 Welcome to the livings cast with Martin and Matt. Hi, I'm Matt, how's it going? I'm doing well, Martin, how are you? Well, well, what you been up to this week? Well, I've been struggling for the last six months trying to get MPD and N-C-M-P-C-P-P. It's the worst name for a music player ever. But I finally got to working this week. My quest to finally stop paying each month for Spotify is finally here. That's what I've been doing. I've never heard of those. Where is it streaming or is it? No, they're just basically players for your own collection of music, but they're terminal based. So MPD stands for Music Player Daemon. It's a music server. It runs in the background every time your system starts up. And N-C-M-P-C-P-P, I only can say that because I haven't written it down in front of me. That's like a console terminal based music player. So I'm a nerd, so I try to use everything in the terminal, so that's what I've been doing. It's, you know, it's fine. Well, I don't know. It sounds a bit elitist to me. What's wrong with the GUI or Clementine or? Those are for noobs, man. Come on. I'm gonna work on Neolobnex. That's the email client in the terminal, so. Oh, that's a bit too high level for myself. I'm quite happy with web-based emails. Oh, I can't stand it. I can't stand web, I can't do it. It just drives me nuts. I have to have a client. Anyways, what about you, Martin? What have you been up to? Not a fat lot. It's been a bit busy with work and whatnot. But I took a bit of a movie from LastPass, LastPass even, to Bitwarden. Yeah, LastPass has got a lot of bells and whistles and it automatically fills it out and stuff like that. Bitwarden I've got, because I've got a two-factor authentication key. So I thought I'd start using that instead of dealing with texts and whatnot and logging in for my Google mail, my Google login whenever I need to check things like that. But yeah, Bitwarden seems okay. For the $10 a year, I mean, you can't really go wrong. I mean, if you don't want the two-factor authentication, you just want the basic, you can just use it as is for free. Yeah, I got the free version. I don't, I probably should get the two-factor, but I haven't, I haven't done that yet. Yeah. I've been too busy messing with my elitist console terminal applications. See, it sounds like he just needs some GUI on the go. Let's have a look. So if we go on to the news. Contact information, Martin. Oh, right, okay. Got it. Right. If we don't have that, we can't be contacted. That means we don't exist. All right, so let's go. All right, you can contact us on Twitter at linuxcast. And Matt can be contacted on at MTWB. And myself, Martin, could be contacted at Martin, Twitter, the number two, and you. As in, why, oh, you, not as in you. So we've been up to this. Sorry, are you going to cut some of this? No, who cares? Oh, rubbish. No, it's much more entertaining if it's a, you know. Keep the bloopers in. It's natural, man. Yeah, maybe someday we'll cut the bloopers. But you know, let them see how the sausage is made. As they say. Exactly. Well, you probably have more bloopers from me than actual show content. So what new item you got this week, Matt? All right, so Microsoft Edge has come to Linux. Now, about six months ago, Microsoft announced that it was leaving its own proprietary browser magic behind and moving to a Chromium-based web browser. And then surprisingly and shockingly, they decided that they would bring out that version of Microsoft Edge for Linux. And OMG Ubuntu this week managed to get a look, first look at it. And from everything everybody, you know, has been saying, it actually looks pretty good. Now, I don't use Chromium at all, or Chrome. I'm a Firefox guy. No, I don't use a terminal-based browser. I looked into them, they're not that great. Oh no. But from everything everybody said, the YouTube videos I've watched, the Microsoft Edge for Linux looks, it looks like Chrome. I mean, I had to say it was like, why, I mean, it looks good, but it looks like Chrome. And that's what I'm so confused about. It's like, why did they bother creating this and then just have it look exactly the same as Chrome? Now, I mean, it has some different features. Like the settings menu apparently looks different and has privacy, different privacy options and stuff. But for the most part, it looks like Chrome. And other than that privacy stuff, I'm not exactly sure why you'd want to use that instead of Firefox. Because Firefox has even more privacy options or Brave even. If you had to use a Chromium-based, why not use Brave, right? So I'm confused as to why this exists on Linux. I mean, Microsoft supposedly hates Linux. I mean, they don't hate Linux anymore, but it just seems like a waste of their developer's time. To me, that's my opinion on it. I mean, obviously throwing a bone or something like that. I mean, there is the vast, a very small minority of websites that people may well be able to use. The do does work correctly on edge. But I've done exactly what you've done. Just to save install it, I've just watched some YouTube videos. Performance is about the same as Chromium. Chromium maybe comes out a bit, a couple of milliseconds ahead on certain things. But yeah, I mean, I'll take it or leave it. The choice is yours. What does every Windows user first do? They open up Edge, they download Chromium, Firefox, and they can't delete it. But that's what everyone ever come across, ever use Edge for, is to actually download the actual browser of the choice. But we'll see. Some people are looking for Twitter and using it, but we've got that much choice in web browsers. Yeah. I think... H3's own. I mean, I'm not saying that it shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that a lot of people are looking at this as a precursor to