 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 comments on the videos posted on YouTube and Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments come to me through social media such as Reddit, Mastodon, sometimes through email. The very first question I want to read is, Haiti, why are you using the mouse to get to your cursor position in Vim and Emacs? And what he's talking about here and I get this question all the time is, you know, when you guys are watching me on video using Vim and Emacs, you know, when I first open the document and go to a place in the document, typically I'll use the mouse cursor. I'll take the mouse and I'll put the cursor exactly on the line that I want to start editing. Why do I do that? Well, the reason I typically do that is because my hand is already on that mouse anyway because I do these videos. So I have a triple monitor setup in front of me. I've got three monitors in front of me and on the far right monitor, the third monitor, I typically have OBS open. The open broadcaster studio is the program I use to record these video clips and they have buttons on it. Start recording, start recording, stop, all that pause and everything and it's all operated with the mouse. There are key bindings you could use in OBS. You could set up key bindings and have it all keyboard control but typically everybody uses the mouse typically for OBS and that's what I use. So, you know, I'll take the mouse and go to OBS on that third monitor and I'll hit start recording and then my hand's already on the mouse so I'll move my mouse over to my second monitor, my primary monitor, where I have VMware Emacs open so that monitor gets focus and again, since I already have my hand on the mouse, I just click in the document exactly where I want the mouse cursor, the mouse position to be and that's just easy, right? Because I'm already on the mouse anyway. It doesn't make sense to I've already got my hand on the mouse and OBS on that third monitor and then move to the second monitor. What am I going to do? Purposely click the cursor position in a wrong place so I have to navigate on camera using the keyboard to where I want to be. That's just making extra work for me so that's why I do that. Obviously, you guys don't have to do that. You can use VMware Emacs completely keyboard driven and, you know, typically that's what you have to do anyway in a TTY, you know, but in a graphical environment, you know, when you have Xorg or Wayland installed, you're actually working inside a window manager or desktop environment. It does have mouse functionality available to you. And for me, it is a convenience. Again, when I've already got my hand on a mouse because I'm working in something I don't know like OBS or Kaden live or you know, and then I moved to the monitor that has VMware Emacs open, then it makes sense just to click exactly where you want that cursor position to be. And the next question I want to answer is actually not a question. It's a comment and it's a comment from basically two different versions of DT. The DT that recorded the video Linux meant for noobs about a year, year and a half ago. I recorded that video and the DT today because he's changed. He writes, DT Linux meant for noobs. When you go power user, you don't use cockies on your screen DT today. Tons of cockies all over his screen. And he he's right on this. So well, partially right. So back when I made that video, Linux meant for noobs. I said, you don't need a cocky on your screen. A cocky is this little widget that displays, you know, time, date, system monitoring information, top processes and things like that, weather information. You can put all kinds of stuff in this little desktop cocky widget. And I say it's kind of it's useless almost because you never see your desktop anyway. As soon as you open windows, you don't see your desktop. So you're never going to see that cocky in an Italian window manager, which is really where I made this point. Cockies are completely pointless because unless you have nothing open, you'll never see that cocky. As soon as you open one window in a tolling window manager, one windows full screen window, you're never going to see that cocky. Now today, when you guys see me and my desktop on camera, it does have a cocky on it. My Exmoned desktop, my QTALK desktop, they have cockies on them. And I have that packaged up because I realized I was getting a lot of the same questions about my window manager dotfalls, my key bindings for Exmoned and QTAL and other things. And I thought, well, cocky is kind of useful. You know, it's not completely useless. It is useful as a cheat sheet. So what I do is I put key bindings, some of the basic key bindings for my window managers in this cocky that I've packaged up. And you guys can go find it in my dotfalls. Those of you that are using the DTOS script, these cockies get installed automatically. So you have some of the basic key bindings like how to open a terminal, how to open D menu, how to close windows, etc. And I still think it's kind of useless because as soon as you open one window, then you can no longer read that cheat sheet unless you go to an empty workspace, but you'd have to know the key binding how to go to the empty workspace. But it's on the cheat sheet, but you can't read the cheat sheet. It's kind of, but you know what? I do think it does serve a little bit of a purpose. That's why I've started including cockies in DTOS for those that want them. And moving on to the next question, hey, DT, is it possible to put DTOS in the AUR, the arch user repository? And I'm actually not sure about that. I'm not sure how they would like a arch post installation script packaged up in the AUR. You know, if you had asked me year, year and a half ago, I would have said, yeah, sure, no problem. But