 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. These viewer questions and comments, they typically come from the comments on the videos posted on YouTube and Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments come through social media, such as Mastodon Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first comment that I want to respond to comes from my reaction video to the Linus Tech Tips Linux gaming challenge. And this comment is simply, Linux software supported? That's not written on the box. So what this comment is in reference to is on my video I said that when you switch from Windows or Mac over to Linux, you need to make sure that your hardware is supported on Linux. And I'm talking about the hardware you purchased from that day forward. When you go buy a printer, make sure that the printer has a Linux driver, that it actually supports Linux. Because some printers do, some printers don't. If you buy a printer that doesn't have a Linux driver, it will never work on Linux. It will be just a dead paperweight at that point. You need to go take that printer back to the store and buy a different printer, one that actually supports Linux. And he's saying, well, there's nowhere on the box that says Linux support. Yes, there is. The problem is, as a Windows user, Windows users have gotten kind of lazy because almost everything works on Windows. I mean, Windows being the dominant desktop operating system, you typically don't have to worry about printers and keyboard and mouse, things like that, peripherals. Typically, they're always going to support Windows most of the time. That's not always true. I mean, you should still read the box. If you're a Windows user, just verify that it does work on Windows. But for the most part, you can get away with never looking at the box. But when you switch to a non-Windows operating system, such as Mac or Linux or whatever, you know, you actually do need to read the box on the hardware you buy, make sure that it actually supports Linux. And most printers will actually have this on the box. Well, you know, just as an example, I know anytime I pick up a HP printer or a Brothers printer, you actually look on the box, it'll tell you, you know, supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and it'll have the logos, even have the Tux logo on there. So there's no doubt when you pick that thing up, it will work on Linux. So the idea that this information is just impossible to find, like these hardware manufacturers don't put that on the box. Yes, they do. Maybe there's a few out there that don't. Maybe you'll have to do a 30 second Google search. Oh my God, that's going to take so long. But for the most part, you don't even have to do that. Most of the time, you can actually read on the box for all kinds of things. I mean, I buy external SSD drives and things like that. And many times they'll put a supports Linux on the back of those things, even though you just assume something like that is going to be supported, no matter what operating system you plug it into. Still, they take the time to actually put that stuff on the box, actually read the labels on the stuff you purchase. And the next question is, hey, DT, you never did a video on Cubes OS. Is it because you're not interested in it? If so, why is that? No, it's not that it's I'm not interested in it. I think Cubes is a fascinating operating system. The problem with recording a video about Cubes OS is Cubes OS requires a lot of system resources because it's essentially everything's run in virtual machines. That's basically how it works. The problem with Cubes OS is that Cubes OS can actually be installed inside a virtual machine itself. So I can install Cubes OS inside Virtual Box or Vert Manager and then record that virtual machine because Cubes OS just won't install inside a virtual machine itself, right? So I would have to install Cubes OS on physical hardware. That hardware would have to be a beefy machine to run Cubes OS properly. I only have one beefy machine, my main production machine. I can't install Cubes OS on that. And then how would I record Cubes OS on this machine? Well, I need a separate machine to actually record to stream everything to that machine would also have to be a very beefy machine, you know, to stream video from one computer to another and capture all of that. I don't have two computers that could do that. So that's why you've never seen a Cubes OS video from me. And that's probably why you don't see much Cubes OS content on YouTube is just because of the challenge of actually recording that thing is system resource requirements and the fact that it doesn't run properly in a virtual machine just makes it hard to capture it and get a video on it. The next question is, hey, DT, I get this error message with your DTOS script. DTOS is my Arch Linux post installation script that gets you my Xmonad desktop environment. And he says, it always says a error recompiling Xmonad. What exactly is the problem here? So the problem with my DTOS script is one thing that doesn't give good error messages, because anytime the script craps out at all, it fails at some point, it automatically skips to the last error message in the script, which is the error recompiling Xmonad error. So that doesn't really tell us exactly where it filled. But I can tell you 95 times out of 100 where the script actually fails is when it starts installing programs through Pac-Man. And I will actually give you a command on screen here. And what you need to do is run this single command CD into the DTOS directory that you cloned and run this one command here. And this is just the sudo