 So, I wanted to do a video today and talk about how I handle things being an IT support company that runs Linux and why we run Linux. So, one, a lot of Linux stuff has to do for me with security and it's an environment I'm comfortable with and a lot of my staff runs this as well, because it's something they're comfortable with. But of course, we support Windows machines. We're not a Linux company supporting other Linux. We do some of that, more, I do some of that, but it's not the mainstay because we're doing small business support, which means QuickBooks and all the general programs you see in small businesses and all that runs for the most part on top of Windows machines and servers. So, how do you administer Windows machines and servers when you're running Linux on your desktop as the base OS? Well, I do that with a lot of virtualization and I'm showing you kind of the workflow here. This is KDE Neon that I'm running for this. I got a whole review on my actual OS and some of the ICANN. It comes with it. I do like that feature that I can kind of expand all screens. And I'm showing you I run this all with triple monitors. And what that means is there's different things at every section of my monitor and it's how I control my workflow. So, I'm going to start with how I lay out my screens first. I guess that's kind of important. So, on my left screen is usually all the browser tabs that I have open for our critical things like Messenger, which yes, we use Facebook Messenger. We have our Slack channel over here. I use Gmail because I'm using the whole G Suite. So, majority of my stuff runs in our browser for all of that. This is our point-of-sale system you're actually looking at now. Then we have our wiki and our screen connect that we're running so I can connect remotely to computers. And this all runs fine in Linux, including if I want to take control of a system. Easy enough for me to go in here, grab control and open up screen connect. Now, the nice thing is being all web-based and then having a Java launcher means I can just go ahead and do this. I'm going to switch back to the three screens so you can see what I'm doing. And then that gives me control of a computer. And I'll usually pull that one to the middle right now. You may have noticed it looks like I'm running Windows in the middle. I am. I run Windows all inside of virtual machines. So, this is a virtual machine running Windows, but I can also drag things right back over on top of it or switch between it. So, I don't have to have that full screen. So, I can just go back and pull over here. And if I'm working on stuff, I pull that all back over to the middle. Now, the middle screen is usually whatever project I'm working on. Like I said, this one's running Windows full screen. So, I can do all the Windows things that I need to do. And then over here on my right screen, this is going to look funny. Yeah, because I'm using OBS to record. But this is generally where all my communication stuff ends up. So, my Google Hangouts, I have IRC open. Some OBS and with some friends and things like that. I hang out usually in the Wayne State Lug channel because I have a few friends at Wayne State and we call it the lunch channel more than anything else. We go to lunch together. So, there's random Linux messages in there and things like that because it's a Linux users group that really only lives in here. We don't really get together and physically meet other than for lunch. So, I have all my communications things going on over here and I'll drag other communication things over here that I'm waiting for. Now, as far as the applications go, this is also where I keep my virtual box stuff. So, let's go to that. And then I have all my virtual machines. Now, the thing I'm doing with my virtual machines because I'm running Windows and they're all virtualized is I end up with a bunch of special projects for clients all the time. Now, the nice thing about running them virtually and it's all sitting on an SSD is I'll show you in real time here. I won't pause to do anything. I'll show you how quickly we can spin up, start down. Let me switch back to all the screens. It actually shuts down slower than it starts up. But for example, right here is the machine I refer to as Windows 10 support system because it has all the tools I need for special support for clients when I can log into things. So, I double clicked it and you're watching in real time how fast it boots up. I know it's booted up before. Even when it's not cached, it boots up within this few seconds like this. The only thing to segregate in occasion if there's an update. But it's pretty quick. I love when Windows does this. There you go. It pauses randomly on any computer. I'm not familiar with that Windows 10 thing. Once in a while, I don't have an answer, but then I'm in. Now, more app to the workflow. Yesterday was a good example of a project I had to do for a client that required me to load special software to get connected to their network and then load another tool in order to get things going. The way I handle that is I've got a whole thing I do on VirtualBox, but I clone my VirtualBox. So, I'm over here. I actually jump right to the screen and show you. So, over here in VirtualBox, I just jump over