Tech Over Tea - The One & Only LearnLinuxTV | Jay LaCroix

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

It's been a while in the making but today it's finally happening, today the one and only Jay LaCroix better known online as Learn Linux TV, who you may know for his countless tutorial videos or even his book Mastering Ubuntu Server. ==========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========== Today we have the one and only Tytan652 on the show, who you probably know from his famous AUR package or maybe packaging every even remotely useful OBS plugin on Arch. ==========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========== Website: https://www.learnlinux.tv/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA ==========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 Azuja host, Brody Robertson, and today we have a very interesting guest on the show. Welcome, Jay LaCroix from LearnLinuxTV. How is it going? Oh, it's going incredibly amazing. Just talking about Linux all day and, you know, having a platform, something I think you know something about. It's the great times and I can't complain. How about you? Yeah, not too bad. Finally, we got to do this after last week.

Or was it last week or the week before? Whatever it was. Yeah. It's been, it's hard to get, sometimes it can be really hard with my schedule lately, but I think at the rate I'm going in, probably a month or two, I might be kind of normal in terms of schedule. Who knows? But it happened. That's the important thing. Yeah, that's true. For anyone who doesn't know who you are, just give a brief introduction yourself. So, OK, so my name is Jay LaCroix. I'm from Learn Linux TV, which is now my only job, the third year going, actually. So it was a nervous decision but you know it was pretty cool i i come from a system administrator background um specifically linux i've written six books and my youtube channel just crossed 600 000 subscribers like a week or two ago so which

i did when i first started i didn't even know there were that many linux people which when I first started, I didn't even know there were that many Linux people. Of course, I'm joking, but I didn't know a niche platform would grow this size. So it's kind of amazing to see it happen. Yeah, no, that's really cool. I don't know what the biggest Linux-focused YouTube channel is, but you're definitely in the top five, without a doubt.

There's not many others I can think of that are bigger yeah there's a few out there i i um i never get a chance to watch too many videos which is a shame because the production time is getting longer and longer and longer like a the kde video i put out yesterday took an entire day and i couldn't believe it like it is not even that long of a video and I'm thinking like how did I manage to spend that much time on one video honestly I look at the way that a lot of other people handle videos and like my editing is fairly fairly simple and fairly lightweight but I'll look at like the way that you edit videos I look at the way that like Nico that you edit videos. I'll look at the way that, like, Nico Loves Linux edits videos. And there's a lot more work that goes into it for some people. I don't know. Like, there's this, like, weird point where I don't know if adding more effort makes the video better.

Like, there's a clear cutoff point there, right? Where you can spend another, like, three hours doing something for, like, a five-second cut. But, like, does that really make it better at that point it's like the it's the 80 20 rule basically like 80 of the work is done with 20 of the efforts something like that is that how that works whatever yeah well basically it's there's a balance because at what point do you say you're going too far with the editing and you're just like um your attention to detail is just way overboard. I mean, there's a fine line from being a perfectionist to just, you know, putting out

something sloppy, but I'm a perfectionist and I guess I had to accept that about myself, but I'll still have to force something out the door. Even if I'm like, I could change this, I could change this. No, no, no, no. Just release it and put it out. I have to keep myself honest sometimes, but I think that's when you care about what you're doing. You don't really want the world to see it unless it's in what you think is its best form. But sometimes that in and of itself can take time away from, you know, engaging with the community or making more videos. We spend all day editing one. You could have filmed three. So yeah. making more videos we spend all day editing one you could have filmed three so yep yeah like that's that is a that is a big problem just knowing when to put something out because at the end of the day like that's what that's what matters right like if you you could spend a week editing a video

and then if you don't release it like it doesn't matter how much time you spend on it like that right none of that matters then like at some point you need to decide on when it's done and i i get for some people that can be like really really challenging to do it is sometimes it depends on the video because i i don't know which ones you've seen but sometimes i dabble with special effects just to surprise people they they don't really expect it in my videos, which makes it even more hilarious when it happens. But on April Fool's, I always try to do something just totally crazy, weird, or just plain silly. So the most recent one, I have

conversations with myself and we're in the same room and it's a hacker movie with two versions of me interacting. And then that took a long time to finish. But the whole point was April Fool's. So I could make an excuse for that because that's a once a year thing. So that's fine. But I'm not going to put that much effort into a tutorial unless I just have no life. Right, right, right. Yeah, April Fool's is always a fun one for me because I like to upload the video Australian time,

which is the day before for most US people. So, and the way I like to do it for mine is I like to make the humor very, very subtle and then make it more so throughout the video. So like, you know, obviously if there's two of you, people are going to notice that straight away. But my last one, I don't know how people didn't notice. I made like a fake YouTube apology video.

And I was basically pretending like I had never actually installed Arch Linux. My entire time on Arch had just been a... It had just been like a really well-produced theme of Ubuntu. And somehow, it took some people like eight minutes to work it out. Oh my gosh. I know. Well, interestingly enough,

like the video I did, I waited like several minutes into the video before the other copy of myself comes up. So at first people are like, well, this is kind of weird. And then I see the reactions live as soon as the other person comes in. But sometimes it's

just yeah like a value negative you just gotta try to get get in there and get it done but getting content uploaded can be a it's a job in and of itself i i guess i'm speaking to the choir here yeah for sure yeah um well once you have like a flow down like that was was, that's, that's always the big problem. Like trying to work out some sort of workflow, whether it be for your thumbnails or be for your video production or any part of it. Like once you at least have that down, that does simplify some of the process, but you still, if you're trying to make better videos, you're going to try to improve upon it. You're going to try to make like different edits here and there try to do different things here and there and no matter what you do you're

never going to be in a state where you feel like it's perfectly ready right right and and also it's not going to be in a state where you're not going to have sarcastic comments from people that didn't even watch the entire video um why didn't you answer this well you would have went a further into the minute um i mean nothing could save you from that. So there's all these YouTube type things that I don't know how often you deal with these kinds of comments, but they come in and you're like, but you're still going to get those regardless of your editing, regardless of the time. So the workflow that I've come up with is just, you know, basically coming up with a list of ideas and it'll graduate to a, you know, decision. I'm going to make this video that I've decided to make.

And then, you know, it's kind of like a Trello board, basically. Well, actually that's exactly what it is. And it goes through the swim lanes. If I have a scripting lane that I have the, you know, editing, I have to, you know, proof it before it gets released, things like that. So I think part of the efficiency is just not doing double work. If I'm going to do a video that shows someone how to do something on Ubuntu, and I'm also going to show a video on how to install Ubuntu, why wouldn't I do those one after another? Because I wouldn't want to wipe the computer, computer do fedora and then go back and do ubuntu and install it again for the installation video so sometimes the order that you do the videos in can make all the difference i guess that makes a lot of sense when you're doing videos

a lot of your videos uh are like there is clearly like a a how would i say it um like a through line between them like you can you can clearly see that some of them were produced at the same time, there's like clearly a link between them. Obviously the best example of that being the tutorial videos, which are clearly numbered, so on and so forth, um, but even so, like you can clearly see from the outside that you did some of these in a certain like order when they were produced. Mine are very much more like one-off things. Like maybe there'll be, I'll come back to a topic after a couple of months.

Like Pop OS's, System76's new Cosmic Desktop. Like I will talk about it at one point and I'll come back, check in like a couple of months later. So it's not really as directly connected but i know it's just a different way to approach the content like you do very different sort of videos than what i do yeah well sometimes there's going to be situations where i can't get away with that too because i think there's going to be times where you have to go back to certain things so what i've started doing and i hope this isn't a terrible idea i've created a b-roll library so anytime i show myself doing something i'm like, that'd be good for the library.

And then we'll see if I can pick from that and maybe save time from getting B-roll. There's all these things that we think about as content creators. But then at the same time, staying up to date on all the technology that's happening and everything that's happening in the news and, you know, the latest had to check that out i just decided all of a sudden if the world depends on me doing a video right now okay i'm joking on that it wasn't that that but sometimes you get this idea like i got to do this video right now because why didn't i do this video already oh my gosh i can't believe i forgot about that right you know all kinds of things to keep track of for sure for sure um so how long have you been making videos for i think the channel started in its original form in 2012 or 2013 or somewhere around there um but i didn't make it i didn't make it a serious attempt until probably i want to guess

2017 or 2018 because that's when I really felt like I could make this into something. Most of the older videos aren't there anymore, but it's also hard to say I've been doing it for 10 years because I've always hated editing up until lately. I love it now, but for most of my career, I've hated it. I just felt like I wanted to talk into the microphone and teach and do the things and then have that be it but the other parts of it I went into kicking and screaming but eventually you know I I started getting getting into editing and realized that I loved it so we could argue that that's when I started with the video um because doing everything in one take was really really tough I don't wish that on anyone i've tried a little bit to do like one

take stuff and i can't do it i need like i need to cut things if i this is a good example what happens when i do things in one take i just ramble i take a lot of pauses and It's not a pleasant viewing experience If I'm just leave the point of the video is to just ramble like in a live stream for example It doesn't really matter but if I'm trying to talk about something like a new Wayland protocol for example, and I want to get to the point and Explain what it's actually about I Stumble across words. I lose my train of thought. And this is, yeah, it just makes way more sense to cut.

I know some people don't really like really jumpy cuts, but you get jumpy cuts or you get unwatchable videos. Those are your two options, basically. Eventually, you know, you get to a point where people won't even notice that anyway. People expect cuts. If you watch the local news, I mean, you get to a point where people won't even notice that anyway. Sure. People expect cuts. If you watch the local news, I mean, how many jump cuts there are in one local news broadcast. But nobody even, you know, raises an eyebrow about something like that.

But since it's in a YouTube video, it's a problem. I think at a certain point, people really stop caring. I don't think I've seen that comment in quite some time. I used to, but I think there's a little process you go through. And eventually people, oh, yeah, he's editing. We can't change how he's doing it. He's doing his thing. So they kind of accept it.

I think also when you started, like, the YouTube landscape was, like, very, very different back then. Oh, yeah. Like, back then, that was, was like when people were first trying out doing the jump cut thing and like a lot of the jump cuts weren't just cutting a sentence it was like jump cuts to do like impact so you like jump around the screen all like and people just had this bad like this bad first impression with it, there's nothing inherently wrong with the editing style. It was the way that... It was very energetic videos and they felt very, very artificial. It felt like, you know, like Disney Channel artificial where, like, this is clearly not how this person actually acts. Whereas if you're just jump cutting for the sake of being able to

properly string together a thought, it's a very different kind of editing. It really, really is. And for me, I think the best trick is just to make the jump cut look like a camera angle. Then nobody will even notice. That's a good point. Just zoom it in a little bit. Just shift yourself over to the right, over to the left. Just change it up a little bit.

And it looks like a different camera angle. And usually it's pretty much accepted. It took me a while to learn or to figure that out, but once I did it's like, oh, okay, that's actually not very difficult. DaVinci Resolve even has a close-up button on the speed editor now that does exactly that same thing,

which is pretty cool. I'd never even thought of that. I don't know if you ever tried that on your channel, but it could be a way to make the jump cut seamless. No, I haven't. I you ever tried that on your channel, but it could be a way to kind of make the jump cut seamless. No, I haven't. I've never considered that. Huh.

