 Today, I'm chatting with a fellow Linux content creator and a real Linux and free and open source software enthusiast Jack Kiefer. Jack, how are you doing? Hey, Derek. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, it was great. I've been wanting to invite you on for a little while. The other day, I caught your video where you were running through a DTOS installation and somebody in your comments section mentioned, hey, you too should do something together on camera. I was like, yeah, that's great. So I sent you a message after watching that video is like, yeah, we should do something on camera together. I don't do enough of these collaborative kind of videos with with other content creators because I've recorded probably nearly 1400 videos and probably 10 of them maybe have been these kinds of things. So it's a very small percentage of what I do. I know, you know, especially viewers love these kinds of interactions because you get conversations that you otherwise wouldn't if you're just talking to yourself. So tell my viewers who may not be familiar with you, Jack. What you're all about? What's your what's your channels about the topics you discuss? Well, you know, I do, of course, Linux stuff and I do a lot of first look and reviews on Linux and just different distros. I guess I really kind of geared myself towards the distro hopper. There's a lot of people out there that that are just like constant distro hoppers. And, you know, I never considered myself one. But since I started doing these videos, I kind of find out that I do that myself. Sometimes I get looking over these things and then I'm like, wow, you know, I want to run that for a while. So I end up having computers set aside where I'm running a different distro on it every week, probably just to kind of get to know the stuff. And, you know, when I first started out my channel, I was mostly covering programming stuff using open source Lazarus. And so I would create tutorials and just kind of, you know, I think my first tutorial was something like scraping a website and pictures. And yeah, I'm looking at your channel now. Yeah, some of your earlier stuff was, you know, a lot of more nerdy stuff as far as setting up server applications, things like that. I noticed also you did a lot more with things like Internet marketing, you know, a lot of web based stuff you were doing back then. Oh, right. Yeah. In fact, way back in 2005, I was pretty much exclusively Internet marketing and creating info products. In fact, one of my first info products was a Van Halen video, how to play eruption. And so I would take you step by step through how to play eruption in that video. And I think I sold it on eBay at first. That was way back when eBay would allow you to sell digital content. And well, heck, you must have been one of the earlier channels on YouTube because these videos are nearly 15 years old, the oldest videos about your Internet marketing videos on your channel. In fact, I think I got on YouTube even before Google got involved. That would have been before they had it, yeah. Yeah, that was a while ago. And of course, back then, you know, I didn't have, you know, like a whole line of videos. I pretty much used YouTube to archive my videos for my Internet business blog. And so it was kind of an archiving place at the time. But yes, I mean, some of those videos, the video quality out of them are pretty bad. You never make a good first video for sure. Oh, no, no. In fact, when I, it was actually in 2020 or 2021 when I first actually started kind of getting serious into creating content on YouTube consistently. And I got to tell you, it was pretty awkward. I remember my first couple of videos, it was a strange feeling to sit in front of a camera and just talk to it without anyone on the other end. Yeah. Yeah. I hear from people all the time that want advice on how to start a YouTube channel. Like, I don't want to be one of these YouTubers that look back a couple of years later at their first video, man, that's so bad. And it's like, trust me, it's going to be bad. There's nothing you can do. You're not going to be good on that first video. Just record it. Just get it done. That's right. Yeah. It's a rite of passage. He's just got to go. Got to have really grainy video, like 480p video that was recorded off a 10-year-old cell phone. It's got to have really thin, tinny audio that was recorded on the cheapest lavalier mic that you could buy at the time. Yeah, and they're done that. And one thing that helps though is listening to feedback from your commenters. A lot of times somebody will comment in there and say, wow, your audio is awful constructive criticism, right? And I like that. And so, yeah, sometimes I can hear the heater in the background is driving me crazy. That noise turned it off, especially I remember the first couple of microphones I bought were really cheap, really crappy. Also, I didn't know the difference between condenser microphones and dynamic microphones and a lot of the really cheap stuff you'll find on store shows. A lot of those are condenser microphones and they pick up the air conditioner, the refrigerator, like they'll pick up computer fans. And yeah, that's true. In fact, I'm using a dynamic mic now. I started off on a condenser and it was a pretty cheap mic and you could probably hear it in some of my earlier videos. And it was a huge difference going to a dynamic for sure. Yeah, I still use a dynamic mic. If I record at the house, which I don't do that often. But that if somebody is mowing their yard while I'm recording a video at my house on that condenser mic, you'll you'll hear the mower. