept it in in my zero Linux install and I posted a guide on my forum on how to disable it.

But after they removed it, and since I used their updated scripts, it got removed automatically. But still, it was a funny joke. Those kind of things I would agree with. But going back to grub and breaking SDDM for no reason, I don't get it. Plus, I cannot set it to use a certain resolution.

It has to automatically detect the native resolution of the monitor. Right, yeah. If you have a 4K monitor, you would need a telescope to read the text. Yup, yup, yup. So I was like, no, revert back to systemd, I'm good. Sometimes Arch gets me antsy, but since I'm a distro maintainer, I know how to fix stuff. But for a regular user

It's not gonna be very easy. They're gonna scratch their heads look around for days and Why why arch why I just like I hear about these changes that happen the eye service often I'm very happy that you don't like need to reinstall arch like, you know every couple of months or whatever So I don't have to deal with this this i've installed arch like once three years ago i haven't had on this system two years ago i haven't had to deal with it since then it's been great but it's always fun to go and look at just some of the random things they're doing it's just i i can totally understand why that would be a massive pain or like when when they changed out the way that the way that networking was done on the ISO,

where they changed it to IWD from what they were using before. Which is like, why? Why did you do that? Also with the NSSwitch. The NSSwitch comp file. They switch things around. A lot of users now don't get...

The network manager in KDE, it shows them that they are connected to the Internet, yet they don't have a connection. Because they switched a value around. It used to be at the end of the line. Now it's at the beginning of the line. Right. So in case, it says, in case something then drop. If this, then drop. For some reason, they put it at the beginning of the line.

If this, then drop. For some reason, they put it at the beginning of the line, thus resulting in a lot of users with special network cards, like on Asus laptops, who use very specific chipsets. The network manager is confused, gets confused. It shows them that they have a connection. When they try to launch a website, open a website, it doesn't open. And my calamaris will break because it relies on an internet. So I'm like, I don't know how to solve that for you.

So after doing a lot of research for a few hours, I figured out that if I switch it back to the end of the line, it will work for some users, it will stop for other users why did you add this value to the line i'm like okay it's it's it's we are as maintainers troubleshooting our own creations because of ours it's one thing when it's a problem with something that you've specifically decided to add to the system but when it's just the base itself isn't as stable as you'd like it to be like that doesn't sound like it's great to deal with but i did want to ask you like sort of what goes into actually making a a distribution base and arch like what do you i have no idea what you'd even need to do to do this you don't need anything, you just need the right script that builds the ISO,

which in my case is ALCI, but what it uses, you need the Arch ISO, which is shipped on Arch by Beeple. So it uses that to build the ISO. There is a guide on the Arch website on how to build the ISO yourself. You just change the packages that are in the package x86-64 to suit your needs, and that's it. But if you want to go add a desktop environment and stuff like that,

you have to ship your own default configurations. For me, it took me about nine days to figure out which files I needed for KDE. I ended up with around 600 different configuration but yeah and the tool that helps a lot is the way you the way things go is I install Arch with the desktop environment of choice in my case is KDE yeah create a backup of the dotconfig and.local folders. I just right-click duplicate here. Start modifying, and then I use a tool called

meld to compare what changed in what file. I just ship those modified files with the modifications as a package on the ISO. There's a script called scale. The job of scale is to copy anything in etc scale to the user's home directory during install. That's it. It's very simple.

It's not very difficult. It's just once you have the right configuration files in the package, you just tell it to move it to the user's home directory. And the desktop environment is going to use those configuration files instead of the default ones. That it that's what zero linux does i just ship the computer like with my rights since zero linux is also about the eye candy yeah yeah i create my own rice i have five different prices that i will offer in in the next release uh in

the tool uh like makulu linux i don't know if you know Makulu Linux They have this tool with thumbnails of the different looks you click apply and it will apply this new look Layout basically same thing will happen with zero Linux except mine will do More things behind the scene. That's why it requires a reboot. Yeah, but but That's what I that's what zero Linux does reboot. But that's what zero-nits does. It just ships with customized configuration files applied to the system during install. That's it. I just add the KDE packages in the package file to tell the ISO to use KDE and that's it. So what you see

during the live ISO that you see that you boot, that's your future system. And I use Calamares because it's super easy. Super easy. Just next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next. So yeah, that's it. It's not very difficult. Once you got the script that creates the ISO, you're done. You just modify the packages file and you're done. That's it. I tell it. I didn't think it was that easy. It is easy. It's super easy. If people think it's hard, I have a guide on my forum on how to do that. You just git clone my repository, packages file, remove KDE, put GNOME packages packages instead done. You have zero next norm addition

Huh? It's it's very simple. It's very very very simple say people think it's hard, but it's not I Have a doing that to be honest. It sounds like a fun little experiment at least Yeah, you could you could build your your own It's like on MX Linux you have the ISO thing that you install your system, you set it up the way you want and you build an ISO out of it. So using rsync and stuff like that. Same idea. So you just ship instead of creating a package because that's the option. I selected to

do it as a package but all you need to do is put your home files like.config.local KDE for in case of KDE you put those in this etc scout folder and it will include on the ISO and will ship it on the ISO as a in your case did I think your which window manager do you use I I'm using awesome right now. Okay, so you include your awesome.files in the etc folder, and it's going to copy them over to the future system. Done deal. So if you want, you can look at the guide on the referral.

Yeah, I might actually do that. Because I know a lot of people out there will do things like, they'll make install scripts, like a post install strip for their system That you do us. Yeah. Yeah, or like loves that Luke was doing well back That honest like doing it through and I customize so it honestly seems like I might be a little bit easier it is easier because you tell you tell the It is easier because you tell the packages file what packages to include. You can include Kdenlive, you can include whatever you want. If you're not going to share the ISO, it doesn't matter if it's a 6GB ISO.

For you, you just put it on the side and whenever you want to install, you know that it's going to install everything you need, you use. This is how ZeroElect started. I wanted to include everything you need you use this is how zero in it started i wanted to include everything i wanted i don't i don't use any office suites or anything i use notepad so i didn't need to include a lot for my use i just needed vivaldi i just needed the discord and that's it so that's what i included on the iso so and then i started modifying a little bit and a little more and a little more and a little more. And I said, well, I can customize given KDE.

I can ship it with the look and feel that I want. And then you gave yourself a ton of extra work. It's not work anymore. At first it was, yeah. It took me nine days to figure things out. But after that, it just takes me half an hour to figure things out. Because I have a base. I have a solid base to do. So I use a pre-existing rice. I modify things around and I meld and then take the files that I need.

And that's it. Done deal. But the problem with shipping rice is like that. They're not universal. This is another thing I wanted to mention to users because they come to me, they tell me, I applied your rice, but I don't see the wallpaper that shipped with the rice on my system. I'm like, I built it on my own system. So my system is using three monitors, two HDMI and one display port. Yours might be using DVI or VGA, God forbid.

We still use VGA these days. But the connections are different. So unless it's hard, I create a whole, I code in C++ as Nicolo Venerandi says, unless I build a theme from the ground up, I cannot hard code the wallpaper into it. So I can just use a configuration file inside the.config a configuration file inside the config that tells the system to apply to my monitors a wallpaper. But your monitors are set up differently, so you're going to end up with no wallpaper, or you're going to end up with the default KDE wallpaper. So you just right-click, change wallpaper, apply the wallpaper that shipped with the rice. It's like a two-second job. People want support for these kind of things. They don't know how to

right-click, change a wallpaper. And now KDE even spoon-feeds how to change the resolution. Right-click, change display settings. You no longer have to go to settings and hunt for the display settings and stuff like that. So I'm like, I can do what I can do on my system. If it doesn't work on your system, that means your system is different. So just do the necessary to adapt it to your system. Simple.

I only have one big system. All the other systems are from 2012, 2015. Yeah, that's fair. So i can only build on that system it's gonna be different than yours it's 100 confirmed but uh yeah things like that it's i i get it with problems like that like that's a that's such a simple thing that if it doesn't work properly like I wouldn't even go out of my way to ask someone about like oh the wallpaper just didn't work properly I'd show us fine whatever yeah yeah like for example with the latest plasma 525 which is at second point released and the third one coming with the third one

coming soon the the floating power I talked to Nicolo. I was like, when I maximized the windows, the floating panel is gaining 200 pounds. So it's becoming twice as thick. He was like, it's by design. And now I understand what he meant by design there's a lot of work that goes into it like related to the shadows and stuff like that he had no choice he had no choice I asked him why don't you make it go back to normal he was like if I make it go back to normal

he had issues with making it go back to floating so he used the shadow instead but now it's like the under screen is this thing I'm like okay so I replace it with latte panel, quite simple solution. So latte just announced that do not use the stable version with 5.25 use the git version. In august it will ship as 0.11, so stable version, which is compatible with 5.25. But for now, use the Git.

So I updated all my Rises to use the Git version. I follow the workflow. And the nice thing about making my Rises into scripts is I can modify them at any time, and you don't need to reinstall. And that's another thing. Zero nits with every new release will never require a fresh install. Yeah, yeah. That's one thing I'm aiming at. Never, never require a fresh install. You'll be offered the changes with my tool if you want them. Okay, if you don't want them, just don't use them. Just keep using the system. Because zero

Linux is a hobby, as you read earlier earlier so I can do it for a certain period of time but everything has a beginning and an end yeah yeah so there will come a time where I can no longer maintain the project it will still be there on github it will be there yeah for anyone to fork and anything I would just archive it and let anyone who wants to pick it up to pick it up and figure out how to do things I'm not going to even teach those people how to do things because it's, it takes too long and I got my own methods and they might agree. They might disagree. We're going to, I'm just going to leave it out there. Whoever wants to pick it up, they can pick it up.