pac-man install, the list of packages for DTOS command. And at some point, you're probably going to get an error. It's going to be a conflict, a package conflict. So if you're installing this on, you know, Endeavor or Garuda or whatever distribution Arch Linux chances are they have a package that conflicts with some of the packages I am installing. And if there's an error during that process, the script will fail. What you need to do is figure out the package that's causing the conflict and see if you can get around that in some way, maybe uninstall the conflicting package and then try to rerun the entire DTOS script again. The next question is, hey, DT, what do you do to protect your posture and general health when working at a computer or a desk all day? What do you recommend to us? Thanks. Okay, well, you have to understand that I don't work at a computer and a desk all day. I mean, I work at a computer, obviously, this is my job, you know, these days making YouTube videos. And it does require me sitting at a desk for a few hours a day, but it's not like an eight hour a day, 40 hour a week kind of job that some people do have that. So I'm not at a desk that kind of amount of time. Typically, the only time I'm really sitting at this desk is when I'm recording. And usually, when I'm recording a video, I'm kind of moving around and active, you know, because you know, doing hand gestures or whatever looking around. So my posture is pretty good when I'm actually recording a video where my posture gets kind of crazy is editing the video. So this video, for example, I may take a couple of hours to edit this video when I'm done. And when I'm sitting at a keyboard staring at a screen, you know, hunched over leaned over. Yeah, that's bad. What I like to do is take a break. You know, many times, you know, you've got computer applets that you can download and install that will actually give you a timer, you know, just set a timer, just know, hey, every 30 minutes, get up, walk around for a few minutes, you know, take five minutes every 30 minutes or five minutes every hour, whatever it is that you can afford, get up and actually just walk around and get up from the chair for a minute. As far as general health and posture, you know, I can give you health tips. I can't really give you posture tips because I really I'm not that focused on it. I know when I start getting hunched over at a desk, I get up and move around a little bit or I just stop for the day. General health tips, though, good general health tip would be to actually be active. I know that's kind of crazy for people that sit at a computer or a desk all day, but you want to be active. You don't want it that's so sedentary, you know, just sitting at a computer that you're guaranteed to actually be overweight, out of shape and potentially be unhealthy. So, you know, walk 30 minutes a day and that really, you know, I would say sign up for a gym membership and actually really begin seriously working out. But honestly, if you go walk 30 minutes a day, you would be surprised how much better you feel and you'll probably actually lose a little weight. We're not talking about running. I'm not saying go jog. I'm saying walk for 30 minutes a day. Put on a podcast, put on your favorite podcast, and go walk around your neighborhood 30 minutes every morning before you go to your job and sit at that desk. And I think you'll be amazed at how much better you feel. The next question, hey, DT, I feel Kate and live is the worst video editing software. Whenever I cut clips and bring them together, they create a screaming effect of audio, which I really hate. Okay, so I can't really comment on his particular bug. I've never experienced that. So I can't give you any tips on how to fix that. I will say Kate and live is very buggy, very flaky. Kate and life has a lot of problems. And I'm a big proponent of Kate and live, you guys know, I edit all of my videos on Kate and live because it's by far the best free and open source video editor we have. Nothing else comes close. I mean, I've tried shot cut and open shot and but TV and I live in flow bleed and probably have a dozen others. I've tried them all. They're all either really light as far as effects and plugins and features, you know, to the point where they're almost unusable or now scrubbing through the playhead is really bad. If you can't even scrub through the playhead smoothly and actually watch your video while you're editing it, then your video editor is almost useless at that point. And Kate and live does a lot of the really basic stuff. Well, the problem with Kate and live is a lot of the more advanced stuff, the effects and the compositions, the plugins, the color grading and all that stuff. It's really fantastic when it works. The problem I have these days is, you know, Kate and live sees a lot of new releases every couple of months. It seems like there's a new release of Kate and live and things that were working effects or compositions that were working for me that I had grown used to using all the time. All of a sudden they don't work on the next version. They're broken for whatever reason. I don't know. And then they'll fix it in the next version, but then some other things that I use on a regular basis will be broken. So it's a constant rotation. I never know what's going to be broken in the latest release of Kate and live. And of course, I'm on a rolling release distribution. So I'm always on the latest release of Kate and live. And, you know, there's a snap flat pack app images for Kate and live. A lot of people really preach how you use the app image for Kate and live because it