 Hey everybody welcome to the Linuxcast for October 11th 2020 Now the last few episodes I've been here just all by myself It's been very lonely, but I have a co-host his name is Martin. Hi, Martin. How are you doing? Hi, Matt. Well, well doing good as well as could be a month much into these days There we go. All right, so this is our first show together. We're uh, we've talked for about an hour on Skype last Sunday We're so probably what you'll notice is will it'll take a little while for us to Get our groove on and become aware of each other's sense of humor because I have a terrible sense of humor I'm probably will make fun of you know weird things at some certain times and I also swear And we're at Martin's request. We're gonna try not to swear. So if you hear me swear I'll I'll finally get to learn how to do that fancy beeping things. They do on the radio. It'll be fun if you want to get in contact with us you can do so contact info is Linux at the Linux cast on Twitter. You can follow me. I'm at MTWB on Twitter Martin is Martin twit to you to you. You need a better handle my friend Years ago and I put His Twitter handle will be in the show notes. It'll be easier just to click on it It's Martin twit the number to you on Twitter. You can also email us at the Linux cast at gmail.com Which I do check once a year And you can also like us on Facebook at facebook.com slash the Linux cast or subscribe on YouTube and all of our Podcasts feeds and stuff at the Linux cast.org you can probably find the link for the YouTube channel also in the show notes And the Eagles lost Well, that's just it pack it in folks my football team lost blows. All right, so Last time I was here all by myself. I said we're gonna talk about in video We push that back a week and this time we're just gonna let Martin introduce himself just a little bit So Martin, why don't you tell us about yourself? How would it why do you use Linux? What Linux do you use and so on? Have a ramble Yeah, well try and keep keep it short Right, so I mean I started my journey with home computers back in the mid-80s I was using a Vic-20 Then on to a Commodore 64 and then progressed on to the Atari ST and then down the console route with a mega drive and SNES or SNES PS1 and so forward. I took computer studies back in 1993 I Haven't never actually used a real PC unfortunately This was back in the days obviously of using the dots prompt No fancy spreadsheets. It was lotus one two three Word perfect, and I was programming using the Pascal programming language even Ever since my computer studies. I've always owned a PC. I've just loved the tinkering about and there various Formations and bits and pieces you can get running on PCs With my Linux journey, I mean I tried it back in probably about 2010. I Didn't get on with it whether it was because it was a low-spec system I think generally it was just what I was not used to It seemed very sluggish I mean I've tried it every so often But it was a gaming and the familiarity which kept me toyed into the Microsoft Windows ecosystem I'll skip forward a few years back to March of this year I decided to upgrade my PC as I was working from home as a lot of us are and still are I'll replace a motherboard memory graphics card and it was quite amazing actually booted straight into Windows Unfortunately bottom right hand of the screen. I had the dreaded Windows not genuine I did a bit of Google food and found out that Microsoft created a special number from my mother board CPU on hard drive and The the toys into a specific key and my login to Windows I Just wasn't too happy at that and obviously I tried to get rid of it and this and that and I mean to be fair It was only a five pound key off eBay So I looked into more to try and get rid of it I've eventually got rid of it and then just found out the amount of telemetry they send off to Microsoft And the constant software updates that often lead to a crash or or even worse data loss So I thought right. Let's give Linux ago So what's a few YouTube videos? And decided upon trying MX Linux and my 2010 Samsung laptop Was quite surprised how easy the install was and literally bought my laptop back from the grave. It is Struggled recently under Windows And I was just amazed at the amount of choice that Linux gave me whether it was conky plank All the all the different system information I could get up on the screen without eating away at more resources The varied different desktops that you can get lost in And the plus was my steam library slightly increased from the previous times of Tried Linux in the past I've not gotten rid of Linux yet for my my main rig Still have to use Windows name and again for the other system Program that is not available yet on Linux and so just dual boot it Currently I'm on Linux Mint with a KDE plasma which I'm trying out which are quite like And nor is resource hungry as I did think and that's about it up until this point Very good. Um, I used to like KDE too, and then I discovered Windows managers and I've never looked back I think that's a rabbit hole long of my well-delving to I Have KDE on this on this machine here in the other day. I went into it for some reason I don't remember what I was doing. Oh, I messed up my i3 config and couldn't get it i3 to To load and when I finally got back into i3 k when was running in the background taking up like 60% of my memory Which is really weird. So anyways first personal like Linux experiences site. So Welcome Martin to the