The website will still remain online. Everything will remain online. It's just, there will come a time and it could be very near because I'm currently okay running the store But I had only two customers in one year Yeah, because of the situation in Lebanon right now but I'm looking for I'm looking for work. I need to get myself situated and

I would because I'm looking for sales jobs and you know how sales jobs You don't even get a weekend off On the contrary on the weekend you work double shift So I won't have time to maintain zero Linux I might have a time and a little bit of time to update the packages on the on my repositories, but that's it So somebody has to pick it up at some point. For the current, for now, we're looking for developers who can take on different ideas

because none of us on Zero Linux team are developers. We just copy-paste. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just take scripts that exist out there. We just modify the name instead of, let's say, Manjaro would put Zero Linux. We just replace the name and we use those scripts. I'm using PAMAC from source, from the Manjaro GitLab. I'm not using

the AUR packages. I'm using the ones from Manjaro straight. So we need developers right now because there is a guy who wants to take on the project, but the way he wants to take, the route he wants to take requires developers who are willing to start doing stuff for Zero Linux pro bono at first until we get enough donations in to start sharing the... Because that's how Linux works. You get donations, and according to the donation, you split it around.

Once we get enough donations we'll start splitting the income but until then we need someone who is willing to put in a little bit of time or who have a little bit of time on their hands to provide a hand in the development route because we don't know how to develop anything. I can only read code, modify one name with Zero Linux, that's all I know how to do. So, if somebody is interested, either contact us via our website, or

you via the comments, in any shape or form, and we'll talk from there. But, I'm hoping Zero Linux will continue to live for a long period of time but we can only hope we cannot confirm anything because the project is a good one and i don't want it to die but it's out of my hands yeah sometimes you start something it's been going on for two years but like

life is the inconsistent constant as I call it when it comes to developers what are you actually looking for like what languages any development experience at all any just like we got someone who is

proficient in C++ right now who's working on the tool but who's working on the tool, but he's working on the tool using Godot or Godot. Ah, yes, yes, yes. So he's using it because it's easy to create GUI-based apps with buttons that call commands and stuff. And he's proficient in C++. And I don't understand differently. I don't know what's the difference between each language. I don't know what C++ is, what C sharp is. I just

know the names. So whatever developer that can put our visions to... Our visions are just small tools, GUI tools. We don't need a whole somebody to create a whole desktop environment, for example. No, we're just looking for somebody who can create little tools that we can include on Zero Onyx that do certain things that would make a user's life much easier. That's the whole idea. We're trying to create a small package manager, a GUI thing where I can offer a pre-made selection. Like I told you earlier, I want to offer video editors, audio editors and development tools and stuff that users can click, select, check, check,

check and hit install and we'll install everything in one go. And it's not as easy as it sounds because sometimes there are conflicts, package conflicts. We need to be done in such a way where it can also allow the user to accept the conflict, ignore the conflict and a little bit of user input. Because the one we currently use has an issue with that specific thing. In case of conflicts, it will crash.

That's a problem, yep. Yeah, so we're trying our best to fix it, but we don't have developers. That's what I'm saying. Once we have developers, they will know how to avoid such things. So if they have to hook into something called libpamac, I'm okay with the idea, as long as they don't install pamac, the package manager from

Manjaro. If they can just install that as a dependency and use it, okay. But I don't want pamac to install on the user system. Unless the user wants it. What is the problem you have with pamac then? I've got my own issues with PAMAC, but what issues specifically do you have with it?

Well, actually, myself personally, no issues. Okay. Absolutely. I prefer it to anything else. The only time I suffered issues was when they started having key issues with Arch. Yeah. Not Arco.

Arco, I removed the repositories for that reason because it introduced, and I don't agree with signing packages. People come at me and they tell me, why don't you sign your packages? People are not going to trust the packages coming from your repo. I tell them, do even users coming from Windows know what signed packages mean?

They don't. So I don't sign my packages, so I don't have any issues with keys unless it comes from Arch. But with Arco, since Arco is also a hobby distro, if you want, those keys are not being maintained by the Ubuntu servers and stuff like that. So it has to be manually populated. So during the installation of ArcaLinux, there's a step that says populate ArcaLinux. It specifies ArcaLinux because otherwise it's going to just populate. If you use just a populate flag, it's going to just populate the Arch keys.

Right. And it's not doing it well enough. It's timing out. It's throwing errors. So that's why I opted to use only my own repositories. I even built a custom TKG version of the NVIDIA drivers. I have an NVIDIA repository. I got the main repository, and I got an Excel repository.

Excel means bigger packages because GitHub does not allow bigger packages than a hundred bank. Okay. So, uh, yeah. Otherwise you have to pay. All right. That makes sense. Yeah.

Large file storage LFS. So, uh, I maintain my own repositories for that reason. I don't sign them. I don't want to deal with keys. Clamac has a big issue with keys. As soon as there's one key that's not there, it just crashes the whole install or it crashes or it hangs the daemon and the daemon gets stuck. You have to reboot the system to get it back.

But that's the only time I had an issue with PAMAC. Otherwise, it was a good experience. I love PAMEC. Otherwise, it was a good experience. I love PAMEC because when you double click a package, it takes it over and it asks you, do you want to install that package? I love that about PAMEC. It doesn't happen with any other package. So they did it right. It works. Because if you want to use any other, I'm not talking about Discover, God forbid. Discover is not a thing to use. But if you want to use any other, I'm not talking about Discover, God forbid. Discover is not a thing to use. But if you use any other like Octopi, you don't get notified about updates. You have to check for updates manually. Same goes with everything, except

Ba'u. Ba'u is written in Python, and Ba'u uses Cron to check at a certain interval you set in the settings for updates that works and doesn't work it's everything uh so if you want to install octopi for example you have to install something like a update notifier third party either plasmoid or a complete package there's a package called kalu KDE. It's superb. I recommend people use it because not only does it offer notifications, it notifies of latest Arch news from the RSS. This is really good and it supports Ye, Paroo, Snaps, Blackpacks. It's amazing.

Snaps, blackpacks, it's amazing. So my whole issue, if I don't offer PAMAC out of the box, my whole issue is how am I going to notify the user of updates? So a user has to install two different packages. Yeah, that makes sense. So I don't know. Decisions like that sometimes cause issues. Yeah, I can see why you want to have something custom then. Yeah, that's why we're looking for developers.

Somebody who can create a package manager with a notifier system that works. And that doesn't use ChromeDrop. Yeah. So we need developers like that just to create stuff that makes users' life much easier. But other than that, Zero Linux is on a good route right now. When you mentioned not using keys, I think that user has a point about keys,

but keys are a weird one. If you're a really hardcore user, the sort of person who, if you get something from the AUR and you validate the build script every time, for those sort of people, keys probably matter because you're probably the sort of person who actually makes sure checks who the

package has actually been signed by. Not everything has keys. The only situations where I wrote was Dropbox the point I was getting that there wasn't with the AUR itself it was with like if you're the sort of person

who cares that much about like what's being installed in your system you're probably also going to check the keys if you're installing something like from the main arch repos that's what I was trying to get out there sorry the only time I even remember the keys exist and everything's been signed is when my key is out of date. Yeah. And when I tried to use keys, because I began by

using the Arco Linux tutorial on how to create a repository and sign your packages, I always ended up having key issues because the Ubuntu servers and those key KMS servers or whatever they're called, they're always down. Or either that or they don't maintain your keys. After installing fresh, you have to reinitialize the GPG key server and get your keys in and whatever. It's an unnecessary headache. I prefer not to have keys. If people want to agree with that, they're free to use zero limits. If they don't agree with that, they can go to a distro that signs their packages. I'm not forcing anyone to use zero limits. Those are the ways I do

stuff. It's up to you if you agree or disagree. It's a decision, it's a choice thing. As Eric puts it, choices, choices, choices. Like yesterday I sent him, I cannot use the new Grub thing with Arch ISO. I went back to SystemD. His reply was very simple, choices, choices, choices. His reply was very simple. Choices, choices, choices. So, yeah. And I agree with him. I agree with him.

It's up. They supply changes. We either use them or no. It's up to us. We choose. So I took the safe route with zero on it, not to include a lot of stuff out of the box. That way, I escape people telling me,

oh, why did you choose this over that, or this over that, or this over that? I don people telling me oh why did you choose this over that or this over that or this over that I don't ship anything it's up to you to choose whatever you want so I took that responsibility off my shoulders it's the same way with sales like to take the responsibility off of your shoulders when selling a product you you you first have to analyze the customer. You see what they're holding, what devices they're holding, what their kids are holding, or what device they decided to look at. You analyze, you process, then you attack. You go to the customer and you start assisting.

So you make your choices. Okay, because she's holding an iPhone, but none of her kids have an iPad, and she's looking at the iPad, so I know that, okay, she needs an iPad. I'm not going to tell her, oh no, go check your MacBook. Yeah, yeah. So I learned that from being in sales. So for me to make the decisions, it's easy for me. But in the Linux world, we know, you and I both know, that there's a lot of elitists out there.

