 So, I'm back from a little bit of a break. I took about three or four weeks off from working on any videos on the channel, and I needed a little bit of a break, not just a break as far as me, just not doing anything. I actually needed to take some time off from making videos for like a lot of cleanup work, administrative work. I needed to reinstall Linux on my main production workstation here at the office where I record all my videos, because that installation of Arco Linux that I had on this machine was really causing me some issues, because there were programs on it that were no longer working correctly. It had been, I would say, the entire month of December, I was really fighting things. It really made it no longer fun to make video content, when you're constantly working with technology that's fighting you, you know, programs that are crash-tastic, right? They're always crashing, or sometimes just not opening correctly, sometimes not opening at all. I had issues with OBS, I had issues with KadenLive, I had issues with my file manager at one point. I had issues with all email clients, every single one that I could install, like I had a lot of problems. I spent like three or four weeks trying to fix the problems on that broken installation, so it wasn't like I immediately jumped to reinstalling. I actually tried to fix some of the problems, and some of the problems I did fix, but I didn't get all of the problems fixed, and it got to the point that installation again had been up and running for about four years. It was time for a complete wipeout and a fresh install. So I reinstalled ArcoLinux, so I had mentioned on my last video that, you know, I was thinking about maybe doing a non-arch based distribution, maybe going back to Debian, you know, doing something like Debian stable, or maybe Ubuntu LTS server, or something like that, doing like a minimal window manager install on Ubuntu server, you know, something, again, more stable, something that's not bleeding edge rolling release like Arch or ArcoLinux are. And, you know, what I did a fresh install of ArcoLinux D, which is kind of a minimal version of ArcoLinux, so it doesn't install a lot of packages, I stripped out even some of the stuff that ArcoD typically ships with, and basically I installed one window manager, it's only got Qtile on it right now, because that's what I've been living in. So I'm running ArcoLinux D with Qtile, and this fresh installation has been okay. There's some bugs with it, but what really kind of shocked me a little bit, and I don't know why it should shock me, because this happens every time I do a fresh installation on any of my computers, whether it be this workstation here at my office, or my home computer, is it always takes some time to get things back up and running after you do a fresh install. It took me a good week, like a solid seven days, to finally get all of the necessary pieces back on this computer, so I could get back to work. For one thing, you don't realize the things that you're missing on the computer until you actually do the fresh install and then decide to try to use that computer for real world work, and then you realize you're missing a lot of programs, you forgot to back up a lot of things. Let's talk about this, because I've run into this problem so many times now, yet I still sometimes forget this, and I forgot these two things on this fresh install. I forgot to back up my GPG keys. That's a problem if you have a password store, right, that uses GPG encryption, right? So make sure you take your keys with you, make sure you take your SSH keys with you, and make sure that you back up user share fonts, if you actually want to keep all the fonts that you have stored over the last several years between installations, because you'll be amazed at how many weird little fonts that you've installed, and you're using in various configs for window managers, terminal emulators, maybe word processing, anything that has formatted text, and you use any kind of strange fonts that are not real common, not aerial or Verdana or Ubuntu font or whatever, you've got all these weird fonts that you've saved over the years that some of your configs expect to be there, but you forgot to back up user share fonts, so remember that one, important tip there. But overall, things are back up and running, and it is noticeably faster, and all the programs that were giving me issues on the previous installation, like OBS was starting to give me some serious problems. OBS is running beautifully on this machine, I've done some tests with it, and it seems to be working just fine. I really haven't tried out Kate and Live yet, because I haven't made a proper video, but I'm about to, because I'm going to render this, I'm not going to really do any editing, but I'm going to render this in Kate and Live here in a minute, and I may add some annotations or things, and something just to see if Kate and Live is working as expected. Yep, works just fine on the new installation, so all of the programs that I really need to do my day-to-day work as far as video content creation on YouTube, all of those programs seem to be working just fine. The only issue I've had with the fresh installation, by default, Oracle Linux uses SDDM for a login manager, and I'd left that, but SDDM, when I log in, it sometimes wants to hang. It's kind of weird. I'm assuming it's hanging because it's waiting for some kind of startup service, maybe a system D service that's hanging. I don't know, I've got to investigate the situation. It could also be it's trying to execute some kind of startup process that I've specified in various config files, because I took all my window manager configs, like my Qtall config, it has an auto start script, but I've stripped out everything from that auto start script other than things that I know actually work. So I don't know, it's just kind of weird. The login takes a little longer than it should. I might have to wait 30 seconds or 60 seconds, whatever. It's not too bad, but because how often are you logging in, logging back out in your machine? Not very often, but that's a situation I need to investigate, but that's not a showstopper, that's not a deal breaker. So anyway, back at the office, setting some things up, cleaned up the office a little bit too. I got rid of a lot of junk, because I had piles and piles of stuff around here. You guys remember some of my recent videos, like my office tours, I had a lot more junk on these shelves and on the desks behind me, on this little desk behind me. Everything that really served no purpose, everything that was either an empty box or a piece of broken equipment, something old, something that really had no value anymore, I just got rid of it. I've always been like that in life. I've never been one of those people that was like a hoarder, like some people just have to save everything. If it's something that I don't think I could sell for more than a few bucks right now, it's trash, right? If literally no one wants that thing you have, it's trash. But some people will hold on to just ridiculous items. I've got family members like that, they just save everything, thinking that the stuff they save is valuable. And having seen people like that is one of those things I never want to be one of those people. So I hope everybody is having a great start to 2024. I hope everybody is enjoying the new year as much as I have. I feel recharged, I feel refreshed, and I'm ready to get back into the swing of things. And hopefully I've got a few more days of stuff I've got to take care of. So I may take just a few more days off after this video. But hopefully by next week, we'll be back into the swing of things. Peace, guys.