Tech Over Tea - The Best Linux Tips & Tricks | Michael Horn

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Today we have Michael Horn on the podcast who you may know from his content over on his Youtube channel by the name MichaelHornNROH, he here today to chat about all things Linux and how he got into this position. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelNROH Twitter: https://x.com/MichaelNROH Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@MichaelNROH ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have a guest that I had meant to contact a long time ago, back when you were first starting your channel, and then I forgot to do so, but you're here now. Welcome to the show, Michael Horne. Hi. How are you? Perfect introduction. For anyone who doesn't know who you are, just a brief introduction. What do you do? Who you are? All that sort of stuff. Okay. So I am a YouTuber, as some of you might have guessed. I work, my full day job is actually a system administrator, mainly, unfortunately, in the area of Windows servers, but increasingly Linux as well. Yeah. I like Linux, desktop environments, all that stuff. It's exciting. I like it. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I guess the best place to start is just,

how did you first find yourself using Linux? Like, I know you've documented the, like you switching to Linux on your channel. Was that the first time you'd actually swapped or had you used it in the past before? Like just how long have you been aware of Linux? That is actually a question that I cannot answer. Okay. Because how long was I aware? It's funny so i got

introduced or reintroduced to linux during my study program in like linux server administration and i was like yeah i already have heard of it but i don't actually know where and i've also used it at some point i guess like i'd used some commands. It's very weird. I have no idea where I knew it from. But it was basically around, I think it was in 2020, something. Around that area that I was basically moving

more towards Linux. And at this point, my old gaming laptop broke. And so I just pulled out an old one. It had Windows on it. I couldn't update it anymore. It was unsupported. And so I just pulled out an old one. It had Windows on it. I couldn't update it anymore. It was unsupported. And I was like, you know what?

I'm just going to install Debian on it. I'm just going to throw KDPlasma on it. It was my first experience. And it worked surprisingly well. That was in January, I think. And shortly after, like two months after, I made my first video on Linux. Okay. Why Debian?

Was it just something you happened to know about at the time? Or was there another reason for it? Yeah, basically that. So it was Debian 11, I think. Okay. If it was already out or 10, I'm not sure. But I knew not sure. But I knew it already, and

since I'm a bit more technical in general, I don't mind installing an operating system with custom partitioning and everything. You don't have to, but I did it anyway, and it's a fun installer if you know what you're doing, so that's

the main reason why okay because a lot of people they will have like got a recommendation from a friend or like something like that because both sounds that you already have like a a fairly established tech background by that point yeah i guess that a lot of people are just what should i use and do you know what's good but the question is always what what is a good distro there are so many of them yeah yeah well well i've got like interesting thoughts on the whole like distro thing i honestly i feel like a lot of the distros out there really don't actually serve a purpose in existing.

Like, it's cool. People want to make a thing. Like, that's great. Like, go ahead and make your thing. But I really don't think most distros should be recommended to someone, especially if they're new. I think if you're like a new user,

the best suggestion is go with something mainstream. Go with an Ubuntu, go with Fedora, Debian, basically anything that has an established community around it. Because once you know what you're doing, and you know that you're running KDE, and you know how apt works, and you know all of these other little components are, it's very easy to go and find the specific resources

for that individual component. But if you don't even know what KDE is, and let's say I put you on some like random, I don't know, some distro that has like a hundred users, finding any sort of resources about the distro will be basically impossible. But if I were to put you on something like Fedora KDE or Kubuntu, even if you don't know what KDE is, if you were to search Kubuntu how to do something, Fedora KDE how to do something, you're far more likely to find resources that at least lead you in the right direction. Yeah, I'm 100% there with you.

The main problem with what I see online is like choose that desktop environment if you're a Windows user but the problem is people coming from Windows don't even know what a desktop environment actually is right so telling them you want to switch to Linux then you gotta pick a distribution you gotta pick a desktop environment what do you actually want do you want to game do you want to work the whole point is they want something that works and like that's basically it and for a starter and represent degree like just pick a mainstream one like honestly it doesn't really matter if it's backed by company or not it doesn't matter if it's a canonical if it's a redhead or ibm For a start, just to get into it,

just to learn about the operating system, the kernel and the operating system and how everything is built up, it's a really good idea to just start out with something that most likely works and then you can always switch afterwards, which a lot of people do once they start getting into it anyway.

Yeah. I am one of the rare people who just really don't like distro hopping. I've been on Arch since I started Linux. I've installed Arch a couple of times because I had some problems that I need to do a reinstall for, but I've never been one for distro hopping. When I first started using Linux, I didn't just jump right into it.

You hear swapping to Linux, jumping right into it. Like, you hear, like, swapping to Linux, jumping right into Arch, like, that's a, why would you do that? But by that point, I'd already probably watched, like, three or six months worth of, like, YouTube videos reading information about how to use Linux. Like, even though I hadn't used it myself, I basically had already immersed myself in that experience, and for for me it wasn't just suddenly jumping in but i i know the way that i approached it is not the way that most people approach it like most people they you know you'll hear someone saying oh windows 7 windows 8 windows 10 the support period is over i don't want to use the next version whatever happens to be at the time

i'm going to try out linux and those are the people who tend to just jump right in. And those are the people who I feel like it's best to direct them to something. Something that at least has a community around it. Whether it's the best thing out there. Like, you know, you can have arguments. Oh, should a new user be on Ubuntu or be on Fedora? Oh, Fedora, they like to move really fast with things, whereas Ubuntu is a lot more conservative with changes. Yeah, all of that

stuff's great, but yeah, I think you're right there. Getting your foot in the door and experiencing it, then working out what you want from your system from there is a lot easier than just giving all of this choice to a user who doesn't even know what things they should be caring about in the first place. Yeah. And I think in the first place, like if you're coming from Windows,

then many suggest that you should use something like a KDPlasma, something like a Cinnamon. But I'm not really sure if that's the right approach because preferences are interesting and Windows forces you into a certain direction, which is kind of nice if you get into KDPlasma. So it's similar, but it's not the same. Yeah, I actually do want to sort of focus on that point

because a lot of people will talk about if someone's coming from Windows, you want to put them onto an environment that is Windows-like. You know, Cinnamon, like KDE. I know the KDE people very much disagree that they're Windows-like, but frankly, they're Windows-like.

Whereas GNOME is a very different kind of way to interact with your system. What do you think of this idea of you want people to be on something familiar or would you rather put them on something completely different so they don't fall into the pit of a pitfall of thinking it's exactly like windows and realizing very quickly that even though it kind of looks like windows a lot of the functionality they expect from windows is just not there or if it is there it's in a very different location.

Yeah. That's actually a pretty tough one. Because I know that if you put them into a familiar environment, that they might feel more comfortable. But KDPlasma is not Windows. And the first time I started noticing that right away is that you cannot dynamically dock Windows with the meta and the arrow keys. Or I think, no, no, you cannot. Oh, you can't do that? You cannot maximize it.

Right, right, right. Okay. You can't maximize it. And that was the first thing that I noticed right away. that I noticed right away. And even though GNOME is a lot different in its overall user interface, it's not that different from Windows because, OK, you have a panel at the top and not at the bottom. But the rest is pretty much identical.

Like, you click in the left upper. Well, unless it's a and then you have the sidebar. Exactly, yeah. But it's a bit different. But you have the sidebar. Exactly, yeah. But it's a bit different. But you have all the hotkeys there that you would usually know, even some advanced ones, like the old space where it brings up like the maximize, minimize stuff.

It's very mixed. Like you could plasma some elements. You have the panel, let's call it the taskbar, whatever. You have similar settings. On the other hand, you have the panel, let's call it taskbar, whatever. You have similar settings. On the other hand, you have GNOME, which has all of the hotkeys. I gotta say, a fuller experience since on KDE Plasma, not everything is as tight in the desktop environment, like calendars and stuff like that. It's very mixed. I find it hard to recommend desktop environments to newcomers, which is why I usually pick

a GNOME version, which has been heavily modified towards Windows or KDE or something like that, because then you have basically all of it in one place and you can always switch afterwards but it doesn't really matter in the end yeah no that's definitely understandable you're right in the end it really doesn't matter because sure even if you decide that whatever desktop environment you start on

is you know the desktop environment for you like it's something that you need to decide for yourself, ultimately. I am a big fan of tiling, and I will talk about how tiling is the better workflow until the end of time. I don't care that people disagree with me. That's fine. They're wrong.

But this is something that you need to experience for yourself and work out what suits your workflow and are you happy with a windows-like workflow was the the way of interacting windows a problem you had like how would i say like if you're on windows there's only one way to really interact with it every window is going to operate in the windows-like way. But when you come to Linux, there are options. And you might be happy with what's familiar, but it's only something that you can answer yourself. Because we can talk about with like tiling, for example,

the power of having a really keyboard-driven workflow. But I can tell you how great that might be. But if you've never used it, it doesn't matter how great it might be on if you've never used it it doesn't matter how great it might be on paper it's something you still need to learn or like actually a great example of this is moving away from desktops people who are really big fans of like emacs and vim if you listen to them explain how powerful these tools are when you've had like five or ten years using them you think this is the greatest thing that you've ever used

and then you try it and you're like i don't understand how to do anything i don't understand why anyone think this is good but it's something that you need to experience for yourself and i think not just try it out for like a day try it out for like a couple of days i think actually immerse yourself in the environment give yourself try it out for a couple of days. I think actually immerse yourself in the environment. Give yourself a couple of weeks, a couple of months even, depending on what you want to do. If you have a secondary machine, you know, clean and store hardware. Don't even do virtual machine.