They will attack you no matter what you do. Yeah, yeah. So I escaped that. So I was like, okay, I don't know how to deal with the online mob. Don't offer anything. Let them do whatever they want. Because at first, in the beginning, I was being constantly compared to Garuda. Because I kind of look like, Zero Linux kind of looks like... Yeah, it's a pretty arch in the stool, so it's easy

to compare you. Yeah, and I don't disagree with it. Looks-wise, coming from the outside in it would Certainly give the Garuda vibes. Yes, because I'm not gonna lie The inspiration behind it was Garuda. Yeah, yeah But I wanted to do it in a simpler fashion because Garuda They in the Dragon Eyes edition at least They ship a lot of tools and a lot of the K-Win effects running by default For lower end systems. It not going to be a great experience. So I made the decision, okay, I want to become an iCandy distro without enabling a lot of things.

And as a result, we went down to between 30 and 60 services running in the background, down from 150, 160. Oh wow, that's nice. So because it's all because of plasmoids and effects, because every effect you enable adds a service. Everything related to kwin you enable, it's a separate service, especially when you add a weather widget. it has to check for a weather update somehow so it has to enable a service to tell itself to update every 30 minutes so we opted not to include a lot of those things so minimizing the number of services and

everybody that installs zero linux the reaction is the same. The snappiest custom KDE distro we've ever used. This is the goal. To offer good-looking without too many services in the background. Same thing like de-bloating Windows. So yeah, we do work on optimizing KDE to the best of our abilities because KDE got everybody knows that as good good looking as it is, as customizable as it is, it comes with its own share of issues. Especially if you installed 5.25 lately, you would have noticed all the issues with KWIN. And the KWIN issue was a typo. The developer, when they released the first point release, in the change notes, they said, oh, typo. The developer, when they released the first point release, in the change

notes they said, oh typo. Okay, how can you release something with a typo that crashes KWin? But anyway, stuff like that. Yeah, so we have to circumvent all these issues, finding fixes for them, and since we don't control the packages that come from Arch, so we have to create our own custom configurations that enable this, disable that, until the developers fix it upstream. Unlike KOS, KOS, they build their own KDE packages that they ship themselves. But we can't do that. So this is where we spend most our time, fixing

issues that are brought on by the developers upstream. So becoming a distro maintainer you have to learn how to do that. You have to, like you fell, you have to figure out how to get up. Nobody's here to help you. So you have to figure out how to get up and how to fix things. And this is what I love about Linux. Linux, the learning curve with Linux is, and I'm sorry if I'm talking too long. No, that's fine.

It doesn't mean I talk way less. I'm fine with this. So it allows us to learn and to become instant recovery kind of people. And I love that. I really, really do. But when people ask me, okay, when you stop maintaining zero Linux, what distro are you going to use?

The distro that got me into Linux, which is Manjaro KDE. And being a maintainer and doing this for so long, I optimized my rising tool to work on Manjaro. I optimized it to work on Fedora as well. So that's why I now know that I can survive on any Arch-based distro or non-Arch distro, on any distro, because now I know how to optimize my stuff

to work on any distro. But I'm not going to make it for users. It's only for me because I either will use Fedora or Manjaro in the end. One thing I did want to ask is why don't you just use Manjaro rather than you know spending all your time maintaining this project? Why don't you just like take the easy route and just do that instead? Well, good question. A very valid question.

I wanted to base zero linux on Manjaro just, basically just an install script for Manjaro. Unfortunately, the Manjaro repositories don't offer a lot of leeway. Uh-huh. Yes. I tried building zero Linux on Manjaro, and I was wondering why it was failing. I went to the development group where all the major ISO builders meet. I was like, I'm trying to build my distro and I'm currently running Manjaro because I'm testing it. They were like, you must be trolling us, right? It was like you're building an arch distro on a non-arch distro. How the hell can you do that?

I was like, oh yeah, I've got that. Manj, I got that. So that's why I cannot get what I want using the Manjaro thing, but why I will use Manjaro after? Because my requirements have dialed down. For now, I keep using Arch because, well, Xero is out in the wild and everybody knows about it. I want to continue maintaining it. Well, Xero is out in the wild and everybody knows about it. I want to continue maintaining it. But when I use Manjaro and I want to continue working on Xero Linux, since I have four desktops, one of them is bound to keep using Xero Linux.

So instead of working on the main one to build Xero Linux, I'll work on the other one. But it will take longer because the CPU is lower and the RAM is lower and everything, but I'll still be able to maintain at least the repositories. But other than that, yeah, Manjaro, because it was the first distro I ever used. It's the distro that got me to fall in love with Linux. Might as well go back to that one. I optimized everything to work on it, so no problems.

People ask me, why don't you go Debian? Like, I use Debian, it lasted 60 minutes. Why? I told them because everything I ran tend to crash or missing dependencies or the package is too old. I find the configuration for Latte, for example, a layout for Latte. I tried to apply it to the one available on the debian repositories it crashes latte why because that layout was meant for the newer version of right right right which is 20 releases ahead i'm like debian no sorry it's good looking it works for users who don't require much out of their system, but for my use case,

it doesn't work. Because I'm a visual guy, I need to customize everything visually. Yeah. So, with packages being so updated, even with Debian Bullseye, it's more updated than Ubuntu, for example, but it's still like 10 versions behind. Yeah. I get it. but it's still like 10 versions behind. Yeah. Well, you just do what some people do with Debian then and just run Debian SID, run the testing branch. Even the testing branch is like four to five versions behind.

I like to be on the bleeding edge. Yeah. But you made a video, a very interesting video that compared bleeding edge. Yeah, this is my very pedantic video, yes. Yeah, so you were correct. You were very correct, you made valid points about that. Bleeding edge is one thing and leading edge is a different thing. Arch is a leading edge, not bleeding edge. If you want to go bleeding edge, use the testing repositories on Arch.

not bleeding edge. If you want to go bleeding edge, use the testing repositories on Arch. But I go with the flow. I call anything what users call it. I don't want to create a debate around that. This is just me being like super pedantic. It's a thing that nobody else besides me actually cares about. I just, I wonder what my thoughts out there and that's just what i do on the internet and uh i what i love about your videos is it's your own curiosities that create your content you go you go you're curious about a project about a certain project you look you do your research around it and then you make a well-informed video talking about your opinions about the thing, especially with the guy that got banned off of GitHub. Oh yes, um...

Same. Um... Uh... The one who got... From the... What was it called? Pro Bono? The AppImage guy?

Yeah. Ah, yes. Okay. Yeah. So they went... The OBS... What we look my pro bono the app image guy Yeah, ah yes, okay Yeah So they went the OBS Yeah, yeah, yeah got government the OBS. Um, yeah, yes Yeah, so they went on and on and on and on the guy that got banned is deserves the ban because They were going backwards and forwards about the same subject for, I don't know, a year plus? At least, yeah.

Yeah, so... I love the amount of research you put in everything, because I'm not as curious as you are. I'm stuck in Arch KDE land. I don't budge away from that, because I'm too afraid as to what I'm going to find. But I love the kinds of videos that you do because they're well informed. You're not doing them just to speak your opinion. You just base them on valid points. You show the proof to the people.

You don't just stick in front of the camera. You show everything on screen. Yeah, I feel like there's better ways I could show the information, but I don't like the idea of just... There's exceptions, but I don't like the idea of just sitting in front of the camera the entire time, just not really showing the things that I've been going over. That's also, I like, in my descriptions, include pretty much all the links I use to actually research whatever it is

I'm researching so someone maybe disagrees with the point I came to Then they can actually go and see those results themselves and you know, maybe they'll learn something They didn't know about it or maybe they'll come back from and say hey Even though I've read that thing This point I feel like I'm still right about, and you can, you know, I, I, I think one of the things I like to have with the channel is, I like to sort of, I guess, bring about a discussion. I'm here to just sort of bring together this information that I've found on these, like, all these disconnected sites, bring it together in this one place, and then

sort of open up a discussion about a lot of things, especially with the System D out-of-memory killer thing that happened the other week. Yeah, the OOMD. Yeah, OOMD, yeah. I'm not here to

say that Ubuntu is bad, Ubuntu is terrible, or even like, you know, some people will just instantly jump to SystemD is bad because, you know, Red Hat or whatever, but I just wanted to bring all this information in one place, explain what's going on, explain the approach that is being taken to actually address the problem, and, you know, I'm not a, like, I, I do have my degree as a software engineer. I should be a developer, but I'm sitting, like, here sitting, talking on the internet. But if there are people in my audience who actually are using one of these systems and do want to go and fix one of these problems themselves,

then maybe they didn't even know the problem was actually going on. And now that they know what's going on, they can actually go and help out that project and maybe add their input to it and see what they can do to it. I don't want to just... I don't like the idea... I used to do this in the past. I've sort of changed the way I approach it. I don't like the idea of sort of attacking projects

because of some approach they're taking. I'd much rather focus on the thing that project is doing well, and then... Especially in cases where we can all agree that the problem... It is a problem, like the UMD thing. I don't want to focus on, it's bad, it's bad, this project is bad, you should stop using the project.

I'd much rather focus on, this is how the project is going to get better, because I feel like that's a more interesting thing to talk about anyway. Yeah, exactly. You don't interject your opinion on the stuff, because you're just here to promote. Generally, I try to at least lay the facts out first. Yeah, you lay the facts and the viewer is free to form his opinion.

And either they want to help out or they don't want to help out. I wish I could make videos. I'm not a video guy. I don't like editing videos. I don't like making tutorial videos or how to install zero Linux, it's kind of difficult for me because I don't know how to talk on video, I don't have the equipment, I don't as you can hear, you're gonna hear a lot of echo because I'm not equipped to make videos and most of the time in the

store so I can only do so much. But there's a lot of moments where I really want to talk about a project and tell them this is the way they do it. I personally agree or disagree with them, but it's up to you to form your own opinion. But I can't. So I get frustrated at times, but it gets me to write an article. I'm a written person. I used to have multiple blogs.