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I noticed. Obviously, you cover a lot of Linux videos on your channel these days. But do you ever use Windows or Mac or any of that stuff at all? Or are you strictly Linux these days? Well, you know, I have an old Mac book still that's from probably 2010. It's it's pretty old, but it's still laid around. And I do like Mac. I've worked on a lot of Macs back in the day when I was a technician. I worked on both Mac and Windows. I do my son has a Windows computer. He's a gamer, so he's like really into all this stuff. Fortnight and, you know, all the games. So yeah, Fortnight, you can't run on Linux, so you'd have to run it on Windows. All right, right. And we tried the whole Linux thing there and it just wasn't working for him. So now, because there's always going to be the one game, the one game that doesn't work and that'll be the one they want to play. So that's right. And he found it. Oh, yeah, he's on the gaming computer. But I have really impressed with, you know, the progress that the Linux is kind of making with gaming. But so many of these games are just proprietary for Windows. And so Windows really is the only logical platform to use for a lot of these games. Well, really, they're all proprietary for Windows. It's really these these workarounds, these hacks with Proton and Vulkan, you know, that really steam is basically making these Windows only games work on Linux for us. But yeah, there's not there's not enough companies that actually cater to Linux as a first class citizen. It's always an afterthought. If somebody can hack it, you know, hack on it and make it work on Linux, that's fine. If they can't, well, we don't care. Yeah, that's true. You know, and that's the problem with the games that use the easy anti-cheat, then that's I think that's the problem with Fortnite and some of the other popular games that just will not run on Linux. This easy anti-cheat will not run on any operating system. That's not a Windows operating system. All right. And it will actually detect if you're in a VM, it'll detect if you're using wine and it won't run. It has to be legit Windows on bare metal. Yeah. I mean, how about that? You know, no cheat. Yeah. Well, I'm glad they're worried about, you know, gamers cheating, but you might want to cater to the people that want to run it on Linux or even Mac for that matter. But yeah, that's true. And I used Windows for years. I mean, my very first computer, of course, was running DOS 622. And back then I was I was terminal all the way. I mean, I think Windows 3.1 and Windows for work group 3.1.1 was the thing back then. But even when Windows 98 came out, I still spent most of my time in the terminal. I really like DOS and DOS Shell. And I was a kind of a terminal guy for a long time. It took me a while to really warm up to Windows. And you like programming and basic and stuff like that back in the day. So what you were doing. Assembly assembly, which I never got great at. I figured you for a Pascal kind of person. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That was something and Delphi. I remember I was just one of my favorite IDEs. And also C++ Builder was one that I really enjoyed. And Borland, I thought, just had some great stuff out there. And that's a blast from the past. I'd forgot all about Borland. Yeah. And those are back in the days was when alternative operating systems. I wasn't exploring things like. I forgot what it's called BOS. Yeah, you had up. And well, actually, there were several alternative operating systems that sprung up in the 90s. But the only one that really had any lasting power, of course, is Linux. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think my first Linux distro was probably that I stumbled across. Probably was a red hat, most likely. You know what year that would have been? Probably. Man, it must have been late 90s. Probably 98, 99. That's probably about the time I would have knew what Linux was to. I got into it. Around 96, 97, when the worldwide web was becoming a thing and playing around with web servers, wanting to build my own websites and things like that, that even the early days of the web, everybody was putting those things on Linux servers. You know, as this new operating system, that nobody, some people were using Windows Server. But it quickly became dominated by Linux, that whole web server market. You know, that's something I'm kind of curious about. What? You know, I seem to recall from some of your earlier videos that you said that back in the day, you were kind of more involved in retail. And I worked in retail for a long time. Right, right. So it made me kind of curious as to what it was. How did you end up on your first Linux distro? Was that something you just stumbled across while you were traipsing around the Internet? Well, I mean, I like I said, I knew what Linux was 25 years ago. And when I was late teens or so in the mid 90s, and the worldwide web was a thing, you know, AOL was becoming popular and everybody wanted to be on the Internet. And I was one of those kids I wanted to build my own websites. So that's how I figured out what Linux was because even back then, you know, you'd have to remote into a Linux server and set things up. And it was a lot different than it is now. A lot of these web hosting services, they've automated a lot of stuff for you. But back in the day, you'd get your password to SSH into a server and then, hey, go to the command line, start installing whatever you want to install and and hope it works at the end of the day. Yeah. But Linux on the desktop. I switched full time to Linux on the desktop in 2008 because my Windows computer was taken over by ransomware. Oh, that's always fun. Yeah. And it made me mad to the point where I just I already knew what Linux was. I've been playing with it on servers. And sometimes