 Welcome to another edition of HeyDT. HeyDT 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 viewer questions and comments come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, and sometimes through email. And the very first question I want to respond to is, HeyDT, have you ever used a dating site? If so, how did you describe yourself? Good question. And the reason it's a great question is because I think many people outside the Linux community imagine that we, the Linux users, that we're all kind of socially awkward. We can't have any meaningful relationships with other people. And we certainly can't have a sexual relationship or romantic relationship with anyone else. And that's not the case at all. Although I've never used a dating site, I'm not against the idea of maybe putting a profile online. I think maybe that could help me in my love life. So I think for a dating profile, let's go ahead and create one right here on camera. My profile would read something like, I'm a Linux enthusiast whose favorite commands are strip, unzip, touch, and mount. I'm looking for a girl who is the total package who is built correctly with no missing dependencies. Also, she must be forward and direct. I can't stand cryptic error messages. And finally, this is a deal breaker. She must be willing to convert to the Church of Emacs. Moving on to the next question. HeyDT, can you go over what makes mainline versions of Linux distros different to each other, like how Arch compares to Slackware? It can't just all be about the package manager. And yes, it actually can be all about the package manager. And I'm assuming he's asking about this is because I often say that these Linux distributions, they're all the same. Fundamentally, they're all the same other than package management, the package manager they use and their release cadence. Are they a stable release model, static release model, or are they a rolling release model? And that's the difference. That really is the difference between, for example, he's comparing Arch to Slackware is they use different package management systems. And one of them is a rolling release where the other is more of a static stable release model. And that's it, right? Other than that, everything you can do on Slackware, you can do on Arch and vice versa. They're essentially the same bash shell underneath the same new core utils, the same kernel. It's really as a end user as a desktop end user, somebody that's, you know, not really geeky, you know, somebody that's just going to use a computer, you give them Arch or you give them Slackware, they're not going to notice any difference at all. The only thing they're going to interact with on a regular basis that will be different will be the package manager. And moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, would you still be using Emacs if there was no Doom Emacs? Yes, I have actually used just regular GNU Emacs a couple of different times. Actually, when I first switched to Emacs, for those of you that haven't been following the channel that long, when I first switched to Emacs about three years ago or whatever it happens to be now, I actually spent 30 days in GNU Emacs upfront because I wanted to learn the vanilla GNU Emacs key bindings before moving to evil mode. I knew I'd probably end up in evil mode at some point. But I actually was fine using GNU Emacs. And then I switched to Doom Emacs. And once I switched to Doom Emacs, I thought, you know, at some point, I should probably go back to GNU Emacs just for learning purposes to go and configure GNU Emacs exactly how Doom Emacs is kind of set up. And I did that, I spent another month or two in GNU Emacs, making a massive config of several thousand lines long, where I was adding all of these packages that are already built into Doom Emacs. And I kind of made GNU Emacs be Doom Emacs. And that was fine, other than it was a massive config that, you know, was managing a lot of stuff that Doom Emacs already takes care of out of the box. And to be honest, Doom Emacs just performs a lot better than what my config was doing, because Doom Emacs does have some speed improvements and performance improvements, because those guys are, you know, really are doing a smart job of how they're handling all of these various extensions and plug-ins that get loaded and things like that. So ultimately, Doom Emacs was just a better product for me than trying to make GNU Emacs be Doom Emacs. So yeah, I could certainly use GNU Emacs if Doom Emacs was not around. It wouldn't be an issue. I've done it before, and I have no problem configuring it. It's just why go through that work. If essentially I'm going to 90% of what Doom Emacs does, I would do in GNU Emacs anyway, because I'm always going to install things like Evil Mode and the Witch Key plug-in, you know, various org mode extensions and things like that that are already there in Doom. Because Doom isn't really that bloated. You know, most of the stuff that's already baked into Doom Emacs really are the kind of packages that I would say 90% of Emacs users are probably going to install themselves anyway, it's just Doom kind of gets you there a little faster than having to start a vanilla GNU Emacs config from scratch. Moving on, the next comment is hey, DT, make a video on how to set up and use a window manager on a laptop where all the function keys are bind to functions like brightness and all some weird grammatical stuff going on there, but he wants to know how to make his customizable probably tiling window manager, it could be floating window managers like OpenBots or JWM or something. Hey, I need to use key bindings and I want to bind them to the function keys on my laptop, but those laptop function keys are already set to some other functions. Well, my advice would be probably not to use the function keys anyway to bind things to anything you're going to run on a regular basis probably shouldn't be binded to a function key. And the reason I say this is unless that's the only machine you're ever going to use most keyboards, most other equipment you're going to use may or may not even have function keys on them. I know a lot of people myself included most of the keyboards I have a lot of these zsa keyboards like the Ergo Docs the Moonlander certainly 40% keyboards like the Plank they don't have function keys on them. So I would never bind anything to a function key, not just for me but also because people will want to repurpose my configs use my configs for inspiration. Some of those people also may not have keyboards with function keys. So for me, I always just avoid using the function keys for any key bindings anyway. Now, having said all that, I do know and all of my tiling window managers, I can bind any key on any keyboard to specific functions like I know in X Monad, I can bind the print screen key and various media keys like play and pause and search the web