Linux cast Excellent great to be we're gonna have a lot of fun. I think over the yeah over time So instead of a main topic so the way we're we've decided to Rejigger the way We structure the the podcast now that there's two people here instead of just me rambling on into the ether We're gonna have a couple links for news and then we'll do one main big topic like I had been doing but you know with two people Today what we're gonna do instead of the news We're just going to talk about the favorite Linux apps that we use and I figure Martin that we'll just go through and you do one I'll do one you know until we get you know until we get to a certain amount of time And then we'll just wrap it up. So why don't you do give your first top Linux app? Yeah, well coming from Windows and I was constantly the running system of optimization or C cleaner And obviously you don't have to run as many on Linux But a nice little system cleaner optimized. I did come across was a one called stacer We'll drop the link in the show notes so you can find it from your software repository, but it tidy things up there's no danger of Bricking your system or anything like that, but it really is a good one and just Feel quite comfortable with it. Obviously, there's there's better ones as bleach bits There's a couple of others But I think bleach bit if you knew and you take the wrong thing you could well be in a bit of danger So I would recommend stacer. It's just a couple of clicks cleans your system. Hmm sounds cool I Don't clean my system often enough It's probably something I should do. I probably have all these orphaned packages just sitting around Oh Yeah, so my first one is a new one that I just actually did a video on for the YouTube channel. It's called Zim or ZimWiki It's a it's a VimWiki alternative, but it's a big a GUI based notes base Nate notes taking app That you can use mark mark down and allows you to create links and child links and all sorts of things It's just a really great note taking it now It doesn't offer syncing services across devices or anything So it's just basically for your computer, but I really like it It's also helped me with like outlining like, you know, I'm a fan fiction writer So I write fan fiction and original fiction stuff that so it's helping with doing outlines and stuff like that's really cool Also free and open source so Cool, I didn't have a mess about with a Kodi MD. Is that something similar? Is that like a markdown just a mark? Yeah, not down. Yeah. Yeah, that's this in Zim has markdown in it, but it's more used to create like your own personal wiki Basically, it allows you to go through and like Each page links to each other kind of like on Wikipedia or whatever, but it's for your own personal notes and allows you to organize Into different categories and tags and stuff like that. So it's a full-blown thing that just uses markdown Not cool. Can you tie that to your Android or whatever device of choice yet or no, I don't have an ant nothing mobile They there was talk in 2017 about them being able to About them doing an Android app, but it never got off the ground But it just saves everything in a .txt file So there's no reason why you couldn't save that in a drop box or something and have like a yeah You know a text editor on your your phone Just do it and if that text editor happened to support markdown It would all come through formatted just like it doesn't Zim anyways, so Yeah, I haven't tried that but I'm assuming that it would work that way because they're just that there's no special formatting Extension or anything. It's just .txt files. It's not like in Vim wiki I don't know if you use them wiki Vim wiki has no it saves all those in a .wiki file So it have you'd have a harder time taking that and putting it somewhere else Then you would just the text files of Zim. That's why I kind of like Zim All right, your next up Oh next up Well, I've been getting actually into web apps Which is available for Linux Mint on a beta People coming from Peppermint OS would have known it as the OS app and this lets users turn their favorite websites Into standalone Applications in a containerized browser, which is ideal for banking To be fair just I've got my banking. I've got my login for work on there I've got YouTube on there. So it just opens up without all your various tracking. So it's just a standalone Basically a container package with a no tracking involved and I'm getting quite Interested in that just locking down this the security a bit Saved tracking me all the way through various web sites if I'm looking for bits and pieces But that's my second app definitely Yeah, that sounds that sounds interesting I don't I don't know if there's any web apps that I would use for that though because I try to stay away from web apps There used to be my you know There used to be this one called like Frank or something that Allowed you to Integrate all of the messaging web apps like a Facebook Messenger and things like that Maybe I could use that for quick. Thanks. I remember but that one other one was alright So my next app is I3 which is a window manager It's what I use instead of like a plasma or whatever regular desktop environment. I Have a message around with other window managers, but I just always keep coming back to I3 I think it's because you don't have to learn any Like programming language in order to do it like so I was using Qtile for a while and that you have to use Python you know in order to do the config