Just go straight on hardware, where obviously that's not viable for everyone. And dual booting can be a problem. And I wouldn't recommend dual booting to someone who doesn't know what they're doing anyway unless you do the way i do boot which is unplug all your drives and then install on the drive and then swap them in the bios which is the safest way to do it but my point of all of this is you need to try it out for yourself and work out what you want from it yeah preferences are always hard like nowadays i i don't even like windows anymore the windows way yeah no not because not because like i it's very

unusual or something but there's just some functionality that i now use that just isn't there right one example uh like something like an overview which i use or i really like because i always have one hand on my mouse simply because i do a lot of editing i do some yeah basically with gimp photo manipulation and all that stuff so having being able to trigger that stuff with my mouse is pretty cool. Windows does also have the functionality in some way. You have the Windows tab key, but you cannot pull Windows from one screen to another, at least not in Windows 10.

And that throws me off so much. I tried it every single day when i'm using windows and it just doesn't work and then i'm like okay it doesn't work and all the all those things life improvements switching switching between desktops it's just not as good and i've learned that over the years that this is what i actually prefer it It's not something that when I was coming from Windows, I was first installing KDE Plasma and I had it exactly in the way that Windows was. And I tried a lot of other things and they worked better, even though they were pretty unusual at first. So when did you... Right now're using gnome yes? No. No. I hold on I think it's

six weeks for now it's KDPlasma 6. Okay okay um but you were using gnome before that? I was using gnome yeah. Okay. In the year, I switched between the two quite often. Right, right. That's fair. I guess if you want to have a... It's something I probably should do more. Because I had been using pretty much only Tyler since I started. And I think it gives me a good understanding how Tylers work.

But with the release of plasma 6 it made me want to try out like what most other people on linux are using obviously there's also a lot of people on gnome i've not actively used gnome so i don't really have a proper opinion on that but you know kde is easily the second biggest desktop like there's no question about that there's nothing else that's even close to it. I think Cinnamon. I know Nick from Linux Experiment did like a big survey. I think Cinnamon or something was third place. And that would make sense.

It was either Cinnamon or Hyperland. I don't remember. But also when you're in like a YouTube audience. You're going to be skewed towards very technical people. Because they're watching YouTube videos. So they're more technical than just the average person and maybe not more technical but yeah actually that's maybe not the best description they're more interested in their system right because if you're some you know random developer and you're just using linux

and you're developing software and you're not watching youtube videos you just you know it's you use linux because that's the thing you use on your computer. You probably don't care about your desktop environment as much. Like, I've spoken to some game devs who, like, do all their stuff in Godot. And as long as they have Godot, the rest of the system literally does not matter. And, yeah, so maybe a YouTube audience does skew that a bit. But, yeah, I really want to experience what kde was like and i i've generally enjoyed it i i don't it's not the workflow i'm gonna stick with

absolutely not i i really like my tiling but i i get it right like I get why people like KDE. It has a lot of customization. I think maybe customization to a fault. And the devs, in a way, do agree with that. And with 6, they've removed some of the options that existed for the sake of having options. Like things where, yeah yeah you can customize it but you probably shouldn't so they sort of collapse those down into a like this is just how it works now but what is your your general thoughts on on sixpin i know you had experience with um kde5 as well so i didn't. What's like the change?

How much of a change was it like for you? So the switch from 5 to 6 wasn't as big as I thought it would be. Even though I was complaining a bit on the settings. And I'm not sure if it's just me, but I think they are worse than before. Okay. The categories have gotten better, but like the whole how it's ordered, it's a bit weird.

Despite that, I didn't really encounter any issues. I did have some issues on 5, but that was a long time ago. Whereas if you had a second monitor, it's vertical. They had a vertical. Yeah, I have a vertical monitor in like it's vertical uh they had a vertical yeah and yeah if you used wayland or xorg for some reason what it did was it basically expanded my horizontal monitor out of view so that it matched the height of my vertical one which was kind of weird because essentially you just had one big screen with parts of it outside which made maximizing windows kind of weird because essentially you just had one big screen with parts of it outside which made maximizing windows kind of weird i'm not sure if that was a one-time thing or not

but it it happened at a time i don't know why what could have caused this but that was the only thing i really encountered other than that i think thatDE Plasma does show almost too much in terms of settings because a lot of stuff is not really in place. One example of this would be tearing support for gaming. The option is there, but if you don't know that you have to enable it via a variable because the atomic mode setting, I think it's called. Oh, you need to enable a variable for it? What?

Yeah. I think it's in the official merge request still of the tearing thing. KMS atomic or something. How to enable tearing. Wait, how to enable tearing slash disable v sync on KD Wayland. Hold up. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, you've got to include KWin DRM no AMS equals one in your Etsy environment.

I see. And that was part of the reason because for one, the kernel didn't support it yet. Like 6.8 does, but before it didn't. And now it also needs a merge request for 6.1, I think, which fixes some stuff. So that setting is there, but it doesn't do anything. Right, and a lot of distros aren't... I guess Fedora probably has 6.8, but there probably is a distro... Well, yeah, this person three months ago.

there probably is a distro well yeah this person three months ago at the time there were distros that weren't shipping 6.8 that had Plasma 6 so yeah I think we can chalk that up to the environment that a lot of devs are testing

KDE in they're testing it in things like like Neon and they're testing testing on things like fedora where you know it's it's not stretching the range of how things are being tested i think this is a a big problem what we're going to see with um kubuntu uh because kubuntu is going to be shipping 5.27 but they're going to be in i think plasma 6 is going to be shipping 5.27, but they're going to be in- I think Plasma 6 is going to be in Universe, if I'm not mistaken. Someone is going to correct me on that if I am. But, I think that things like this, I get how they get missed.

Things like this, I get how they get missed, but when they're discovered, I do think that something should be added into Plasma, whether it be like, hey, a little tooltip or a pop-up that's like, hey, stupid, enable the thing. But, I don't know, it's one of those things where you can chalk it up to the distro, and I've spoken to devs before about this, and they're not really sure where they should say the distro is at fault and where they should implement changes on their side that sort of alleviate issues with the distro. It's a tough problem to deal with. I honestly don't envy that position.

I do not want to be in it for sure. I don't envy that position i do not want it to be in it for sure um i don't know it it it's i that's stupid that you used your naval variable for it but i i get why it was like that yeah a lot of people have have problems uh like like where's the desktop environment default and where is the distribution responsible? I think especially experimental features, like GNOME, for example, and fractional scaling. A distro could enable it by default. So the GNOME team doesn't really or might not feel responsible for fixing it right away because it could be enabled by distribution. It's, where does it end? I think, maybe you can make the argument that if it's compiled, like you can hide these options behind a compile flag.

Like, that's a fairly easy thing to do. So, instead of it being an experimental feature you enable, it's an experimental feature the distro has to explicitly compile in. But I guess if it is behind an experimental feature toggle, it's still effectively in a similar state. And if users are enabling themselves and users want to report features on i think that's great but this was a similar issue that the obs snap had this is a random tangent it seems like a random tangent but it's gonna make sense so the obs snap it ships like 20 different plugins but because it's

being shipped in the snap and there's not like additional things you download if you don't know about the like what is and is not a plugin you're gonna see all these additional things that look like they are core features that should be expected to work but you might try out one of these plugins it turns out it doesn't work under like weird conditions and you go to report it to the developer and they're like hey not our problem this is a plugin and it's similar in this way where it's like this is an experimental feature why is your distro enabling this? Like, we know it doesn't work, that's why it's not enabled. Like, again, I do not want to be in that position myself. Especially when you are at the size of GNOME and there's going to be a lot of people that, when a distro releases with a new update that enables that, there's going to be a lot of people all at

once that will flood you with the exact same problem. Yeah. Yeah. I guess those big desktop environments have really gotten to a point where you really need some sort of management behind them. Yeah. Which automatically comes with a sort of corporate sense because then you have rules and all that.

It's interesting to watch. Right. But if you're someone who has to make those decisions, yeah, you are probably going to meet people that don't like it. Yeah, for the better or the worst. There are some things that are good. There are some things that are bad.

Yeah. So when looking at GNnome and KDE, how do you feel about the idea of Gnome is this environment where it's a lot more curated of an experience. Obviously they do expose some settings, but the idea is there is the Gnome way of using your system. Whereas KDE, it does expose a lot more settings

and you can really do some crazy things with it if you were recommending this to someone who they had experience like maybe with a linux server like they understood all the general surrounding stuff with linux they don't need to learn the terminal. But if you were recommending an environment to someone, which direction would you go? Generally speaking, I would probably go for GNOME for most, simply because it's not too overwhelming. I often like to compare this with Windows. You have the control panel, the old one, which is good. Then you have the new settings, which are objectively worse.