and you know, all of those weird keys that you'll sometimes on to have a like on a 110 key keyboard that have a million keys. Most of them are really weird, odd specific keys, you know, toggle eject, for example, you know, eject your CD player and things like that. I can bind all of those keys in X Monad to anything I wish. Now, again, you have to be careful with that stuff because unless you're always going to be at a keyboard that has those keys available, I probably wouldn't do that. But but there's nothing stopping you from doing that if you choose to do it. And the next question is Haiti. What do you select when your AUR helper asks you to remove make dependencies after install? I always decide to keep them. But is it necessary if I don't plan on rebuilding the package? No, it's not necessary to keep those dependencies, you should probably just always choose Yes, remove the make dependencies. And this is not just for the AUR but any kind of package management system. If you're installing software and it asked you about do you want to remove the build dependencies, the make dependencies, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, just have it remove all of that stuff. It will be unneeded cruft that is just taking up space on your system. Because those programs don't do anything for you. They were installed temporarily to help build that package that you wanted. But now that's built the package you wanted. You don't really need that that program that was needed to build the package. Just have it go ahead and uninstall itself in that way. Again, you're not taking up needed drive space. And the next comment is Haiti and Media School. They said something profound that stuck with me. If there is a microphone in the room, then assume it is on. And this was in response to a recent video I did where I was talking about proprietary operating systems and proprietary hardware as well. Not just you know, desktops, laptops, mobile phones as well. Anything that has microphones attached to it and also cameras as well. But the microphones assume that they're always on and they're always listening to you always spying on you because with proprietary software, these operating systems, you really don't know what they're doing. You're kind of taking a chance anytime you're using these devices with these proprietary operating systems. And he says, Well, in school, you know, they had this saying if there's a microphone in the room, always assume it's on. Yeah, they were doing that for slightly different reasons. It wasn't necessarily because of people spying on you without your knowledge. This was more of so you don't accidentally say something on a hot mic, right? And then this is more akin to, you know, not accidentally saying something publicly that later on you're going to regret because you assumed it was a private conversation, but it really wasn't because it was on a microphone. Maybe it was a microphone that was being recorded and you thought the recording was over. The microphone was no longer hot, but you know, it can also be analogous to social media these days. Many people, you know, post something crazy on social media and then of course later regret it later. That post causes them some grief because when they posted it on social media, they weren't in a current position that they are now. And they weren't as well known. They didn't have this position in this company or this school or whatever it happens to be. And now people go back and look at these older messages before you were really you. And now they use some of what you said in the past against you today. So that's more analogous to what you're talking about with the microphone and media school and everything. I was more talking about the dangers of people spying on you, not accidentally saying something and being a jackass. But in today's world, I think both apply as far as you just anytime you're around microphones and cameras just always assume that they are waiting for you to slip up and do the wrong thing. Next up is two questions that are kind of related. Well, one is actually going to answer the question of the first one. The first question, Haiti, do you know any PC vendor that builds a PC or laptop without an OS installed? And we can install the OS that we wish to install. And the next question, Haiti, is that Ava logo for angels and airwaves behind you. So typically behind me, you'll see a blue box that's got Ava. Let me grab the box. This box here, AVA. Now this is from a custom PC builder online that I have used more than once. This company is called Ava Direct. And go to Ava Direct.com. They build custom PCs, laptops, workstations, gaming systems, servers. And you can, you know, choose the components, the hardware that you want them to use to build your machine. And you can also choose what operating system to install. If you want Windows, they'll install it. If you don't want Windows, they won't install it. I think they may even offer some Linux options for them to go ahead and just put various popular versions of Linux on the machine. Or you can just have them send you no operating system installed at all. That's typically what I do. Because rarely do I want the Linux distribution most companies are going to ship with, because typically they're going to default. Ubuntu LTS makes sense for the masses, but typically I'm going to go with other stuff, right? So typically these kinds of companies, I just tell them, don't install the OS, I'll take care of it myself. So when I get my machine, you know, I just, the first thing I do, put in a flash drive and I throw, you know, whatever, arch or whatever I want to run on it and away I go. And the next question is really just a comment. He goes, hey, DT, just notice some bot pretending to be you replying to comments. And then he goes on to warn people in the comment section. Remember, folks, DT wouldn't promote proprietary garbage like WhatsApp. So there's these bots that go out there. And once you've gained a bit of a following on YouTube, your channel gets flooded with bots. And some of these bots pretend to be you. They'll have your name as their username, they'll have your avatar. They can't really have my name. A lot of times they'll have my name. It'll say distro tube and then out to the side of it, it will have some kind of information as far as numbers to connect to WhatsApp and Telegram and crap like that proprietary garbage, right? Stuff I would never use. And that's how you know. Anybody telling you that they're me and want you to meet me on WhatsApp or Telegram or Discord or any of that proprietary garbage, you know that's not me because I wouldn't use those. I've never ever used WhatsApp or Telegram ever. I don't plan on ever using those. So that's never going to be me plus I'm always going to have a checkbox next to my name, the real DT, because I'm a verified user on YouTube. So if that person claiming