seems to be more stable because it has all the dependencies. That's not necessarily the case with the app image either because the app image still has the same kinds of problems, you know, from release to release, where the new version will break things that were working in the previous version vice versa. And it's frustrating. It's one of those things that those of us in the free and open source community that want to use a free and open source video editor to produce content, many of those people talk bad about Kate and live and really frustrated about Kate and live. I've never really vented my frustrations of Kate and live because I do want to promote it because I think it's a great project. But I understand the frustration. It is really, really hard to not use a proprietary video editor just out of sake of convenience. All right, because on Linux, I mean, I could use DaVinci. It's available on Linux. I could use Lightworks. It's available on Linux, but for ideological reasons, as long as I can get my videos done with a free and open source editor, that's what I'm going to use. I'll put up with all the pain. I put up with the pain, the heartache, the frustration as long as I can get it done with free and open source software. But I understand most people are not like that. And if you're not like that, DaVinci and Lightworks are available. What I've been doing here recently, though, I haven't told you guys about this on camera, the last three or four videos I've made, I actually edited them in a video editor that is not Kaden Light. And it is a free and open source editor. I'm trying something different out and you will probably get a video about that particular video editor very soon. So the next question is, hey, DT, how do you make your thumbnails? So I make all of my thumbnails and all of the channel artwork, the YouTube banner, the channel header and all that. Heck, even, you know, some of the logo designs for my t-shirts and things. I do most everything inside GIMP. GIMP is the GNU image manipulation program. It is our free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop. GIMP is available on all Linux distributions. It should be in every Linux distributions repositories. GIMP is also available on Windows and Mac, I believe. It's cross-platform. GIMP is actually one of the most popular free and open source programs on the planet. I've done at least two or three videos on GIMP. I did a specific video on how I create my thumbnails in GIMP. So check out that video if you're specifically interested in thumbnails. If you're new to GIMP, I did like a 30-minute introductory video on GIMP showing you guys the basics and all the tools in GIMP and that is a really great video for those of you wanting to get up to speed quickly on how to use GIMP. Now, if you were looking for more than just, hey, what program to use, maybe you were looking for tips on what makes a good thumbnail, well, what makes a good thumbnail is going to differ from person to person. Every YouTube channel is different. Everybody's audience is different. What works for one person is not going to work for the other. Nothing is ever a one-to-one copy. You can't do exactly what I do and get the same results. I can't do exactly what this person's doing and get their results. Everything's different, but I will say in general what you want to do with your thumbnails, you want to have a lot of contrast. You want to have a lot of saturation because really high contrast, really over saturated images, that color and that contrast that really pops. When you're viewing search results in YouTube, those really highly saturated, high contrast images really stand out from those boring, just a normal, somebody took a picture on a phone and really didn't doctor it in any way. If you take the time to take a picture of yourself, maybe on a phone and then put it into GIMP and really over saturate yourself, you're going to really stand out. You could even draw a border around yourself. That's what a lot of people do. One thing I often tell people, people ask me about my thumbnails when they all look the same as far as the color scheme I use with the text, the text that's wrapped in various boxes that are black, white and purple. I do that for consistency sake and I strongly urge everybody that creates thumbnails to be consistent with their thumbnails. That way when you're building an audience, they know when they see a thumbnail, oh, that's that person's thumbnail. And the next question is, hey, DT, have you ever considered getting professional help? So obviously being a Linux user, I'm kind of a do it yourself or kind of person, right? I don't need to hire professionals to do anything because typically if I have a problem, I'm going to fix it myself. That is what we do in this community. So no, typically I don't bother with professional help unless it's in one of two areas. If I need plumbing work done, I don't have the tools that a professional know how to do that, especially if there's actually a serious problem with water leaking in the house. I'll call a plumber and the car. I don't work on my car. It's just not that I couldn't work on my car. It's just for sake of time. If it's a big project, yeah, I'm taking that thing to the shop. But beyond that, professional help, I don't need it. The next question, hey DT, is there a distro that does not have a dock at all? Has the super key search thing and shows the running apps in the top bar for easy switching between apps? Or can we create the same in Papa West in some way? So if you're looking for a distribution that does not have a dock at all, has a super key thingy, which he's