But I know a lot of people who like the new settings more because they cannot find stuff in the control panel anymore. And I like to compare it with this so the gnomes or the try to be some minimalistics very simple don't expose too much i think that the average person will have a much better time navigating through that even despite the old overall ux then in kd plasma because if they need to change something, then finding that setting is a bit more tedious, but it's also not all that bad. Yeah, I felt a fairly similar way with the control panel. I, you know, grew up using Windows. I've been using it. I think my first

system, like we got a computer fairly late. I think my first home computer was Vista. Yeah, I'd used earlier. Like my school had earlier than that. But my first home computer was Vista. And I obviously got used to finding things in the control panel. And, you know, I knew where everything was, every little setting that I wanted to get to. And it's very much the same with like kde users where if you've been using kde for 10 years you have a actually kd5 for 10 years

considering how long that one was around for you have a very good understanding of where everything is but there is something to be said about that fairly simplified approach where it yes it doesn't give you as much power but it does give you easy access to the things that you're going to want to find like everybody is going to want to do their monitor settings or mouse settings or things like this and instead of it being like you know in the kde system settings there's you know things like this and instead of it being like you know in the KDE system settings there's you know things like the the K win scripts and there's an option for what is it X 11 legacy app support is an option there it's its own separate screen so it adds to the whole list of settings that are in there and

and that's great like it makes it easy to configure stuff or makes it uh i guess accessible to configure stuff but i it's not for me but i get why someone would be more attracted to the simple way of doing it there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever there are two very different approaches to do it and i think depending on what you're trying to get from your system, they're both completely valid ways of designing a desktop. Yeah. I'm trying to think about this. There's... I'm trying to think about this. KDPlasmic Gnome have two very different approaches in this.

It's really interesting because there is not really a right way to do it. Because if there was a right way, then we wouldn't have different directions. Sure. I guess it depends on just what the average person really wants and expects from the systems there are many who customize even windows to it to a certain extent which is interesting because you can do it with external tools and whatnot or even with internal tools with the power toys or what it's called well even just like a a system like auto hotkey there is there are people that have these wild auto hotkey scripts

to automate massive parts of their system and that's not something you generally associate with windows but if you if you dig into that more power user approach like there is tooling there obviously there are things that are locked down like you're not getting rid of that desktop the desktop that is windows can be modified to an extent but you're not fundamentally changing dwm.exe to anything else it's gonna be that and there are other core parts of the system that can't be touched either but I'm always surprised by what can be done on Windows if you are willing to just dive

deep into whatever that system has going on and this is like something that I really like on KDPlasma because you have most of the stuff there, you just need to find it, whereas on GNOME you basically have to first enable it, if it's there. If it's not there, then yeah, good luck. So Azure

Studio, technically you can compile some stuff or you just do it with some different settings. They are usually there in some config file in kernel or whatever file. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on running plugins with your desktops? Do you actually use any plugins? Do you use these desktops in a fairly vanilla way? What's your general approach? I usually keep them as minimalistic as possible.

But the reason for that is not necessarily because I don't want to use plugins, but because of the YouTube videos. I like to, I like for people to see something that looks as close as possible to the native experience so that they don't install it and it looks completely different and they're like, but how did you do this this how you did that and that that's sort of the reason currently on kd plasma i basically just have one theme installed uh that changes the colors and that's it like i don't use any kwin scripts i don't use any icon themes it's basically a bare bones experience which is what i like to show others even though there are things that i would like to improve very much

what about the um i'm assuming the same can be said for the gnome side then what about like so besides like the plugins that are just pre-installed, if you did something on Ubuntu, for example, you would just... If you did an Ubuntu video, obviously you would have the big list of Ubuntu plugins you have installed, but the focus there wouldn't be GNOME in a sense.

It would be more like what Ubuntu is doing with GNOME. Yeah, I think... Yeah, exactly. I mean, Ubuntu is technically already just GNOME. Yeah, I think, yeah, exactly. I mean, Ubuntu is technically already just GNOME with a lot of custom plugins. And for me, it's like its own thing. Like GNOME and Ubuntu is not really GNOME for me in the sense that I would like to experience it, even though it's a bit similar so what i usually do for a native default install is just throw some aesthetics in there you know like blur the shell

and add tray icons and for the most part that's already it some people like of course having a taskbar a dock or whatever that's pure personal preference and i wish that that was actually an integrated way because i don't see why they couldn't hide it or even if they want to keep their clean desktop um it's essentially a bare bones experience and i like keeping it that way like on ubuntu i don't really think people have to modify much there because I think you can change the way how the sidebar or whatever it's called is displayed yeah it's almost uh I I don't I don't like calling it a modified or better version because it's essentially just a different experience, a different approach.

Yeah, it's in a sense similar to what Pop OS was doing with GNOME, where yes, GNOME is there at its core, but they even called it something different. They called it Cosmic, and now they're working on their actual

Cosmic environment, which is very much inspired by what they were previously doing even they didn't read like yes that it's core and you could install additional gnome plugins but that's not what they were intending for that experience yeah so what is your general go-to distro then if you're using a fairly clean desktop? It depends on if there are any new releases. So generally speaking, if a new desktop environment or something releases,

then I typically have Fedora installed. Otherwise, I usually am on Debian. Last time it wasn't Debian stable because it wasn't that old currently i would go to a testing branch as soon as six or or 46 releases how old is the latest debian released right now how old how late are we in the cycle uh okay so 12. when did 12 come out i think think it was June or May or something. It's not that old. Yeah, that sounds right. Debian 12 release date... June 2023. So not old in Debian terms, but still a little old.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it was GNOME 43 or something. No, it wasn't 44. It was GNOME 43, definitely, which had some problems, especially file picker icons and stuff like that. But the KDPlasma was. I always forget that one took so long to get fixed that is insane i think it was like but yeah katy plasma was recent i think it was like 10 years or some it was some ridiculous amount of time i i love finding these issues that like people have

it's not like it's an unreported issue for 10 years it'll be you know there's in some cases even an open merge request where at the time there was working code for it but nobody wanted to merge it and then it just sat there and over the years no one else wanted to touch it and it's it's always funny to go back and read through those logs because the problems that people are talking about back then whilst these specifics like the specific tech they're using might change like i i read about an issue with um the way virtual desktops work on kde this issue has been open since the KDE 3 days. So people were talking about using KDE 3 and GNOME 20 or 15 or whatever it was at the time

some old version, I don't know what year it was. And even, well they were talking about internet speeds in the context of 2003 speeds, and even though you have that context there internet speeds in the context of 2003 speeds. And even though you have that context there, the specific way they're communicating about Linux and the problems they're having are exactly the same as what we're seeing today. My favorite one in this regard is

if you go back and read the mailing list from the early 90s with people arguing about whether it's called Linux or GNU Linux. Literally nothing has changed. People are saying the exact same arguments for the past 30 years. It's always fun to just know

that you're not that different from the people that came before you. Correcting others online, that's always a fun strategy. It's always a very productive use of your time. Why? I don't really know. I mean, there are some things

that are important that are being correctly said, but then there's others like everyone knows. You know, like, no one cares what it's written about. Is it gnome or gnome every time i say it i don't know what what changed because when i first started using linux everyone's corrected me when i was saying gnome and at some point there was a switch and now people are like why are you saying gnome it's it's a gnome

like yeah i i don't know if it's i don't know what to blame is it the steam deck causing people to try out linux is there's clearly a lot of people using linux now who don't have this historical context who are fairly new linux users who and that's fine right but it's very weird to see this change happen because I haven't been using Linux that long probably probably a little bit longer than

when I think I started the year before COVID. Whatever year... Like 2018 then, I guess? Something like that. It depends.

19 or... 18 is almost a bit early. 18, 19, something like that. It's only been like five, six years. But even then, there's been... There's just this very subtle change that's happened. And maybe if I wasn't doing the videos, it's not something I would notice as quickly. But having all of these comments there, you definitely get a sense of what people are talking about.

And I don't know, it's just a neat little idea that I was thinking of. It might also be just the algorithm that you're reaching different people with your videos now. Maybe. That's something that I discovered over the two years that I'm now on YouTube. So at first, there were like a lot of people that said KDE Plasma is better, KDE Plasma is better and all that stuff. And now it's kind of switching in the opposite side where a lot of people on the KDPlasma videos are actually saying like, no, GNOME is just better. Where it actually balances out. And it's really interesting that when you make a KDPlasma video,

a lot of GNOME users watch it and then you make a GNOME video and then a lot of KDPlasma users watch it. It's really, really interesting to see. And I don't think that the overall audience really changed in the past two years. Sure, there was growth, but not in the sense that I would probably notice it. Really interesting. So, yeah, I guess that's fair. I don't, maybe it's just a difference in audience, because whenever I do KDE videos, it is a lot of people who use KDE who,

maybe it's because of the way I initially approached it, a lot of people who use KDE who want to, who are looking for any slight mistake I make, and want to, like, jump any slight mistake I make and want to like jump on that I don't know it could very well just be a difference in audience there um and maybe if this thing with gnome people call it gnome or gnome maybe it's just a because the the channel is bigger there's a more wider audience so there's less of the people that are very hardcore into Linux and more of just like general Linux audience, because I

when I started my channel, I was doing some of my like big early videos were Vim plugin videos Vim plugin videos, configuring, tiling window managers and you know fairly, you know, you have to be obsessed with Linux to want to even talk about this. So the people who are watching it are kind of in that same camp.