file and like I don't know any Python at all And while it's nice to learn it's just kind of a pain in the butt if you you hey look I didn't swear. Good job, man You know, it's just it's just a pain you go in there you forget a comma and you're like, oh man Like in all of a sudden your thing won't load so I3 is not like that it also has like a If you make an error it still loads for the most part except for that one time where it didn't load Anyways, that's just it's the thing that I When my first start out with Linux and Windows and everything I use my mouse for everything Like just like everybody does and now that I've switched to window managers. Everything is just keyboard driven I mean, it's just so much easier hardly ever use my mouse So that's the reason why I like I3 Submit of doubled with the open box Yeah, it's a floating tile tile floating window manager, which I haven't tried all that much but from the the Unix porn Subreddit, there's a lot that you can do with it. It looks fun Yeah, yeah, I mean to definitely Drain your system if you're using a pre-2010 laptop Definitely, especially if you get the right distro working on it at the end of the day Personally, I'll just use Linux to log on to server at work and YouTube and all the various there's nothing Particularly demanding that I do use a system for and mindy tinkling about Yes, basically what I do is most most of my work is done in Like Libre office is where I spend most of my time I'm writer. So that's what I do Yeah, that's That's my main thing about Linux. I like using my Microsoft proprietary software like Spreadsheets Yeah Yeah, I mean I can log on to the web apps and things like that, but I'm used to Excel But it's no big if I need to log I can log into the web page from here It just opens up just as good. So and and I don't think Microsoft's gonna give that up. They might give us a Microsoft Edge Not that I don't think a lot of people's Too bothered about that But that's another topic. I'm guessing. Yeah, right. So you're next step Another app Bear with me. Let me just have a look through what I've recently um Could I cheat and say audacity? I don't have an eyelash I said the one I've Used today really just before the show just run for a couple of bits and pieces I've heard a lot of it from the podcasting world a lot of people. Is it available on Windows also? Yeah, it's on Windows and Mac. Yep. Yeah, I hear a lot of good things for it So Decided to run that But yeah, it seems nice and clean. It's not a busy system User-friendly, so I'll have to cheat and use that if I can Yeah, all that I use audacity all the time. It's it's fantastic. Um, the it there the Primary the user interface kind of looks like it's from the Windows 98 era, but if you can theme it it looks good So my next one is another keyboard driven one is called Rofi. It's basically a launcher It's alternative to D menu, which is what most window tiling tiling window managers use But I like it because there's I mean there's so many different ways you can use it So I got to set up so I can hit control or Super C and that brings up a Whole bunch of everything that I've copied and pasted a whole history of copying paste stuff the clipboard. Yeah I could do Windows B and it brings up all the emojis on my system I can hit one and then it goes to the clipboard and I can use it So that's really cool So you don't have to go through and search like if you're on Facebook Facebook has a whole bunch of these emojis And they're a little thing, but you can't search them You know, I'm 35 years old and I still use emojis that judge me if you will But that's basically basically Rofi and you can just use it to launch apps and stuff And it's just a keyboard driven way of launching apps. No, there's other versions of this cut. There's one called So like Mac Mac has Alfred, but Windows has Linux has Albert. So That's a more GUI century version because this is just like brings up a little terminal launcher So that's my next step. I really like it You got another one for us Martin. Oh, yeah, I think a staple for anyone should be redshift which Changes the your monitor toning depending on the time of day, so it'll obviously reduce I think it is it the blue No, it'll drop your temperatures in your monitor because In a couple of times I've been on Until we small hours and it just fries your eyes But redshifts are a really good thing and obviously If you're dimming out the blue light, it does help you to go to sleep And obviously, you're not you're not getting the flickering that sometimes you have from the refresh rate of the monitors But yeah, definitely redshift should be a Installed on anyone set up. Yeah, I think that's one of those things were um That's something that I should be using but I don't use I'm young. I'm invincible. I don't have to do these things Maya who needs You got two eyes. You don't I mean you have one to lose All right, um So you told you bad sense of humor. So you're just gonna have to deal with it So my next one is uh nc spot. It's a terminal based spotify client So when I switched to window manager window managers, I basically tried to Make it so that everything is as minimal as possible. So I don't have a ton of overhead And the spotify client itself for linux is an electron app and electron apps take a ton of system resources. So nc spot just basically you Install it you sign in with your spotify account and everything's keyboard driven and it just works and it's Hardly any overhead