Yep. Yep. You'll see it on my video. If you check the older ones, I actually do have two cameras now. So if you check, like, anything from last year, like, I would say the tail end of last year, you'll probably see it at the beginning of the video hmm okay let's see if we can find one like uh we're nine months ago let's let's see if i can just jump around through actually i won't be i probably won't be to jump around through just to cut like that uh yeah that's not gonna happen anyway go go shake on jay's videos you'll see what he means i guess um oh it's all

good it's all good apparently i can't drink water today um that's embarrassing you good i am good yep just relearning how to drink water apparently all righty yeah apparently. Alrighty. Yeah. It's fine. This is why I don't do any cuts during the podcast. You get random fun things like that. Yep. Yep.

I encounter that all the time or the random cat that shows up or a kid that comes into the room. So. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So you have like cleared out like the old content on your channel you said it started like like 10 years ish ago 12 years ago something like that yeah that's kind

of a weird thing about youtube because there's all these things that you don't think about so someone i don't even know if this is true but somebody in my circle said that so that he was under the impression that having less quality videos will kind of have, you know, mixed quality, old, bad quality, new, good quality, but it's not consistent. And that by removing the older videos, it makes everything more consistent, more, you know, more consistent in quality, which would maybe help the algorithm or something like that. We don't even know if it's true, but one time somebody thought I was just deleting content or just trying to get it off the internet.

I'm like, I didn't even know anybody was still watching that video. I'm surprised anyone even knows about that video anymore. But you find out pretty quickly. But at some point, I just didn't want my older content mixed in with the newer content because I feel like the difference is kind of jarring. I've definitely heard people say that before. And not

recently, but definitely four or five years ago. I do remember that being a common thing people would say. Here's the problem. It's a black box system, right? So it's just a matter of testing it here and there and seeing what sort

of output you get and usually like usually what you get from youtube just you've got to do big tests to work anything out with it because it it's such a complex system that i don't think anybody well i guess besides mr beast apparently has a good understanding of how it actually works. Like most people are just trying to see what they can do and hopefully, hopefully get it to work in their favor. You've got like... Yeah, that's basically YouTube in a nutshell. I think you've nailed it.

That's basically what it is. You hope for this 1% improvement, that 1% improvement, which doesn't really amount to much individually, but these little tiny tweaks over a long period of time, they start to add up. And I think that's when you start to see the difference. But it's kind of defeating to some people because they don't see a big jump. They're looking for that big pat on the back.

They see like, oh, I made $70 last month, and this month I've made $80. So great, I can get a PS5 game, I made $70 last month and this month I've made $80. So great. I can get a PS5 game, I guess, or something like that. And then eventually it goes up as you go. But it's just every 1% really counts. But after a while, it starts to stack. And then that's how, unless you're Mr. Beast or I don't know how he got big. Well, initially he was spending like 16 hours a day

messing around with YouTube. Like actually going insane with it, treating it like the only thing in his life. If you do that, yeah, I'm sure you can work something out. But if you're a normal person and you're spending, you know, maybe like five hours a day, six, seven hours a day on YouTube, like, yeah, you're spending you know maybe like five hours a day six seven hours a day on youtube like yeah you're gonna work stuff out but a lot of that's also video production as well you're not spending all of your time just analyzing the algorithm analyzing analytics

analyzing other channels analytics because that's also very important because it's not just a matter of what your channel is doing because yours might be a an outlier here you need to see what like other people are doing and how they're editing and how they're approaching content production and then you gotta make sure that what you're actually seeing is actually real and you're not tricking yourself into thinking there's a thread here when there really isn't right right yeah it's just just amazing all the idiosyncrasies of content creation when what really, I think a lot of people, they don't even like that. You know, they like the content they're making. They like their community and all this stuff, but they don't like the things they're forced to pay attention to that they really don't care about.

It's like, I don't get excited about tags. I don't get excited about descriptions, right? But you have to do it and you have to have a good, you know, SEO title. And I hate them. I hate them all. But the fact is, you know, you don't want to be in an echo chamber either. You're putting a lot of time into this and you want people to be able to get access to it. So it's just all these different things that go into it. And it's like, I just want to make content and not think about those things, but eventually just have fun with it. Like the thumbnails I've done recently are pretty much a, you know,

sarcastic insult towards thumbnails in general. I thought I'd have a little bit of fun with it and not in a, you know, cringy YouTube way, but in a cring it and not in a you know cringy YouTube way but in a cringy YouTube way making fun of the cringy YouTube way because I'm I'm gonna have to you know join them I may as well make it fun I suppose so I guess that's the way we look at it like yeah so I had a thumbnail recently with a penguin attacking me allegedly because I made one of the five mistakes on the thumbnail that I i warned people not to make or something like that so just have a little bit of fun with it honestly people talk about the the whole like youtube face thumbnails like

right like all that i actually enjoy making them like i know people like there's some people complain about them but maybe this is going to be an unpopular opinion but there is this there is this viewer power fantasy that their opinion on the way that thumbnails work the way the titles work that what they're saying is actually reflected in reality and a lot what i one thing i have very clearly noticed is what a lot of people say they want from a video isn't necessarily what actually is being watched because i've i've made videos people like oh make a video it's like super niche video on this thing and like 10 out of 10 it's like okay and then i make a video on my first impressions of Plasma, I'm like, oh, okay, sure, that did well. Yeah, it is, it is interesting how, how that kind of thing works. The YouTube is just so,

I don't even know how to describe it half the time, it's just all the, like I said, all the things you have to pay attention to, then the content i i record some of mine months ahead before anyone sees them like like sometimes people oh that video that i just watched this video i'm like you just now saw that video um oh right i just put it out yesterday but i filmed it like like last summer or something having a content workflow where you have a bunch of things you know in a pipeline but um it sounds to me like our experiences are roughly the same because of things, you know, in a pipeline. But it sounds to me like our experiences are roughly the same because of things that you're running into, especially when you say that, you know, people, their way is the best way. I get that a lot. But I also wonder if that could

be because of our audience, not that there's anything wrong with the audience. I mean, like tech people are very passionate about how they set things up. Like if you go to a business and a seasoned network administrator is there and you ask that person, how did you set this up? They're going to tell you how they set it up if they have policy to be allowed to tell you. But if they do, they'll brag about it. Why? Because they're really proud of it and they feel like their way is the best way. So when that person watches a YouTube video, what kind of comment do you think that person makes?

And I think sometimes the type of content we make kind of attracts people that are very passionate and specific, to put it a certain way. No, that's definitely fair. Most of the content I watch is at least tech-adjacent. It'll be gaming content or it'll be like other things like that there's not much i watch that's you know i don't watch like i know this is like a big thing in certain spaces i don't want to watch like mechanic videos for example i don't know if their audience is like is different it's like our car

channel video is different our makeup channel is different i don't know i have no idea yeah but at least i can tell you it is i can tell you it is well at least for some because i i'm really into you know retro gaming is my my side hobby um and i'm looking up even newer games it doesn't matter i'm looking up how to do something because i'm stuck on something and somebody will have a video showing the game and how to get through that particular area. And I don't really see anybody that often saying, you know, that you're stupid for doing it that way. You're supposed to do that and go this direction. And sometimes, but not really. But when that happens, as long as the person's nice, they might actually have a better strategy in the comments. So it's not like they can't back it

up they could give you the the strategy right there in the comments you could test it for yourself sometimes they're actually right but most of the time it's oh thank you for showing me how to do that i i spent hours trying to figure that out and that's as much as it goes they're not as passionate about it because if they get through the area they can complete the game and move on to the next one. But as soon as you get a passionate tech person behind something, then I think that really comes out, their passion comes out in the comments. I think we're going to probably get that more often than some. Do you find you get a different style of comments between like your tutorial videos, like the Tmux videos you have out here? I guess that's a bad example that just came out, but like what's a popular tutorial? They came out. But like, what's a popular tutorial?

They came out a few months ago. I re-uploaded it. Oh, okay, right. Those are actually three months old. I had a sponsor that no longer has a contract on those videos. So I had to take an ad out of them. You know, another YouTube thing I had to pay attention to. And I think I did that just before we got on the air.

So yeah, we do get different, or I do get different comments on the tutorials. Like your SSH full course, for example, like that has like half a million views. And then compare that to like a Plasma review or like a Distro comparison. Do you find the people commenting on the SSH video, you get like a different style of comments there? Or like, what's it like?

Yeah, because you'll get people on, you know, first impressions videos arguing. And it's something I've never enjoyed about technology. You know, my mindset is use Windows, use Mac, use Linux. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. You know, use whatever you like. I don't really care. I love Linux. I'll teach Linux.

And that's the community that I'm in. But I don't really care what someone else's situation is, they could use whatever they want. But other people will have a mindset, like, you need to be using Linux. And if you're not using Linux, you're wrong. And I'm like, says who, like, that's that person's computer, that person's workflow. And that person, I mean, someone's workflow is intimate, and how they deal with that, and how they configure their software to deal with that. And you're telling them that you know more about their software choices than they do. That doesn't really make sense to me, but you get a lot of those comments, but don't get me wrong. I get a lot of great comments. So I'm not trying to make this

out to be like, everyone is complaining, but you know, if you have like 20 really amazing comments and they have one, you know, bad one, that one amazing comments and you have one you know bad one that one bad one kind of stands out a bit yeah because it's like really you know but yeah i think the comments do differ because you're going to attract the it's like the hero content versus the evergreen content the evergreen content if um anyone's watching doesn't know what that means is you know like a bash video bash doesn't change much you could watch one of my older bash videos chances are it's exactly the same and everything i said is still true today even if it's like a 10 year old video that's evergreen but we're talking

about kde 6 for example plasma 6 i still can't call it plasma when i'm not editing my videos everyone calls it a mix between kde 6 kde plasma 6asma 6, Plasma 6? I think I'm saying KDE devs refer to it as KDE 6. The desktop environment formerly known as KDE or something like that. But in all seriousness, you put a video out like that, it's in the news right now, everybody's looking it up, you're going to get a ton of views on it, and then the views just kind of die. Because at some point, Plasma 6.1 will come

out. So no one's looking for the 6.0 video anymore because the new one's out. Right. But if it's a situation where you have like Tmux or SSH, I mean, these are things that people are using all the time. So these are people that are learning. They're studying. Maybe they're going for a certification.

They want to just kind of learn how to do something for work or whatever the case might be. So the comments there are going to be more inquisitive. They're going to be like, and they're almost always really good questions too. It's like, well, if this is the case, then why is this not the case? Like they make this connection and I'm like, well, that's pretty smart because I probably would have thought the same thing when I was starting out. And they're a lot more patient. But as soon as you start talking about distributions or desktop environments or systemd then you know things just kind of go from there in their own direction yeah i talked a little about wayland so i know exactly exactly

what you're saying yeah it's it's yeah it's like oh we gotta test it well yeah we have to test it before we can use it but if we don't make people use it nobody's testing it that type of situation that we're dealing with that yeah uh plasma knows all too well from the past i think the like what what gets how to say it i think there there might be like a bit of a communication barrier in some cases with my videos because i like to be very straight to the point right so i will talk about things but i like i think the way that like for example a lot of the wayland approaches are better i think that some of the things that plasma 6 is doing they're good but there's some very rough edges and i won't like like navigate around that a lot

of the time i'm just like or like like tiling window managers, for example, I think tiling is just a better approach to handling windows. And because of that, I get some comments from people being like, oh, why are you trying to like force this onto me? Like, I'm not trying to force anything onto you. I've made it very clear when I talk about like,

like Wayland is the future of the Linux desktop. That's a fact. That doesn't mean you have to use it. You can go and use anything you want assuming that someone packages it and that's the other thing that I bring up every so often and people don't like to hear that. I'm like, yeah but Red Hat is pulling out of XOR

completely and they're basically one of the main maintainers of it so you've got to maintain it yourself pretty much if you want to keep using it and when i say that people like oh well why are you trying to take this away why like no one nope and that really drives me crazy too i think gnome gets the most of that because people will make comments again. Don't get me wrong. If somebody says, I dislike GNOME. I tried it. It's just not for me.