Whereas now I do a lot more, I feel like I do a lot more videos that are more generally appealing to Linux space. So it, you know, is going to get a more general audience from it. And I'm sure you've probably seen that from like some of your videos because you've had some videos massively, okay, ignoring the OBS videos, some videos that massively popped off. Oh, I thought you were going to say something. Yeah, no, I'm thinking.

Okay. So I guess though the videos that mostly popped off are in a certain space sometimes. I think a lot of it was gaming relevant so you know that you're automatically getting gamers but not necessarily just from from linux even though that was the vast majority so the the overall topics which are much more towards certain applications or just talking videos, you usually get a lot less attention and a lot less technical people are commenting. On gaming, it's almost the exact opposite.

Like when I said Linux has good controller support, there are a lot of comments that just have controller support that have controller problems even though I can't replicate it and those people are not commenting on other videos which maybe even feature the same topic which is really interesting so it really shows that gaming videos even though they have the same content and they're tagged the same, are being shown to different audiences. Every time I think I understand how YouTube works, I upload a video and I'm like, this video is going to do well.

And then it doesn't. Yeah. Same, yeah. same yeah like i i feel like i have a a general enough idea down where for the most part things are gonna do well and the channel is doing well but i if if i was to say that i knew what i was doing and i knew which videos were gonna pop off that would be a lie That would be a giant lie. No, it's really hard to tell. But what sometimes happens is

when you make a truly technical video, which doesn't pop off at all. I think I made a virtualization video about once, Proxmox. That didn't really get much views at first but it grows steadily which other videos don't like other videos just drop to a basically zero discoverability state whereas the the proxmox video it stays up and it gains views over time which is also in really interesting way. And reading through some of the comments, which problems or what problems others have

is really interesting. And a lot of things are just different, it seems from from the experience, but it could also be just different versions of a product or something. I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, some of my early... I'm looking at my views right now. Some of my early videos that popped off, they were definitely ones where I jumped

onto a big topic at the time. I talked about when LTT recommended Atlas OS and they just completely ignored a lot of security stuff with it. I did a video on the... This is actually a fairly recent video on the Linux kernel GitHub. And if you go to the issue tracker, it is some of the... Because they don't check it.

It just has insane issues there that don't make any sense. But my first video over 100k was a video on how to do multi-monitors on X11. It hit like 120,000. It wasn't a good video. It was rambly as hell. It didn't do well when I first uploaded it. But it's one of those videos where let's see is it yeah even today it's still getting a couple hundred views and jesus the average watch duration

is two minutes on yeah that was not a good video that was not a good video. But I'm looking at the graph, and within the first 100 days, it got 800 views. But now it's at 120,000. It's one of those videos where, even though initially it didn't do well, it definitely, definitely... when it's a tutorial it's going to if people are looking for it pick up views over the years yeah assuming you don't have like massive competition in that space like if you want

to make a a video on i don't know some video game that's popular that might be different but when it's something like linux where there is a there's a big audience but there's not that many people making videos on linux yeah definitely i think that linux content lin Linux content in general has a very big potential to actually grow. Because you can try to make some product review or something. No one's going to watch that because you're not really an established brand, not really a trustworthy person because you don't have nothing to show for yourself. person because like you don't have nothing to show for yourself but on linux it's a bit different because everything is like done on the computer which is pretty much pretty easy to show pretty easy to replicate not everything but it's it's very similar in comparison and a surprisingly

big number of people are actually using Linux which I never really thought one example for this is like I used DaVinci Resolve for editing I thought I wasn't a minority here because it's a terrible program on Linux if you set it up on a distribution that is not meant for it yeah and a lot of people want or are using it, which is really interesting. I never thought that I would see them at all. Well, one of the things that always interests me with Linux is my audience is very much the open source, free software crowd. The people who are very interested in, like, the licenses around the software they're using.

But there are a lot of people out there, like the gaming audience, like people who use something like DaVinci, who just don't actually care about any of the, any of the, like, build-up stuff around Linux. Any of the, any of the, what do you call it? The, like, politics of licenses or anything like that, they're just here to use good software, and it's always interesting to see the differences between channels, because, as I said, mine's very much the free software crowd, but I'll

go to someone like, um, I guess even your channel, there'll be a lot more people, because you have done these videos on things like DaVinci lot more people because you have done these videos on things like DaVinci and various other people have done these videos where those people actually do exist as well. And it's easy to forget they do exist because I think the

open source crowd, the free software crowd are kind of the louder people in this space. Whereas the people who are just using software because it's software they want to use, they're too busy a lot of the time to be ranting about whether you want to have an MIT license or a copyleft style license. Yeah, there's definitely a distinction

in terms of people who are in the Linux community. So there is really, like you said, the open source enthusiasts, basically, which also in some way contribute to the ecosystem, they look those licenses, they maybe do some reviews if someone makes a mistake, this is a very important part, but on the other hand, you have all of the technical people who are just looking for something that works, that is stable. Linux is just a tool for them rather than an active environment. That is especially true in a business sense, I guess, whereas you have a server and you're

not using Linux because it's open source. You don't care what's actually happening in the background. You use Linux because it just works because it is stable. And those people do exist. And they certainly have a space in the Linux community as well. Because big companies obviously want to support their own products. And if a lot of people choose to use Linux because it works better in some way, then it's a good thing to gain those support, even though they don't necessarily like

to open source their stuff at first. But I think it's a growing matter, not something that happens just overnight. Yeah, that I think is definitely the key point. Really any change you want to make is going to be, it's going to be a slow, gradual change over time. People will talk about, and this comes up every time that there is a Windows end of support period. Guys, there's going to be so many people

that start using Linux. Or like when more ads get injected into Windows. Guys, this is the time. Linux, it's finally going to be the main thing on the desktop. And I get the enthusiasm, right? But it's not like that. It's going to be small increments every time and there are absolutely

people who stop using windows because of the tpm stuff that happened or when windows 7 left support or maybe 8 left support or add more ads being ejected into windows but it's not millions of people and that's fine right it's okay that you make these little dents at a time because if you look back at say i don't know the start of debian the people using linux back then were a very different crowd from what we see now. Back then, you realistically were going to be a programmer, or at least had some sort of Unix background if you were using Linux. Then at some point, Ubuntu came along, and more regular sort of computer users could actually use their system. And I've talked about this before.

If I couldn't play games on my system i would not be a linux user and i've had some people try to say that like steam and proton it hasn't been that big of a deal for linux and no it really has been like i don't have two computers and i don't want to do boo i i probably should set up a capture pc at some point. I know I should do that. But regardless, the fact that you can play games on the same system that you're using Linux on, you can game on your Linux system, for a lot of people, that was the last thing that pushed them over the edge. And then all of these little things that Windows does to make it so slightly worse pushes more people to at least maybe not swap but at least try it out and see what it's like and even though it's only a couple of people at a time

it's a couple of people at a time and over the years that adds up and eventually you have what we have now where you have this fairly healthy ecosystem it could certainly be better and there are certainly funding issues that exist and development issues and bog triaging issues but i think for the most part we're in a pretty good state yeah i think so too actually and it's a really interesting discussion on the the year of the linux desktop when it's finally going to happen i mean it will happen in some sense but it's not like uh linux will explode and everyone will just stop using windows right for me the whole thing is the year of the linux desktop will come as soon as you have sort of assortment. How would I say it? Let's just put it like you have 50% Windows PCs and 50% Linux PCs in a store.

At that point, I could say the Linux desktop is basically here simply because it's mainstream. And I think that's like the main thing is as soon as Linux becomes some sort of mainstream platform, it's the year of the Linux desktop. And in some way, we are already at the start of it because of the Steam Deck and people are using Linux even though they don't necessarily even know about it. And I'm not talking about embedded systems, all that stuff. Or like Chrome OS or Android. I guess you'd count those differently.

Yeah. Those two are also a different thing. Like Chrome OS is almost a Linux distribution in the sense that we would talk about the Linux distribution. Android is a bit more in the tough spot because there's so much in it that's different. So then there's the whole argument on GNU slash Linux and

all the other things. But I agree. Did my Steam start downloading something? No? Your camera just dropped in quality. I don't know whose side that's on. It's fine. I can still hear you fine it's just you okay you're now like three pixels oh yeah what the hell 180p that's fine it's fine

um yeah no i i i pretty much agree um i don't know i i yeah i don't i yeah I think you summed that up pretty well I don't think there's really anything else to add to that actually one thing is with Chrome OS Chrome OS is a very weird one and you did say it was like almost a Linux distro because you can run Linux software on it

but that's not like the main intention and it's changing now like traditionally with chromo systems they shipped with very very minimal storage now you are seeing you know actual ssds going into them and they can store local files previously you know you're getting 32 gigabyte storage on the stick like there basically were phones at that point with the level of storage they had but even though it may not be the main intention i do think i do think there is an argument to be made that linux had become

mainstream in a sense because of chrome os in the same way that you can argue that Unix is mainstream because of Mac OS. Even though the way that most people interact with it is very different, at its core, you can still interact with it as if it is a Linux system or a Unix system in the context of Mac OS. Yeah. as if it is a Linux system or a Unix system in the context of macOS. Yeah, I agree essentially.