these days, I don't know because about a year or so ago, the AUR folks, they promoted a new member, a package maintainer, or AUR maintainer. And this new person like his first day on the job went and removed most of my packages from the AUR. And since then, I've just kind of gotten soured on the whole AUR experience because he kind of removed my packages for, for no real reason. And I've responded to him about this. And the answer I got was the kind of answer, you know, I'm right, you're wrong, and you're never going to convince me otherwise. So I only gave one try to get my packages back in the AUR. And then I realized it was pointless talking to this person. But you know, it's one of those things that these people's project, it's not my project, you know, I don't, I don't own arch Linux, right? So they removed my stuff from the AUR. And since then, I've been really hesitant just to package anything for the AUR anymore. That's why I maintain my own arch repositories. I actually build my own arch Linux binaries for my own arch repository of software. These days, if you want any of my custom builds of anything, or any of my scripts or anything that I've packaged up for arch, you will find it in the DTOS core repository. If you go to my GitLab and look for DTOS dash core dash repo, look at how to add that particular repository to your arch Linux installation or any arch based distribution, you can add the DTOS core repositories. And in there, you will find all of my programs are things like the shell color scripts program, you'll find DM scripts, you know, which is all of the various D menu scripts. And then you'll find other things in there too, such as various config files and things that create DTOS, for example, my Xmonead config, my bash config, do me max config and all of that stuff. I've actually got packaged up in that DTOS core repository. So that's kind of where I'm at these days. I just kind of avoid the AUR these days. One of the things is when you're kind of well known, you know, I'm this E celebrity, essentially, you know, sometimes people treat you in a unfair way just because you're a known quantity where most people are online. And nobody knows who the hell you are, even you have your real name and you even a avatar or anything. Nobody really knows you. Unfortunately, anything in the Linux space, everybody knows who I am. So that does leave me open sometimes for these kinds of attacks. And moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, have you ever contributed code to a well known open source project? I'm really curious to know. Well, I would say yes and no. So I have contributed many times over the years. I've been a Linux user for a long time. So I've filed many, many bug reports and filed issues. And sometimes I've submitted fixes to things. So that has happened these days since starting the YouTube channel about four years ago. I don't do that as much. I sometimes do. I remember filing bugs for some stuff in Xmonad a while back. And I know I filed bugs before for Qtile. You know, some of the stuff I use on a daily basis, I find something that I may think nobody else has properly found this bug yet. Let me make sure that people know about it and this thing gets corrected. So that does happen. I've also interacted sometimes with distro maintainers, you know, because obviously I review a lot of Linux distributions. And there's been two or three times where I've contacted distro maintainers to let them know about something that I thought maybe they weren't aware of. And in some cases, how to fix the problem. But of course, I think the question here is he wants to know, have I taken like a big position as part of an open source project? No, and these days, I probably would never do that. As a matter of fact, I typically avoid interjecting myself in anything. Like I never go to any big projects, GitHub or GitLab and, you know, start opening issues or trying to be a contributor, because even though I think that's important, people contributing to open source projects, even open source organizations of distributions, Linux distributions, things like that. I don't want to do that myself, because in many ways, I'd probably be more of a distraction than a help again, just because of the E-selep status. I know, you know, just because I'm going to receive a lot of craziness from haters and trolls and things like that. In many cases, whatever help I could provide these people, I'd probably be more of a distraction. So I purposely try to avoid all of that because of what I do on this YouTube channel. Moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, what's your professional background? Are you a Dev IT professional? Is that how you got into Linux? I've answered this question many times, but I know we've got a lot of new subscribers here in the last few months since the last time I answered this question. No, I've actually never worked with computers, software, I've never done any kind of programming professionally. I've never had a job doing anything with computers or with Linux specifically. So before going full time, making YouTube videos about Linux, what I was doing was I was a manager for a retail company, a large retailer, and I've been working in retail for a number of years before starting the YouTube channel. If you're asking about like college training, you know, professional training as far as degrees, I actually have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in music performance. The trombone was my main instrument. I worked on a PhD in music for a little while, never finished it and don't plan on finishing it at this point. There's many, many years ago at this point, I'm in my mid 40s. I'm not going back to school to finish that degree because I don't plan on doing anything with it anyway. I did do