talking about, you hit the super key and it brings up a menu and you can start searching for your apps. And it shows the running apps in the top bar. Okay. So here's the thing. I'm assuming this person is kind of new to Linux because is there a distro that has all of this, you're not necessarily looking for a specific distro. You're looking for a specific desktop environment. So and this could you can run desktop environments on any distro, all of them run on any distribution. So it's not a Linux distribution problem. So whatever distribution you're on, keep running it, just install a different desktop environment. One that I would suggest looking at is KDE Plasma because KDE Plasma has a panel. You hit the super key, it brings up the menu and you can search through the menu, just start typing after you hit the super key and all of that. The panel by default is typically at the bottom of the screen, but you can move it to the top. Actually, you move it to the left or to the right. In any side of the screen, you won't put it at the top. So you got your top panel, you got your super key thingy and shows the running apps in the top bar. Yeah, KDE, the panel has many widgets that will allow you to have a task manager or quick launchers kind of like a dock bar thingy where instead of having a big button for your task manager to show windows that are open, they'll just be iconified. You can do all of that in KDE Plasma. And I'm pretty sure that most of the big desktop environments, maybe not GNOME, GNOME is kind of limited, but I'm pretty sure XFCE probably can do this. Maybe LXQt can do this as well. I would be surprised if Budgie couldn't do this. Mate, I'm sure could do this as well. So it's probably a situation by his question. He's on POPOS and POPOS uses the GNOME desktop environment, which is rather limiting. So unfortunately, he probably just picked this as his very first distribution and his very first desktop environment. And that's not where I would have directed somebody. So especially coming from Windows, if that's where you're coming from, KDE Plasma is probably a better place to start. And the next question is, in a response from a video I recently did, one of my backyard boomer vlogs, I was talking about the Linux community and the Linux ideals and things like this. And in a little box out to the side of my head, I said, right now I'm making Linux sound like veganism, as far as a lifestyle change, a way of life. And this person writes, Hey, DT, being a vegan means making an ethical and moral decision to not contribute to hurting animals or exploiting other sentient beings, i.e. animals. What's your problem with that? I didn't say I had a problem with that in this video, right? I said nothing about my thoughts on veganism other than the correlation between Linux being a lifestyle change, a way of life and veganism being like a major lifestyle change and a way of life. That's the only thing I said. I never said that there was a had a problem with veganism or that I love veganism. I made no comment on this at all. So here's one of the things being a YouTube content creator is so many times people try to start arguments where there's not one. Sometimes they just make stuff up. One of the really interesting things over the years I've noticed is people assume political identity with me. I'll make a video and I've had several videos where I've posted something and I guess, you know, it leaned a little left, right? According to some people's minds, I was like, man, you're you're one of these leftist liberal yada, yada, yada, cancel culture people. Shame on you, DT. And then I make a video the next day. And all of a sudden that same person will be, oh, you're one of these far right wing extremists, yada, yada, yada. The same person called me a leftist the day before calling me this right wing person the next day. And I didn't say anything political on either video as far as I never have I've never once on any video mentioned political parties that I belong to anybody I've ever voted for you've never not one single time on any video have gotten anything from like that from me. So it's weird people just assume this stuff or they just make this stuff. I think some of these people just want to have an argument. So they start something like this vegan person, right? I didn't say anything about veganism, but he's going to try to put words in my mouth like I did hoping that I'll come back and have an argument with him. No, I'm not going to do that, right? Because I don't spend my time arguing with people on the internet. That's why I canceled my Twitter account. That's why I canceled my Facebook account. I don't do that. I have stuff to do. And honestly, you guys should have better stuff to do. If you're one of these people that are constantly looking to argue with somebody on the internet to the point where you have to make stuff up to have an argument with somebody, you know, just to feel better about yourself, you really need to have some introspection. You really need to take a darker, deeper look at yourself and figure out why that's the case and try to resolve that. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about these guys right here. Devon Gabe James, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Akami Allen, Lennox Ninja, Chuck, Commander Edgar Kerr, Diokai, David, Dylan Gregory, Heiko, Costco, Lee, Maximite, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archon, Fedor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode of Haiti would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support me, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.