to be me does not have a checkbox next to their name, they are not actually me. The other way you know that it's not really me or really any content creator on YouTube that's actually posting these messages is because any content creator that makes a lot of videos and really spends a lot of time making content probably is not then in their spare time going to tell people, hey, now come hang out with me on WhatsApp and Telegram or where no they're not going to do. They have to have a life outside of, you know, all of the content all the video making, right? They're not going to then want to also in real life hang out with like fans of their channel or whatever. No, I mean, I really love the community I've built around my channel, but I don't want to hang out with you guys when I when I'm outside of working hours essentially, right? Once I've set aside time for myself, I'm not going to be hanging out on things like Discord, for example, or whatever it happens to be. So that's how you know if a content creator, if you see somebody claiming to be a content creator and they're telling people, hey, come hang out with me here, that's going to be a scam. They're trying to scam these people out of money in some way. I don't know what all the scams are about, but probably a lot of it involves, unfortunately, financing, investing, crypto, things like that. And the final question is, hey, DT, do you think that canonical have cleaned up their act since the whole Amazon spyware debacle? How do you feel about them as far as free as in freedom goes? I have no issues with canonical as a company as far as promoting free and open source software and the whole Amazon spyware debacle I thought that was way overblown. And we're talking about something that happened many years ago where what he's talking about for those that weren't around is in one of the earlier versions of the Unity desktop environment, they put an Amazon link. There was an icon on the launcher, you know, kind of like next to Firefox and your terminal icon. There was an Amazon box that would open your web browser to amazon.com with a like an affiliate link. So canonical could make a little money if you actually bought anything through Amazon, which I was fine with as far as I don't mind them making a little money if I'm going to go to Amazon and buy stuff anyway. I thought that was okay, but a lot of people had a problem with that. And I really didn't understand why because it's not like you couldn't remove that Amazon link and later what they ended up doing is making it opt in where you had to opt in to even see that link. And, you know, it wasn't a big deal to me for me being a free and open source software proponent. The only issues I've ever had with canonical over the years is that all of their software has not been open sourced. So I remember when I first started in Linux, you know, about 15 years ago or so. And I actually was a an Ubuntu user. That was my first Linux distribution as far as when I switched to Linux full time on the desktop. And a lot of their stuff on the web was not fully open source. They were using probably still our proprietary software to run their web forms. I know they had a proprietary service that was like a cloud syncing service that wasn't fully open source. Launchpad was not fully open source. There was a lot of stuff. And most of that stuff is not really relevant today. Some of that stuff is no longer with us. But some of the stuff that is with us that still kind of annoys me is Snapcraft. The Snap server, the back end to Snap packages is still not fully open source. Now that doesn't really affect you, the end user, because you can install Snap packages that are Snap packages of free software. And those packages are free software. When you install them, you've actually installed a piece of free software. The only thing is the servers that you had to interact with. A lot of that stuff is not fully free as in freedom. But honestly, I'm not one of these people that ever trash canonical. I don't get why people feel the need to. Well, I won't say that. I understand why people trash big corporations like Canonical and like Red Hat, those two especially here in the Linux community. We love to trash these companies and talk about how bad and evil they are, even though nothing canonical or Red Hat have ever done has ever been on the level as kind of the stuff that Microsoft has done or Apple or Facebook, Google, things like that. It's really weird that the companies that are doing the most out there to actually promote Linux and to promote open source software that we in the open source community, we actually like to trash those companies. And I think a lot of this is just human nature. We love to pick on the guy on top. We like to bring the person on top down a little bit, right? If Canonical and Red Hat, you know, if, for example, Ubuntu wasn't a popular distribution and nobody used it. No one would ever talk about Canonical. No one would have a bad thing to say about it because if you're not going to go to a subreddit and try to start this massive thread trashing a company that no one really cares about and the distribution they make no one really uses, that's not what you do, right? For the person that really wants to start stirring some shit up, right? They're going to go, you're always going to pick on the guy on top, right? You always punch up. You never punch down. So I really wish the people in the Linux community would really think about how they treat certain corporations. Again, Canonical, Red Hat, increasingly because of the popularity of Manjaro, which is a corporate back distribution. People really love making fun of Manjaro for various things these days. And you have to understand that if we're going to succeed with free and open source software, we, the open source community, we can't destroy ourselves, which is kind of what we're doing. We're destroying ourselves. We're eating ourselves. And at some point, we have to make sure that we're actually fighting the correct battles because there are certainly corporations out there that deserve our vitriol and our hate, but it's not the companies that are doing the most to promote free and open source software. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Matt Maxim, and Mitchell Paul West. Why you bald? Homie, Alex, Armor Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, George, Lee, Mars, Drum, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Arts, and Adore, Polytech, Realities for Less, Rod, Profits, Rowland, Steven, Tools, Devler, Willie. I kind of flubbed that, but I'm not going to rerecord it. These guys, they're my highest-eared 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 fine ladies and gentlemen, 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 sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. Amazon's spyware debacle talk about holding a grudge.