Microsoft bringing their other software to Linux, like Microsoft Word and all the rest of the office stuff. Yeah, I don't think I know. I can't see that happening. I mean, it'd be cool if it did, but I don't think it's gonna... I mean, because they did bring Teams over last year. And now they have this. So, I mean, maybe, but it just seems... They did bring it to Mac, and nobody... But more people use Mac than use Linux. I mean, it doesn't seem like something that they do. So, I don't think that this is the harbinger of Microsoft software we expect it to be. And it'd be different if it was running on Chromium. Everything runs on Chromium, right? So, I mean, it would be cool if they'd forked Firefox. You know? I mean, that'd be more interesting because there's not a lot of great forks of Firefox out there. So, I mean, that would have been more cool. That would have been more interesting to me. Anyways, what about your link? Yeah, I'm going for an OS. It's called SEPTO OS. Well, just on DistroWatch for what it's worth when you sort through the page rankings and whatnot. I just noticed this trending recently. I mean, it's basically for your tour and the nimity with KDE. So, it's a nice-looking little distro. I've only messed about with it. I was able to get onto stuff that's blocked from my home. I mean, I've got web safe, so I can't go on any gambling or any sites like that. I just tried the gambling, nothing else major. But it got me through. So, if you just want to keep a USB to the side, just to stop getting tracked, if you're looking for certain things online, cars or whatever, or you're shopping, it seems fine. Nice-looking, relatively lightweight. Doesn't come with a lot, but you can always install what you want, but all worked out the box where I used it for. It seems okay. So, if anyone's looking for some sort of tutorial alternative to tails or things like that, you may want to give this a try. The nice-looking KDE support. Yeah, it looked good based on Debian Stable. I've never had success installing Debian before. I mean, I've only tried once, but maybe I'll give it a try. What, Debian? Yeah, it's based on Debian Stable. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll be using apt a lot. All right, let's do our main topic. This is your topic this week, Martin. So why don't you explain to us what the main topic of this week is? All right, so it's elitism. Is there a danger of the penguin master race? I mean, we've all heard of the PC master race. I mean, I think, well, there's no two ways about it. The elephant in the room, there is elitism in Linux because you have to be quite computerate to actually go down the route of installing Linux. And it isn't a case of, well, obviously he's coming pre-installed now, but people have to burn the distro. They've got to log out of disable fast boot on Windows. They've got to press escape, F2, F10, delete, whatever, get into the BIOS changer settings and start up Linux and go through that. So I mean, you've got to, you have got a big computer to use Linux. And I do think that the vast majority of us or tinkerers and tatters that actually love have in the system exactly how they want. I mean, in terms of elitism, obviously there's, your power users and things like that and your noobs and various things like that. It's just, I don't want to say it's not noob friendly, but you do have to do a lot of digging for certain things. And you might well pull a webpage up from 2010 and you're just scratching your head. And you could go to the forums, obviously, and try and find someone with the same problem. Or if you're unfortunate enough to actually ask a new question, you're going to get the read the F in manual or haven't you tried to top right, there's a search button type in your query, but there's certain bespoke things that you may actually look for that are not coming up on your search criteria. I mean, I did a search for something before, couldn't get anything. So I dropped it in the chat and someone came back to me quite quickly, but it was like, oh, if you checked out the so and so and had a look here, you just saw this. And I like got back and says, oh yeah, thanks. I did do a search, couldn't see anything. But for other people that searching for the same thing, here's a link below and I just saw and I saw this before with different ones. I'll search if the moderators won't come. I just say, oh yeah, it's quite easily searchable. Please see the link down below so people can click it. And I mean, I check my query a couple of days after and it was like 60 people that had hit it. So it wasn't a case of it was a noob noob. Someone had actively searched for this question and got the answer. I just think little things like that. And I think people used to Linux actually forget exactly what it is like when you do start. Terminal can be scary. I mean, it can be a cinch if you've got the right instruction. You're only copying and pasting unless it from a reputable site. You don't start copying, pasting any old scripts. I mean, what do you think from your side? How long have you been using Linux? So I've been using it full time since 2017. But you're right. You're right sometimes, Martin. I think that it really depends on what community you're in. So like the Arch community is notorious for read the effing manual. I mean, you go to the forums or the Reddit or whatever and they're gonna point you towards Arch-Wiki. Arch-Wiki is great. I mean, it's a fantastic resource, but it's not written in language that's understandable by someone who's never used a computer for like my mother could go to the Arch-Wiki and like, what does that need that mean? It's not gonna know what it is. But I think other communities are much more, you know, quote unquote, new friendly. So like Ubuntu community