I like to write. So I write my opinion. I write everything on any platform that I can. But I do agree with everything you do. You don't force an opinion. You just bring the facts to the users. And I learned from you a lot from your videos. I learned from me a lot as well.

This is part of the reason I make the videos actually, because I forget a lot of the things. Like this is actually why I do a lot of, a lot of the tutorials I'll do so I can remember them later down the line. It's like, Hey, how did I do that thing with Vim again? I don't remember.

All right. That's I've got a video do that thing with vim again i don't remember yeah all right that's i've got a video on that don't i and i i miss a lot of your uh tools videos when you discover tools uh you make videos about them i don't know if you made a video about that i didn't look uh but there's a terminal tool i don't know if it's my turn to let people know about something, it's called TopGrade, it's called TopGrade ever made a video of that? Yes, I did, it was a while

back It's still being maintained it's still being maintained, and I'm using it by default on zero limits. Oh, nice What I love about it is... Yes I did six months ago. It made me cry because I was like where was this tool all this time? It updates your AUR packages, it updates your flatbacks, your snaps, your git like if you installed zsh react from source it updates power level 10k all my zsh

and everything and the one that got me that brought tears to my eyes was it even updates your ssd firmware i don't think it did that when I was using it. That's cool. Yeah, I noticed it like a week ago. I ran the top grade command and it was like updates detected for, I forget which SSD, I think it was the Samsung 970. It said, oh, there's a firmware upgrade for your Evo 970 Samsung. I was like, okay, install, enter. It installed and everything was cool.

And it also detects firmware updates for printers. Wow. Wow, that's impressive. Where was the Swiss Army knife when I was looking for one? So now it's being used on Xero Linux by default. And I even ship it with my own custom top-grade Toml configuration. By the way, Toml is what language?

Toml is just a configuration language. Yeah, configuration, but I think it's written in Rust. Oh, it might be related to Haskell. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I wouldn't know. But the configuration file is written in Tomo. So you enable the no-confirm flags.

You want it to get the RSS feeds from the Arch Linux website. There's a lot of configuration to be made in this tool. But the problem is it's not a package manager. It's just an update tool. Yeah, yeah. It's just lot of configuration to be made in this tool. But the problem is it's not a package manager. It's just an update tool. Yeah, it's just sort of a... It's basically just a script that runs through everything to update effectively. Yeah, it uses Pac-Man. It uses Yay.

It does use Paroo, but it works better with YAY, according to the developer. He said, it works with Paroo, but I recommend to use it with YAY. Okay. So it works. I don't know what it uses to update the firmware, because I don't think PAMAC updates the firmware. I don't know what it uses. Wouldn't have a clue. But it's amazing.

And I have aliased to up all when you type up all in zero limits it run runs top grade because top grade is too long of a word and especially to remember I I aliased it to update and upgrade update is without the without the no confirm flag and upgrade is with a no confirm but if you if you use a no confirm and there are conflicts you will get issues yes it's better to use better to use the update but it's amazing and I'm pairing it up with a T UI package manager that you made a video about a long time ago I think that that shows you how much I watch your channel. What program is this?

I'm going to find out how long it is. Pack UI. Pack UI? Either you or somebody. I think either you or somebody else made the video, but I'm almost sure you did. Pack UI? P-A-C-U-I?

No, pack UI or pack something. Almost sure you did. PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI?

PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI?

PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? PACUI? That's the pack. Can I call you Bill? Pack. Pack, pack, pack, pack, pack. Pack Seek? Pack Seek. Pack Seek.

Pack Seek's been, it's on zero Linux before. Yeah, Pack Seek. Pack Seek. P-A-C uh S-E-E-K-BIM. I don't know who made the video about it. No, I have not covered this one, no. I've never even heard of this one.

Okay, Pax Seek is written by someone who is currently on the Endeavor OS forums. Uh-huh. And I want to use it it's a TUI think about it as PAMAC but terminal version yeah that looks really cool

so it also does AUR stuff as well then? yeah you can set it to use you go to settings in TUI thing you set it to use either Paroo or Ye. And it works good with both. That's really cool! Yeah, you can make a video if you want about it, it's really useful. I want to use it on the next version of Zero Linux. I'm going to use it in conjunction with TopGrade.

Okay. But PackSeek only supports the AUR other. It doesn't support app images or snaps or anything. It just supports Arch and mainline repositories and AUR. Yeah, yeah.

Anything you add into Pacman and AUR. Yeah, anything uses Pacman. Yeah, yeah. Anything you add into Pacman and AUR. Yeah, anything uses Pacman. Yeah, yeah. It's a very neat little tool and it's maintained and I'm updating it on my repository. But that's what I'm going to offer. As for the update checker

notifier tool, I'm going to use Kalu KDE. If you look at Kalu KDE, it hasn't been maintained since October 2021 or September 2021, but it works. It just works. There's nothing to be done to it to make it any better. With the exception of the settings screen, it's a little bit messy, I would say, for a new user. But if you're a long-time Linux user, it's very simple.

Just check the news, uncheck. You can set it to follow certain AUR packages separately. Like if you want to follow, let's say, Paxseq, which is on the AUR. If you want to follow just that package, you just go to the settings of Kaluke.de, it will notify you when a new commit has been pushed to that package. That's cool. Yeah, it is really useful. It's on my repository as well, Kalu KDE.

I just don't like the fact that nothing other than PAMAC handles Arch packages if you want to just double-click them. It's annoying but Because I'm a mouse user. Yeah, if I can't do something with a mouse double click. It's annoying to me I people tell me why don't you use a window manager because I am NOT a keyboard warrior and If I show you my keyboard, you'll understand you'd be surprised. Oh I cannot show you but it it's the original G15. It's humongous and it's got sticky keys. With a lot of the window manager, you'd be surprised with how much you can get done with like just like a single hotkey and

a mouse as well. Like i3 for example has a lot of mouse bindings in it. Yeah, there's DWM as well. BSPWM or DWM, I forget which one. BSPWM has no config out of the box. DWM is the suckless one. Yeah, DWM, that's the one. You can use it with a mouse as well as you can use it with a keyboard. Okay, I

need to go check that out at some point. I've been meaning to for a really long time. The surprising thing is that on the AUR I found drivers for the G15, the original G15 from 2011. I think this one I got in 2000. No, it's a

2006 keyboard. Somebody went to the trouble to port the drivers because on Windows it no longer works. Right. They updated their driver to only work with the new G15 and onwards. Because they took that G15, they shrunk it down and the monitor is smaller and it's got a

higher refresh rate. Yeah. This one is no longer supported on Windows by their own driver. But someone went to the trouble on the AUR to make it work on Linux. And that's what I have. It now displays the time, the resources I'm using on my system, and I can

use another package that the guy created where I can inject my own scripts. Like, if I want to display my health bar in a game or how many coins I have Stuff like that because that was the whole point behind this keyboard is for gamers to see their health bar That one 2006 g15 logitech So it works for me now. It works flawlessly under Linux because someone on the AUR.

So what I'm saying is the AUR can be helpful. Don't attack the AUR for having bad packages. Look at my case. This is a keyboard that no longer exists. And I got it 10 years too late when I bought it almost so I'm like wow somebody reverse engineered a Windows driver to work on Linux I'm like I'm beyond speechless so the AUR and I build packages that I test myself for my repository so if you don't see the packages being signed doesn't mean I didn't test them. I test everything on my system

before including on my repositories. So AUR is a treasure trove of unique packages. You just have to... I was going to say, that's one of the big reasons why I just struggle to use anything that isn't Arch-based. The AUR is such a useful resource.

It is. I've tried to use some De Arch-based. Like, the AUR is such a useful resource. It is. I've tried to use some Debian-based systems in the past, like inside of a VM, and it's just like, but where's my AUR, though? Especially for what I do, because a lot of the software that I just want to test, some random person, it can have one star on GitHub. Someone's already packaged it.

I don't have to deal with getting it manually installed it's so convenient yeah and pedora is trying to alleviate that as well with their core repositories it's basically the the aur of pedora okay but the problem with pedora is for each package there should be a separate repository. That's the thing, like if you install Novara, I don't know if you heard of Novara, it's a Pedora spin with KDE created by Glorious Eggroll. Okay, cool. For gamers. So I noticed that he's got his own custom build of OBS with all the streaming plugins your heart desires

The titan six yeah Because yeah, they refuse to fix Yeah, and and including all this something plugging or something called the stream effects studio and stuff like that. Oh Okay, it's all It's with the Nvidia's NV FBC patches applied because I think the NV FBC they're made for quadro cards If you want to use them on mainline cards, you have to apply a patch So everything is included for OBS as a single package. I noticed that that was a separate repo for OBS and then he created a separate

custom package for Wine... Wine GE. It's a separate repo and one for the GE custom kernel. That's a separate repo and a separate repo and a separate repo. When I ran the update, the DNF update in Fedora, I saw that there was like 16 different repositories trying to update. Isn't that the problem that Ubuntu is trying to fix with the... what are their custom repos called? Yeah, DT mentioned that. Um... I can't remember. Someone's gonna call me the fuck.

Me neither. Um... But, they're AUR style for Debian. Yeah, yeah. Basically. But it's got so few packages that... And it's been a year and a half, maybe two years now, and it's got still very few packages. It's not attractive enough.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. I think that's the thing about the AUR. The AUR is sort of self-sustaining at this point. People add packages to the AUR because there are already lots of packages in the AUR and they know that by being there, it's going to get more people to actually look at that application. But there are cases where the AUR does not make sense.