So the thing about macOS in particular is it's a Unix system. Yeah, sure. At its core, quite literally. But people are just not using a Unix system as in the sense that some would think of it. And I guess that Linux will at some point also go into that direction

just that it is more open source in general and not being locked down. So you add up a lot of features. A lot of people complain about some stuff that it gets bloated and all that uh but at its core you don't have to use it in the way that it's being developed you can always rip out parts you can always build your own experience i i think that linux general is just a a better way how a future

operating system might look like because you have the modularity if you want it but at the same time you also have the way how the devs intended or the big teams and I find that pretty exciting

I think the only thing really holding it back from that is there is out really outside of gnome you do have you have a lot of developers designing things and that's not to take anything away from kde kde's gotten a lot better in this regard if you go back and look at 3 and 4, very much was developers clearly designing things. But I think right now, GNOME is one of the very few UI polished experiences. And I feel kind of a similar way with Cosmic as I do with KDE. Have you seen much of what is happening on the Cosmic side?

I haven't looked into it except some screenshots. I think the beta is coming out soon. Alpha, I believe, is what they're calling it. Alpha, yeah. So I know how it's going to look like a bit. And they're doing a pretty good job but i think that people are in general having too they have too much expectation of cosmic because if you want uh let's call it a unique design choice that spans across the entire desktop environment

then you have problems developing it and then you are essentially into into gnome policy stuff whereas like you want to implement it but you cannot because like it's not in the in the framework itself yet or you're not allowed to use it in that way yeah let's see how it plays out allowed to use it in that way yeah let's see how that plays out yeah i'm personally excited for it solely because it is a desktop environment that supports tiling like that's my main reason for it and i know like the devs want to they built pop shell they want to build a proper tiling desktop environment experience alongside a floating experience because they know they have the metrics on it that most people are not using the tiling but a lot of people do and especially a lot of developers do like that experience so i'm

very curious to see what a desktop environment that has a strong tiling and floating system is actually capable of doing what i'm curious about is how much they're going to go down the gnome or the kde side with when it comes to exposing settings because it looks a lot like gnome it's pretty clear that that's a lot of their inspiration it this is what i was getting at before where i do feel like a lot of the design concepts they have are kind of discount gnome it it it's an alpha right like things can improve and early katie and early gnome were not great looking and i'm sure as we see version 2 version 3 a lot of those issues will be ironed out like that let's understand but they want to get something out there and then go from there but I'm curious to see how much they go down this route

and what they can learn from the desktops before them because this is because you can build something completely in a vacuum and that's that's cool and all but i think if you can take what the other environments have done and what you like about them what you don't like about them and then make sure you don't replicate those bad behaviors i think it can get up to speed a lot quicker than a lot of people might expect. I know initially people were talking about Cosmic and we're very wary of it. Like, oh, and it's a new desktop environment. How's it going to be anywhere near as good as what we already have? But they're not starting from zero in a sense.

Like maybe they're starting from zero code, but they're not starting from zero experience with the linux like with the linux desktop yeah so i think the the whole thing about the cosmic development currently is that their baseline is essentially what they had before and all the additions that maybe gnome has added up until now and then of course you have kd plasma there which also had a lot of changes and they are probably going to integrate a lot of these things very quickly and in the end i think what cosmic is going to be is you have like uh you certainly see the gnome experience in some way still,

especially like margins and all that stuff and how the menus look in general. But I think you are exposed to much more settings that are tended to please everyone. That includes like refresh rate support, fractional scaling. Then of course you have maybe setting your, on some laptops, the mouse pad, on some laptops you need

to set it to area or that you only can scroll at the side or something. I think like those things will be integrated into the desktop environment itself. So it's basically known as the baseline. Then you have extensions from KDPlasma and maybe their own additions, which certainly will have an influence on their own desktop PCs or maybe the other way around.

The desktops they build, whatever is in there will be also available in cosmic and i think that's something that other desktop environments cannot achieve that easily because they just don't know what's what hardware the user is going to have so i presume at this point you're using whaling completely yes or are you using x11 currently yes yeah uh yes which yes wayland yes x11 uh wayland um so what is when did you swap and what has been like your general experience and what do you feel like still needs to be addressed for your personal use case or do you think everything for what you're doing is just basically fine there are some things where i'm not entirely sure who's at fault like if it's the protocol or if it's the compositor uh generally speaking it's mostly it's it's not most it's it's more of the stuff that I don't use regularly,

you know, like something like screencasting, but it's more on the application side rather than Wayland. Right. It has come along a long way. I think I'm on Wayland exclusively for a year now. Okay. So quite a long way i think i'm on wayland exclusively for a year now okay so quite a long time and during this time the main things were that they dropped the whole the whole forest v-sync thing and all that which made the desktop feel smooth but rather slow using your mouse and stuff stuff like it just felt a bit off and because I have two monitors which are both 144 hertz but not quite and I have seen some weird issues where it kind of feels weird when you when you

try to sync them but it has gotten a lot better and I think wayland is almost up to par to x in terms of my overall how i experience my desktops i haven't seen any more crashes or stuff like that but it's more the minor things like i'm screen cars screen casting and drag and drop doesn't work for some reason in kt plasma in browsers i'm not sure if that's a KWin issue, Wayland issue currently or something. I have noticed things... I've noticed it work,

but also I've noticed it just not. It seems very hit and miss for me. Like, I'll drag a file over, it does nothing. I'll drag a file over, it does nothing. Then I drag a file over and it works this time. And i don't know i i don't know if that's like what the deal is there whether it's because i think the the browser i'm running is also a wayland browser as well so maybe i don't know there's definitely some weirdness when it comes to

dealing with both x11 and wayland stuff running at the same time I've noticed especially when you're dragging files, I think from X Wayland apps into a Wayland app, things might act weirdly, maybe it's the other way around Wayland into X Wayland I don't know

it's one of those teething issues that is not broken per se. It's just not as smooth as you would like it. Yeah, it's not perfect yet. I think that's a good way to put a lot of what we have with Weyland. It's not broken for most things. There are definitely broken things

out there, like I think screen readers on GNOME don't work properly. On KDE, they have a workaround for it, and if you need a screen reader, you simply need a screen reader. But most things

are just, it's kind of a little weird. And you can get used to it. But I do think we're still a good couple of years away from it being completely up to X11. There are certain things, I'll have people talk to me about network transparency. Okay, that's great. But how many people if you're if you're using remote desktops you're using vnc now you're not you're not doing x11

network transparency if you are you're a very very tiny group of people and that's great that you need that feature but it's not something that most people are going to be bothered by like most people are going to be bothered by the like having apps like obs have their hotkeys work properly obviously obs is a very special app but the same problem exists with screen readers for those people or um there's a lot of people that like nightlight apps for example and for a long time uh genomic ad didn't have wayland nightlight apps now they do and it's more of those problems that i think uh as more people try out wayland it's not the things some people think we're not making progress it's just as more people try out wayland more of these issues are being noticed no No one initially thought that

screen tearing, for example, was a feature that anybody would want. Wayland's about perfect frames, and it took three years to convince the developers that this is a feature that people actually want. If you go read the thread, the first comment on the thread about

this is a really funny one, the first comment on the thread about, this is a really funny one, the first one, the first comment on the thread about, uh, screen tearing, the guy who first complains, like, no one ever wants this, is the guy who ended up merging the merge three years later.

So, it took him a while to be, like, convinced about it, but, like, that's the problem. We, we can't ignore these problems that exist on Wayland even though there's not as many as there's not as many key ones

that there was before getting involved in those discussions and actually trying to resolve them I think at bare minimum that's what I think need a lot of people need to do and I I know some people just don't want to get involved in repos, and that's fine. But at some point, these problems, someone needs to actually bring them up if you think it's actually a problem. Yeah, I think that one of the problems that Wayland

and also GNOME suffer from is some sort of... They want to do things properly and secure. Yes, yes. Which is something that slows development down a lot and they don't want to implement more than it needs to have. And on the other hand, I mean, some things are really justified. You know, like why do we work with X portals or is it X portals or with portals in general on Wayland? And why

do we need to use pipe wire to screencast and stuff like that? Those are valid things, but it just slows down development and stuff needs to be implemented later. People need to be convinced. It just takes a long time and we are in a transition from x to wayland a lot of stuff just doesn't work yet a lot of stuff just isn't implemented yet and many developers need to rewrite their apps as a whole in some cases if they truly want to have a wayland native experience a Wayland native experience. Yeah, it's a lot of work in progress. But once Wayland offers basically most things and we have transitioned to Wayland in terms of application support, I think the experience will be much better then.