is much more new friendly. They will tell you to do your searching first, but I think because they attract more new Linux users, they're more interested in helping people even if it's an obvious question. But basically, the Linux world or whatever is based on two main, you know, for the desktop anyway. It feels like the vast majority of people are either using something that's based on Ubuntu, either Ubuntu itself or Mint or whatever, or they're using something that's based on Arch and I think those communities are really kind of opposite of each other in terms of new friendliness. Now, I mean, obviously there's a, then you get into the whole Red Hat and CentOS and OpenSUSA communities and stuff and they're, they could be very prickly too. Like OpenSUSA does a really good job with their community. I've experienced, but if you try to get into like the Fedora or whatever, some of their support is not all that great either. But I think it really depends on both the community and what your question is. I mean, because I mean, some people ask questions that are very, I mean, very simple, but I think it all, I mean, because you're talking about how hard it is to get into Linux and for like a new user and way back when Ricky was helping me do this podcast, we talked about one of the things that was kind of preventing Linux from going mainstream and one of the things we talked about was having to go through and burn an ISO and getting into your legacy BIOS and all that stuff. I mean, that's the biggest hurdle, right? And finding information on how to get past, formatting your disk, GDR, MBR, whatever, because Windows requires one and Linux requires another and it can go on the other and it's all very confusing. It's not easy when any Joe Schmo can go on the internet and publish a blog on how to and they might not know what the hell they're talking about. It's the PPA problem, like in Ubuntu, you get your PPAs or whatever and they might be out of date by years and years. So you might get online and find instructions that no longer apply to Ubuntu or Arch or whatever. They were from 10 or 15 years ago. So it's a huge problem. I'm not sure about the elitism thing though, because I mean, are there Linux? Really, Linux is the problem of people wanting, are not interested in helping new users really elitism or is it just, I don't know, stubbornness? Or disinterest in having new users at all? I don't know, it's something. Yeah, I mean, it's like when, I don't know, when some drama happens, whether it's mint, not having snaps pre-installs and things like that. At the end of the day, it's down to the developer, things like that. I mean, obviously, people get tribal but at the end of the day, Linux is there for choice. I mean, you could sit there for four hours and just tatter about with the amount of stuff that's available to you. What I do enjoy about Linux is the amount of stuff that you literally can do. And look, I've done that or I've changed this or I've changed my desktop environment, things like that. But with the elitism, I mean, with the PC Master Race, I mean, they just think they're better than everyone else. And obviously, there are parts of that to it, to every software, look at Apple, your Apple people, things like that. But yeah, there is elitism for sure, definitely, but that's the reason with everything else, I just think, I mean, there's gotta be really at the end of the day, there's gotta be someone that's a lot better at Linux than the next guy. Just from a new user coming in, it's maybe a bit more helpful. Like you say, the Arch Wiki may well be difficult for your average person to read through because you pick up information day by day, week by week. But as opposed to, oh, here you go, just start them on Arch and things like that. But it's like, okay, so we'll know if you're gonna start anywhere you're going to, I mean, you're going to was brilliant years and years ago, because you actually had a CD with your magazine that was free or something like that, with your going to it. So you could just get started, read the information and try this new operating system. It's like an AOL disk back in the day. Oh, I found one of those the other day when I was in the loft. I have a book in my view right now. I can see the book. It's like three feet away from me. It's on a Buntu 8.10, I think. And it still has the CD in it. So I also can see a certification thing for Red Hat Linux. I'm not sure which Red Hat it is, but that also has the CD in it. I don't know why I keep these books, but I still have them. That's how long I've been interested in Linux. Those things are really old. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But I have a bone to pick with us a Linux lead-ism thing, Martin. Linux is better than Windows, it is, just is. It can be argued that you can do more on Windows than you can on Linux. It can be proven that you can do more on Windows than you can on Linux for the most part. I don't necessarily think that that's the right way to look at it, because you can pretty much do everything on Linux that you can do on Windows. You just have to do it differently, right? But I think anybody who actually gets in and starts learning about Linux and using it and adapting their workflow to actually, once you've moved off and away from Adobe products and learn how to use GIMP and Inkscape and Kaden Live and all that stuff, you adapt and you may miss some certain features from those products, but you also, then maybe you are like me and you log back into Windows and it starts doing crap that you forgot how annoying Windows can be. I think that's, it's hard to, it's kind of a, I don't know the word that is described, but it's an overall sense that Linux is better in so many different ways, but I mean, Linux has its