at all. I mean it doesn't take up hardly any system resources and it There's just something there's just something about using a Application in a terminal makes you feel like you're a nerd and I like to feel like a nerd So um, that's the reason why I use nc spot, which is uh, probably not a good reason, but it's it's good There's certain I mean it doesn't have all the functionality that the spotify client has but I mean you can still manage your Playlists and search for artists and stuff. The only thing I wish it had was uh the ability to start like a radio station based on an artist or a song or something which you can't do from the terminal, which is disappointing So your next one martin um, I'll go for steam on linux mainly because I do like the odd game um It's just not well. It's exactly the same as on windows. Obviously with slightly less games I mean I did go down the rabbit hole of Lutris and wine but sometimes you could You could just end up scratching your head and then I mean you're looking up and you'll find out exactly what you've Done, but it's a lot of hard work. I just rather write. It's in my steam library. Just download it play it native um, obviously I've gone to Use proton and things like that, but yeah, I'll go for steam It's a good choice. I don't play as many games as I want to play Um, but I will say this you're so right about wine in Lutris I I've been using linux for three years and I've never not once been successful in getting a game to play through wine I don't know whether or not it's because it's so hard if I'm just a moron It's either one as possible, but I just cannot like I really I desperately want to be able to play hearthstone on linux because that's through like hearthstone is the only reason Why I have windows on a partition Uh, but I can't get battle net to install on linux They just can't do it and there's no good tutorial out there like saying hey, you know You have to have these dependencies and these fonts installed. There's there's nothing like that out there I'm not sure why you think that I mean, I've seen people on youtube have battle net installed and play over watching stuff, but there's I don't know Uh and rant anyways, so my next one my next one is the only piece of proprietary software that I actually Uh use on a daily basis. I have Skype installed reasons Skype right now But I don't use that very often But my one that I use every day is to do is it's a my to-do list manager I keep my daily things that I have to do, you know in it and it sinks across my phones and There's just no good Open source way to do this. Um, there's a a to-do list client called planner. That's for elementary os It works pretty much only well in elementary os from my experience It doesn't work well on a window manager, which is just disappointing But even then it still uses the proprietary back end of to-do list Um And I like being able to sync the tasks across phones and you can do that with g-tasks And or g-tasks client, but there's no good ones. They're all Meh, you know I don't know just there's not good as It's weird to say your biggest is if you had to list your biggest disappoint with with linux Mine would be the lack of a good open source to-do client and you'd think I mean every Computer science student their very first app that they code is a to-do client I mean you'd think that there'd be at least one good open source one, but there's just not That's that's my That's another rant for today. Um, so you got another another app for us martin Yeah, I'll go for a Terminal app called well, I'll butcher this now Ya Quakey Y-A-K-U-A-K-E Um It's just a nice little terminal app f4 and it drops down. I mean, I know you can use the terminal shortcuts But I find myself opening terminal shutting it down, right? Oh Open it up blank new terminal. You're quicky. You're quakey f4 Popping your commands paste it in um It's it's quite customizable as well when you lose focus. You can roll back up Um roll back over drops back down or press f4 carry off where you're left off Um, I think it really is a a good little terminal emulator I've used it before that it'll I think it has a nice feature where you can like start Say you start an update for a boon to or whatever And then it can just go like run in the background Just leave it running. Yeah Yeah, that that's really nice because otherwise, I mean for everything else you have to leave the Terminal open on a screen has taken up real estate. That's you know, that's cool. Yeah There's a couple other ones that are kind of like that too. I've tried Anyways, my next one is um so in my quest of To try to find everything open source for my Daily needs. Uh, I switched from last pass to bit warden. I discovered bit warden from through an ad on the dln And uh, it's awesome. I mean, it's just fantastic. It's open source. It's every feature you want is free. They have a paid version I'm not even sure what you get with the paid version, but I just throw up some money every month because it's awesome. I mean it's just Uh, it's basically like, I don't know if you've used one password or last pass It's basically that but just open source and it's well designed. It has you know, android app iOS app Uh to keep your passwords in and I mean, I think everyone should use a password manager So it's just this is the one that I've chosen and it's open source. I was using uh end pass for a while And that's not open source, but it worked fairly well But bit warden is just Yeah, it's