I do think some of the arguments are kind of ridiculous though. I do think some of the arguments are kind of ridiculous, though. My favorite thread, I've brought this up so many times, is the thread about window icons. It's like 400 comments long about how to implement window icons. It's really dumb. And they're getting somewhere um but i think wayland is the textbook definition of design by committee and having too many cooks in the kitchen like because you know it's there's

no bdfl in wayland it's you have gnome, KDE, Cosmic, Western, W Root, all have equal voting rights on whether something gets implemented. And that's fine when everybody agrees on the rare occasions when they do.

But there are a lot of cases where Gnome especially doesn't want to do something or they have they have their way they want to implement it and things get like things get stalled because of it. It's not always Gnome

sometimes KDE has problems as well sometimes Western has problems but when you don't have a project leader this is what you get this is why design by committee is always discussed as this like really dangerous idea of like how to run a project because it's going to take a long time to get things done and that might be fine right like we aren't done and that might be fine right like we aren't the the clock has been set for wayland but if everybody had to swap to wayland tomorrow besides the accessibility stuff which is a legitimate

issue and those people actually couldn't use their computer besides that most people would be fine maybe they wouldn't be happy they. Maybe they wouldn't be happy. They wouldn't be happy. It depends, I guess. Most things that people are using work just fine, I would say. On the desktop, I would agree. I think we would start to see a lot of problems. I mean, a lot of people are coming from a technical perspective

and are often working with Linux on servers as well. I think that turning off X would be a huge problem for those people in particular, because I know that a lot of applications rely on X to work and also some some stuff like RDP applications. You still use X and only work on X. If that's implemented in some weird custom way, like the application is built for the protocol and the

solution, then we are running into certain issues. I know that some stuff doesn't work. For the desktop, I would agree, but there are a lot of stallers on the server side as well. We use some desktop experiences I would agree, but there are a lot of stallers on the server side as well, which use some desktop experiences

there as well, some app streaming and stuff like that. That's fair. I don't think it should be done, right? You know, it's got, like, the timeline we have set right now, the deadline we have set

basically is the death of Roll7. Because when Roll7's got, like, the timeline we have set right now, the deadline we have set, basically is the death of Roll7. Because when Roll7's dead, that means Red Hat is going to stop maintaining Exorg completely, because they have no reason to keep maintaining it. And that means, basically, nobody's maintaining Exorg. And it'll be fine for a bit, I guess. Do you have, like, a thing you've been refilling there? Because I've noticed you drinking that.

Yeah, no, do you have, like, a... I got a whole thing. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Cool, I thought I was going insane. Because I kept seeing you drink and I didn't see the level go down. Okay, that makes sense now. But, um, where was I going with that before I got sidetracked by MagicalT

oh right Roll7 we have a deadline set they actually did extend the deadline for Roll7 by another 4 years I think it's like 2036 or something now so it's a bit more time. But I hope by then,

I hope it's not going to be one of these issues where people don't start taking it seriously until we're very close to the deadline. Because I know there's been a lot of projects, especially as of late, who are like yeah well we're just going to drop Weyland support and just not even

think about it we're just going to go full ex-Weyland and it's going to work fine like there's no plans to drop ex-Weyland for the foreseeable future but I don't know if relying on that until the end of time is a good idea because there probably will come a time

where there is discussion to drop X-Wayland. Yeah, definitely. And part of the reason is, of course, because people are going to rely on X-Wayland for stuff to work. Especially gaming, currently. That one

is being worked on. Yeah, luckily. The Wine devs, they have, I guess you would call it like rudimentary Wayland support. It's like a 30-part patch set series. There is so much work to go into doing this, but... I find this pretty noble. But on the other hand, I guess a lot of people are developing apps because or they don't care to use x because there is x wayland and it will be there for the

near foreseeable future so why bother with wayland and learning all how you need to talk to each protocol individually when you just could use X essentially and it will work anyway. Luckily, toolkits do alleviate a lot of that problem. Like if you're using QT, you don't really need to think about it being Wayland for the most part because it does abstract a lot of that out for you.

But if you're using some of the more simple toolkits, sometimes it's not as kind towards you. Acuity is pretty good, actually, I think. I haven't used it in a while. I learned

it back when I was first learning C++, but I never stuck with it. I probably should go back to it and mess around with it properly at some point. Because I keep hearing that GTK is not pleasant to write code for.

So maybe I probably avoid that one. Maybe. I think it depends. When you just write a simple application like a simple user UI, it's actually pretty simple. I'm not sure what the programming language was. I think it's the most common ones. I think you can write in Python and all that stuff. It's not

really that hard. You don't necessarily need to use C or C++. On the other hand, you can go... when you go a bit deeper, then you definitely need to learn it in some way. Yeah, for sure. I know that, you know, people doing stuff with Vala... I know there's that. I am not big on the gtk development i just hear stuff from uh from the outside about what people have said about it um i've never really been big on the desktop app development when i do a lot of development most of my stuff is like website stuff and obviously like system scripts and things like that i i've never really done a proper deep dive into doing like desktop level applications uh i should it's on my very long list of things that i should get around to learning the infinitely long list of things

especially if you uh want to keep up with anything that's actually uh anything that's actually going on do you know you especially like web development right i don't do you have any experience with like web stuff yeah okay uh yeah because the the point i was gonna i was gonna make there is like i learned like i've done some react work in the past, and that was fine at the time. Apparently now everyone hates React, and I don't know what people are using now. If you actually want to keep up with what's happening on the web, things move so quickly,

but then you realize it's... Things move quickly amongst the people who care about talking about it but then you go get a job and you realize they're still using jquery from 10 years ago like they haven't even updated they're just still using a 10 year old version of jquery and it's it's easy to get caught up in learning the newest coolest thing and like lose track of focusing on the core concepts but i think focusing more on the ideas that you want to learn rather than the specific tech is going to get you a lot further yeah definitely like always chasing the newest and recent stuff

is generally not a really good practice because I mean, I'm, I'm pretty comfortable here on Fedora, but there are distros that are even more bleeding edge than arch. Arch is really bleeding edge. It's just, yeah, it's, it's rolling, but it's not. Yeah. Bleeding edge as, as many, yeah. Perceive it to be. There are many distros that are actually like there's a release. It's

basically version 1.2.0 whatever. And next day it's up there in some repo because someone recompiled it already. And it's not really a good practice to chase that experience because stuff will break. But on the

other hand, it's a really good idea to inform yourself stuff will break but on the other hand it's a really good idea to inform yourself about what's happening on the web because then you run into some issues whereas like you said some company has very old tools which they at some point so rely on that if there is some security issue then they just can't patch it that easily because it's like so deeply integrated into the system yeah it's a good idea to update from time to time and like not really chased in u.s but like finally find a good middle ground right right you don't need to be running a 40 year old uh cobalt mainframe yeah if you want the most stable possible job simply because there are no

there's so few people that know it become an expert level COBOL or FORTRAN developer because there's so few people competing for those jobs and a lot of those people are close to retirement it's going to be hard

to get one of those jobs but the second you get it they will never get rid of you because nobody else knows how to touch that arcane code and they're not gonna find some like junior dev they can train up for nobody's going to want to learn it so it's just

gonna be you never let them convince you though that it's a good idea to update the system into something like c-sharp because the second that you rewrite it into something sensible they don't need you anymore because now they can hire someone who's not a developer exactly i hate i hate the old stuff it's it insane. Like updating a system. It doesn't matter if it's Windows or Linux. Updating an old system and do major version jumps over years. That's actually insane. I know of a server, which I tried migrating a bunch of times it's a windows server 2008 which is fairly old at this point and like if you just

can't update it you cannot make a new server and put the program on it because the program depends on it on a lot of stuff that needs to be carried over i think it's licensing stuff and and all that because there is no licensing server anymore and all that. Right. So you need to do an in-place upgrade, but the in-place upgrade doesn't work because of dependencies and it's... Yeah. No. It's stupid.

Well, especially with these really old systems where you don't have redundancy built in place, there's always the worry of it, especially if you have a system that hasn't been shut down a long time, like, is it going to turn back on? I've definitely heard horror stories of there was a server that,

that people were running in this company. No one, no one really knew like why it was running or what who set it up, but they realized very quickly as soon as it caused a problem that they didn't

have a redundancy solution in place 10 years ago, and it turns out that was like a core part of their system that just it's gone now, good luck years ago and it turns out that was like a core part of their system that just it's gone now good luck yeah that's that's a good practice oh look I'm really bad with like redundancy on my system but like if you have something in production whether it's like it doesn't matter what it is, you probably should have at least some basic redundancy.

Some, like, bare minimum, like, data backups. Preferably recent data backups as well. It's all well and good to have a data backup, but if you haven't updated it in five years, it's not that useful a backup.