own problems too, I suppose. So it's hard to argue, it's just really hard. I've talked myself out of the argument that Linux is better, but I think that Linux is way better, but does Linux, I guess the question I wanna ask is, does Linux Elitism, I mean, say I agree with you that Linux Elitism is there, does it hurt anything? I mean, because obviously it hurts that noobs can't get the help they want, but then they, do you think that they're scared away from Linux altogether or they just try a different distro and find help elsewhere? Yeah, I think a good introduction, I mean, there's plenty of videos out there on YouTube, just a right introduction from the right people to get started on it, things like that. I mean, there's no bones about it, Linux is far better than Windows in resources and the way that you can stick it on the laptop from 10, 12 years ago, even longer, some of them. You can update whenever you wanna update, that's my favorite part about Linux. Well, yeah, you can just let it update while you're actually working on it. I was thinking about it the other day, actually, I was thinking, yeah, games, catching up there, getting a lot better, go down the proton route if you want, that's fine. And I thought, one thing that Windows has got over Linux is the printer drivers. You've had problems with them? Yeah, I think Linux users have a lot of problems with printer drivers, I think. I haven't got one set up yet and I've saw a couple of things as I'm traveling through. I think, brother's about your best bet to have some decent Linux support, but we're not gonna cater to the majority, aren't we? I have an Epson and it's wireless and it works fine. I've never had any problems with it. No, it doesn't have full functionality, like I can't go through and use the scanner wireless or whatever. So I'd have to go to Windows on that, but I mean, who scans anything? I mean, I just, the funny thing is, I have had to scan something because I say who scans I think, but I had to scan something like four or five months ago so I had to go into Windows. So I guess you're right, the printer things, but I think, do people really print that off me? Is that really, I mean, I think if you're looking at the biggest hurdles to get into Linux, you're looking at installing it and to begin with, getting past the ISO and getting into the book menu and all that stuff because I mean, every computer is different. I mean, how do you get into the boot menu on your computer? You know, maybe it's F12, maybe it's Escape, maybe it's F1, maybe it's G, maybe it's R. It could be any of those things depending on what computer you have and you have to be deliberately interested, I mean, really interested in installing Linux in order to go get on Google, search for your specific model of computer and find out how to do that and it's the same way with learning how to use a package management. So if you're in a boot, you have to learn how to use app or you have to learn how to use their software things. You have to learn how to use Snap, whatever. If you're on an Irish, you have to learn how to use AOR. I think the thing about Linux that really differs the Linux user base from the Windows user base is that Windows users can just go on there and things just for the most part work and when something goes wrong they either throw their computer in the trash or they take it to the Geek Squad, you know, or whatever. If you're on Linux, you start off with the idea in your head that you have to learn. You have to think and you have to be willing to go out and search for the answer and if you're not willing to do that, I think that that's really what leads to a lot of the whole read, death and manual thing is because every Linux user has to be willing to go out and learn on their own and if they don't have that willingness to learn and find out the answers on their own, they're gonna encounter the problems of asking stupid questions or noob questions, excuse me, not stupid questions, noob questions and that's where they're gonna encounter that wall of, hey, you went on, this answers like really readily available on Google because I mean, in my experience, remember, I'm much more removed from being a noob than other people, but in my experience, I've come across some of the, go read the manual thing, I mean, everybody has, but I mean, for the most part, if I've actually asked a really good question and I haven't, and there really isn't an answer on the internet, for the most part, I haven't seen the pushback of not being able to answer. I've gotten, for the most part, I get my answer to the question now. Arco, what I use for my daily distro, the guy who runs it, he's the most unhelpful person in the history of the universe when it comes to support because he makes YouTube videos on every little feature and he's made like 1,700 videos on his distro and that's like really impressive, right, but when you ask a question on their Telegram or whatever, he goes, go find the video. Like, dude, you've made 1,700 videos and YouTube searches about the most trash you've ever seen in your life, how am I supposed to find the specific video on the one problem I have and it's the, oh, I don't know, so yeah. Are we ready for the apps now, or do you got anything more to say about the Linux lead-ism? No, I mean, I'll definitely agree that wouldn't you actually dive in and you go over the hurdles and things like that? Internet's a wonderful place, a bit of Google foo. Once you've showed the interest and you're actually on board with it all and you've got used to using different packages and whichever one fits the way you like, I mean, yes, some of them aren't very good looking but they're all improving and getting better and better. Better and better, I mean, there's some absolute brilliant