here. Right-click, clone. Next, and maybe I'll usually call it the client name and I do what they call a linked clone. So, right here's my Windows 10 support clone. So, what this is for is those special occasions. So, when I handle the special software, I hurry up. I do this clone. And you can see even cloning it took only a matter of seconds to all the screens. And now I have a complete clone of that one. And I go. I load whatever crap software they want to load, which was some VPN connection software and a bunch of other tools to manage a project that I finished. And this is how I handle that. Now, I like this better because back in the days of just running Windows, you're like, oh, man, I got to load a tool, but it's not a tool I'm going to use very often. I hate cluttering up Windows with things because it can cause so many issues. So, when I'm done with the virtual machine, I just go back over here, shut it down. Right click on the virtual machine, remove, and delete all files. Done. So, project's over. Deleted files. I still have my clean Windows 10 system with nothing added onto it. And the only thing it does is leave a snapshot in case I want to go through there. And I can just go ahead and delete the snapshot it created because I didn't like any changes. And it merges all the change dates back in and weren't really in this one. So, that kind of helps with my workflow of that. What I'm using on the desktop are going to be these apps here, like Genie. I'm going to bring that one over here and throw it over in the middle screen. Genie is a really great tool for looking at all kinds of code, whether it's HTML, PHP, or when I'm putting together like a script to get something done, to parse something. Genie's really helpful for that. It's kind of a tabbed, not really a compiler, it is an IDE, but it's not like a full one. But it does have some compiling options and things like that so you can tie it in other things. That's a really great app for that. For all my recording stuff, I'm using OBS that I have open over here, so I'm recording on right now with my Yeti mic. But it's really not a ton of apps that I have to run because I just run everything inside of the virtual machine. Now, one thing that is real important is my screen tool. I do this a lot, which is a cool tool called Shutter. And I do that because people ask me a lot of questions on your work instruction, how do I get into something, and I'll just go grab, and it lets me grab a screen shot of something real quick. It grabs that screen shot, then I can right away jump into the editor and do things like put an arrow, and then throw some text. Click here. And move it over. Save. And now I can then take this. There's options actually to upload it right to Imager or things like that, or you can just do copy, and I'll throw it in Facebook Messenger, or wherever I'm replying, or my email, and that's how I tell people where to click. This is a great little tool, and it's that quick for me to send things. People ask me, man, you did that fast. I'm like, yeah, it's really, really handy. Now, a nice thing is we are using Screen Connect for our remote support, and it has a draw on screen option. Sometimes when we'll talk into clients, we'll jump into Screen Connect, grab control of the computer, and we can draw on the screen and show them where they have to click on something, because a lot of little support things are, they just didn't realize you needed to do this or do this, so we can just share some understanding of how something works. Now, that's most of my daily use of running Linux. All my other special, as I call them, support applications, anything that's not web-based, is going to run inside of that Windows 10 box I have that I call Windows 10 support system. But there's really not much of a need to go in there, because Screen Connect runs natively in Linux for our remote sessions to support people. I load the outlook, so I never use outlook. The only time I ever use outlook is to do some testing for a client and load outlook on something for them, you know, to make sure something works or whatever. So my chat application, if I didn't say it was HexChat, that's another free one you can do for all my IRC communications. And it's not really much else, other than being in the terminal, pinging who is and looking things up all the time. I had to do a bunch of NS Lookups yesterday because a client was having a problem. We're a part of an IT group that was working on it, and the head-ended IT group is not as competent as I'd like them to be, so they were sending me things that made no sense, and I had to show them my NS Lookups, oh, we didn't realize it looked like that outside the building, so sometimes you're, well, I'm using Dig, they're using NS Lookup on Windows, but so there's some command-line tools I use who is and dig to look things up occasionally, so I do have the terminal open a lot. But there's not a lot of other apps that I have running all the time on there. It's like we can live in a browser now more than anything, which really makes the transition to Linux so much easier. If I need to keep notes, I'm using Google Keep for all my note-taking. Nothing like Password or anything goes in there because for security reasons. All the last pass handles a lot of my password