Backups are so incredibly important. Like, it doesn't really matter for which system like of course for business or server side it's really important but on your home pc you don't really think about it much but then something breaks and you're like oh there were some important documents on there or maybe there were some pictures on it that you would like to have i've lost a bunch of sd cards of all the sd cards with a lot of memories or the sd cards break which also happens i've had servers crashes i had windows system of mine completely hard reset i have no idea what happened there after an update it just never came back

and there was no way of getting the data off the drive just completely and like stuff like that makes you realize you you need backups yeah it's it's it's incredibly important and i it happened so many times already i think it seven times already that my pc corrupted in some way or some pc corrupted well the last i i still don't have great backups and i really should because i this has bitten me like recently where i to be fair it was my fault um i had this issue where every so often i booted my system I would get a systemd error message and it would be like something something couldn't mount your home and I would need to like run a command it would fix it and that was fine it was fine for like six months then at one point I opened it and a bunch of random

files were just missing I think I lost maybe I think I lost two podcasts so I lost like four hours of recordings I lost maybe like three videos that I I hadn't uploaded yet and a bunch of other random things don't do that do as I say not as I do have data backups. I I'm bad at it. Do not be like me Even if it's not a NAS like just have something have a have a second drive that you mirror directly to it doesn't have To be a complicated setup Hmm and getting it like a another drive isn't really that expensive now like you Drives are pretty cheap And getting it like another drive isn't really that expensive now.

Drives are pretty cheap. Yeah. I think a lot of people also don't use their second, or a lot of main ports have a second M.2 slot. A lot of people just don't use it. I mean, if you put in a very cheap one, and even a hardware RAID, which basically every modern main port supports, like you just mirror that stuff,

and it will automatically tell you when you put up a PC that OneDrive is broken and you can exchange it, but you can still use your PC. Even though mirroring is technically no backup, but that's a whole other issue. Yeah, like people, I guess, I get people say, oh, well, you shouldn't have a mirror in your system, you should have a, you should have that in, like, an external machine, like, what's the general guidance?

It's a local, it's like a local copy, a cloud copy, and there's something else, like, there's a general guideline people have for like a proper data backup because you know if you're if you break your machine you might even if you have like a a secondary drive you might break the other drive as well so you should have a another drive and another machine and then you should have an off-site copy as well yeah or at least some some external media that doesn't rely on some form of electricity battery or whatever. Yeah, yeah. That's like the overall suggestion. And I mean, it's kind of true. Because like, if for some reason, let's just say your house or whatever is with a lighting strike, and for some reason it manages to fry your PC.

If you had a mirror setup, or you had a second hard drive in it and both are gone, then yeah, it's not all that great. On the other hand, if you have a USB stick, which you also backup once a month or something, or an external hard drive, that is safe as long as it's not connected to the system. It's a good practice, but I also don't really do it. So it should be something to think about. Well, then there's the whole idea of having something offsite as well, whether that's like cloud storage or whatever it is. Because, you know, if your house floods,

you could lose both the mirror and also the USB. That would be... Yeah, that depends. I guess it depends on, like, the environment you're in. Like, you know, in somewhere like Australia, like, in South Australia, we don't really have any natural disasters here. Like, when there's a... The last time there was an earthquake,

they had, like, a big news story about it and an earthquake in south australia is somebody's window cracks that's pretty much it like it'll maybe like a brick will slightly move out of place we don't really get earthquakes here we don't the worst we get here are bushfires um and they can get pretty bad but in like where i am like it's besides like a you know a house fire which is gonna happen anywhere like you don't really get general natural disasters here like it's pretty it's pretty safe where i am if i was was in Queensland, they get hurricanes up there, they get floods up there. We don't really get earthquakes here, though,

because fault lines and all that. But if you are somewhere that gets earthquakes, yeah, I guess maybe offsite backup is probably a better idea as well. Yeah. But do something. Do something.

Something is better than nothing. Yeah, at least one copy is always good. Doesn't really matter how old it is. It should have some sort of content on it. Like I usually keep one backup around, which like my pc is pretty simple i actually don't save anything on my pc basically except maybe some some recent downloads some some

iso files or something and i do have a picture folder or directory uh so all that basic stuff which i copy once over and if i do some changes, then I copy them once a month or whatever to another system. But I actually don't really do that. So I essentially have one backup that's over a year old, which

is exactly the system in the way it was before when it comes in terms of files and important stuff right right i guess it depends on like how much you're adding files depending on what you want to do right like a lot of things you have if it's like you know tax documents from however long your country requires you to have um history, or anything else like that. A lot of things you have,

they don't need to be up-to-date copies because it's not something that is changing. But if it is something like, I don't know, video stuff, for example, like a video that you're working on, then you might change how you want to handle that data backup. Whether you want to do like a... Especially with something like a video,

right? Like maybe a, a mirror is fine for that because the life, like the life cycle of that video is going to be a lot less than something like memories you want to keep. You might, I don't know how often you upload, but like if you record something,

if you record something like a video, yeah, you can argue like, you know, know you want to you want to keep things around like you could have like a petabyte server like ltt has but most people when they're doing videos are not keeping their old content around um so it doesn't really need to live that long yeah i think it also depends on how serious you are in the backups if you have any requirements in terms of leading requirements. Like I'm not sure if that's actually true or not because like a lot of stuff is written, but I technically would need to keep all of my videos, I think, for six months or something

just in case something happens. Some of the truth that applies to YouTube or not. It's a bit weird. But there are also some documents that I have digitally saved that I would have to keep for a long time. So I do need to keep backups just in case, even though most likely nothing would happen if there actually was a data loss. I mean, who's going to come to my house? Do you have that document? Yeah, sure. Whatever. No. No one's going to come to my house? Do you have that document? Yeah, sure. Whatever.

No. No one's going to come anyway. I don't know how we got to data backups. See, this is what I was saying before we started recording. Sometimes we get on a tangent and we talk about nothing for like 20 minutes. It's kind of weird. Yeah, but you know, it it's fine we could switch it up um well i guess we talk about a bit about your channel so when you first started you were doing

like more of the how would you describe it like the how to be a youtuber sort of videos like you're doing videos and like obs plugins on like you you literally had a video called why she's stream i why you should stream on youtube in 2022 yeah um what made you want to swap from doing that sort of stuff over to doing the linux stuff you do now uh just the story is quite simple so i have been making a lot of those older videos especially towards streamers and i did do some mouse reviews uh some i did in german uh some i did in english on a different channel i've been trying this for years but it like it never found the right audience because there's just a lot of competition and all that.

And as soon as I started getting into Linux, I was like, yeah, sure, I'll make a video on it. And there were a lot of people interested into the stuff I discovered and some perspectives. And then I thought to myself, there's generally not a lot of content around. And the stuff that I at the time found personally was more towards professional use, like how to use that command, how to use this command. And I was like, but no one is really making a lot of stuff on desktop environments and on all that.

on desktop environments and on all that. And that's how I basically determined for myself that I was going to create content on Linux and or exclusively almost desktop Linux. And that it's actually not that hard to use it unless you need some specialized case. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's in a in a way well in a way like how i felt about it initially as well

mine was also um there were some people at the time where i didn't like the way they did the videos and i was like i can do that better turns out i couldn't and the videos i made back then were really bad but there was the idea i had in my head and that was what spurred me on to start doing it and now I just honestly I just enjoy digging into some of these topics

like I think I'm one of the very few people that will do a video on like something happening in like a mailing list somewhere and you know maybe you'll see like a Veronica on like something happening in like a mailing list somewhere and you know you maybe you'll see like a veronix art corner and there'll be like a slight a little excerpt but i will go through every comment on there and i will find out what the hell is going on in that thread and i've never understood it but for some reason there is a relatively sizable audience that's interested in what is going on in these

projects and maybe it's because they are using them and just they're like okay well here's the thing that i have and here's it works relatively well but i want to know like how do we go from you know this how do we go from the the state it was in before to the state it's in now? Like, what really happened there behind the scenes? Because a lot of projects really, they're good at saying, like, what they've done, but many of them aren't great at communicating, like, how it was done or why it was done. And usually that discussion is, it's somewhere there in the mailing list or somewhere there in the merge request and i guess i don't know it's it's it's fun to go dig into it and see like

why and like what what really is going on there especially in like the whaling case for example like you know you'll see a protocol being added like screen tearing and then you realize oh this is insane how did it take this long oh there are there's a bunch of ah which which request was there is also one in gnome i think it's over 10 years old what was it about about? I can't remember. It was a very old merge request, and it hasn't been resolved, and there's still active discussion going on on how to implement this certain feature. I'm not sure which one it was. I thought it was the icons, the icon picker,

which was also a long time. Yes. But there is another one, which was from the GNOME 3, 2 era. I'm not entirely sure when the Switch was. It's very old. If you knew what it was, I probably would recognize it,

but it's not coming to mind what it would be. The point is, it's really interesting to read through the backs and forths and why something is not implemented. And at some point, it's also interesting because there are some that are very impatient, and then they're just going to blame someone someone or like basically trying to uh fight the the community like why why is this not implemented this isn't so hard or whatever it's really fun to read though those people most uh don't really don't last very long anyway yeah i i guess the idea is just find well this is maybe maybe this is what it is maybe it's just that

because i'm enjoying what i'm going through it's people are enjoying watching me enjoy it maybe i don't know maybe maybe that's part of it like enjoy the content you're making and you'll find an audience people that enjoy it yeah i guess maybe you know you might have people who watch your gnome stuff who are like i guess hate watching it who are kde users trying to like oh what's what's so let's see what's so bad about what's so bad about gnome i don't know maybe i'm just cynical maybe i'm sure there's some people going into an open mind and just trying to like see what's happening on the other side but i'm i'm i'm sure there's a lot of people who are just watching it just to see what they don't like about the desktop they already know they don't like yeah i think a lot

of people are just looking for something to agree or to disagree on that That's very true. Not just to learn something new. Yeah. It's incredible. Like every versus video, every GNOME versus KDE Plasma video or something, like I switch to this desktop environment or this desktop environment. Statistically speaking, it does get more views than the average.