I have nothing to say to that. Whatever. You know, I've tried many things that didn't work out for me. But if somebody then gives a reason that's not true, then it's like, well, hold on. Like they'll say, well, it's bloated. No. Yes, it is. It's using a gig of RAM.

You know, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Good. It's caching RAM. Congratulations. It's doing what it's supposed to do. It doesn't mean it's heavy, but people get this opinion that it is even, even when it's truly not. And he truly, you measure it and I could line Gnome up with Mate roughly the same amount of memory if you want to really get technical, but they, they, you know, believe it's true. And then there's all this culture of don't use this because I don't like it. I don't like GNOME.

You shouldn't use GNOME. I don't like Plasma, so you shouldn't use it. But that goes against the very reason why these exist in the first place, because we could use something if we don't like the other thing. And that's kind of the point. If you're on Windows, you can't say, you know, I hate the interface. I'm just going to delete it and put a different one on it and then use Windows with a different UI. And sure, Windows users are probably saying, well, I've done that yesterday. Yeah, theming the Windows desktop is one thing, but actually putting a different desktop environment on top of it, that's what we get to do. And I think that's something that is amazing because

we don't all have to like the same thing and i think that's when the community starts to miss the point and why i try to double down on everyone has his or her own preference and that's okay that's why we have these things uh well one of the things that you did mention in there was that... I'm really struggling with words today. Yeah, me too. It's like freezing down here, and I've got to turn the space heater on. Well, it's 8 a.m. here.

This is when I normally be waking up. So one of the things you mentioned in there was people having thoughts on something based on things that are not true. And I don't think it's always that they're not true. I think it's that the information they have is outdated. That, I think, is a lot more often. Where you have something like, like, GNOME likes to remove features. Yes, they did.

Like, back during the end of Gnome 3, they were completely removing major modules because they were rewriting things. They were removing features back then. And then they've been slowly adding them back in with, like, a properly maintained module that they can actually, like, develop and improve upon. So that was true at a point.

Or people's perception of Plasma... Like, I've said Plasma is kind of rough around the edges, but there are some people that their last time using Plasma was KDE 4. And yeah, you're going to have a very different opinion of Plasma, especially if you use 4.0. Yeah, I stuck through from 4.0 to 4.12 and used everything in between, if I remember correctly. So that was my last. I was a Plasma user full time up until I think right before 5 came out. I just almost made it to the end of 4. It didn't quite make it all the way. But when you say, so we have things that people say that aren't true. Yeah, I do see your point like outdated information but they'll sometimes people say well um gnome is removing features because they're trying to push

you know this onto onto other people when they literally say we took out this feature because we just don't have enough people to take care of our code base and this one isn't getting any attention at all. So, you know, it's probably a security risk as well. But if someone wants to like, you know, help out, they might be more inclined to keep it around. But sometimes it's just important to understand that developers don't have a team meeting

with the community and say, you know, we need to make everybody angry. So how's the best way that we can make everybody angry with our next update? Because that's what we want to do. Like nobody has that conversation. It's kind of like this, I guess you can't please everyone kind of thing. Because if you make, if you go this direction, then, you know, these people that don't like that direction, they won't go that direction. But then again, we have other desktop environments. So at the end of the day, I feel like it's always okay in our community. I think a lot of people have this misconception of the way that a lot of these big projects are

run. Because you can look at a small terminal and you're like, oh, there's like five contributors on the terminal. Like, okay, that makes sense. And you look at something big like Ganoa, I mean, how many hundreds of people are working on it? I don't know what the number is. If somebody happens to know how many contributors there are, let me know in the comments. Yeah, a lot. Yeah, it's definitely, it's probably over a couple thousand, like over the lifespan of Gnome.

How many of them are active? I don't know. But people see how many people work on it, how much money the Gnome Foundation has, the fact that the gnome foundation actually has like employees and i i think they assume that if there's that many people working on gnome every part of it is being treated the same way whereas there are things like the gnome calendar where that's basically maintained by one guy

yeah i think it the number is quite large i don't know what. Yeah, I think the number is quite large. I don't know what the number is either, but the number is quite large when you just add up the straight number. But when you put some criteria on it, like, okay, lessen the number by, I want only the people that are full-time employees, then the number is going to shrink considerably

because how many of these people spend more than an hour a week? I mean, I'm sure a lot of them do, but maybe somebody only has an hour extra in their week to donate to the project and their name's going to be on there. But if that's the only hour that they have to contribute,

then I mean, it's not like to your point, it's not going to be the same. Whereas if Microsoft has X number of developers on Windows, you could pretty much assume that they're probably full-time positions, each and every one of them. But sometimes a contributor could be a one-time contributor that just submitted a patch, and then that's all they wanted to do, and that's all they ever do. So it's really hard to convey that to people. to convey that to people. But also, it's, I've seen people that pay for things like have less, you know, anger when they don't get their way, because it's like, we get the software for free, we could contribute to it, we could donate to help out. But it's always interesting to me that

it's like, people won't even file a bug report if there isn't one, when that could really go a long way to getting it fixed. But you know, open source is another discussion that probably go in many different directions maybe this is like a incorrect way to think of it but the i thought i just had is maybe it's due to the fact that you can see how everything comes together like you can see all the internal discussions you can see the the bug tracker so right whereas with something that is proprietary generally you don't know what's going on so you don't even know like like you just assume that somebody is probably doing it like somebody is involved somebody is already doing it. Like, somebody is involved. Somebody is already fixing it. But when it's open, it's like, okay, well, everything's here.

And other people are going to see the thing that I try to contribute. Other people are going to see my bug report. Maybe they're going to disagree with me. They're going to disagree with me publicly. Like, maybe, I don't know. Maybe there's something there as well it's just a thought I just had so not really properly thought out

oh I'm so sorry there was some noise in the background I missed the last part of what you just said on my end I had my microphone muted I'm sorry if you could repeat the last thing I started to have to ask that um basically I was saying because everything is open you you can everything is open so

other people can see how you're contributing other people can see your bug reports other people can judge what you're doing and maybe there's like some fear to getting involved there because if you were to report something to a like about a steam game for example maybe you'll get an email back being like thank you for your bug report but that's basically as far as it goes but if you're doing something on a a public project on something that's open source like there's going to be this public back and forth here so maybe there's like a stage right there or something i don't know i think it's a combination of everything because it's open source is similar, but it's different. I mean, at the end of the day, you're being provided software, whether you're able to download it, download the source code, or you just pay for proprietary software.

The end result's the same. How you get that software and how it's made is different. So if you think about proprietary software, it's very much a transaction transaction based system, I bought this software, I have this expectation, or if you're a company, you have this SLA, you have this expectation on the contract. But if it's open source, expectations completely change. In some cases, you can't really have them because maybe, you know, they're just volunteers on this project. And you can't really expect anything in particular out of volunteers or, but then again, you could have open source where you can have expectations because, you know, Red Hat doesn't get to say, you know, if they have a massive problem, oh, it was just, we didn't get

enough volunteers to take this CVE seriously, right? They have companies depending on them. And sure, it's a bad example because they're paid open source, but there's other things like that too, where you have companies using it. So the expectations are bigger. And meanwhile, you have different types of users. You have people that just edit photos and they're not computer users. You have people that check their email. You have people that are writing code and all that kind of thing. So you have all these different people from different backgrounds approaching this thing that, to be honest, I feel like would be kind of thing so you have all these different people all from different backgrounds Approaching this thing that to be honest I feel like would be kind of hard to understand to an outsider open source like how does that work and the questions are always? The same how do they pay their bills if they're giving everything away?

We all have trouble with our bills no, but I think because you have An open source you have such a varied way that it's going to be, I mean, you have different licenses, you have different styles, you have, you know, open source software that has a closed source, you know, UI on top of it, like Vivaldi, for example, with open source browsing engine, then you have something not open source on top of it. something not open source on top of it. And it's just, but you want this intimate relationship with your software where you could depend on it to do the thing that you want it to do. And that's what everybody wants. But when you don't write the code and you don't know how all of this works, it's really hard to navigate that system and try to get visibility onto the

thing that's going on. That's causing you to not get your work done. It's tough. Yeah, that's a good point. It's definitely tough. And I think the problem is that even over the time that I've been using Linux, there's been,

I'm sure it's been even more so over the entire lifespan, there's been a shift in the kind of people using Linux. It's become less technical people. It's become less programmers. It's more general, normal people. And they're going to have a different expectation with the way software is handled.

If you go back to the start of Linux, for example, back then, the very, very start, pre-Debian, if you wanted to install Linux at that point, you needed to have a Minix system or another Unix system that you use to bootstrap your file system that you could then put the Linux kernel onto, and then you'd need to use that Minix system to go and compile your tools and bring the tools over as well. Like, at that point, you have to be a very technical user you probably have minimum some level of programming background so basically everybody back then was contributing to projects in some way whether it was to the linux kernel whether it's to some tool like the majority i'm sure there was someone out

there that was using it. I'll say, you know, I don't know if this is a popular opinion, but it's just what I've noticed. It's not like I've done an analysis on this or anything, but it seems to me like it was Windows Vista's fault, believe it or not. I know that sounds strange, but okay. So when Windows Vista came out, and I don't need to go into Windows Vista.

What year was Vista? Was that like 2006 or so? I want to say. Sounds close to right. But either way, it came out. It made a lot of people angry because it just didn't perform well. People had complaints. Now, when I first started using Linux, it was like installing the NVIDIA driver.

You were risking bricking your entire install and having to start completely over from scratch each and every single time you do that. So around 2006 or 2007, I can't remember exactly, but somewhere around there, Ubuntu started the Ubuntu drivers thing to automatically install the NVIDIA driver if you needed that kind of thing. And then around the same time, I think the Totem video player had the feature where if you try to play a media player, or excuse me, a file type that you don't have a codec for, it'll tell you that it can't play it, but then proceed to apt install whatever it needs and then play the video. I feel like all of those changes, especially like live CDs where you could demo before you install it and have that entire environment. I feel like all of that, at least

as far as I remember, happened around the Windows Vista time period, which makes me think that the boost of Linux to what we have today started from anger from Windows Vista that we kind of don't even remember now because that to me was the time period where it really started to get easier because i started noticing i had to do less right i had to do less to get my wi-fi driver installed i had to do less to get my video driver installed i could use a live image like our like nopics came out as a huge huge revolutionary thing to put a dvd in your drive and just run from the DVD. We don't even think of it as anything but, you know, something we take for granted now.

But back then, it's almost like we had this Linux renaissance because of Windows Vista that no one really noticed happened. I would say the first, it's definitely a smaller turning point, but the first turning point would have been the shipping of Ubuntu, because that changed the, that changed the distro landscape, because pre-Ubuntu, how long have you been using Linux for? When did you start? I started in about 2002. Okay, okay, cool, so you're around there, cool, I can skip over some of the context. okay okay cool so you're around there cool i can skip over some of the context um so for anyone who doesn't know prior to ubuntu it was very common for there to be paid linux distros not

just like oh you paid red hat to use their like proprietary prior they're they're commercial support and all that it was no it was one of them i can't remember now yeah um something like that but there was like There was a lot of these paid distros. You would buy a Linux DVD, and not just buy a Linux DVD because that was a convenient way to get it. That was the only way to get it. You bought a DVD to get it.