apps on Linux. You just wouldn't find on Windows without reading every single thing. Be careful what to click in case you've got Chrome installed with God knows how many web pages that it keeps booting you in. There's never anything like that on Linux which is absolutely superb. But yeah, it's just a good little topic to chat about, I think. But at the end of the day, there's hierarchies in every way, trovely some everywhere, but yeah. Definitely, it's always what I use is the best and what you use is the worst. That's the way humans are. Yeah, well, yeah. Look at, look at automobiles. Like, so, I mean, I don't, you know, there are Ford people and there are Chevy people. And if you drive a Chevy, Ford suck. If you drive a Ford, Chevy suck. I mean, it's just the way people, I mean, other than saying, you know, I bought a Ford because it was cheaper than a Chevrolet or whatever. I mean, people aren't really honest about that kind of thing. Like maybe I just use Linux because I don't want to pay for Windows license fees, you know? I mean, that's one possible reason that you use Linux and then you have no lead-ism right at whatever. You're just a cheap person, you know? Yeah, well, no. After the week, Martin, why don't you go first? Yep, sort of my app for this week. I've got it from Jason, from Linux for everyone. I'll leave a link below so you can check out his YouTube video to actually see it up and running, but it's called edex-ui. And it's basically opens up it now, command a terminal. So you've got a lovely, groovy terminal. If you've got a touchscreen even better because you've got all your letters down there, you've got various information on myself, if I did like the matrixing to it, so I'm full on hacker, so I've got that scrolling through it. But it's a really nice thing to have. I mean, especially if you've got a second screen, you could just have that running in the background. It's got all your system resources, various information. It's just really super neat. You can actually watch a film in ASCII Art on it that Jason's popped on his video. So yeah, check that out, definitely. Yeah, it looks cool. I haven't had a chance to download it yet because I just got to the link today, but it looks really nice. So mine is a command line program, because elitism. Well, if you have to do everything in the command line, that's fine. I like doing things with the command line. I can't explain why. It gives me my nerd cred, okay? I got the badge, it says I'm a nerd, so I got to use it. I mean, if I don't use the command line, I'm not a nerd and therefore the end of the world. Anyways, mine is something called YKit. So Wikipedia is a thing that people use. It's not the best thing in the world because there's a lot of misinformation on it and stuff like that, but whatever. If you find yourself visiting Wikipedia a lot, but you don't actually wanna use a browser like a normal person, you could be a nerd and use YKit. It's basically a command line tool for searching and getting brief snippets from Wikipedia. Now, one of the reasons why I like it is because you can build it into your app launcher. So if you use Dmenu or Rofi or something like that, or if you're a programmer, you could probably implement this into something else like Albert or Alfred or whatever it is. And you just do a brief search and it just shows you the summary. So it kind of brings up, like you know when you go on Google and you search for something and often to the right, there's a little card that shows you a little blurb from Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah. That's basically what this does only. It's in your terminal and you don't have to give Google any of your information. It's just, you know, it just gives you a small, little bit from usually the first part of a Wikipedia article and that's it. It's very simple. It doesn't say what it's written in. I'm not sure. Oh, JavaScript is what it's written in. So, you know, take that way it is, but it's, you know, it's really cool. I don't use it that often, but it's just something that I have installed on my computer and it, you know, it works. Yeah, it goes so easy, I guess, yeah. So that's mine. You know, I feel like Martin, I stole the hosting duties away from you. No, no, I need steering, definitely. Like you started out and then I just, you know, I'm just so used to being the man in charge, I decided to take it off. So that is, I'm just gonna go ahead and close it out. Cause if I'm gonna thieve it away, I might as well just, you know, steal it all together. Carry on. If you want to, all the contact information was covered at the beginning of the show at the Linuxcast on Twitter, make sure you remember the, because we don't have at Linuxcast, it's the Linuxcast, we have it wrong with the docs, we have to change that. If you want to make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube, I have been putting up some Linux videos over there, about two or three a week, mostly just nonsense videos. They're kind of horrible, but if you wanna see the horribleness of my YouTube video career, go ahead and hop on over there and give us a subscribe, make sure you subscribe on all of our podcasts, feeds or whatever. You can find us on Anchor, Spotify, Apple podcasts, all those things and you can find all of those links at thelinuxcast.org. And coming up next week, what is our topic next week? I've forgotten. Our next week is, oh, Linux permissions, we're gonna talk about Linux permissions and how terrible, terrible they are. So we talked about the barriers to entrance on Linux. One of the things, I've been using Linux since 2017 full-time and I still suck at Linux permissions. We're gonna talk about that in detail next week. So we'll see you then. That's right, we'll see you later, guys.