Like I'm going to give a valid example. There are snaps and flatbacks PKG builds. So you can convert snaps and flatbacks into a regular arch package. But what's the point you're just breaking the whole idea of snap self-contained snaps and flat packs you're turning them into just another package that might mess up your system the whole idea behind snaps and flat packs that they are containerized and self-sustaining you don't need dependencies but by turning them into a arch package so you're ending up installing

all the dependencies again. And as a maintainer, I suffer from that. When I build a package and it requires certain dependencies that are only on the AUR, I end up having to build all the dependencies as well to include on my repository. So I'm like, I put a hard limit to 500 packages on my repository, I'm already at a thousand. I don't think it's a very hard limit. But I ended up with double that because of the dependencies. Yep, yep, yep.

Oh, right. Okay. So like bottles, for example. I'll take bottles as an example. Recently, instead of using a stable package as a dependency, the developers decided to include a bin. Sorry, a Git version of the package that is on the AUR that we have to build as a result.

And building was always failing because that git hasn't been updated since 2020. Instead of using the stable one that was updated a few weeks ago, they go use an older version and when I talked to the developers they were like yeah because the older version has something we are relying on for bottles but it's not building for 99 of the people only one percent of the people are being able to build it because they're on older systems they were like yeah we'll look into that after 24 hours they reverted all the changes that they went back to the stable one they were like yeah we don't want to cause any more trouble we'll revert back to the stable one. They were like, yeah, we don't want to cause any more trouble. We'll revert back to a previous commit. There was this open letter that came out about bottles a while back,

about a month ago. I was going to make a video on it. I just didn't get around to it. About how basically distros shouldn't be shipping bottles, but instead relying on the flat pack because that's the way it's intended to be shipped and not doing it like that is

going to lead to some problems that is true I recently decided to remove it from my repository because I am going against the the whole ideology of the user, of the creator. Yeah.

I was shipping it not on the distro but as a choice in the installer to install it as an arch package. But the whole idea behind bottles is that it's containerized and it creates containerized bottles. By shipping it as a regular arch package, everything will end up in your home directory. Right, yes. So it's gonna start building... your home directory will end up being a few hundred gigabytes because of your bottles and stuff.

Oh, okay, that makes sense, yeah. So I'm going to remove it soon because, number one, it's breaking the whole idea, going against the idea, the whole idea of the package. Number two, I'm going to remove all snaps and flat packs that I built from the AUR because the idea is not normal. Containerized is containerized. Why ship it as a regular package? Is it that difficult to just be installing them from a like flat hub when you're actually

like setting everything up or is there any reason why you were doing it that way before? I was doing it. The only reason I was doing it is because I wanted to offer it as a, as an option in my package installer that, that uses Pac-Man. But the user, since I ship with the Flatpak support, not Snap support, no Snap support, because Snaps are gray area for now. I consider them gray area.

But Flatpak, since everything is becoming a Flatpak these days, users, there's a flat hub. And I include Flatpak support in PAMAC. Okay, right. So all they have to do is search. Ah, yes. Bottles. So they will get the Flatpak.

That's the intended way of installing it. Like I did something tremendously bad the other day. I tried to install Next Cloud from the AUR. How does Next Cloud suggest you do it? Snap. Oh, okay. It's a snap package from the beginning.

If you want to get a well configured and easy to configure the way it was intended, Nextcloud, you install Ubuntu server and you grab it as a snap. This is how it was intended to be from the beginning. There is, however, an AUR package. Good luck getting that to work. Good luck getting that to work. luck getting that to work number one it's slow number two it keeps timing out and it keeps forgetting your files

that's a problem with xCloud it's got Alzheimer's specifically for people who don't want to go store files on the cloud they want to store them locally like I do on a separate machine the way. They want to store them locally like I do on a separate machine. The way it was intended to be used. It kept forgetting my comic books. It somehow

got infected with Alzheimer's disease. I'm like, okay, no. So I deleted the whole thing. I just copied the file, regular file on the JBOD NAS, and I'm good. So yeah, there are some packages. Whenever it comes to a snap, flakpack, do not install as a... Yeah, you know, if it's already packaged, there's no point packaging the package. Exactly, because if it's... I prefer, and I am with Nicolas with this one, flatbacks are great to use, if only they were better maintained. They need better maintenance, but not in having, especially for me, and I'm going to be, go

a little bit off the books a little bit on this one. Since the economic situation in Lebanon, I can no longer buy games. Right. So I get the pirated version. And pirated versions, you know, all the cracks can sometimes cause issues and it can infect your system with whatever.

Yes, yes. But by running them with a flat pack version of bottles and everything being containerized, if it should infect anything, it will infect only the container. It will never leave the container. But if you install it as a regular package from the AUR, it's going to go infecting everything because it's no longer a container as it should be. So this is where I agree with Nicola that people should start gravitating more and more towards blackpacks and containers. Okay, I don't know why people

use this excuse not to use blackpacks. It's a useless excuse. It doesn't hold any water. it's a useless excuse. It doesn't hold any water. It doesn't go with the system theme. It doesn't use. That is a fair thing because it does, but Flatpack does a really bad

job at explaining how to get that to work. Like Kdenlive, for example. Simple. Kdenlive. I'm using layinin theme on my system. And that's a very common theme everybody uses. I launch it. It's white as snow.

So I have to go into convoluted settings to look for where to tell. And when you go to the theme in the menu, it gives you a thousand themes. Because it's got built-in themes to use. And your own. So I'm like, a way to introduce confusion to the user. Just give them dark or light. Why do you have to give them Dracula, Leon, blah, blah, blah blah, because even if you select Dracula, it's not completely well done in the Flatpak.

That's why I opt to use the one from the art repositories instead, because I tried to use the Flatpak version and I enabled the dark theme. The menu entries, the text of the menus are black on dark. I'm like, way to go, Caden. I go to the regular Arch package. It works just fine. Well, here's the problem with flat packs. And some flat packs are great.

Things like the OBS flat pack work fantastically. Bottles of flat pack also works great. The difference with Flatpaks like this is the developers maintain the Flatpak. Most Flatpaks out there are not developer-maintained. Like, they're treated the same way that, you know, a package on Arch would be maintained

or a package on Fedora. Usually, it's not the developers of the app that are doing it. It's some third party. And maybe they understand the application well, but in a lot of cases, like with the OBS package on Arch, it's packaged completely wrong

and no one should ever use it. Exactly. That's why I stopped shipping it in my package manager because I much prefer the Titan one. Yeah. And the Titan guy is on the OBS Discord server. So you just go to the Linux section of the Discord

server. He's always there to help. He's always there. Yeah, I was using his version all the time until OBS finally started shipping the flatpack. Now I generally use the flatpack except on Wayland where it started to break recently. I just opened it crashes. I don't know why

No, the the Flatpak I think has still has an issue with Nvidia. I use AMD Well, lucky you I still run the the 1080 that I got in 2016 and I still run the 1080 that I got in 2016. Ah, yeah. So, and Bank Encoder, and NVFBC. I have a user on Zero Linux. He's a streamer.

He streams an odd choice of a game, but he likes it. So, Mega Man. Okay. He loves Mega Man. So, he streams his Mega Man gameplay. he loves Mega Man so he streams his Mega Man gameplay but before every stream on the Arch Titan 652 package

he's always having issues no he doesn't have the same issues as he has with the flatback, with the flatback NVFBC, the frame buffer thing he keeps having to troubleshoot that he keeps having to forhoot that. He keeps having to...

for the NBank encoder, sometimes it shows, sometimes it doesn't. He has to quit, relaunch, because he uses a laptop with hybrid Intel NVIDIA, which is the problem at its core. If you have hybrid... Oh, it's hybrid as well! Oh, that's a bad idea. So it will always have issues, but with the Titan 652 version, since it's an Arch package, it can detect his hardware better. You know, less troubleshoot, always troubleshooting, but less. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And since Titan is on the team of StreamFX plugin, and he's on the OBS Discord, so he always gets help from the developer himself.

That's the benefit. So it's the same discussion as you said earlier, that the Black Pack is by the developers. Same thing can also happen to Arch packages as well, like the Titan 652. It's not maintained by him on the AUR, but you can always go to him because he's using somebody he knows to maintain the AUR package. So you can always go to him and ask for help. He will 100% support the project. And so far, with the latest update of the flatback version, it has fixed a few issues.

It has fixed a few issues, especially related. And now with the latest driver, NVIDIA driver, they fixed a few issues with the NVFBC. All you have to do is wait for the guys who create the patch to enable it on mainline cards to update they updated it and now he's good he's good

I've heard the NVIDIA drivers have been slowly getting better they are and now but I still opt to use the TKG patched versions over the stock versions that come on the Arch repositories. Because TKG is a gaming-oriented... Oh, yes. He's got his mainline kernel patched with gaming-oriented patches.

So I use his packages on my repository to ship because they're better. And I notice a lot of smoothness and responsiveness with those drivers rather than the ones shipped on the ARC repositories. Right. But it takes a maintainer to understand these things. Regular users won't know.