Ubuntu came along and killed that. You don't see paid distros as a norm nowadays. There are obviously examples. Elementary has their optional pay distros as a norm nowadays. There are obviously examples you have elementary has their optional pay don't is basically donation on the download page you have red hat which doesn't sell you the distro they sell you support and that's the way that it's typically done now usually there isn't an upfront distro cost it's a

cost for the things that come along with it because Ubuntu a cost for the things that come along with it because ubuntu completely destroyed that model by doing everything they did completely for free because it was it was funded by someone who was a multi-millionaire and could afford to do that initially and destroyed that model entirely so that was the the first start and then obviously yeah I think, is a big one as well. I think the next big shift was probably when Linux gaming became viable. There might have been something else in between there as well, but that was definitely a massive thing. I don't know. I might not agree on the gaming part of it. I mean, I feel like it's going to be bigger.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying gaming isn't better. It's awesome. But as far as having um you know an impact on linux um i i feel like maybe many of those people were already interested in linux anyway because i think of things a little bit differently because when i look at the overall ecosystem like when i was a kid i had a sega genesis i knew that a super nintendo cartridge would not fit in my Sega Genesis, and I couldn't play it on that system. So why are people nowadays thinking that Linux needs to play their Windows software when

it was never made for Linux in the first place, when my understanding has always been this OS, this platform takes that software, this OS, that platform takes that software. When I hear about people gaming on Linux, I often think of it as like trying to make it out to be something that it isn't. It's like they want to take this piece of Windows with them over to Linux. And sure, Linux will probably do it better. And I feel like Linux is better overall for this, but the developers see it differently and they have to port these games over. It just seems to me like going straight to the source and playing games on Windows would be the better way to go.

But instead, we're forcing games to go on Linux. And then that's all OK. But where I have a problem with it is when people say, I hate Linux because it doesn't run my games. Well, it was never supposed to run your games. It was never advertised to run your Windows games. So that's, I feel like the thing that is amazing about gaming on Linux is just how they solve this problem. Like we want this to work. So here's what we're going to do. And then Steam comes along and says, we want this

to work. And, and there's these people that come together and want this to happen, even though the software isn't meant for it. The end result is we get together, we make it happen anyway. But I don't know that I... I guess my point is, as amazing as the outcome is, I don't know that I would say gaming is quite a big boost in Linux when it comes to usability. But then again, I'm not an analyst, so there could be... I can't speak for everybody, but I can say for a fact

that I probably wouldn't be daily driving Linux if I couldn't play games on it. Like, I want to play games on my system. Like, that for me is a massive use case. And that was one of the things that kept me away from it back, like, when I first, like, one of the things that, like, one of the big things I first heard about

with Linux was when the Steam Machines came along, and the Steam Machines being an utter failure, basically, because they tried to force developers to make games for a platform that didn't have gamers on it, which was just not a sensible marketing strategy for it. I was hoping that would work, but it didn't. Yeah, i do remember that so being able to say to developers hey with some maybe minor tweaks but in most cases you

don't need to do anything your games are here it for the for the users who actually are interested in gaming it's less of a less of a difficult transition because most people don't want a dual boot I like I know some people like dual booting and that's that's neat I don't want a dual boot when I do it I don't do it properly like my dual boot is the laziest I swap my drives in my BIOS because I I've had nothing but issues trying to set it up properly with my bootloader oh i i literally at early in the channel made my computer like a almost like a cartridge system with like a um 2.5 inch uh swappable se ssd bay just pull out the drive so i had another one in just put it in this little caddy they become a cartridge so it's like i have one labeled this os that os have like a stack of

ssds i just swap, but you have to shut the computer down, which is always awkward. I solve the problem differently, but I think this is because I'm more of a console gamer, but I do love PC games. So that is definitely a need of mine. But when I was coming up in Linux, I never really felt like my Linux box needed to be my gaming machine also. That was my productivity box. That's how I got things done. That's how I get work done. machine also. That was my productivity box. That's how I got things done. That's how I get work done. That's how I design things. My desktop PC, I think this was many years ago, what year this was, I think I had a Windows XP 64-bit edition back when that was a thing running on a desktop that only existed for games. That was its only purpose. No work is done on it. I play games on that,

but I get work done on Linux. So I liked having that separation because it just was so much better for me not to want Linux to be something that it's not. I could use Windows for what I think it was good at at the time and Linux for virtually every single thing else. Later that graduated to, I think this was after the Steam box or the Steam machines came out and failed. I liked the idea, so I kind of created my own and just had a PC that's hooked up to the TV, and that's how I play my games.

And then later that became a streaming server where I put it in the rack, and then I used Steam Streaming, and it's headless. I bought a fake monitor from Amazon. Did you know that was a thing? What? A fake monitor. What does that mean? Like a fake display. You buy these on Amazon for cheap and it's an HDMI plug that tells the

computer, I'm a 1080p monitor. Honest. Trust me. I'm really a monitor. That's what I am. And it's just, it looks like a flash drive and it probably costs like $10. So it literally tells your computer that you have a monitor attached, which then allows steam to run without a monitor and then you just put that on a 10 gig network and then just with windows installed you can stream all your windows games to any computer in your house and then over 10 gig it's like it's you know extremely fast and then that's where i i think i ultimately ended up just to try to solve the problem i've never heard of these before yeah i you can obviously emulate software but i didn't know they were like hardware dongles for it i i just googled it one day i'm like i wonder if anyone's

done this and sure enough i'm like oh my gosh it actually existed because it was the missing piece because i kept plugging the server into my network and I can't stream any games. Why? I plug a monitor in, I start the game and it works. And then I started Googling it. And, and obviously it makes sense now because there's no surface for the game to draw on. So what's it going to draw on? There's no monitors, no display. So you just got to check the box that you have a display, then you could turn a turn my gaming machine into a streaming server for the games. And then that's where it ended up. And now with the Steam Deck, I don't even, you know, I don't even have that anymore because that's what I use now because it works for virtually everything I want to play on it, which is, you know, to your point, gaming is amazing on Linux. It's just when someone wants Linux to be something that it's not or judging it based on

something that it's not, that's always kind of like the interesting thing about Linux in this community I've never fully understood. I think the difference for you is it sounds like you've had multiple computers like in your house at the same time for a long time. Like it's just been a normal thing for you. Not really. It was at a point, but I was always like really, really poor up until I got, you know, my career started. So I would have a lot of hand-me-down computers. So somebody would just give me one because it's like really old and barely worth keeping around. And at that point, I would use it for something and I can't sell it or do anything with it because it's given to me for free. It didn't even have any value. So it certainly has less value by the time I'm done with it.

But so they just kind of stick around. But I have these different machines. And then, you know, my laptop wasn't even that powerful. But if I'm not playing games on it, then it doesn't really have to be powerful because it's ultimately I'm just pretty much in the terminal most of the time anyway. So, right. That worked for me. But yeah, I can see your point.

People want their one device to be all the things, and I think I get that. I do get that. I would love for that to be the case, but I think until we get the Thunderbolt thing figured out, it's going to be kind of hard to make that the case.

Get the eGPU thing figured out. Sorry, I think the... Radio was just listening. Some of the lights went out. Sorry about that. My home assistant decided my TV needed to go off. And that brought your lights down? Yeah.

It was like, oh, you should stop working now. Interesting. I didn't know that I didn't turn that off before we started. I apologize about that. So you've done a lot of home automation stuff then, I guess. Oh, yeah. I definitely do. But this one needs a little bit of work because it interrupted your episode here.

No, this is actually perfect. Tell me about your home automation. I've not even considered doing any of this. What's that? You had no idea about what? Yeah, tell me what you've done. What you got going on? on yeah let me go ahead and get the recording lights back on and i will tell you all about it there we go okay now they're back

all right so it's it's a project that's kind of on pause right now but it's it's mostly done i would say it's probably like 80 90 done so I wouldn't say there's anything too amazing, but my cameras are automated with it for recording. Wake on land for the recording PC. So I guess that that's pretty cool. Like it's mostly lights, cameras. I automate when the lights go on and go off. I like to map things to the sunset, sunrise, plus one hour usually works best for me. And some of the, another thing I liked that I didn to the sunset, sunrise, plus one hour usually works best for me. And another thing I like that I didn't know you could do, I found out you can hook it into PFSense and Unify, so you can pull in information about devices and put automations on there.

So the way I did it was I liked it. I wish I could show it to you, but I like to keep everything simple. So what I feel like when it comes to home automation is buy-in from people in your house is extremely important. If you make it annoying, they're never going to like it again. If you show them something complicated, they're done. Okay, you got one shot. It's got to be simple.

So I basically figured out, and I'm sure this is in the documentation. I found this on accident. You can have sub pages when you hold or long tap on something in Home Assistant, you can actually have it go to another screen. So I can have one button that turns on the TV and the soundbar and the Blu-ray player all at the same time. So someone just has to hit that one button. But if somebody wants to control any of those devices individually, then they can long press on that same button then

another menu comes up with all the individual controls and for that i used an ir blaster to copy all the remote code so then it was able to operate pretty much everything in the rooms that i have but um there's a lot more that i want to do with it, but it's just with creating content, then I don't get a chance to go in and fix it. Case in point, my six o'clock turn the TV and the recording lights off thing. That's not supposed to happen when I'm occupying the room. So. Well,

but I could tell you what's more amazing than the, the home automation system. And that's my server automation system because this thing is insane. If I do say so myself. It's an Ansible system with like 330 individual files in it currently. Just to give you an idea of its size and scope.

Okay. And I am going to be releasing it publicly. I just don't know exactly when. It should have happened by now. But I have like a really old version out there that's just so old that it's barely worth looking at. But essentially, I use Ansible Pull. I'm sure you've probably heard of it. Most people haven't.

Ansible Pull, have you used it? No, I haven't messed around with it. It's the only way I'll use Ansible now. And I know a lot of people will roll their eyes when I say that. But when you have servers, laptops, and desktops, and you're managing all three with one Ansible setup, essentially, I call it NodeForge, which is my internal name for it. And it operates differently depending on which one it's on. But the problem is, if i have like an ansible server my laptop's in my bag then i'm going to get errors that it can't configure my laptop well yeah my laptop's in

my bag of course you can't get to it it's not supposed to be configured right now and that was kind of hard to figure out how to make make it so that it didn't care if something could be off or something wasn't supposed to be off and it was that i needed to be alerted on it so with ansible pull i can give it a git repository and say run this local host so it's just ansible pull i think it's dash uppercase u off the top of my head and then a git repository url and inside that repository should be a file named local.yml and And that's like the file it'll run. So every machine basically checks that out and runs it against themselves. But if you add the dash O option,

it changes it to only if you have made a commit. So it's not going to do anything unless you've actually made a commit to the Git repository. So you don't have Ansible jobs running over and over again when they don't need to be. You can make it so that you push a change out to your repository and then all of your machines will download them and run them. And for me, that makes a lot more sense because my laptop in my bag, if I open it, then it's going

to run the job as soon as it wakes up. That's fine. And then I use healthchecks.io to let me know if any of them haven't checked in in a long time, then I could go in and find out. So that way nobody can quietly fail either. And I think I've spent two or three years of an exclusively Ansible pool. Wow. For anyone who doesn't know, just a quick explanation of what Ansible is. Oh, for me, yeah.