I install it on test equipment. I played around with the Ubuntu live CDs. And back then Ubuntu had their wooby installer. WUBI installer, which is kind of like a virtual machine, but not really. But it was where you can install Ubuntu kind of as a program on top of Windows. And you could run Ubuntu in this little virtual machine on Windows. I knew the programs that were already installed on Ubuntu back then. I knew I could get all my work done because I was already even on Windows. I mostly used free and open source software back then. I had I had never used Internet Explorer as a browser. The whole time I'd use Windows. I was Netscape navigator originally in the early days of the web. And then when Microsoft killed Netscape and Mozilla started and created Firefox, I was Firefox user on day one. I just I never used any of the proprietary browsers. So that was easy when I switched to Linux. I was already using Firefox. I was already using Open Office, which now is Libre Office. Never used Microsoft Office. I was already using GIMP, right? So GIMP is a standard. So it was real easy for me that, you know, when my Windows XP machine was taken over by ransomware, I was like, well, I've already been playing with this Linux thing. I know I could live in it. Let me just get rid of this headache because I'm tired of the viruses and and the malware and all the spyware and everything. And it's much worse probably now as far as the spyware that Microsoft puts in their operating system. So because that was what 15 years ago. And now it's well known, especially with Windows 10 and now Windows 11 that Microsoft has a lot of built in spyware and key loggers and things. They're just tracking everything you do on that particular operating system. And just for privacy reasons, I'm glad that I made that switch so long ago. Yeah, definitely. And by the way, you never did pay me for that ransomware back then. You know, I didn't forget that and nobody got paid for that. I mean, I was so angry. I remember it's like this guy is a pop up message comes up. Hey, your computer has a virus. If you pay this amount of money to this person, you'll get the antivirus. It's like what? Yeah, that's kind of like there's no way. Even if he only wanted was a dollar. I'm not paying a dollar for for your antivirus. It's like, yeah, let's just format the drive and start all over as a principle of the thing. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I I I kind of went over full time to Linux, probably back in. And I think it was around 2012, 2011, something like that, when I just kind of made the switch completely. And I can kind of relate to that because I was pretty much using open source stuff except for Photoshop. That was the only thing I at the time I didn't like GIMP. I couldn't relate to it. And finally, I just kind of when I switched over to Linux, Photoshop, you could kind of run the older version and wine. But I thought, you know, it's kind of time to see if I can maybe transition over to GIMP and kind of cut loose the old proprietary Photoshop. And once I really got into GIMP and really took a couple of tutorials and understood how you did the layering and so forth. You've got to watch videos as one of those things. Yeah, does have a learning curve. And like if you watch or you go to the GIMP website, they have articles that talk you through some of the things and it starts to make sense where at first none of it makes sense. Right. And that's where I was. None of it made sense. And but once I got through a couple of videos and I think the GIMP website was kind of where I started. Wow, you know, in about a half an hour, everything started to click. And within a week or so, I ended up liking GIMP better than Photoshop, actually. I did, too. I hadn't used Photoshop much many years ago. And before that, I used some other proprietary programs similar like PaintShop Pro back in the day and other things like that. And I found, you know, yeah, once you learn it, it's like, this is easy to use. Yeah. Well, I think what the problem was back then in those years you're talking about, and it was the same for me when I switched to GIMP at a different interface that was back when they still had like the three or four floating windows, like it wasn't just one window like you would get with something like Photoshop. You would open GIMP and like four different floating windows with different tool sets would appear on the screen. And that was weird. I hated that. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that was one thing that put me off with the Lazarus when I was programming is when you installed it by default. Nothing's docked. It's all just kind of floating around. You got all these loose windows and I never really like that. But it didn't take me long to figure out that you could actually dock them all together. There's a few programs I found like that over the years, kind of like GIMP, where you'd have all these various floating windows that are all separate from each other. And the reason that that's a problem for me these days is tiling window managers. I don't need, you know, five different windows because they're going to get tiled and it's going to look all weird. We're on a floating window manager. I guess it would be OK. But for a tiling window manager, I can't use that stuff because unless I float all the windows the way they're supposed to be. Yeah, that's true. I didn't even think about that in the context of it. And actually, it's you that's gotten me more interested in window managers. A couple of videos back, I remember making a comment saying that I probably wouldn't use a window manager because it's kind of like driving a budget you go with all the very basics and nothing more. Yeah. And and