So on Zero Linux, instead of shipping with regular drivers, I ship with the TKG so users don't get confused. But the only confusion happens is with the usual NVIDIA issues. If you have something older than Turing, sorry, older than Pascal, you will have

to use a different version of the drivers. You have to go for 70, and if you have even older, you have to go with a 390. You're using for whatever reasons something from the year 2000, you have to use the 340 drivers. So this is where the confusion starts again. So the user is confused, which driver? I have this graphic card, which driver should I install? Those are the questions I get. So I have to answer them because I'm the one who knows, they don't know. But this is an issue that will forever exist in NVIDIA land. And recently, Mesa decided to jump on the same train. The recent Mesa drivers, 22.2, I think,

Mesa drivers 2.22.2, I think, they decided to drop support for the RX100 and 200 series AMD cards. Oh, wow. Okay. So users with those cards will not even be able to boot a lot of ISOs that use the RISC. And you cannot make two versions of the Mesa drivers coexist on the same system. And I'm not going to go above and beyond to find and figure out a fix for those users. I just tell those users, if it doesn't boot into the live environment, select the distro that works for you.

If you have the development knowledge, you could probably make it switch at boot. Yeah, I don't have them. But that's why we're looking for people if we can find someone who can help us do these kind of things it will help zero Linux work for older systems but for the time for the time being until we do the choice is clear for users with rx100 and 200 series go to a distro that supports your hardware. Zero Linux will not support it until we get somebody that knows how to work on those things. Somebody already is, not for Zero Linux, but for another distro,

they're trying to make hardware detection work that way. If RX100, 200 series is detected, use the older version of Mesa. If a newer version is detected, then use the newer version. But so far they have failed. Because Mesa is a huge package. It's not a small package. It took me three hours to build it on my system. If you have a build server,

then okay. But if you're building it on your home computer, it's going to take a long time. But this is the kind of things that go into maintaining decisions. And if you have the manpower and the development knowledge, you make the distro grow and support more hardware. But since I am a one-man show doing a one distro, I cannot really do that. And with zero development knowledge,

I cannot really do that. So I stick to my guns. Whatever works, I tell the users, this is how the distro is. It supports this kind of hardware. Either use it or don't. That's it. I take the safer route because I don't have the knowledge

nor the manpower to do anything else. When I do, things might change. But until then, this is how they are. Maintaining a distro comes with a lot of responsibilities. It's easy to do, but it comes with

a lot of responsibilities because you need to make sure you're making the right decisions. You have the right amount of manpower you have the development knowledge and all that but if you're doing it for yourself you can do whatever you want but if you're doing it for the people yeah it's gonna be hard to satisfy everyone you can't satisfy everyone this is I learned that the hard way because I had a lot of sleepless nights trying to satisfy one user. I added something for one user, oh KDE wallet because he had a NAS and he

didn't want to have to input the password every time you wanted to access it. So with KDE wallet you just save password, you have this checkbox where you tell it to save the password and that's it. Done deal. But if you have it disabled, you have to enter the password every time because the checkbox is not there. I enabled KDE wallet. I had an angry mob. I just didn't. I applied for one user, all the other users attacked me. No. So I disabled it again. It's those kind of things, you know? Small things, but they grow with... So I decided, nothing out of the box.

You do whatever you want. Yeah. Maybe provide some toggles to install stuff, but that's about as much you'll do. Exactly. but that's about as much you do. Exactly. Well, but the Linux,

I prefer to use Linux with all its issues over Windows because Windows will always be there on my system because it has its uses. And what I tell users is, if you're coming with Windows, never wipe your Windows installation. Install Linux alongside it. Learn Linux and have a safe ground to go to.

Go back to it. Jump in the deep end. Do it. You know you want to. That's what I did. I did it during the middle of a semester. It was a bad idea. I'll tell you when I did my Linux jump. I was working for Apple in Ireland.

And Apple gives you, since it was 30 days of the pandemic, we had our iMacs at home, our work iMacs at home. And they give you one hour break time during the day until you punch out. During that time, I hit the punch out for the break time, go to Linux. Come back from the break time, go back to... because I used to work for Siri. So my job was to have headphones on my head, listen to people's requests. But I wanted to take a break from that and I wanted to take a break from Mac OS so I went to Linux. I used to have Windows on another machine connected to my TV but I only used it

because I was on the team of custom images for the Raspberry Pi 4 for retro gaming. So I was using Windows for that. I needed it, but it was on a separate machine. But when I was working, during work hours, punch out, go to Linux, come back, and have lunch, of course. And then come back and continue on macOS. And we had those iMacs that took 20 minutes to boot with a mechanical drive.

So I was like, no, macOS. I've been using macOS and Windows all my life. I need something different. So I was using Manjaro KDE, and I was enjoying it with all these effects and transparencies with KVANTUM and stuff. And I told myself, as soon as I come back home, my main machine will have Linux. And I haven't seen Windows ever since. I do see Windows just for the small period of times where I need to play something that, for some reason, Proton does not support.

Sure, sure. But other than that, a total of one hour. I don't game hours upon hours upon hours. I have an attention span of one hour on games. That's it. Launch the game one hour 60 minutes, go back to Linux. I don't even see the Windows desktop. I just see it for a blink of an eye because I have Steam Big Picture mode to launch. So it boots into Steam Big Picture, launch the game, done deal.

I just hide Windows as much as I can because I don't want to see that desktop. I don't want to see the taskbar because it's Windows 11. And Windows 11 taskbar is the worst. So I'm like, yeah. So that's how I escape Windows and macOS. It's Linux, and I love the issues that it has. For me, they push me to learn. It's a reason for me to learn and to keep learning. And the more I learn, the happier I am.

But I cannot learn development because of my ADHD issues and my anxiety issues. Because if I concentrate on code too long i end up in a corner can't breathe it i can't breathe so anxiety attacks they hit whenever i read too much code so if i had the ability to learn code i would but unfortunately i can't so that's why i need developers who don't have any issues to help us with that stuff. But otherwise, Linux is amazing. I don't care if people say, oh, it's unstable. It's fragmented because you've got Ubuntu, Fedora, I mean, Red Hat, and Arch.

Yeah. Those are the main. And everything that comes out of it is too much. You either use those three or don't use anything that comes or get yourself overwhelmed with the rest of them. I say for a beginner user, use the base. Use Bullseye. Bullseye is more stable than any of its derivatives either Ubuntu or anything else because Ubuntu as of late has become unstable. It's an argument to be made.

But still, I would recommend Fedora if I were to recommend this software. I've seen a lot more people recommending Fedora as of late. I use it, and I put myself in the shoes of a beginner. As long as you know what the command is sudo dnf update, upgrade, you're done. That's all you need to know. And sudo dnf install, name a package. Okay they don't have a... they use they use discover. Oh my god I don't know why they do that on KDE. But anyway, it's user-friendly. I'm not saying that it works as intended, but I'm saying it looks friendly. And if I recommend something really, I would recommend Fedora GNOME Edition. Yeah.

The workstation. Why? Because GNOME works on Wayland for a lot of NVIDIA users. Not perfectly, because you cannot blame Wayland as much as you have to blame the developers of said apps. Especially Electron apps. Because there's a lot of apps that are still using electron 10, electron 12, electron 13. Those electrons are so out of date, they'll never work on Wayland. So electron apps, app developers need to step up their game.

Basically, it's packaged developers that are to blame more than Wayland Wayland is providing you the new backend the more and I agree with your key binding issue with Wayland mm-hmm I do agree 100% because I can understand a lot of people I heard a lot of people in the comment section they're like oh this isn't that big of a deal I don't use this like yeah you may not use this but this is fundamental to my workflow i literally cannot main weyland without this being fixed like when i record a video on weyland you've probably noticed if you've seen any of those videos like i will be talking and then i'll have to look over here and then like look back i could always like cut stuff out and do it

like that but it changes the way i have to record the video. I don't want to do that. I want to record the videos the way I want to record them, and on Xorg, I can just do that. I can just record it, like, press my keybinds, everything just works. Yeah, and for me, when I'm in the shop, I only have one monitor. I don't have... So I have to use workspaces. Yeah, yeah. I'll alt-F1, F1, F2, F3, F4 to switch between workspaces is fundamental. If it doesn't work on Wayland, it's an issue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But other than that, this is a unique, very niche issue. But for apps not working like OBS and stuff like that, it's on the development side, all those packages to get up and running with Wayland. Wayland is by no means ready for the masses, but when it is, better make sure that it will ship on zero linux as an option but until then it will not be included on zero linux on the iso because it confuses a lot of people i had a lot of users not because when you have the sdm login screen i don't know why when you have the just the uh when you enable the wayland session it defaults to that for some odd reason it defaults to that. For some odd reason, it defaults to

Wayland. So users don't look at, don't pay attention to that. They put their password in, they hit enter, they're NVIDIA users, they hit enter, it throws them back to the login screen. They come back to me, I can't log in with your distro, it's broken. No, did you look at the top left or the bottom right to see if it's defaulting to Wayland? 99% of the time it's defaulting to Wayland. So I decided to remove the session from the ISO, that way it automatically goes to X11. I tried doing the hack where I put session X11, for some reason it still defaulted to Wayland. So Wayland, you put it, it's the master. still defaulted to in Wayland.

So Wayland, you put it, it's the master. So now I removed it, so no issues, but whatever. Wayland still needs time. I give it around three to four years to get to a usable state.