So Ansible is a configuration management solution similar to Chef and Puppet, but where it really excels is that it's much more lightweight. Whereas with Chef and Puppet, you have an agent that you install, you have a server where your configs are stored. The agent could sometimes be kind of heavy because it's always running local. will have is a control host, as they call it, where you have, you know, the server has SSH, the client installed, and it just connects to the individual servers that you want to set up. So you have a web server, it'll SSH into the web server, it'll run the playbooks, which is what it's called. It's a configuration management link. Well, maybe not so much configuration

management, but it is, it's its own language. It's kind of a long story to get into, but it's a, it's a language that's understood and it's not specific to Ansible and it's easy to write in. And it's very logical too. I think most people can look at it and kind of tell what it's doing. They don't have to know a programming languages. So with that simplicity and the fact that it doesn't need an agent because it's just connecting to individual machines, I feel like that gives it a major edge over those other solutions. But on my end, I use Ansible Pull, which is this additional binary that you get if you install Ansible. So if you have Ansible installed, you already have this, then that's

just a way of kind of doing the reverse where you're saying, I don't want anything to connect to my server, I want my server to pull down the configs and then run it against itself, which is effectively creating an agent system, let's be honest, which kind of invalidates some of Ansible, but you still maintain the ease of the language of the YAML and how lightweight it is. You get all of those benefits still with that method. So that's my variation of it, which I'll show off at some point when I get around to doing a NodeForge video, which is on my list, but it'll definitely be this year. And then what I plan on doing is just opening it up into public so people can just download it and just,

you know, see how I configure servers if they're curious. So what made you want to do this? And I guess also what made you want to do the home assistant stuff as well? So the first answer is YouTube. YouTube made me get obsessed with configuration management because I had one computer when I started, and I was getting really, really tired of erasing it, trying a distribution, installing it, putting all my files back on there, you know, just using this computer and just every week trying something new. I was a distro hopper by profession, I guess.

It just got really old. So eventually I just wanted a way to reconstruct my setup without having to do any of the work. And that's where this began. So now it'll set all of my GNOME keyboard shortcuts. It'll change my wallpaper in gnome it'll change what's on the lock screen all the configuration items within the gnome desktop um pretty much right down to um trying to think what i have in like extensions are are a part of this even and then mate and then the sway window manager is in here as well. So I have all these different configurations. So if I want to restore a system back to where I want it to be, that is set up the way I want it, then I could easily do that.

Now I have multiple systems and I don't have to do this, but then, you know, it became a business and now I have servers. So this thing I was using to manage my own laptops then graduated and became the software that basically runs everything that's fair and with home assistant i think it's just kind of like the star trek effect you know when when you're just looking at star trek oh wow they can just talk to things and they have all these automated things wouldn't that be so cool i think it's um the the child in me watching star trek that gets to play around with technology that is

not nearly as good as it was in star trek but even if it's 10 as good as i guess i'll take it maybe it's just that i don't really have that like star treks just sci-fi background in general i'm not like a big sci-fi guy when i look at the like home automation stuff home assist and i'm like that's neat i guess but right outside of well i could see value in my case for automatically setting up my recording stuff that that would make sense like turning my lights on turn my camera on that makes sense to me but when it comes to just doing my general home like like, I don't know. It's something that stacks. Right.

Like, you're not going to find a value in one light being automated. I mean, how much time are you saving by not flipping the switch yourself? Like, let's be honest. I mean, you could argue that there's probably time negative. But when you add different things, I feel like you're creating more comfort. And it's kind of a weird mind trick because your lights are automatically coming on at sunset. So your house is changing itself to match your environment. Motion sensors, like my last studio had a motion sensor in there. So it would turn on the computer.

It would turn on the television. Basically, all my computers would come on, the lights, everything. I had the fan in that room have a heat curve like PCs do. So I had a temperature monitor, and it would cut the ceiling fan on. If the temperature was above, like, 80, and then if it got down to, like, 70-something, then it would cut the fan off, and you have the fan coming on and off along with the temperature. So the more you keep adding these things, the more i think it kind of makes sense but it's it's more the sum of all the parts and less so any one individual thing because to your

point the recording thing is is pretty cool but there's always going to be some individual things that'll throw you for a loop like my camera i have a a dumb battery which i do as well someone doesn't know is just you could just plug it, and your camera thinks it's a battery, but it's plugged into a wall, so you never have to charge anything. It has this warning that it's not a legit battery, and I have to actually, in the menu, go up and press OK. Otherwise, the camera can't be used, which completely defeats the entire automation

because it comes on with the automation, but you can't use it until you get up and you go over to it and then you hit the button. So the one that you're seeing me on right now is the ZV-E10. And then I have the A6600 as the primary camera that I have. So I have those two. This is my closeup cam when I'm doing, you know, closeups on the videos, but normally it's the A6600 that you're seeing me on. Which one's the one that complains about the battery?

What's that? Which one's the one that complains about the fake battery? That would be the A6600. Okay. I was talking to my friend Tom and we're thinking, should we just make an actuating arm with a Raspberry Pi that when you turn it on, it just turns a thing and then it hits the...

I don't think we're going to go through that much trouble because that's when you start to get to a point where you're putting way too much work into this. Right, right. And you're sucking the value out of it. So we decided not to... We'll get up and hit the button. Yeah, if you spend 10 hours of work

to save 3 seconds how long is it going to take to recover that time but if somebody wants to hack the firmware I won't be angry if it's legal I'm not trying to get anyone in trouble but you know well it is Sony so forget I said anything I was only asking because I've got a Canon camera that doesn't

have that issue so maybe it's Sony that wants to just add an extra protection in there. Well, I'm not a Sony apologist. I like them, but I got them on clearance. So I'm not going to say that I made the long decision to get a camera. Lots of research. It was cheap at the time, and it was at Best Buy. They were trying to get rid of them.

So I grabbed some cameras, and it was at Best Buy. They were trying to get rid of them, so I grabbed some cameras, and that's what it was. But if I was going to research, I probably would not have gone with Sony. The menus are so hard. I mean, you can't even, like, export your settings. Like, I like to have known good settings, like export my settings so I can import them back in. No, you take screenshots with your phone.

That's how you do it. So that's basically how it goes, which, you know, yay Sony, I guess. But once you get them set up and just leave them alone, they're fine. Yeah, yeah. That's how I feel as well. I don't touch my camera settings. They are like every couple of months, I'm like, hmm, maybe I should tweak a little bit. And then I don't look at it again.

Like, I don't know what my settings are right now. I don't need to know what they are. I know they are fine. They're not great. I obsess over audio, personally. So what's your obsession with your equipment? What gear do you have to tweak the most? I'm curious.

Yeah, probably audio. Probably audio. I've messed around with, like, the EQ a ton of times, and I can never get it to a point where I'm perfectly happy. Uh, a big one for me is also, like, just, just little things, like, the distance of the mic away from my face, and how it's angled, like, how it looks on the, um, how it looks on the recording, like the recording like do i want it to be like this do i and i actually need to replace this arm because this arm is you made it a lot easier on yourself i i made it harder on myself by uh mandating i didn't want the microphone in the frame and when you make that decision you are increasing the difficulty level yeah uncomfortable level but i was determined to make that happen and it took months to figure it out how to make it work but i'm not recommending that absolutely not but what is your setup look like what are you going on uh so i have like a it's i forgot the

name of the microphone it's a audio technica you know one of those long numbers it's it's basically a shotgun hyper cardioid i have one in my um in my closet that i'm not using right now i need to mess around with a bit more it goes into a channel strip which goes into an audio interface which then goes into a dedicated computer for recording because i like to have the recording pc for taking all the footage in so i i don't have to you know it's like an appliance basically and i don't like to see you know cables so i always run the cables through the walls and you know just try to make sure you can't see anything you see a cable on the floor back uh back under this arm i've i've seen it's it's fine nobody has to go to the

obsessive level that i do it's fine to see a microphone there's no problem with it whatsoever it's so much easier to deal with it's a lot less work because when you deal with distance when you're trying to get it out of the frame then you have to deal with a whole bunch of acoustic issues yeah yeah i i've learned more about audio than i feel like i ever wanted to doing this. I like, I'll mess around with the software stuff, but I need to mess around with like more, like I I've been wanting to like put foam up for a long time.

Cause I do have an echo problem in this room. I've just mitigated it with the short SM seven B, which is a God microphone. It, it, so just put a foam behind your monitor call it a day like people overdo the phone thing it's like um i'll get the question a lot on on the youtube channel they're like when they saw my previous studio like like why do you not have foam behind you

and then i'll answer well my audio is not going behind me i'm talking towards the camera so i don't need anything back there i mean sure if your sound signal is bouncing off of walls you might need that kind of thing but i look at some of the people that that do this and i'm like wow you have a lot of foam padding here i think like recording artists probably some of them probably have less than you so i think it's kind of overkill like sometimes they'll make these little tiny foam shields just put behind your microphone, like literally the microphone and the sound can't bounce back because it's being, you know, hit right then and there before it even leaves the microphone. But then again, audio, if you have a different kind of microphone where the

pickup pattern is, you know, around you, then that's not going to help you. It's just all these things. And it was the most frustrating thing to learn. And, and I, if I could go back, I would have hired somebody that just set it up for me and called it a day. Like it was way too long. Like, like there's people that would love to get an hourly rate to, to, in exchange for help. And you figure this out and yeah, if you get to my level of obsession, just let someone else deal with it. That's what I'm telling telling myself anyway i'll probably still mess with it yeah i know i know like every so often like i'll get a i'll get just like an itch to change something usually it'll make it any better it's like it's usually just as good in a slightly different way and it'll be a such a subtle change this is the other

problem this is what we're saying before about like making sure your videos are perfect you can make a very subtle change that nobody else is going to notice like it'll be like a one percent like change in your sound signature and at the moment you'll be like this is so much better you listen back to it you're like this sounds exactly the same what am i doing yeah man this first of all what are you doing like i would say not to obsess over that level because if no one notices then there's probably no point but i feel also there might be value if you have a certain like like sound in your head you want to get to right and you want to kind of like incrementally get to that point. Yeah. I can totally see that being a good thing to tweak things constantly,

but you just, I feel like you just have to have an idea of what you want it to sound like and then try to get it there and then call it good. But then the problem with me is I just moved studios. So I had to go through all that again. So that, that took months to tune it and it's still not where I want it. So it's again i probably could have hired somebody that would have probably

set it all up in one hour would have been done with it you know probably someone that's good at this kind of thing like i'm not but um yeah i hear you the audio thing is pretty annoying but once you get it good it's fine like like it's just you just sit back and listen that sounds good so one thing you mentioned earlier is if you make like a video on bash or tmux or something like that the content is probably not going to change now another thing you you have is you have uh we mentioned before that you've written some books um so where is it on your website where can i find it um there should be a book section i just changed it um just now actually go under shop i believe there under shop ah yep yep yep yeah so you have um this mastering ubuntu server

book and you've written multiple editions of it as well yep that's it's incredible i can't still get that happened when was the the first edition released i don't even remember what year it was honestly um i'd have to google it i have no idea i mean that i know it wasn't 2014 it would have to be 2016 27 no huh good question you got me i don't even know when the first edition came out well this seems like forever ago where i was going with this is like i imagine the content of the book doesn't change that much between editions i obviously there's going to be different maybe some different tech you want to mention that maybe is being used at that point. But the general things, like using apps and all that sort of stuff, the core of using Ubuntu is going to be basically the same.