compared to a desktop where you have everything and it's you just riding in comfort right off the bat. But now I'm kind of taking back some of that stuff. After especially after I evaluated DTOS a couple of times, it really kind of kind of lowered that barrier, you know, to window managers. It didn't it actually enabled me to discover more things that I didn't realize about window managers. Well, with DTOS, though, you get the desktop environment built for you around the window manager. Exactly, because every desktop environment is essentially the window manager, plus all the extra tools you'll need. And it's just kind of like DTOS with Xmonad. You didn't get just Xmonad. I gave you a whole bunch of other stuff to go along with it to to make it work. Yeah, the Xmobar and the. All right, you get a panel and you go to run launcher and all this stuff that if you're setting it up from like a base arch install, you'd have to set up your pull kit program and, you know, session programs. And hey, you have to install fonts. I mean, you got to install seriously everything from the ground up. So yeah, video drivers. I've already got as part of the script. Like, if you're installing it on virtual machine or on physical equipment, I think I I install all the Xorg drivers. Yeah, and I love that because I've been messing with Linux for years. In fact, way back in the day, I set up a Slackware server where I worked at the time and, you know, ran Slackware in the terminal. And it was like one of my most stable servers I ever ran. And, you know, all this experience with Linux However, just starting an Xmoned window manager from scratch and having to build the config I'd have to spend hours trying to figure out. Oh, no, no, no weeks, if not months. Yeah, OK, ask me how I know. When I first when I first tried out Xmoned, then this was more than a decade ago. You couldn't find obviously like video content or YouTube would have been a much smaller place. Linux content was practically non existent even just a few years ago on YouTube. And all you could do is go to the Internet and hope you would find somebody's config on GitHub or GitLab. But really, there just wasn't a lot of that stuff out there back then. And a lot of what I had to do in the early days, I actually learned Haskell so I could configure that massive Xmoned config of mine. And it's become to the point where almost my Xmoned config, because I put so much stuff in it. It's a very lengthy config. It's much longer than most people's. Most people have a really tiny Xmoned config because most people don't know Haskell anyway. They're just going with the stock with making just a few changes. And in many ways, my Xmoned config over the last few years has kind of become almost like documentation for some people. Like any time when somebody wants to see something with Xmoned, they go look at my config to figure out exactly how I do certain things. They take what works for them, throw away the rest. And that's always what I do when I'm learning something new. I go find somebody that knows what they're doing is already configured, whatever piece of software. I look at their config. I take what I like. I just ignore what I don't like. I can tell you put a ton of time in that. I mean, when I look over that config and I don't know Haskell either, but I'm kind of figuring it out now. When I say I learned Haskell, I mean, I know enough Haskell to where the code most of the time I can figure out what's going on in a piece of Haskell code. But it's a very strange language if you'd never seen it before. Yeah, it is, you know. And the nice thing about programming is once you learn one language, it's really easy to cross over and pick up other ones. And Haskell, to me, is kind of like that. But it is strange, too. It's got some weirdness in the syntax and so forth. There's a lot of dollar signs and a lot of periods. Right, right, which kind of reminds me of PHP a little bit. Kind of takes me back. And the cool thing is there's really not that many parentheses. You rarely see parentheses in Haskell. And the reason is because those dollar signs and periods kind of eliminate the need for some of that. Like all those dollar signs that you'll see function, dollar sign, function, dollar sign, function, dollar sign, those are really parentheses. So function, dollar sign, function is function, opening parentheses, function, closing parentheses. The dollar sign just substitutes for the opening parentheses, tack one in on the end of the line. Ah, OK, that's all it is. It's just a easier. It's actually a much easier way to write parentheses. And then you don't have to worry about nesting parentheses because you're just chaining those dollar signs in between each function. Hmm, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, once you know that, if somebody doesn't tell you what all those dollar signs mean, you have no idea what all that is in the code. No, I never would have guessed that at all. In fact, I was just assuming it was an indicator for a variable. No. And that's kind of going back to my PHP days. To know something I messed with a little bit when I was making websites. But I know just reversing engineering your script there really makes a difference. I mean, I I have to say I haven't used a lot of window managers, but I have I have not seen any configs as complete and well laid out as as what I see in the DTOS. So as somebody that's learning his way around, kind of how configs work in window managers and so forth. And, you know, messing now, I'm messing with a poly bar with your poly bar thing there and kind of getting the hang of that as well. But I will say Polybore on X-Moon add is really not designed for X-Moon add. So there's it's going to be weird. It's going