some teaching as far as I did teach a little bit in public schools and I did do some private teaching, of course, with my music degrees. And I do enjoy that. It's just not something that ever became like a career path for me. But I do think it was important, especially, I've always thought that I was a really good teacher. I was a good music teacher. I am a good music teacher. I will still occasionally teach lessons to students. And I thought I was good as a supervisor as far as in retail, you know, training new employees, things like that. I was kind of always in that role, that human resources kind of role. And I think that has translated into what I'm doing now as a career, which is of course making these educational videos about Linux and free and open source software. Because again, I think that's always been a strong point of mind is teaching. And I hope that comes across on camera. And the next comment I want to read is Haiti. Don't forget about Trinity for KDE3 fans. So what he's talking about here is my video the other day. The Linux desktop kind of stinks. And I mentioned about how KDE made a big mistake when KDE3.5 reached, I guess, end of life in 2008. KDE moved to KDE4 Plasma. And KDE4 was really, really buggy and bad. And they lost a lot of users because they had this fantastic desktop environment 3.5. And then they moved to this almost unusable desktop environment with KDE4. And he's saying that Trinity is actually KDE3.5. You know, it basically was a fork of KDE3.5 when they made the switch to four. Well, some people didn't want to go to four. So they created this Trinity fork of KDE, which is essentially KDE3.5. And it's gets updates and things. It's not strictly KDE3.5. It's got, you know, new features added and things like it's a more modernized KDE3.5. But it actually is a really fantastic desktop environment that not many people know about. Unfortunately, the Trinity desktop environment gets very little love these days of the only distribution that really does anything with Trinity is Q4OS, which Trinity was their main desktop environment until recently. But recently they actually switched to using Plasma, KDE Plasma. So even Q4OS, which was kind of leading the Trinity charge has now switched away from using Trinity to now modern day KDE5 Plasma. And the next comment is, hey, DT, change your office lights to LED daylight bulbs much better for you than fluorescence. Fluorescence are the leading cause of office place migraines. Well, I do appreciate the tips on that. I actually don't get migraines. So that's never been a problem for me. But I do understand that fluorescence are not great for you because working in plenty of offices over the years, I do hate just the weird glow and everything of fluorescence. I understand it's not great. And I do like daylight bulbs. Daylight bulbs have that more sunlight kind of color you to them, you know, the more orangeish rather than that bright white. And obviously, because it's more natural, I can understand why that would be a better choice. Thankfully, I don't actually use the overhead LEDs here. So most of the time when you guys see me on camera, I don't have any of the LEDs that are actually in this office lit. I'm lighting everything with my own lighting, my own LED box lights. And those do have color temperature adjustment knobs. And I do actually use a little bit of orange in them in the daylight range to get a more natural look for these videos, because if they were blasting, you know, that really bright white light, you know, I'd look like a vampire here on camera. And the next question. Hey, DT, this might be a weird question. If you were that devoted to X-mone ad and Haskell, wouldn't it make more sense to use term on ad instead of alacrity for my terminal? And he says for both me and DTOS as well. So term on ad is a terminal emulator that can be configured using Haskell. Its config file actually looks very similar to like a X-mone ad config file is really neat. The problem with term on ad and why I don't use it anymore. I did a video about term on ad about two years ago is these days I can't even get the thing to compile anymore. I don't know if it's under active development. It looked like it was kind of one guys project, but it was it had some issues. It wasn't a perfect terminal emulator, but now I can't get it to compile. And also term on ad was based on VTE, which was the GNOME terminal widget library that the old termite terminal emulator based off of as well. And termite ended up basically ceasing to exist because they got tired of being based on this GNOME technology that they just couldn't work with anymore. They said it was un-maintainable and they were recommending everybody to go to Alacrity. Well, term on ad, of course, is going to run into those same issues to being VTE based. So unfortunately, while I like the idea of having a terminal emulator in Haskell, because I do think it kind of fits with the overall theme of DTOS. At the end of the day, I do want to go with the best project. I want people to get the best user experience. And right now, Alacrity is just a far better product than term on ad. And the next question, hey, DT, what's the best advice you can give for content creators new to the game? I get this kind of question all the time. I have dozens of times a month I get questions from people thinking about starting YouTube channels and they want to know, hey, what's the secret? What can I do to make myself a success? Well, there's a lot of things like this is deep. I could make an entire video series of videos on this topic. I may do that at some point. I don't know. But just a few tips here if you're new, if you're brand new and let's say you haven't even started making videos yet. The very first thing you need to do is make a video and publish it. Right. The biggest thing I get from people is, hey, I'm thinking about starting a YouTube channel and they're thinking about starting it for weeks or months. We'll just make the dang videos and put them out there. You know, you don't think that you're going to put all this work in ahead of time and you're going to make that very first video and it's going to be fantastic. It's not going to be fantastic. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be bad. Video quality is going to stink. The audio quality is going to stink. Just make a video that way. You've gone through the process and hopefully learn something from it so that the next one is a little better, the next one's a little better. And that's what you have to do is start making the stuff and then just practice. It's kind of like, you know, people want advice on this and I can't really, I can't. I could give you advice, but I can't make your first video good, you know, just because I tell you what to do doesn't mean you can actually do it. It's like basketball, the game of basketball. I tell you, you've never picked up a basketball or never shot hoops ever in your life. I can tell you how to do it, but when we actually get out there on a court and you shoot that basketball, you're not going to know how to hold it even after I told you how to hold it. You're going to shoot it and it's going to look all funny and it's not even going to hit the backboard. It's going to be several feet off to one side and it's going to be just a complete disaster. Even though I told you exactly what to do, right? It's the same thing. You're going to have to practice a little while. You're going to have to figure out how to shoot that ball. And it's the same thing with these videos. It's one of those things. You got to get started and then you just have to do it and you have to be consistent. All right, it can't be one of those. I made a video and then three months later, I make another video. No, you know, it's got to be one of those things. You've got to be able to at least dedicate to being making a video a week. If you can at least make one video a week, then it will take you forever to figure out how this stuff works because you're just not going to get in enough practice. Honestly, you should aim for, I don't know, two or three videos a week and you need to do that consistently for a few weeks and then you start figuring out how things work, you know, with camera positions and audio levels and things like that. Because again, it's just practice. It's just consistency. It's just doing it. And then it's just a stick to itness, right? You just got to stick to it. And that's the secret. You know, I've been doing this for four years now and I've been pretty consistent as far as, you know, I typically make four or five videos a week. You know, of course that changes from week to week. Some weeks you guys might only get two or three videos from me, some weeks you may get a video every day. But for four years, I would say I've averaged about four to five videos a week over the last four years. And that's tough. You know, that's major dedication and stick to itness that has helped me succeed because nobody else is going to do that, right? I mean, I'm not going to say nobody else does that. But it's one of those things you look at other content creators, if you've been on YouTube for a while, they come and go. They start a channel and they go at it hard for a few months, three months, six months. And then you never hear from them again. Some of them are able to stick it out for a year, maybe two years. But really, if you're following some of your favorite content creators and they've been consistently making content for more than a couple of years, there's some of the ones that have that stick to itness, that drive, that determination that they're gonna succeed. And I hope you support those content creators as well. And the final question is actually kind of related to the previous one. Hey, DT, I noticed you use a consistent theme for your text and your thumbnails for a very long time. Do you feel like changing it, yes or no? No, I don't feel like changing it. And yes, I do use a consistent theme for my thumbnails as far as I use the same font face and I use the same colors. And the reason I do that is because, as you say, it's consistent. When you see one of my thumbnails, you know, hey, that's one of DT's thumbnails. I like DT's videos, let me click on it. People that actually enjoy watching your content, now they'll immediately spot your thumbnails. Like if they search for a particular topic and they go to the keyboard and they search, I don't know, Arch Linux and all kinds of stuff comes up and they see a thumbnail with my black, white, purple, Tex stuff, my theme, they immediately spot, oh, that's one of DT's videos. I like his videos. Let me click on that. It's a way to instantly draw people that are familiar with my content to my videos. So that's actually another tip for those of you new to the content creation game. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank the following people, Devon Gabe James, Matt Mitchell, Paul Scott-Wess, Sakami Allen, Brian Chuck, Commander Angry, Kurt, Dio Guy, David Dillon Gregory, Hiko, Lee Maxim, Michael Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Peace, Arch, and Fedora, Polytech, Raver, Rid Prophet, Steven, and Willie, these guys, they're my highest tier patrons. Over on Patreon, without these guys, this episode of Hey DT would not have been possible. The show's 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, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys, the community, I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you guys enjoy my work and wanna consider supporting me, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.