So I'm sure a lot of people have always asked you, why have you made multiple editions? What's the point of having more than just one of them? So I guess just explain why there even needs to be different editions well first of all there's gonna be like the little things that change that that kind of bother people because even if it's just just one little thing you're going through a section of the book and then something doesn't work and it could be that there's a very easy like. Maybe a flag isn't in there anymore. And that's defeating to somebody that's reading a book and feeling like they're making progress and they get stuck on something. They're not going to know if it's because they did something wrong. I mean, it's too easy for a book to say, you know, if you find an error, let us know.

Nobody knows if it's an error or not. They don't know if it's them or if it's the person writing it that's the problem. So I think it's them or if it's the person writing it that's the problem so i think it's keeping it consistent with reality my line of thinking is if people were to ask me should i buy the new edition i'd probably say no unless i mean if you've already read the current one then there probably isn't a reason to read the new one because to your point things don't really change all that much but when they do it's always something totally frustrating. The first edition, if I remember correctly, it was own cloud to next cloud.

It happened like weeks after publication. And I was like, darn it. I was like, darn it. I almost could have just, and I, yeah, that was not a good moment. But it was okay. It didn't create a big problem or anything like that. But sometimes these little things happen, or my personal favorite, Ubuntu changes the installer at the end,

so I have to go and redo all the screenshots of the first chapter that I've taken many months before because, oh, they're not going to touch the installer. They never touch the installer. They just touched the installer. They just changed it. Which edition was that with? What's that? What edition was that with? What's that?

What edition was that with? That was with the live installer, the new server installer. I believe that was 2204 or was that 2004? I believe 2004, it was more of like a preview 2204. So was that the newest edition of the book then? We had to deal with that? Yeah, well, yeah. That change happened with the previous edition.

I think that was kind of where it started but basically it was the it was like 40 screenshots in the previous installer because it's the classic debian installer that had like you know like how many steps right and you have to take a picture of each one and it's it's kind of hard to not make it the illustrated guide to installing ubuntu at that point so i was kind of hard to not make it the illustrated guide to installing Ubuntu at that point. So I was kind of happy to see that they changed it. So the number of screenshots could be cut down to a reasonable number. So, but still it's additional work to do. So it's kind of just keeping it current, I think is the best thing. There really isn't much more to it than that. It's just basically making sure that if somebody is going in there for the first time that what they see is going to match reality and not you know frustrate somebody yeah that's always that's always going to be a concern with any anytime you're writing an unchanging piece like

this like a book is obviously the worst example of it but like a video as well. Like you put out a video, for example, and you're just like, here's a video on T-Mux, for example. And what you say on T-Mux is gonna... I'm so sorry, my throat's getting dry. No, no, it's all good. It's all good. If you make a video on T-Mux, what you say now

is gonna be relevant for the current version of T-Mux, and you could always make a newer tmux video and remove the old one but with a book there's always going to be those older editions floating around out there and there's always going to be like the secondhand bookmark and all of that sort of stuff so it's really hard to make sure the content is up to date unlike say a wiki for example where if you go to a wiki the current version is always going to be the version that is shown yep yeah that then you could just yeah edit

it i used to maintain a wiki for the channel before i combined it to the blog i i'd like to see books be more like that i i almost feel like the um edition thing is a little archaic for tech because you know we could have like a fourth edition of something and then like there's a minor change and it's not worth someone buying a new book, but we still want them to have that experience. We could do a 0.1 release and just give everyone a, you know, updated PDF or ebook or something like that. But, you know, the way it is is now i guess the cadence of ubuntu lts releases is probably fine enough for it to be additions but some software moves really fast like they kept trying to get me to cover the interim releases i'm like do you have any idea how bad of an idea that would be to cover an interim release in a book you'll have a nine month

shelf life like i don't think you want that. Right, right. So they have to talk them down sometimes from some of these ideas. It's been fun. There's lots of behind the scenes shenanigans going on when you're writing books. It's always lovely. What made you actually want to write the book in the first place? I like writing for some reason. I don't know what it is. It's just like, satisfying. I just I love structuring, you know, the I just love the writing process. I don't know what it is. It's just like satisfying. I just, I love structure and, you know, the, I just love the writing process. And I'm not going to say I'm like an expert when it comes to writing or anything, because, you know, I could release, you know, something not so great and the editor can make it look good. I feel like I'm decent

though, but it's just something very satisfying about it. And it kind of just happened just out of nowhere. I got an email early in the life of the youtube channel from someone from the publisher just like do you want to write a book and i'm like yeah this is a scam they're gonna ask for money or something and just totally disappear that's what i thought so i checked the email headers and they were legit i'm like okay like so either someone got control of their email account or it's real and And then it's like, they want to give me money? Really? Like, that's what we have to go through when we get something from eBay to know that it's actually legit.

I mean, not eBay. I meant to say YouTube. eBay is another discussion altogether. But no, anyway, a little stutter problem there. But no, seriously, when it comes to these types of things, it's just, I don't know, so much to keep track of, I guess, especially when you're writing about something and things are changing right from underneath your feet. Most of those books are written when Ubuntu Server was in development.

So I was writing it and changing it, along with them changing Ubuntu Server in development. So it was like this catch-up game up until release. I'm sure now that you have the general structure down and the things that don't really change, it's a lot easier to write the new edition. No. No?

It's actually harder. It's way harder. But not because of the writing itself. When it comes to the publisher, I feel like they often make it harder than they need to. It's you just have to look for things like they like someone in the editing team changes all the double quotes and the commands to a different one. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. If somebody copies and pastes this from the PDF into a terminal, they're going to get an answer.

We can't have the double quotes that way. They have to be this way. And then I have to micromanage them because, I mean, even though they're a tech book company and this is what they do, there's so many things with tech books that you don't run into when you have a normal, like a fiction story. You have two characters talking, who cares? But look, communication is communication. They're having a conversation. There's grammar, there's sentence structure. But when you're talking about, you know, this command is camel case, this command isn't, this option is uppercase, this one isn't, this one is double quotes, single quotes, backticks, and all these different things,

you have to micromanage those things. And I'm not sure if it's the publisher or whatever it is, but it's that process I think is at least for me the the longest part of the whole thing because um i just don't want that book to go out and then somebody have all these problems it's like i'm gonna micromanage that thing to death until they hate me and then it comes out so i guess when you were at the first edition, how long did that take you? Six or seven months. And like six, seven months working on it, how much a week you would say? I'd say at least two to three hours a day, depending.

But I like to do things in bulk, which is kind of hard to say or hard to judge. So I might record like 12 YouTube videos in like a day. in like a day right through a month or something like that i could i could sit down and dedicate a day to writing and write you know four or five chapters that day and then never touch it again for another week and not even to submit those chapters and just take a little break or something then right that's why i asked you like another week or instead of per day because i did the same thing yeah it's the only way that ever works for me because i'm i don't believe in multitasking Right, that's why I asked you for the week instead of per day, because I did the same thing. Yeah, it's the only way that ever works for me, because I don't believe in multitasking. It's just a big belief that I have.

We can only do one thing at the same time. And if we tell somebody we multitask, what we're telling them is we're good at putting something down, picking up something else, doing that, and then going back to the first thing again. That's not multitasking. That's still doing one thing at a time so i feel often at least for me by just getting as much of one thing done as i can then that one thing is not going to come back for a while and it's gone and it's gone for a week i don't even have to think about it then i could do this thing and dedicate a day to that thing and then that thing's done and then that's yeah like the only way i can ever get through my workload you know i do the exact same thing i so i i generally spend like all of monday like planning out the videos for the week um then like all of tuesday i'm recording all day

all of wednesday i'm recording whatever's left over uh And then basically the rest of it after that is just editing. I like to do it in very clear chunks like that. Do you have a B-roll day ever? Because that's something I've been having to do. I don't really need that much B-roll for what I do because most of it is like I'm showing off software. So I guess like usually the B-roll I can record like as I'm recording the video.

I'll give you a pro tip like do you do you script at all yeah i don't like hard script it but it's like general like here's the point i need to hit on it's become more and more of a script as i've been going right the like script the off-camera parts don't script the on-camera parts script the b-roll parts and just so what i what i what i'll do is i'll have it written on paper exactly the way i want to say it right and there's nothing but me in the microphone i'm recording only audio and i just have this piece of paper in front of me and i am reading it and then i go back to the computer i play it back and i reenact everything that i said and then

i lay that one track down on top of the audio track done just like that. It's this one trick that I've kind of picked up, but I guess if I'm more B roll heavy, I don't know if I would be than your content, but I feel like for me that works really well because I hear myself talking. I'm like, Oh, I'm talking about this thing. So I got to do that thing.

And then I just lay it down on top of the audio track. And then because it's written, then I feel like in that case you have less editing because you don't you said something about rambling before and i did the same thing i don't have to worry about it because i wrote it i just read what i wrote and i'm done and then but the on-camera parts i don't like to script because you could tell if my eyes are going back and forth i'm probably not that there's anything wrong with that but it's that like if i'm with that, but it said like,

if I'm just addressing the camera, it's fine. But when it's the technical stuff, I like to write that side and then kind of tell a story and to kind of show where they're supposed to be and what's supposed to go, go on. Sometimes just having a, like those little things can just go a long way and help you to make

content because it's like, you know, just saves time. It's just, even if it saves like five minutes, it just, just, just goes so far. Maybe I'll try that out for a couple of videos. You see how it goes.

It takes a while to get used to it, trust me. But once you do, and only certain videos will work this way. Like reviews will work very well this way because I could just create the B-roll. I'll have a B-roll day is when I'm reviewing a hardware product and then another hardware product that's like I'll just record the b-roll for all of it in one day just because I'm doing it anyway set up the camera do all the b-roll save it and then I go to edit it and it's already right there so I don't have to you know set up my product lights and then take them down multiple times just get it all done one day and call it good um but that's just

me being oppositional to what people call multitasking multitasking so no i get it i get it that's fair because i will often like record the demo of what i'm showing like while i'm talking and it's something i've gotten used to and it's caused issues in the past where i've like had to like redo takes and i don't know like i get what you're saying as well like that makes sense for a way to do it as well maybe maybe the tmux videos and those kinds of tutorials cannot be done that way because because you don't know that that you're not going to get an apt install error right you don't know that you know there's going to be a mirror issue or something like that so there's going to be a mirror issue or something like that. So there's going to be some content where that just will not work.

But if it's like you reviewed a product, you already know what you want to say, you spent the time with it, just at that point it becomes a lot easier. But then again, it's YouTube, so whether or not anyone will see the review video, I guess, all that work. But that's just what we go through, I guess. Yeah. Well, it is what it is yep so when you said you started using linux in 2002 is that right yep roughly yeah somewhere it was a college class i took around that time around the time that

star wars episode 2 came out on dvd around the time i was finishing my first linux class there you go. If you do the math, you'll have the exact time period. I was going to ask you what that introduction was like, because that's a very different time period for Linux. Again, that's before Ubuntu was a thing. That was before Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was still Red Hat Linux back then. Oh, yeah. What was Linux like back then?

Yeah, how did you... It was so amazing, like the class. It was... When I was going to college then, I was curious about Linux, and I looked into it, and I saw the distributions. I'm like, I don't have time for that, and I just said no. So I'm not doing that. There's too many distributions.