to be the way it displays workspaces and things. It's it's designed for another type of window manager. Yeah, that looks like it would probably be really challenging to kind of. It's not challenging to to get it to work. It's just not going to to work the way you expect it. It's going to display workspaces all out of order. And it's just strange the way it is. Really X-MODE bar is kind of the bar for X-MODE add. Yeah, I think you might be right. When I was looking at the poly bar stuff there, I wasn't even quite sure how you would even get those those workspaces to even show up on there to to be usable. Yeah, if you're on multi monitors, it's extremely annoying because you will see different workspaces in different orders on each of your monitors. It doesn't keep the same order alphabetically or numerically. It's very strange. That's a known bug that I think the X-MODE add guys already know about. And they're going to try to patch it in the next version of the next major version of X-MODE. But who knows when that'll be released a few months, maybe a year down the road. Yeah. Well, you know, you were talking about the the funds being I forgot I forgot what an X-MODE bar. Yeah, they they changed the way fonts are rendered on the bars. So it doesn't have anti-aliasing. That's the word I'm looking at. Which which depending on the font family you choose and the font size you use, it's not that big a deal like it still looks OK. Using my config like it's. I I can tell the difference between the old and the new if they were side by side, because one of them is definitely a little sharper and clearer than the other. But if I didn't tell you there was a difference, you might not notice. Well, you know, I got to admit, I never would have noticed. No. But but it depends on some fonts, because some fonts, you know, were very sharp and blocky anyway. So yeah, some of it probably depend. Like I was using the Ubuntu font family and X-MODE bar. But if I was using something like Terminus, you know, with the weird blocky kind of letters, you know, it'd be a little different. Yeah. Right. But the defaults, they look great. Yeah. In fact, I don't think I would even mess with that personally. One of the things with tiling window managers, you know, about my X-MODE configs kind of a massive thing. And I've got a lot going on, a lot of extra code, a lot of extra functions, my own custom things going on with it. As one of the cool things with many of the tiling window managers, if they're written and configured in a proper programming language, which many of them are, where the config file is actually written in the language that the window manager itself was written in. That means you can extend it however you want. So with X-MODE, if you know Haskell, you pretty much do anything you want with X-MODE. Or if you know Python with Qtile, you could configure Qtile using Python and do anything you want with it. Or the awesome window manager with Lua is configured in Lua. Some window managers have their own user-friendly syntax that they're they're configured in. And that's very limiting because their little syntax is not a complete language. There's only so much you can do in that config. So that would be things like I3, for example, you know, you kind of limited in what you could do in that. But most of the other ones are actually configured in a real language that assuming you knew that language, you could get a lot done with it. All right. Well, you know, when I when I installed DTOS, I didn't choose the option for like awesome. Did you have to write the config in Lua then? Yeah, it's in Lua. OK, so. And my awesome config is not there there's a lot to it. But a lot of it's just standard stuff, key bindings and things. It's not it's not as crazy pimped out the way my Xmoney ad config is because I actually don't really know any Lua. I mean, I kind of know a little bit how the syntax works, but I'm not really comfortable with Lua. I'm actually much more comfortable with Python and the Qtile config. Now, I've got a lot going on in it. If you check it out. Yeah, same here. And a lot of the artwork you did on the login manager there. Yeah. And actually, all throughout it. And the. Yeah, that's all the artwork. And that's really great stuff. And I've been meaning to play around with some more artwork. I need to create a custom DTOS logo. I need to create some proper branding. I've got some stuff in the works. And I've been putting in actually a lot of work on DTOS, even since you recorded that video trying to update a lot of things. I've added a lot of packages to the repos. I've added the installation script quite a bit because I realized the other day and I've seen enough people install DTOS. One of the things I didn't like was setting the locales, as most people are not going to have that LC underscore C type variable in their locale. So why don't I just automate that process? Why do you need to go edit that file? I'm just going to pick out whatever you already have set to LC underscore Lang and then using, you know, some command line utilities like CID or whatever. Now, I'm just going to add that line for you. So that's what it that's what it does now. And the only thing is you would eventually still need to reboot the computer. But you've got to reboot to finish the installation of DTOS anyway. So I do all that underneath the hood now. And you know, you never even hear about the locales now on the script. Yeah, I like that. And I like the addition of the the package installs there. That's pretty cool, too. And that's something that I just noticed popped up here probably in the past week or so. Yeah, I have to rebuild the packages every week or two. I don't have to. But yeah, just to keep them updated. I don't have it automated to where it's on a schedule because I build all the packages for the DTOS repository actually on this production machine where I do my videos. And I don't have this machine running all the time. And I don't want it to start compiling while I'm recording or editing because obviously that would run what I'm doing, you know, like the stream right here where we're on a jitzy chat. I don't all of a sudden I don't want my CPU to be pegged at 100% compiling all those programs. So like every week or so when I remember it, I rebuild all the packages for DTOS so they get updated if there's a new version available. Oh, very cool. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your, since you're a video content creator, I love talking to people about, you know, how we accomplish some of what we accomplish. Let's talk about video editors, especially video editors on Linux because they're a bit of a mess. What are you using to edit your videos? Well, you know, I started out using Shotcut because Kaden Lai was always kind of giving me if it worked great for a while and then boom, you get an update and yeah, it would kind of, and then I went over to Kaden Live because it started getting really through the streak where it was kind of working really nice. And I kind of like in Kaden Live, the fact that you can save your presets. So when you create all these different effects and so forth, you can save those and you couldn't do that in Shotcut. So to me, that was huge. And then I stumbled across a website. It was an online video editor, what's that called? I gotta pull it up real quick. I always forget the name of it. Well, I will say that your comment about Kaden Live, I remember Kaden Live, Kaden Live still can crash on you occasionally, but there was a period three, four, five years back where Kaden Live was really crashy. Like it loved to crash and it wasn't good at the time of saving your work. Where now Kaden Live has this cool feature, if it does crash, which is kind of rare now that it crashes, but if it does, it will remember all the work you'd already put in, even if you didn't save, it'll recover. That's nice, because back in the day, I lost hours of work sometimes before you didn't save, and then it crashes, it's like, oh. Yeah, that's a real good feeling, I tell ya. I've done that. Yeah, the new one that I discovered here just recently, in fact, the last two or three videos I made, I used an online site called ClickChamp. ClickChamp, okay, I've never heard of that, yeah. I was really, really impressed with them. And I'm still using the free version. You get so much in the free version, there's no watermarking. I think this company was just bought out last month by Microsoft. I was actually going to ask if it was bought by Microsoft. Yeah. It wouldn't make sense. And so that scared me a little, but. It should, because that means this company's gonna be dead in six months. Yeah. Because everything that Microsoft buys, it eventually dies. How about it, yeah. So I'm kinda keeping that in mind as well. But I'm really impressed with the software though, because I can edit in there, and I don't have to keep saving my edits, and it's actually a very quick process, and it gives me access to a lot of nice font effects. And video clips and so forth that I can access quickly without having to go and download them myself. So it actually turned out to be kinda convenient. Yeah, that's cool. I'm kinda combining that with Kaden Live. I still use Kaden Live a lot of times when I wanna kinda tweak it a little farther back to the next level. So you might call it kind of a hybrid process that I'm using. Yeah, I strictly use Kaden Live for the most part if it's working. If, and this does happen, if Kaden Live is for whatever reason broken with an update and I just can't get it to work, I can edit a video using Blender if I have to. I know how to use the video editor in Blender. And it's not bad. It's very slow to render the video though once you go to render it. It tastes twice as long to render a video as Kaden Live. That's the only downside. But the actual putting the clips together and everything, it's actually really smooth. Scrubbing through the video and Blender is really nice. It's surprisingly easy to use. Yeah, it's really not bad. It's almost perfect if they could fix the render speeds. Yeah. I probably use it over Kaden Live to be honest. Yeah, that would definitely be a changer for me too because that's kinda where I would get stock is on the render speed. Yeah, it's just because I make so many videos. I can't have something that typically would take 30 minutes to render, take an hour. Because if you're doing that for every single video you make and you make, I don't know, a couple hundred a year, that's a couple of hundred extra hours every year that I was waiting for videos to render that I wouldn't have had to wait had I just used Kaden Live. And it adds up. It does, it really does. But it is surprisingly intuitive. I think the only obstacle I ran into in the very beginning was setting your frames because it would have a preset set of frames. The 22 frames per second or whatever the cinema, whatever they record movies in, yeah. You have to change it to 60 frames per second. And then I think there was also, let me think, it was a number of frames too was another issue. Oh yeah, because it only has a really short, like you can only record about two minutes worth of video the way it's set up by default. Right, right. And then I discovered this key binding that you could hit to set it automatically to cover the whole video. Yeah, I had to Google that because I ran into the same problem. And we talked about, of course, the artwork you're probably using GIMP and like for thumbnails, things