There is something fun that's probably going to happen with Wayland. This came out I think the Pharonix article came out today. There was an issue made over on the GTK GitLab, and it looks like possibly

GTK 5, which will probably be in like 2030, is going to be Wayland only. Yeah, I heard of that. If it is Wayland only, I think it's GTK Wayland only? Yeah, I heard of that. If it is Wayland only, I think it's GTK Wayland. In my head, it's Gnome only Wayland. They know how to deal with Wayland better than the KDE people do. For me, since I am KDE in a KDE mindset, I think KDE. How will it benefit KDE? So far, KDE have done nothing. They keep updating, oh, better Wayland support for AMD and for Intel, but not for Nvidia. Wayland plus Nvidia on KDE equals, if you want to have nightmares, yeah, go ahead. But I think according if I interpret what

Nicolo said, he was like we cannot do anything with a proprietary company. They have to do something for us, give us something to work on before we can do anything. And so far Nvidia is concentrating on oh we need more people to use Nvidia so so we're going to start giving them the hint of open sourcing. And people think that Nvidia open source is the driver for the masses. No, it's development, it's CUDA, it's Quadro, it's not mainline. If you own a mainline GPU like a consumer GPU, nothing will be open source. Nothing is open source, it's still proprietary. If you want

all the open NVIDIA open DKMS, you should have a Quadro card, you should have a professional card. You should have a professional card. Some people, some developers are trying to port that over to consumer GPUs. Not so much luck. That's why if you try to build, for example, the DKG drivers, it will come up with a huge warning telling you, okay, the OpenDKMS does not currently work on that. Do you want to build with them? If you do, get ready for nightmares. He gives you the option to if you're convinced that it's going to work for you,

but it's a big warning in the build script. So NVIDIA is starting to get around, but not for the masses. NVIDIA did put a list, I think maybe like six or so months ago, outlining the main problems they need to address with Weyland. Whether everything on that list gets addressed, I don't know. We'll have to see what really happens,

but they are aware that it's a problem. It's just a question of how much manpower they're willing to allocate to fixing the problem. For people that don't bring them money. Yeah. Because Linux doesn't bring money to NVIDIA.

I think by 2030, 2035, we'll see something. But until then, my recommendation, if you have an NVIDIA card, don't go over there yet. If you have an AMDVIDIA card, don't go Wayland yet. If you have an AMD card and Intel, it's awesome. It's getting there. It works okay. But if you're an NVIDIA user, which a lot of people are, don't use Wayland.

Don't even approach Wayland. Even unknown would do it very well, but still it's got issues. I would suggest if someone is building a system with Linux in mind, just build it with an AMD card. I get the people who buy Nvidia cards. Nvidia does right now make better cards,

especially on the top end. But if you're building a system specifically knowing that it is going to be a Linux system, top end. But if you're building a system specifically knowing that it is going to be a Linux system, AMD and maybe Intel, depending on how these desktop cards go in the future, I know the

initial stuff wasn't doing super great, but AMD or potentially Intel is where you should be going. Just going to say one thing about AMD. I know they work. I have an AMD card in this system. It's not an AMD card.

It's an HD, Radeon HD64. Oh, yeah, okay. A little bit old, yeah. It's an ATI card. It doesn't have a... You know how N how Nvidia has their Nvidia settings control panel where you can set things up AMD does

not have that they don't do they they do on Windows and it's never ported it it's like okay AMD works I agree with you but if you want to change your settings related to the GPU what do you do suffer yeah like I am used to If you want to change your settings related to the GPU, what do you do?

Suffer. Yeah, like I am used to on Windows, I'm used to opening the NVIDIA control panel and setting up the... I want the GPU to handle the anti-aliasing, not the application. I want the GPU to enable or disable. Oh yeah, NVIDIA's tooling is vastly superior when it works. Like when the GPU's drives are working. Yeah. I'm not talking Linux.

I'm talking in general. Yeah, yeah. So you can tell the GPU what to do. Enable G-Sync, disable G-Sync, and stuff like that on NVIDIA. On AMD, you're forced to use the driver as it chips. That's it. And that, for me, who is used to a lot of granularity with uh with the system he's using uh when amd tells me oh sorry you use the driver as is if you want to

modify it you need an amd pro graphic card or whatever it's called uh to be able to use the amd uh whatever it's called driver driver on the AUR. It gives you a sort of a control panel. Or use Core CTL. Core CTL is sort of a tool that enables you to control the fans on your GPU and CPU and whatnot. But it's only AMD. It's not NVIDIA. So, okay.

So there is a developer who created something to give us a little bit, but all we can control are the fan curves and the RGB so far. Yeah. But nothing else. I'm hoping somebody steps in and creates a Complex control control panel. I want to say there's a tool that lets you do overclocking as well. I want to say I'm not sure If you figure it out make a video about it. I'll be sure to check it out I think it's better than like another tool that I think it's the... Whatever that program is to manage power usage on laptops. Auto CPU frequency control?

Something like that. I'll check it out. Oh, no, no, a different one. It's one of those tools that you would use, but yeah. Yeah, I need a unified control panel that gives me full control over my CPU. I don't know if anything is unified that's for sure if someone can create one please do because that's what I'm missing to switch to AMD because I don't like to switch to a GPU that works but uh with which I have zero control yeah

so I need control I I really I don't overclock I don't need overclocking overclocking is not my thing. I Overclock once I write the motherboard So it's not it's not my thing. I just want to be able to control the fan curves I need to control the RGB. I need to be able to control the power usage And stuff like that all under one single application. I don't have to open six different ones just to be able to yeah so give me that i'll switch to amd don't give me that i'll stick to nvidia because at least with nvidia i can control the for example you know as an amd user you have to configure you have to set up edit a configuration file to disable terry yeah, yeah, yeah. And NVIDIA is just a tick box in the settings. So... Force compositing and stuff like that.

So, check that tick box, you're done. With AMD, oh, you have to hunt for the configuration file. Yeah, you change the XOR config file, or you can edit it with XRender. Yeah, so you have to do all these things just to disable tearing.

I'm like, no, I need a tool that just gives you a tick box. Done. So simplify the user's experience. Don't make it more difficult. So that's the only thing I'm waiting for before fully switching to AMD. Because my upgrade, my next upgrade is in 2025 for my system. I bought that system in 2021. In 2025 I give it four years and I upgrade myself. I don't buy a new system since I am on an AMD system. I can jump from the 3600x all the way to 5950x and my experience is gonna double.

50x and my experience is gonna double. Yeah. Yeah, my performance is gonna double My 1080 would be replaced with an AMD GPU But if on Linux they don't create that control panel I'm waiting for I'm sticking to a NVIDIA totally fair so Give me control. I'll switch not before That's just me. No, no, I want a control panel as well. That would be very nice. Like other users, they just want it to work.

Like, they come to me, they tell me, oh, I have an AMD card, so all I have to do is install an x86 video AMD GPU, done deal. And my games run just fine. deal and my games run just fine. Not really, because if you want to control something related to your GPU to get a little bit of boost, you can't. You're just stuck with whatever. They tell me, oh you're right, I can get better performance if I was able to tweak this and that, which you can't. So I tell the users about the limitation, they don't notice it. Because they're used to something that just works. Like, same thing happens on Windows, not everything works. On Linux, it's better.

And on Linux, you learn, you feel like you learn something, get it coming out of it. With Windows, because everything is spoon-fed to you, just double-click on a setup file, install, you're done. It's the same thing with Apple. Why do people forget their iCloud password? Because Apple made it not necessary to remember it. Right. Because you use either your face ID or your fingerprint. Oh yes, yes, it or your fingerprint to authenticate. So you don't have to remember your password. Since I used to work for an Apple premium reseller for five years,

most people came to me, please, I want to buy a new phone. Can you transfer my data from one phone to another? Yeah. Okay. What's your iCloud password? What's an iCloud? What's iCloud?

Mm-hmm. They don't even know what iCloud is because somebody in their family set the phone up for them and everything. And Apple's done a really good job at making that a very transparent thing. You just store your data and it's stored.

It's stored. And when you want to download a new app instead of authenticating with a password you just put your fingerprint or your face id you just look at your phone it's done so there's nothing to remember we're like sorry we can't do anything We cannot transfer your data without your iCloud password. So I called Apple for that. This was back in the iPhone 4 days. It was always required. It was mandatory to input the iCloud password every time you wanted to download a paid app, purchase an app. Free apps, not required.

But paid apps, yes. Okay. So people couldn't forget their iCloud password because they had to input it every time they purchased an app. Yeah. Then people attacked Apple telling them, we want to be transparent. We don't want to have to input our password every time we want to download an app.

So Apple did what the users requested. And now people don't remember their iCloud passwords, which is mandatory to remember because without it, you cannot transfer your data. You can see they satisfied the people. They created a bigger problem than it ever was. Yup, yup. So, and here in Lebanon, people are more like, if you say the word, I can't, they will take off their shoes and they will hit you with it. Yeah, it has reached that point. One guy didn't take off his shoe.

He just, I give him credit because the phone he was trying to transfer data from was his recently deceased brother's one. Right, okay. He wanted to take it over and use it himself instead of buying a new one. But since his brother recently was deceased, he couldn't get the password. So when we told him we can't because we needed the password, or at least the face ID or the fingerprint ID, that person is gone. He no longer exists. We tried to explain that situation to Apple because this is a unique situation. They wouldn't hear of it. They wanted proof on paper by the government that this person was dead before for security reasons yeah yeah so the guy got

pissed he took the phone he threw it across the table it hit the wall it smashed into a million pieces because you know it's good he was like you can't transfer you cannot unlock the phone from my dead brother's phone so i can use it I told him call Apple you'll see they're going to tell you the same thing he started cussing and yelling and screaming and the phone ended up in a million pieces on the floor it was an iPhone 10 at the time oh so yeah yeah Apple is not all that great with that kind of stuff. So, yeah, but this is what I meant by saying I did something for one user. I got attacked by a mob. Same thing happened with Apple, a conglomerate.