I don't really want to go through many 2002 yeah and um so so i kind of gave up on it unfortunately so fast forward that same year i'm taking a unix class and i'm really enjoying it and this guy comes in is like i'm gonna be teaching linux next semester as a demo class if anyone wants to try it out so i just i was like the first one i'm like yes okay because i figure i could try linux and have someone else tell me what distribution to use might be better because you know i just want the instruction at this point so the class was amazing i feel like he did it the way it should be done he the first day of class he gave he gives everyone a hard drive and he says this is your Linux install. It's your Linux install. You're going to put your name on it.

You're going to maintain it. And you'll come in. You put it in the computer. It had a removable hard drive bay on the front. So you just slide your hard drive in there with your name on it, boot it up. There's your OS. When you're done, you shut it down, take it out. So we had to maintain the Linux install throughout the class.

And one of the first projects was, first assignments was we had to choose a desktop for the class between GNOME and KDE. And it was an hour of arguing. And my first taste of this, right, these people didn't even know Linux yet. They didn't even have any idea. And they're shown two interfaces between KDE and GNOME. And they have to choose. And we went with KDE because it looks so much cooler than Gnome. Like Gnome looks boring.

We don't want to use that. Let's use KDE. And that's what we did. So it was just so much fun to learn the way that he taught it. But it was so hard because when we first install it, you don't have internet access. Like you'll have a network card. You'll have the network driver.

But you had to manually set up the route to the internet and all these things like when you first install it so you didn't even have like a working internet connection out of the box like you do now um nvidia driver forget it i mean you're going to be tempting fate if you want to go ahead and do that so it was it was tough i mean it was very very tough but i like a challenge so for me it was fine i didn't really care i just didn't want to choose a distribution but i didn't mind a challenge learning linux i guess i was trying to find a good screenshot of kde2 yeah that oh they had this window border they had like dragon wings on the right hand side or something like that i've never seen a theme

that cool again since the funny thing about it is i can see a lot of modern plasma in it which is kind of funny like obviously there's been a lot of rework but think like the the way the um the what do you call like the virtual desktop display the that is the same thing now it's just styled differently yeah it plasma doesn't change i mean it changes a lot but it doesn't wait i just realized it used to use windows style icons for the like full screen stuff before swapping over to the arrows that it uses can we just go back to what i had before i think that was better can we i i hate the arrow for maximize trinity is kde3 it's not exactly kde2 i don't know if that is that still a thing i haven't heard about it it is it's just not oh good yeah it's not doing too much but i i i really don't like the up arrow for maximize and down arrow for minimize on modern plasma we'd like at least oh gosh it's

yeah it's funny how they simplified it when it i mean it it's it looks good but i i felt like before it looked just not necessarily better but in its time period it just stood out more and i feel like now it's it's either windows is stealing from kde or kd is stealing from windows i'm pretty sure windows 11 looked pretty much nearly exactly like kde 5 in a lot of ways so it's kind of interesting to see that um borrowing ideas back and forth when it looked so you know original back then but it's always been a great desktop it's just interesting the direction it went so you mentioned the uh desktop you guys went with but what distro was it at the time it was red hat ah red hat 7.2 or i think it was 7.2 he went to 7.3 during the

class or it could have been 7.1 and went to 7.2 because i know that at some point red hat 8 came out and then 9 and then i using, after the class was over, I was using Red Hat 10 beta until it turned to Fedora, which I don't know if a lot of people knew that it was, Fedora 1 was Red Hat 10, up until like the, what, two weeks or a month before release, and they changed it all of a sudden. Yeah, again, for anyone listening, we're talking about Red Hat Linux,

not Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is back before Enterprise Linux existed. Yep. This is back when... That's what they had, Red Hat Linux. In the earlier versions of Red Hat Linux, we also called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Hmm.

I think at one point I had the box DVD and everything. Fun times. It was such a different time. And I remember people were like, how did you get on the internet? We've been trying. We can't figure it out. I'm like, I did this. And they're like, oh, now we're online.

Nowadays, it's like we have a live image, and we're online from pretty much get go. Unless you're using some weird network device device most things just work like there are some exceptions for weird laptops but if it has an intel card it just works right and if it doesn't have an intel card just make it have an intel card because it's easier to do that than deal with broadcom drivers it's like it's funny i see people just try to force their wi-fi card to work on linux i'm like just go on ebay12, buy an Intel card and call it a day. You won't even have a problem again unless it's a Lenovo and they brick your computer if you swap your Wi-Fi card.

I always hate that. But the Wi-Fi issue, I remember when it was like a network card issue in general, it didn't even matter if you had a Wi-Fi card. Anything networking was hard. And now it's just a few naughty providers of network cards that are wi-fi cards that don't play nice upstream but i guess i'll take that if that's our biggest problem so what were you so what when you when you went to go study what was your intention with doing that before like obviously the linux class came along i didn't i don't think I had it figured out back then.

I knew I liked computers, but I just wasn't... I don't know if I really had it figured out what in particular I wanted to do. I think I was really fixating on programming at the time because that was pretty much the only thing equivalent to DevOps back then. I hate to use the word DevOps in talking about programming, but I'm learning C++

and having a lot of fun and thinking I'm going to be a developer, but I liked it, but I didn't like it at the same time. I felt like something was missing. I think Linux was that missing piece, but then I decided I ended up liking that more than programming. So now programming is more of a hobby and Linux is what I do. So I kind of like that better because I can write code and not really care because I'm just doing it for fun. But then when it comes to Linux, it just became my hyper-focus. I couldn't, it's like, yes, this is it. Like I knew. And then at the time people were like, well, there's barely any jobs. Why would you want that? I mean, you'd be lucky to find one job for a Linux admin. I'm like, I don't care. Like back then, it was hard to find a Linux admin job.

You'd be lucky to see one on a job ad in your area. It was literally that rare. And then now it's like you type Linux admin or DevOps and you have like pages upon pages of results. It's kind of funny, all the people telling me that it's not going to amount to anything and there's no jobs. And I'm like, I don't care. It's fun. That's what I want to do. And now it's like they it went a completely different direction i guess i

got really lucky it wasn't it wasn't an analysis thing i didn't know it was going to be huge i'm like that's what i want if it takes me longer to find a job so what it is kind of funny it is kind of funny you had that that impression of it obviously, it was still really new at that point. It would only be around, what, was it 96 that Linux started? Am I getting the year wrong? I know you'd find Windows admin jobs that have, like, a bit of Linux in it or something like that would come every now and then, but just Linux admin, that was hard to find.

But where I was going with that is there was a lot of unix work that would have still existed at that point and nowadays most of the unix work that exists is a lot of legacy stuff so the fact and the internet was obviously becoming this this bigger thing so you have this like when linux came along it was a perfect opportunity because obviously these unix systems were often like expensive. They were on dedicated hardware. And then Linux comes along as the Internet's coming along. And it's this free thing.

And people want to host websites now they don't have to pay for anything. So they can install this thing. And obviously it took a little bit of time for that stuff to come along. But once it was there, you have this free thing that anybody can use and you can just run a website and boom perfect perfect time for it to happen if it was any later i don't think linux would have had as much of a massive like impact as it did i feel like it would, it probably would have picked up steam over time, but being there as the internet was being adopted, I think was what really, really helped Linux in its early days. Yeah. I would say that's a pretty good point. Yeah. I would say that definitely

helped it out, but I think it's, I don't know if this helped it out at all, but it had this rebel mentality that I don't think it has now. Like back it was like you know we have these the big software companies doing what they're doing and you have these renegades they're just coming in there and doing what those windows are making it look easy even though it's not easy but you know they're they're producing this and if they had this like oppositional vibe to them even though that really wasn't what they were trying to do they're developing software that's for a purpose. But everyone thought of them like the renegades, the rebels, or like the software vigilantes are coming in here with this crazy new license and trying to do things differently. And they're doing what Unix is doing, but you could download it and you don't

have to like call anybody or have a license key. It was just incredible. Nowadays, it's, I think we kind of take it for granted. I kind of missed that rebel mentality that it had back then yeah i said in there like windows refund day happened where he went to microsoft and demanded money back for their keys they didn't need because they were gonna run linux that was so incredible i have not thought about that in so long but i do i do remember that it was so incredible. I have not thought about that in so long, but I do remember that. It was so hilarious when people would talk about their experiences calling Microsoft and asking for their money back when their license came with the computer or something.

It was just so funny. That was a good time. That was all probably back when you had Windows XP that would come on the computer. If it's a business computer, if the Windows Vista DVD that nobody used if you wanted to upgrade but everyone stayed on XP I guess

I guess that goes to show like the change in audience of Linux like nowadays it is a lot more like just regular people it's not just the people who are using Linux aren't necessarily like hardcore free software advocates.

It's... You will find people who, myself included, will just... For a lot of people, when I do this podcast, I have them on Discord. It's fine. I don't really care. I play a lot of video games, and almost all video games are proprietary.

And you've got this very different audience now whereas if you go back to like those early days you did have a lot of people who were like free software or death everything must be free software and this right yeah that's yeah there's been a like toning down of the way that people look at the software in this space. But one thing I do want to mention about Linux is if you go back and read some of those early Linux emails, it was oftentimes Linux is great, but guys, just hold out longer for the free software kernel we're gonna the fsf is gonna finally get their kernel done like even even it's like the like 2000 2002 people were still waiting for the fsf to get their kernel done and it just never happened even today like it's still

i mean the practicality of the free software or die kind of thing it doesn't really work i mean it's it's like good that it exists and and i love it okay so i'm not saying it's bad i'm just saying you're against you know everyone i everyone. I mean, because you think about it, like, how far are you willing to go with that? Are you willing to not have a Blu-ray player on your TV because you don't have the firmware code for it? So you decide not to watch movies. That's fine. If you don't want to do that, I'm just saying you're making that decision. Back when this was, this movement came out, I'm thinking, well, your PlayStation 2 is an open source, but you're happily playing that. But God forbid, it's your computer that's not open source, but nobody looks at the PlayStation

and even bats an eye. So if you, the free software, all the things, I mean, nowadays, you might not even be able to have a microwave. But I'm not saying that justifies the fact that, you know, software isn't free. It's just like, that's what we're up against. It's like we have these appliances and these embedded systems and all these different things, which are probably running Linux, but they're not open source, which is kind of another rub altogether.

But to make this movement happen, we gotta be able to just get people interested in this that don't really care. Nobody cares if they have a smart microwave that's going to like, you know, email their phone or something and they change the operating system or they have the source code for it because it's going to make their popcorn pop that much faster. I don't want a microwave that even wants to email me.

I don't want a smart microwave. Can we just don't do that, please? Oh, no, no, no. I use that example because it's weird. I'm sure it exists. That's the thing. That's the sad part. Oh, I'm sure they exist, no. I use that example because it's weird. I'm sure it exists. That's the thing. That's the sad part. I'm sure they exist. Yeah. And I'm sure somebody's writing a comment right now to let you know their favorite model of said microwave. But I mean, we have to get those people to care.

And that's why it's hard, because it's like trying to get someone to care about their software freedoms when all they want to do is turn a box on and watch a movie or play a game and go to sleep. And that's as much as they care about it. That's what we have to try to crack. And that's what's always been hard because it's like, again, how far do you go with it? You say, oh, my software, my computer has to be open source. Well, what about your cell phone? Well, you could just choose not to have a cell phone if you don't have the source code for it. But your employer might require you to have a cell phone. And if you don't have the source code for it, but your employer might require you to have a cell phone.