like that, or you using online tools for that as well. No, for my thumbnails I use Inkscape and GIMP. Oh, cool, yeah. Now the Inkscape is pretty much where I do all the designing and everything because for me it's very quick and intuitive and I can do a lot in Inkscape. And then I started integrating GIMP actually after watching one of your videos a couple of years ago when you kind of went over your process in GIMP where you would load the thumbnail in and then set the saturation and the contrast. And that really made a difference for me after I started kind of following suit there. Wow. One of the things with the YouTube game is getting people to click on a video and many people don't realize this. As important as the video in many cases is the thumbnail because what's the point of you making the video if nobody ever watches it and what's gonna make people watch it, seeing a thumbnail and making them click on it. And one of the cool things you can do is, yeah, add some extra saturation or add a lot of contrast. So in GIMP, go to the brightness contrast tool and add a lot more contrast to the picture and it will make your thumbnail stand out from all those other thumbnails and the search results that are not doing that. It really does. And for me, I kind of look at that like a game changer for thumbnails. I can't imagine not doing that anymore. You got a great point. It's kind of like you can have the best product in the world, but if you don't advertise it, then it doesn't mean anything. There's been a few videos I've made where I had an idea for a thumbnail and I made the thumbnail without having a video in mind. Then I'm like, I've got to make a video that fits this thumbnail now. This thumbnail is so good, right? Now that's a cool idea. I'm gonna try that sometime. One other thing you mentioned earlier about comments from your viewers helping you out. Have you found the Linux YouTube community to be a friendly place? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, very friendly. In fact, way more than I expected, when I first got into doing YouTube, I really kind of expected maybe a little bit of the opposite. You know, I really was thinking that, you know, these guys could probably be hostile if they wanted to. My attitude going in was when I was doing programming videos and so forth, I still really wasn't quite sure what kind of format I wanted to go with, but I thought maybe the best thing to do is just kind of let your audience define that for you. Let them kind of nudge you in directions where they might like to see you go. And so I kind of did that. They were, people were responsive right off the bat. I mean, yeah, I did have to go a couple of months making videos without probably hardly any views and barely any subscribers, but you know, it's, you got to keep in mind that it's all about the videos and providing content and loving what you're doing and everything else will just follow. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to make the videos that you want to make because I mean, that's, if you're not having fun, what's the point? Right, right. You got to enjoy it because that comes across when you're making your videos that if you don't enjoy it, people are going to sense it. Because I get, you know, a lot of comments about things I should do on video avenues I should explore and some of them are things I have absolutely no interest in. I know I never use it in real life and I know I would just absolutely hate making that video and I don't care how many people would watch that video. I'm not going to make it if I'm not going to enjoy the video because it's going to come across on video that I absolutely can't stand what I'm doing. And the reason I know this is because I see YouTubers like this. I'm sure you have to, where you watch their videos and they look like they're miserable making the content that they're making. And I don't want to be like that. Same here, you know, I'll take a nudge but it's got to be in a direction that I go for sure. Yeah, I found like the comments on my videos and community that, because there's a social aspect to YouTube in the comment section. I have found it overwhelmingly positive. They're obviously in any comment section, any kind of chat format, social format. You're going to have jack wagons that are just there to troll. Troll you, troll the other commenters but those are actually the exception, not the rule. Like it's for the most part a pretty friendly place and you get a lot of people in the comment section that are trying to help each other with Linux installs or whatever software they're using. And it's, yeah, I'm like you. I was surprised at how friendly it was when I first started this as well. I had to tell myself right from the beginning, try to ignore the trolls. They're going to probably be everywhere, you know. I like the trolls. They pop your back and I was like. One of the things I like about the trolls is they do keep conversation going. Like when I get this one troll and that's all of a sudden he's just trolling everybody in the comments and then they're coming back at him. And next thing you know, you've got like 500 comments on this video that not that many people have watched. It's like, well, you know that troll really helped me out there because he really got that comment section going. I like that. I've gotten a couple of flame wars on my channel as well that are pretty entertaining. Yeah, that's another thing that I get sometimes from new content creators is looking to start a channel. What about all the negative comments? And what about them? They count toward the algorithm as well. Like don't take them personally like they're okay. As long as they're commenting, I don't care what they say. I'm just