management. Once again, browser plug-in, cross-platform, so I don't have to run Windows for any of that, and it kind of makes my workflow easy. Now, I might do a separate video, and if it comes down to, because I'm talking about IT support here, when it comes to things like running a video editing suite, I really love Kaden Live, I've done a video on it, so I thought about doing a whole video on my workflow for editing videos and just kind of talk about how I do it, how I handle it, but that's all here. I do have GIMP running too, but once again, that's more related to video editing. I don't like GIMP a lot as an editor, but for making my YouTube thumbnails, it's actually really, really easy. So like when I made my little Equifax one, I can just copy and pasting. As a matter of fact, that's actually a nice feature. In there is, this works fine in Linux. Let me pull this up. You can just right-click Copy, Edit, Paste as New Layer, and I know this is available in Windows, but it works just fine in Linux too, so I can just paste things as a new layer, drop them in, and that's how I create my thumbnails and everything, so I'm going to do a separate video on my workflow for video, but I want to share kind of what's on my desktop, how we do support, and it's really that kind of boring. Kind of simple. The other program that I'm not going to pull up right now is like obscuring everything is KMyMoney, and I love that program. I've been using it for years to handle all of our ledger for end-of-month finances and things like that. I got a whole separate video you can find on how I use that program to do all of our accounting because I really don't like QuickBooks, and it does support banking inputs, but that's it. There's not a lot else to doing this. When I have to run Windows for Windows Support Tools, I'm just using VirtualBox for all of that. You know, cloning them so I don't clutter things up, and you may notice in my VirtualBox here that I actually, when I have to do some other testing with things for security reasons, I have like, if I need to do some pen testing, I have a copy of Parrot Security running right here for testing that I'm playing with right now. I'm probably going to do a whole review on Parrot. It's just so extensive. I'm trying to decide if I want to do a real long review of short videos on there, like explaining each piece of it. Whenever I'm running PF Sense, I have a copy here. PF Sense, my testing box for my demo things. PF Sense 2.4 release candidate, which once that one goes full, definitely doing a full review of PF Sense, testing with some security onion stuff, and it's a nice thing over with machines. Now I do have a Windows XP box sitting here, and I had to load it up the other day. Occasionally clients will have some really old piece of software and they need it tested, and it's really only supported Windows XP, so I have to clean Windows XP handy just for spinning up and doing some testing when I have to test something with an XP. We have some clients in the manufacturing and they have legacy support applications. It's been a while. I know you can run some even older OSes in here, but so far I haven't had anyone that needs anything prior to XP running. It's enough stuff that does work inside of Windows XP, so we're good on that. So that's kind of it for the workflow and how I'm getting things done. Like I said, I'll do a separate one just talking about my video workflow, but it's also handy because I have a fast computer, so being able to run all these machines virtualized really makes me safe because everything is kind of container to that. Because if I wanted to do any testing on something like copy over a file and say, I don't know if I trust this, I want to know what it's doing, you can very quickly create a virtual network with PF Sense, turn on some tracing and everything so you can fully log what a virtual machine is doing, and the settings right to that network you create and keep everything kind of locked down tight and so you can do some analysis. Once again, way easier to do it in a virtual environment so I don't have to physically set anything up and having a fast enough computer to do that makes my life a whole lot easier. KDE Neon is fairly stable. I've been really happy with it. I will admit if you're going to switch to Linux, don't start with this distribution. You probably want to start with something along the lines because for me, rock's solid. I just love all the iCandy I get with the KDE Neon platform, but the crashing, if ever, is really minimal. It's a really solid operating system so I don't really have any issues with it. But like I said, do another video on my just dedicated to how my video production workflow does on Linux and go from there. But this is how I run my IT support and everything for me and my staff. We just run Windows virtually completely, but I can at least containerize it and keep it very clean and minimize the amount of update downtime that we may have because we don't really need to use Windows as our daily driver. Unless you're a gamer, then it's a whole different thing. So if you like the KDE Neon, like and subscribe. Hopefully that answers the questions. You have more questions. Leave them in the comments below and I'll try to get to them. Thank you.