 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 comments on the videos that I post on Odyssey and on YouTube. Sometimes these questions and comments come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, sometimes through email and the very first question I want to respond to is, HeyDT, you say you don't care if people use free software or proprietary software that everyone makes their own choices in this regard but you talk about the free software philosophy all the time on your videos. How does that make sense? And I can kind of see why this is confusing to some people because I talk about the benefits of free and open source software versus proprietary closed-source software all the time on my videos. And the reason is because that's a choice I've made and I want people to know that there are benefits. Like it's very clear benefits why you would use free software versus proprietary software. You know there's certain differences there's tangible differences between free software and proprietary software and I want people to know the differences in those two different areas and I want people to actually know that freedom of source software actually exists because many people have never heard about it right. It's a topic that most standard computer users you know people that are not nerds just your average desktop computer user for example has never heard the free software philosophy and I want to tell people about it right. I just want to provide some information. I want to shed some light on a topic that most people have have no knowledge of at all that way people can make better informed decisions. If I tell you about free and open-source software versus proprietary software if you hear that message and you understand it and then you decide okay I've heard everything you said about free and open-source software DT but you know what I don't care. I don't care about that at all. I'm just gonna keep using all the proprietary software that I like because honestly I just I don't care about the free software movement. Okay that's your decision. I respect that. I have no problems with that. I don't take it personally. I hope you don't take personally you know the software decisions that I make or any decision I make in life we all make our own decisions on what we do with our own lives. One of the things when you're making any decisions in life so many times there's actually a right decision and a wrong decision a good decision evil decision everything is kind of black and white for the most part so many decisions they either benefit you or they harm you in some way and you know when you're making these decisions if you're better informed on the topic at hand you're much more likely to make the better decision for you personally and when you really think about this idea of making decisions in in the light or in the dark right. I imagine you are totally ignorant to the whole idea of free software versus proprietary software and maybe you make the right decision in my eyes where you're you're using a lot of free software because just by accident you don't know anything about free versus proprietary software you all you know is software you don't know free versus proprietary but you just happen to be using free software you've never heard the message is that a good thing well in my mind no that's not a good thing you made I guess the right decision is as far as the one I would have made but you're not aware that that was the right decision you're totally ignorant you're totally blind to the fact that you even made a decision because really you didn't make a decision it was all happenstance it was all accident that you even arrived at the decision you did and conversely if you're making a wrong decision but you're in the light you're educated on the topic you you know about free software versus proprietary but maybe you make the wrong decision in my eyes where you're you know I just use proprietary software well at least you're educated on the topic right you made an informed decision and maybe you know enough that one day you'll actually realize hey you know what that decision that I made that might have been the wrong decision and you can correct it having more information is always better and that's all I'm trying to do with the message of freedom of source software versus proprietary software I just want people to be aware that that choice that freedom is out there and I want people to be able to make a decision for themselves based on that knowledge moving on to the next question hey DT do you have a video showing how to best set up a window manager so that it doesn't automatically shut off the monitors after 10 minutes I've been searching far and wide for an explanation that works but nothing seems to work on startup I mean I know how to do it manually okay well I mean that's what I was going to suggest if you know how to do it manually you use the X set command if you're using X or window manager which 99% of the window managers out there using X 11 right so you would for example to turn off DP MS which is the display power management system you would X set minus DP MS and that turns it off if you wanted to turn it on X set plus DP MS would turn it back on if you want to turn off your screensaver X set S off so screensaver off right if you want to set a specific amount of time for the inactivity to kick in you can do X set S and something like 3600 space 3600 those are seconds so in an hour then the inactivity would kick in and your screen would would go blank now in your message you mentioned you know how to do it manually so you probably know some of the commands that I just told you about so if you know the commands then if you're using a window manager a window manager is going to have a config file somewhere in that config file there's probably a section for auto starting programs just add those commands those commands to turn off DP