glad they commented. Exactly, that means they watched it. I noticed you have a Odyssey channel as well because I'm on Odyssey and I see your videos pop up on there sometimes when I'm checking out content over there. Yeah, I set that up a couple, probably a year and a half ago and that might have even been inspired by your channel. You do have a way of throwing some great ideas out there. You should be a content creator. One day, yeah. But yeah, I love Odyssey. I've been on it for a while. Since early on, probably the first six months or so, it was really getting started and I jumped on it and I've kind of promoted it kind of heavily. So I think I'm one of the bigger channels on the entire platform. I'm in the top 20 or 30 channels on the platform which is kind of weird for a Linux content creator because I'm not in the top 20 or 30 channels on YouTube. Probably not in the top 20 or 30 million on YouTube. Well, you know, as you said a long time ago in one of your videos, you kind of considered yourself a relatively big fish and a small pond. Yeah, unfortunately, Linux is still, I mean, it's growing, I see it growing. Free and open source software is definitely growing but it's not mainstream yet, not close to being mainstream. But I do see, there's definitely been a serious tide change. Here, I would say in the last 10 years, especially with companies like Microsoft in the last five years, now really embracing the idea of open source software. I think that is a complete game changer. Even Google, which is as evil as Google can be, they've got a lot of open source code out there for people, obviously some of their operating systems like Android and Chrome OS, there's some open source aspects to some of that stuff. And even these companies like Microsoft and Google, Facebook, you know, all these companies, Apple, they're not as anti-open source as they once were. Yeah, that's true. I think they've kind of seen the light over the years. Well, I think they've realized that they can make money off of it, that's what. Yeah, that's the life they like. Yeah, when Google can sell, you know, a billion phones or whatever, Android devices every month, right? Whatever the number is these days, I forget what the last time I checked on that is crazy how many new Android devices are activated every month. It's an insane number. Wow. Yeah, and hey, you know, Google's making money off Linux. I know, I'm happy for him. Oh yeah. I'm happy for him, I guess. You know, looping back to Odyssey. Yeah, I think one of the things that really attracted me to Odyssey as well was the fact that you could automatically send your YouTube videos and have them sync with the channel, which I thought was a great feature. And I still do that. Fall back too, in case you ever get tossed from the YouTube platform, you never know. Even to this day, I still just post to YouTube and it automatically syncs to Odyssey. I don't post to Odyssey myself. I just don't have that kind of time. And actually Odyssey now has the ability, if I wanted to, I could post to Odyssey first and have it sync to YouTube. I think I could go the other direction if I wanted to. Oh, that's cool. I didn't think I'd say that. Odyssey now has the ability for live streaming. So that's another kind of newer thing that hasn't been around too long. And there's a lot of new features to Odyssey. When I first joined, you couldn't comment on the videos. Now there's comments. When they first introduced comments, there was no moderation. I had no way to moderate the comments. So if somebody just spammed the heck out of my comments, I couldn't get rid of all these spam links. Now there's moderator controls where I can actually delete comments and block users and things like that that didn't exist a year ago. It's gotten a lot better. Odyssey is a real competitor to YouTube. Yeah, I can definitely see that. I mean, right from the get go, I think they had some pretty innovative features, for sure. Well, Jack, that was really all the questions I had for you. You got any final thoughts or anything you wanna bring up before the end of the conversation? Well, nothing too technical, I suppose, but I gotta tell you, I really appreciate the fact that you invited me on. Caught the user's comment. I think that was a bainy one, I think is how you pronounce that. But he's been around since, he was one of my first subscribers, I think, one of the top seven or so. And so I was, I remember responding to him and saying that I was open to that and really actually quite surprised when you chimed in there and responded. And so I really appreciate you having me on. I think that was a lot of fun. Yeah, this was fun. I didn't do too much in the way of, in fact, this is my first collab. So, yeah, I admit it. Yeah. Well, you know how it is with us Selenic users. We're used to doing everything alone, right? We're not social animals, right? Right, right. We kind of live under our rock and our videos. Well, thanks for hanging out with me, Jack. Do you have any contact information you want to disclose? Obviously, I'm going to link to your YouTube channel. I'll link to your Odyssey channel as well, because I have that. Any other social media links or anything you want to promote? Oh, thanks. Well, I'm also on Mastodon. I got a fairly new account there. And I think I'm at Jack Keeper at Mastodon. Well, I'll tell you what, give me your Mastodon link in an email after this. I'll make sure to link to that. Anybody wants to contact you on Mastodon. Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. Very much. All right. All right, well, Jack, thanks for chatting with me. Best of luck in your YouTube channel and any other endeavors, all right? Thanks so much, Derek. Peace. Great chatting with you. All right.