I'm not talking about a single user. I'm talking about a conglomerate. So, yeah, some decisions are the wrong decisions. You have to admit them. I am happy to admit it, but Apple will never admit it. Apple will keep on telling you it's to make your life easier. No, you're not, because I forget my iCloud password 99% of the time. How easy are you making it? If I want to upgrade my phone, since I forgot my iCloud password,

I cannot use a new phone. I have to start from scratch every time. That's a problem. Some companies create more problems, but they convince the consumer that it's not a problem. I don't want to be that. I don't want to be that. So I don't satisfy anyone. I just give them a blank slate. They do whatever they want. They create their own problems. Not me. I don't create a problem for the user. On the contrary, I solve their problem. So yeah, Linux taught me that. Because in Linux, it's simple to solve problems, because they're not big ones. On Windows, they're big ones that you cannot solve.

In the back in the day, I used to ship customized versions of Windows. If you think about TeamOS, if you know them, a version of Windows that's pre-themed, pre-patched, has pre-installed packages and stuff like that, which was illegal to do because we used to distribute it as activated. Not anymore. Now we just ship it and it's up to the user to do what they... But I don't belong to that group anymore.

The last time I was part of that group was 2002, 2003. belong to that group anymore. The last time I was part of that group was 2002-2003. But doing so with Windows, you cannot solve anything. Like the guy tells you, oh it's broken. I tried to open Explorer, it crashes. Can't do anything for you. With Linux, you do the research. With enough research, you can give the solution. This is what I love. As an owner of a repair store, I can give solutions to customers when they're using Linux. When they're using Windows,

pirated versions of Windows might I add, I'm like, it's out of my hands. I have to restore your system back to factory, so using the factory image, I can't do anything other than that. So with Linux, you can fix it and keep the data. And with Linux, you can set a separate partition for home directory. Just reinstall the system, all the settings are back. Yeah. So Linux is more simple than people give it credit. You just need to know how you do your stuff. So with Windows, there's no way around it.

It's broken, it's broken. Format, reinstall. That's it. Your documents are gone. Your pictures are gone, your musics are gone. But with Linux, if you have a separate home directory or if you have a time shift backup or a snapshot or whatever, however you created the backup, you can always come back. With Windows, not so much. So I am starting to introduce Linux to more people through my store. I'm using my store to introduce, like there was a customer who had a corrupt system. I installed a Windows system. I installed zero Linux on their system. They didn't know what Linux was or anything, but their system worked

much better than when it was on Windows 8.1. So they're happy. So I'm not telling them what it is. I'm just telling them I reinstalled the operating system, now it should be stable. Most of, 90% of the people in my small hometown, because it's a very small town, 3,000 people altogether. Wow, really? Yeah. Yeah, so most of them, they use their computers for YouTube, documents, and browsing the internet. Yeah. Maybe chatting from time to time.

Probably some emails as well. And by the way, Ferdy is dead. Did you get the email? I'm very aware, yes. I got introduced because of your video. And now I'm using Ferdium, the fork. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People keep telling me about Ferdium. I need to actually go and...

I think I covered Ferdium when the whole Ferdie situation happened. Because the dev went kind of crazy on his Twitter. I think he's Arab, because his name is Arabic. So I don't know. I wouldn't have a clue. But anyway, Ferdium is Ferdy. It looks exactly the same,

functions exactly the same. It's like I'm using Ferdy, but different name. But they're using the same service, because the underlying service is the one that, I forgot, Slack uses or something. No, no, I forgot. The underlying service is the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As the paid one, I forgot what it's called. So he just forked the GUI. Ah, RAM box, yeah. So he just forked the GUI. Ah, RAMbox, yeah. So he just forked the UI of Ferdy and just called it Ferdyum. And it works just as well, and I can use an account. So I'm in sync upstairs because my house is up there. Oh, I actually never used the account sync feature, but yeah, that's cool that works as well.

Yeah, so my house is upstairs. So the shop and the house are in sync that's that's a benefit so I go upstairs I log in I turn on the computer it's the same settings that I have over here they're in sync but yeah per diem is worth using because I don't like to have to open multiple windows for multiple chat clients. That's the only benefit. Other than that, there is no benefit. Actually, you're using the web interface of every app.

Yeah, well, it's more RAM. It's heavier to use. It's just convenience to come to that. And it will not work with Wayland because it's using Electron 16. So unfortunately, and now I know what Electron is, I didn't know in the beginning. Electron to me was just another app. A devol explained to me what Electron is. It's basically Chromium. It's a Chromium engine packaged up as a package. Yeah, it's like a GUI.

I didn't know. Anyway, we've been on for two hours already. Yeah, it's about time to end it off. Yeah. It was great chatting. I hope I gave a little... I clarified a little bit what ZeroLinux is and what it will be and hope

we didn't bore people with our discussion. Well, it's less of a discussion, more like just I let you speak for a few hours. I tend to do that because I'm passionate about Linux. This just shows how passionate I am. No, I can definitely see that. I also love it when I have people on like this. I feel like they are way more fun episodes

than me trying to force a discussion to be happening. When someone is clearly passionate about whatever subject it is I always feel like they make the best episodes yeah because oh, Ferdium just updated the package on the UR, I need to package it up I'm using a daily build

so I package it up every 24 hours but yeah, being passionate about anything makes that thing become better whatever the project is be it linux be it in a package or whatever this is what helps the the project get better i want linux to get better because in all honesty the last thing I want to say is, in all honesty, Linux, the way it is, with the confusion that it's introducing with those countless distros, including myself, I'm not excluding myself, the more distros you introduce to Linux, the more confusion

you're going to introduce to users, especially new users coming from Windows. We need to minimize the amount of distros if we want Linux to be used by the masses. The less distributions you have, the more the user will gravitate towards it. The more distributions you have, the more confusion you introduce, the more users are going to say, no, no, no, too many. I don't know which is which and what is what. Yeah, yeah. The thing where we tend to use more than we should is explaining what each distro has better than the one before it or less than the one before it.

better than the one before it or less than the one before it. We need to have like a few distros. I'm not saying just three, the three bases, just a couple of distros that each one attacks a different area of Linux, but not 200,000 different distros. So I am of the camp that less is better, more is more confusion. Because someone recently told me, don't introduce too many options to the user using your tool. They're going to get confused, they're going to break their system. That's what got me to think about that situation with Linux. Minimize the distros, not by much, just enough that each one targets a certain net. Don't make hobby distros. I would be happy to stop making zero-linux because it's

one less distro to confuse the user. I will continue doing it for myself, but I will not keep it online for much longer. Whoever takes it over wants for myself, but I will not keep it online for much longer. Whoever takes it over wants to keep it online, let them keep it online. It's not my problem. But the whole idea is minimize the confusion. Yeah. And my last word will be, if you want to use Arch, expect issues because, and you're a new user to Linux, expect issues because that's the nature of Arch. The nature of Arch is a learning curve. It will break on you because

it wants to teach you how to fall and get up again. Fall and get up again. If you want something that spoon feeds you everything, all the Debian-based distros are that. Anything Arch-based and Fedora-based is for more advanced users. Go Debian if you're new. Discover what Linux is. But if you go Arch, you are agreeing to an invisible agreement. You're signing an invisible agreement that you are ready to fix a lot of issues and learn from those issues. If you expect Arch to work right out of the box like Debian, don't go there. Just don't go there.

Arch is for learning, Debian is just for using, it's just a ready-made desktop to use out of the box. But Arch is not by any means, even with Manjaro. People think that Manjaro, because being what it is, is simple to use. It's not. It's Arch at the core. It just doesn't use the Arch repositories, but it's Arch at the core. So the same problems that happen with arch will happen with Manjaro, so don't think that if it's dressed up in a different coat of paint that's gonna function better than the rest Arch as a whole is for the people who are willing to learn

That's it Is that the last last thing you have to say now you don't get another last thing on there? last thing you have to say now? You don't got another last thing on there? Kind of long, but I cannot summarize it in any shorter than that. Well, before we go, where can people find you and the work you do?

They can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is techzero, T-E-C-H-X-E-R-O. And if they want to find me on Discord, they can join the Zero Linux Discord server or on Telegram, Zero Linux Official.

Yeah. And, but just, people ask me, what does Tech Zero mean, and what does Zero Linux mean? Because all names mean something. Zero Linux, because I'm half Greek, zero means I know. So that translates to I know Linux.

Zero Linux. Okay. I know Linux. And tech zero translates to tech I know. Technology I know. Huh. Yeah. I just wanted to introduce a little bit of Greek into everything.

Dark zero is darkness I know. That's really cool. Yeah, I like to use I know a lot. Also, the website for Zero Linux is... zerolinux.xyz Yep. xero linux.xyz. Yep. X-E-R-O Linux.xyz. I'll have all of those links in the description down below.

If there's anything that you didn't mention, feel free to just send me the link afterwards, and I will... We'll do it. I just want users to read the end user agreement before they click the download button, because this will set expectations. Awesome. Do not expect something that this will set expectations. Awesome. Do not expect something that zero isn't.

Yeah. Cool. As for me, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos, all that fun stuff there. I've got a gaming channel that is Brody Robertson plays. I stream there twice a week.

Every other day, there are YouTube shorts going up. If you are listening to the audio version of this, the video version is available on YouTube as for the video watches the audio version is available basically anywhere you can find audio podcasts itunes google podcasts anything else out there there's an rss feed um add it to whatever application you want to use and you'll be good to go um i will give you the last word. What do you want to say? Linux is amazing.

You need to learn it. It's so much fun, and you'll thank me when you begin. That's all. Awesome. Well, see you guys later. See you.