it's better in every way So that's my Go ahead. Cool. Cool. Um, yeah, I've had the guys at dln With it because I'm on the last pass guy still Um, but I've been thinking about giving a bit warden a try um Because there is a lot of features and I think of Doing this off my head. Have you got something like a gig of your notes and stuff like that you can Save on the system and things like that Um as well, I think you can have it closed down. So it's just on your system or in the cloud um, but I think it's about 10 books for a year, which I'm pretty sure of which which is nothing just especially we the security And they offer bounties to try and crack it. So I don't see last pass doing that. I just hear that last pass has never been um broken into but When I log into last pass, it isn't one of the best. It's just like you get your Yeah, you put your obviously your email in and you've got countless amounts of troys at your password and I just I don't feel safe as a password manager. So maybe that's one to have a look to and Obviously if it works on android as well, um, yeah, it does That'd be spot on Yeah, it's it's very nice on android. Um, I'm not sure if it has a limit of Password track. I'm not sure if it has that same volume. It seems that I mean that seems like I mean That seems standard, right? It seems like something you'd have to do like hey, you've tried 10 times. You have to try I mean, even like even like twitter. I mean who cares about twitter, right? That has a timeout pastor, but a password manager doesn't that's not very odd. All right. Yeah, uh Go ahead and get you got you. Uh, we got time for one more app. So why don't you if you have another one to share with us Right, I'll go for I'll I'll go for p-cloud Excuse me Um I just bring it up Yes, a p-cloud. I just want to check how much you get on a basic, um The system's sorry. I'll give you a p-cloud gives you extra for pretty much every action you take You fill out your profile you get an extra gigabyte or something. You share it with somebody you get extra gigabytes and Be called screen Yeah, I use p-cloud a lot. Um, obviously distro hopping. So I just log into that. Um Pull down some of my favorite terminal commands to install software or whatnot, but p-cloud is quite nice I mean, I was going to go for next cloud as well, which I've gone on to um But I I'll keep p-cloud as like my My my extra backup. So I've got next cloud and I've got p-cloud but I'm Quite like next cloud as well, especially I think I've got five gigs free And it's just like I'm guessing that the one, um Me to bring all my files across and go for the one terabyte or 10 terabyte But five gigs enough just for um My desktop saves and various things like that obviously it handles my email, but yeah, I'll go for a split between p-cloud and Next cloud for that for the apps just for file synchronization, especially if you're distro hopping Let's face it. We're only keeping a couple of files on your system at any one time. That's of any use It's uh, just in case you format the wrong drive, which occasionally happens Yeah, dd is not necessarily the easiest thing to work use No So I've looked into after we talked last week. I talked I looked into a little bit of doing Next cloud and I found a service provider. I think I'm going to use that I don't know how to pronounce their name it starts with an O But you get a hundred gigabytes and it's like 25 bucks a year like that's That's That's that's really good, but I'm quite happy with the five gig. But yeah, that's good. I mean the thing is you The prices are coming down all the time um But yeah, that's a really good deal. So I mean you can quite easily transfer all your files across there, but Like this thing I'd rather have it shared out with between a couple because you don't know in some of these guys They're just going to go belly up or you're just going to lose your date. So it's always best having two cloud services um your pictures stored on cd rom uh, or mail off You're at your us beta A family member just make sure you've got it in three different places, especially for like family photos and things like that Hey, I got yeah, I got mine several different places too. Um, yeah All right, so I think we'll go ahead and and wrap up there We got about a half an hour of a of a good podcast coming up next week. We're going to talk about Uh, Nvidia and arm. We're going to talk about our opinions on that. We'll also have a couple news links of uh that suit our fancy. Um, and uh I just guess I'll go ahead and go and if you want to get in contact with us we uh All of the conflict tech information is at the beginning. Nobody listens to the all the way to the end anyways um I mean, I say that but then there's like that, you know, like seven people who actually do It's actually 70 of people actually make it all the way to the end. So you brave brave souls making it all the way to the end of this nonsense I mean our heart really goes and We're so grateful to those who listen all the way to the end. So um, we should put it like a contest I mean, we we had like unlimited money or something we do a contest at the end The only way you know what the contest is if you listen to all the way to the end But you can't skip because we'd have some jit You know swear word That skips the end, you know, just to get the answer to the contest. All right. Anyway, uh, we will be back next week Not bad for a first episode on martin Excellent. Great talk to you much for the pleasure