And if you don't have one, they might provide you with one and you'll end up with a cell phone anyway. So it's just this weird world we live in where software choices are just in so many different directions than they were before. We had our computer and we had this dumb phone that looked like a calculator at the time. And now we have computers and everything. And it's like much more of a target for the free software foundation to hit i mean at this point i mean what doesn't have a chip in it what are your thoughts on the term not specifically on the movement itself but on the term free software because i've always felt that the term itself has done nothing but made it more confusing for regular people i i've said many times before like the term we we can have oh

well free software doesn't mean free as in beer it means free as in freedom like if you have to qualify what the word you're using means i think you've already lost the first battle. I think so too. I feel like with technologists, you had them at source code, right? I feel like a lot of tech people, even if they're not developers, they would probably like to look at the source code for something that they're using, not because they want to become a programmer, but because it's cool. Like you have this piece of software, you can kind of look at how it's written. And I think that having the source code is something that is very important, but at the same time, you know, the proprietary versus not. I'm sorry, I think I'm getting off into a completely

different tangent here, but when it comes to the free software movement itself, it's, I just, it's just what I keep coming back to is it's just in practice is where it gets really hard. But the message, again, when you go to the technologist, you had them at source code. You don't really have to convince them. And that's kind of where the point is I'm going to. You don't have to convince them that it's important to have the source code. They know, and they could probably tell you what source code does. But the average person that's buying bread at the supermarket doesn't even know what source code is. And again, we go down to that because as technologists, we care.

But we have to find something that non-technologists care about. It has to be something we all care about, right? If only some of us care about it, then how can we expect a change? We all have to care about it to make a case for this. And I think that's the part that they they really haven't it's like they're talking to the technologists they're also talking to the non-technologists but they're they're only within the range of technologists so even if they release this white paper on why windows is bad the only ones seeing it are technologists they're not getting that the people that convince the people

right yeah it's like you're preaching all they do is preach to the choir and they do get a few people here and there that wouldn't have known about them, but you might be able to argue that those people might have been technology fans anyway. I mean, it's kind of funny when you think about people ask, like, why isn't

Linux number one? Why didn't the year the Linux desktop happened? Because nobody cares. It's an operating system. Nobody has a conversation about operating systems. Like we do, you do, I do, in the industry we do, but you're trying to tell me the person who is not using a computer for their job cares what operating system they're using at home. They don't care. And honestly, it's like when you see these articles, Linux won't catch on because of this, this, and they have all these numbers.

It's like, people don't like change. That's it, it's that simple. You can give them a distribution that has 100% compatibility for every piece of software ever invented or will be invented that runs all of your applications 10 times faster and has an interface that's so easy that there's no training classes for it

because it's so simple that literally everybody just automatically knows how to use it. Like the best thing ever. Nobody uses it. Why? Because it's change. They don't want to change anything. And, you know, these are the people we're trying to talk to about the free software and why the source code is important. The same people that really don't know what Windows is other than that splash screen that comes up when they start their computer. That's what we're up against. And that's what we that's who we have to educate. And unless we get them, then I mean, we're just preaching to ourselves at that point. And I think that's the biggest problem. There is this, this Windows 10 survey that someone posted like six years ago, Microsoft was asking like,

how likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague? I need you to understand that people don't have a conversation about operating systems. I've seen it. That's where I got that. That's one of the things that inspired it too, because, you know, you can apply that to Linux. Like, you know, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off,

but it's like I knew immediately. It's all good. I just want to bring that up. Yeah. Like a message comes up, you know, how likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend? And then, you know, of course, the meme, just in case someone didn't hear it, is someone basically saying, I need you to understand

that people don't generally have conversations about operating systems. And that, to me, tells you everything about the year of the Linux desktop and why it didn't happen. People see an operating system as an appliance. Not very many people go in their car and wonder what OS it's using and whether it's open source or whether or not they can run a live image on their Ford. Nobody's trying to do that, right? But it's just interesting that how we come about this is different, but the message has to hit the people that need to hear it. Otherwise, it's just we've got to make them care about it.

Right now, again, they see it as an appliance. They get in the car. They drive it. They use their microwave. They put their milk in their fridge. They don't think about what OS is running. They're watching TV. They don't care what servers Netflix has in the back end.

They don't care what system it is, what OS it's running on the TV. They turn on the TV. They watch their show. They turn on the TV. They watch their show. They turn on their game system, their gaming PC. They play their game. We have to hit them right there. Otherwise, the only way that Linux will catch on on the desktop is when the desktop itself dies out and its replacement comes. That'll probably run Linux.

And that's going to be what does it, unfortunately. But that's, unfortunately, the way I see it playing out. But ultimately, Linux doesn't care if it's successful or not. It's just going to happily exist in whatever form we want to use it in. And I think the fact that Linux doesn't care if it's successful in a desktop or I think that probably tells you everything you need to know. It's happily the way it is. A good example of this is one of my roommates at the last place i was staying at

uh she was running a a laptop that had shipped with windows 7 and this was like in 2022 or something like that was still running windows 7 and was running word 2012 or something like that, because that's what was on the device when she got it or whatever year, basically she got the device when Windows 7 came out, I don't remember the exact year, 14, 12, whatever something in that range, a really outdated version, a really outdated OS

and she didn't even consider it a problem it's just, this is what I have on my computer this is my computer this is this is how my computer works yeah like i don't know what an os is i don't know what software is it i just click the thing and it just does the thing right like car mechanics aren't going to understand why nobody or not nobody but why some people don't care what kind of engine the car has it gets them to work him back and and does without any problem. That's all they care about.

But to a mechanic, you know, you have to know what engine is in that car. You got to know like what's going on in there. And I think that's how we approach technology. We want to know how it's built and we have this passion. And I feel like sometimes we'll assume everyone has the same passion as us. And some people do, but people come at technology from different walks of life. And some people care and some don't. But ultimately, when we could find something everyone has in common, like if Microsoft has a big breach, I mean, even that doesn't seem to lower their desktop market share half the time.

When Apple had a big iCloud leak, no one really cared after a couple of days. Right, right. No one really cared after a couple of days. Right, right. So it's just the industry is changing, but we're just trying to see what it's going to change into. But it's almost like if we don't push it a certain direction, technology just goes its direction. And I think Linux will definitely be a big part of that.

I think it'll probably outlast anything else. But I didn't know there'd be a Windows 11, and here we are. You made a good point about uh whatever device comes after the desktop would like to be linux based and i think the steam deck is like a it's it's sort of an example in a direction of that right because you can run the steam deck have no idea what linux is and for the most part it if you just are in the the linux the steam deck game mode you're just playing games like yeah mate you don't even know what it's running yeah it just doesn't matter yeah that doesn't matter well i i see i feel like we would have the next thing now

and the reason why we don't is because of thunderbolt um honestly what is your because your deal on thunderbolt i need to know this i'm not sure what the problem is here because well thunderbolt is just we had plug and play like nobody noticed we achieved this okay with when usb 3 came out unless it was a printer it worked plug and play okay but thunderbolt it makes it hard and so the way i see the future is the desktop is dead i know this isn't what anyone wants to hear but what will keep the desktop alive is gamers so for gamers it'll be alive like when people want to build a computer they'll buy a chassis they'll buy a gpu i don't see that going away but if you're not a gamer and you're just a casual user you're not going to have a desktop anymore like it'll just be for gamers only you'll have like a laptop and you'll have a docking station with the gpu in it they could play all

your games not like the games the high-end games with gpu but it'll be decent and we have all this technology now where your laptop can be your only machine with thunderbolt you can have everything hooked up but we had to make it complicated we have different levels of thunderbolt we have one through four. And some of them can use a GPU. Some of them can't because you don't have enough lanes. But when you go and buy a computer, just like the average person, they say, oh, I need Thunderbolt. This computer on the box says it has Thunderbolt.

So I think it's what I need. They take it to the cash register. They buy it. They get home. They can't use a GPU because they don't have enough lanes in their Thunderbolt or it's Thunderbolt 2 and not 4. Or, you know, it just complicates this so much. But once this is uncomplicated, then, which it didn't need to be complicated in the first place, we'll have a situation where someone has a laptop that can play the games you could play now on high settings, for the most most part that could be their one and

their one and only machine and then and they just dock it it's their desktop they take it with them it could be a phone i mean i i know ubuntu's convergence thing way back was a little bit too soon but something kind of like that but i still kind of see it going that direction but we're kind of delayed because we had to over complate pretty much every technology that's around it. But once we converge on something, I could see the one device thing being a very big component of this, but the desktop will, will, I think the gamers will keep it alive for their use case, but for people that don't care I mean, they're all,

they're already probably fine with an Intel NUC at this point for the average person. So probably wouldn't be too far of a stretch to have a one device for all. But I think at that point, then, you know, we have a new platform or something that evolves from this. And then Linux is a greater fit because it's more adaptive. And then next thing you know, you know, it's a sure fit for this kind of thing. And I think that's when it kind of becomes mainstream. But desktops, the desktop Linux, no, I don't think Linux even cares if it's dominant there. So it wants the server and that's when it kind of becomes mainstream, but desktops, the desktop Linux. No, I don't think Linux even cares if it's dominant there.

So it wants the server and that's what it has. Well, that's as good a place as any to end it. I guess we're coming up on the two hour mark. So unless there's anything else you want to say, we'll just end with some other things to say, but I think time is limited as I said

I had things written down I think we hit on about half of them so there's plenty more for another episode at some point in the future awesome, that'd be great where can people find you? give people all your socials learnlinux.tv

everything should be there basically it should be that simple oh okay awesome um my twitter should be on there the youtube page is on there the books is on i have all the all the things i'm um engaged with should be linked right from that place so okay awesome um any yeah i guess already said that nothing else you want to say just that's it um i think that's what i think that's good i think we we did touch on a lot of things but i guess you know if we need to elaborate on something some other time you know there's time in the future so projects you want to highlight that maybe are coming out at some point i wish i could but it's not like it's secretive it's like i hate promising things if my interests shift fair point but it's not like it's secretive. It's like, I hate promising things if my interests

shift, but there's a couple of book ideas I'm working on. I might do both, which would be overkill knowing me. I probably will, but I don't want to over-promise. So there's like a course I'm working on. There's a couple of book ideas I have going on and about like 30, 40 video ideas that I have in various stages of completion. So I can tell you there's going to be some not huge things, but some pretty big projects that are going to come out that are going to be a lot of fun. So I think people

will enjoy. So just go to learnlyndex.tv periodically and eventually you'll see something new there. Awesome. I guess I'll do my outro then. Cool. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos over there six-ish days I guess I'll do my outro then cool so my main channel is Brody Robertson I do Linux videos over there

6-ish days a week go check it out I don't know what will be out there when this comes out because I have recorded a bunch ahead so this will probably be out April sometime so check out the channel you'll see some stuff there my gaming channel is Brody on games i stream there

twice a week uh currently playing through god of war but i'm probably done by the time you guys are seeing this so probably devil may cry 4 i don't know check it out and also neo's world ends with you uh if you're listening to the audio version of this you can find the video version on youtube at tech over t if you're watching video, you'll find the audio on basically any podcast platform. Search Tech Over Tea and you will find it. How do you want to end off the show? What do you want to say?

Go Linux, I guess. I don't know. I wasn't that close. Yeah, you did. See you guys later.