And you already know that a lot of people are just not there because they want to see the reasoning behind it but They're just looking for the facts basically which they can disagree or agree. Yeah Yeah you go into a video with the With like the with like if you're going into a video about why KDE sucks or why gnome is incredible like and you're already using that system like you're

not like you're just looking for something to boost up your own ego at that point that's fine right but like let's not pretend that it's anything else yeah but on the interesting on the on the flip side of that like if you make a video where you are against the general sentiment you will notice there are... There are definitely some people out there that really struggle to, I guess, understand the perspective that someone else is coming from. And this is something that I've definitely dealt with. Like, personally, not understanding someone else's perspective.

And it's something I've definitely gotten better at. But I do definitely see that there are there are some people, this is especially true if you start looking into like any contentious Linux issue, whether it be it's not even really contentious amongst normal people but like

systemd, if you talk about like Wayland or X11 if you talk about GNOME or KDE if you're not in line with like the general sentiment you will definitely hear from people about it or especially if it's like

I think the smaller the thing is but how would I say it the smaller the thing is the more likely people are going to argue if you disagree with the sentiment like if you're talking about linux in general i guess because there are so many people with so many different opinions like the people who are really angry with what you're

saying aren't going to be like the main focus but if you're talking about something smaller like you're specifically talking about a kde issue that people disagree with you on you're going to notice that it it seems like a lot more people disagree whereas it's not necessarily that more people do it's the proportion because there's just simply less people interested in that topic yeah i mean it's essentially just cherry picking them out of the crowd and making them vocal. So that's definitely something that you did. You know, a lot of posts when there is something negative, you you make up, you look into the comments or something, and there is a bunch of people that disagree with this, but you

don't really find something similar if you just look it up online or something. You have to specifically look for it, and then you, of course, find the complaints and all that. But there is also another thing where a lot of people just get influenced by others in terms of decision making. What I find always funny, even though i certainly don't like it either is that the whole nvidia topic like yeah nvidia proprietary all that stuff some stuff didn't work but then there's also the the whole biased approach where a lot of stuff just works nowadays but it's still

presumed as it doesn't work yes or that Or that issues that are in a completely whole different thing are biased towards NVIDIA. I've seen many Wayland issues where, as the issue was the Wayland protocol itself, but it was always, no, not that's an NVIDIA issue, even though same stuff happened on AMD and on Intel. It's very interesting. Yeah, I

I've talked about this in previous episodes as well, where a lot of people they form an opinion on it once and then never look into whether something has changed. And this is especially especially true with nvidia stuff like people talk about in the state of nvidia on wayland being like it was

five years ago or they'll talk about my favorite one is when people bring up things like screen capturing on wayland i still see people today who think you cannot screen capture on Weyland. You can. You've been able to for a long time. Or just various other... Like, I think... This goes back to... When I was saying that projects are good at talking about what they do,

sometimes they're not even good at that. Like, it's very difficult sometimes to find out what the state of something is unless you're actively using it yourself, like you might not know how Nvidia GPUs work on Wayland because you just don't have one and especially

in that case that's not an easy thing to go and try out, it's easy to go and try out GNOME or KDE but if you want to know what an NVIDIA GPU is like, like, that's an expensive, endeavout of, like, find out an answer for. And most people were not willing to do that. And most people, I would hope,

would at least go and try to find, like, recent forum posts about it. But even then, there are definitely people who just they're they read something at one point and that's just that's just the way it works now until the end of time yeah and i think in general generally speaking a lot of hate towards those proprietary things or like stuff that's that's really hated i think it goes both ways in many things like i now have an amd gpu it works essentially the same way as nvidia can but i do have a worse experience while video editing because like a lot of stuff doesn't work on amd and many many are forgetting that amd

could open source a bunch more stuff could could help to improve their ROCM libraries and all that stuff. They could do that. They could work together with Blackmagic, the original developer and all that, but they're not doing that. So it's not just black and white, like NVIDIA is messing up a lot of stuff, but they're also doing or providing a lot of solid stuff that others could use. There are good and bad things about both companies. In the end, NVIDIA is a lot more hostile towards the Linux desktop, but it does have a place,

and especially in huge data farms and stuff like that, I think it's probably exclusively NVIDIA there. Yeah. Yeah, AMD's kind of dropped the ball like nvidia nvidia is not a gpu company nvidia is an ai shovel company they basically are selling every time that people get more excited about ai nvidia's stock price goes up because if you're doing AI You're Nvidia like there's just no question about it. There is a little use case in like scientific research for AMD but for the most part it's Nvidia and

Like I would like to have an Nvidia card for you know CUDA CUDA is just Useful and Nvidia's video encoder is just better but there's you know there's the rest of it it's the rest yeah and things are things are getting very close to being good with the video like they've dealt with explicit sync is being dealt with you've got the whole nvk and all that being dealt with and like that's that's awesome and i think we're going to get to a point where there is legitimately not going to be an argument to not buy an nvidia gpu besides not liking the proprietary drivers and that's that's totally fair if that's the reason why you don't want to support it um but even look we're gonna get to a point where the open drivers are gonna be

pretty good so yeah and I know people say like oh well why don't you just buy an AMD GPU if you're gonna use Linux and that's fine if you're buying hardware specifically for your system but going back to the new users, the new users are going to use what they have. You used an old laptop you had. What was the device you had? The old thing that was an Acer thing. I think it has an... I actually have it still yeah uh it has an intel an intel onboard gpu but also in like like a dedicated amd

seven eight m it's an adm or something uh it's a very weird system but it work generally fine but then i also have other things like i have a microsoft surface i put linux on it yeah it has an intel gpu which should work with Mesa and everything, but that's not the whole story. Like cameras don't work, all that stuff. And those are the devices that people usually use. Like they have a device, they want to put Linux on it. And if it's not the desktop PC, which generally works pretty well, but if it's a mobile device,

a laptop with a lot of hardware in it, like you have the cameras, you have the microphones, the speakers, and all that stuff, you don't really have a good time. Yeah. Which is sad, but hey, it is what it is. Yeah, exactly. We're coming up on the two hour mark now so I guess we probably should

start wrapping it up this has been fun I enjoyed this me too it's an interesting experience I'm really bad at this sort of talks I've had people a lot worse on than you so just it's fine

you're used to talking on camera that's a step above a lot of people there are some people I've had on where they just they don't know how to talk I'll ask a question and they'll say three words about it and that's that's pretty much it and it's a struggle to get through the episode but you know

i feel like you're a fine job all right well um let people know where they can find your stuff wherever you want to direct them to i okay um yeah i have a youtube channel uh youtube.com slash at michael enro which is basically my last name spelled backwards i didn't even notice that. That makes sense. And I also have a Twitter account. I'm also on Mastodon, even though I rarely post something. But it's hopefully going to improve soon. And that's essentially it.

Awesome. Nothing else you want to mention? That's it? Actually, by the time this comes out, you'll probably have like two videos out by then. Nothing else you want to mention? That's it? Nothing really. Actually, by the time this comes out, you'll probably have like two videos out by then. I was going to say tease a new video, but I have a giant backlog of podcasts.

Yeah. I don't really have much to say except for thanks for the invitation. Absolute pleasure. I had a blast talking to you. And even though due to our different time zones, I was happy that we could find a time that works for both of us. Yeah, I'm happy that I'm not recording this

at a stupid time. For anyone who's curious, it is currently 6.30 p.m. for me. It is not 6 a.m. for me, like some of the episodes I do. I was not joking joking i have actually recorded podcasts especially with a lot of europeans like they were like hey let's record at 7 p.m my time and like okay what is what does that work out to i'm plus 9 30 so i see well, do I sleep or do I stay up?

But this is nice. I appreciate it. But yeah, as for me, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, no, it is six days a week. The gaming channel is BrodyOnGames. Right now, I probably am streaming Sekiro.

I haven't decided yet, but you'll see when you go there. And whatever the other game is, I don't know. Check it out. If you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at TechOverT. If you're watching the video and want to find the audio, there is an RSS feed. It'll be on all of your favorite podcast apps.

Yeah. Give me the final word. What do you want to say? I like pretty time. I'm on the spot. See you guys later.