MS and to turn off the screensaver add that to your window manager config and then you never have to enter those manually every time you log into that window manager those commands automatically run and you're set and the next question comes from the video I recently did on whip tail whip tail is kind of like dialogue you know dialogue boxes kind of like incurses a dialogue boxes that you can use with your bash scripting and this person writes hey DT why don't you use print off for ensuring the right amount of spaces that for loop you used is actually ridiculous and he's right so one of the things with my scripting videos my programming videos I never really spent a lot of time trying to write the best code the most optimized code especially on my videos sometimes I like to do things kind of hacky kind of janky and the way I was adding those spaces to the to the whip tail boxes I knew that it was ridiculous I knew there was better ways but I was doing it in a hurry but a lot of times these scripts I don't spend much time on I write them rather quickly I have a real-world problem I want to solve and I just write a script and the script works there's nothing wrong with it could the code be improved yes and I leave it like that because it sparks conversation in the comment section of the video and obviously that's good for the video that's good for the channel that conversation but it's also good for the general community and a lot of times what ends up happening is on these scripting videos these programming videos that I sometimes do is the comments section has so much fantastic information you know because people are posting all of these solutions for these problems they're doing these rewrites the refactoring the code for me in the comments section you know and it's it's really in a lot of ways the comment section on some of these scripting videos I do is better than the video that I made as far the information in the video I made is good information but you'll find 10 times the amount of information in the comment section from that conversation that gets sparked sometimes by me doing some of these you know less than ideal situations like that for loop that ridiculous for loop I was using in that case of the script I won't say that necessarily I troll you guys sometimes doing that stuff because it wasn't a troll job I mean I legitimately wrote the for loop thinking it would work but after I wrote it like I immediately after I wrote it I know this is kind of janky this is hacky but I was like should I rewrite this I was like no I'm gonna leave it in the video because I knew again that you guys would help me out and it was really good now as far as the whip till boxes as far as the script itself that I eventually implemented whip till into it doesn't use that ridiculous for loop but I've implemented a much better way of achieving those spaces but again for video purposes sometimes I like to spark that conversation by doing things that I know people are gonna you know correct me on moving on to the next question hey dt can you do this for alacrity and what he was specifically asking is can he add things like neo-fetch the power line effect is for silent like bash power line I think I was using in this video it's an older video that this comment came from the shell color scripts because in that older video I think I was using either the ST terminal or maybe you are xvt and of course this person that commented he's using the alacrity terminal which is what I'm using now I've been using alacrity for the last two years is was all this work in alacrity yeah so one of the things and I get these kinds of questions about a lot of terminal stuff that I do is there a difference between all of these terminals alacrity and ST and your xvt and whatever the GNOME terminal the XFCE terminal console with a K you know what's the difference yeah I see you you've got all these fancy effects you know the shell color scripts and the random whiz bang effects and power line effects and now I'm using the Starship prompt and they all work in every terminal for the most part everything you see in my terminal would work in whatever terminal emulator you use because all terminal emulators are essentially the same thing all they do is display text it is a text-based interface that's all they do they display text and they all do that now some of them do it a little better than others like if you're using weird characters weird Unicode characters weird glyphs you know drawing boxes and things like that certain mathematical symbols some terminal emulators are really bad at supporting some of those strange Unicode characters oddly enough you are xvt is terrible and displaying a lot of those weird Unicode glyphs X term also has some issues it's it's not as bad as you are xvt but it's pretty bad as T actually is really good at displaying Unicode and alacrity is amazing as far as there's very little I've come across that alacrity didn't display correctly as far as a text-based environment moving on hey dt can you review free DOS you know I have this is the first time I think anybody's ever asked me about free DOS because I don't think that many people have a use case for it and the reason I've never reviewed it probably will never review it I don't have a use case for free DOS I can't think of any reason why anyone would use free DOS the only legitimate use case for that operating system that I can think of would be if you want to run some legacy DOS games and by legacy I mean we're talking about 40 year old games right legacy DOS only games so that's really yeah I I don't know what what I would do with that operating so I don't know what you would do with that operating system like I really I kind of I get sometimes get these comments I sometimes wish you guys when you ask me hey would you try out this particular operating system or this piece of software and this text editor whatever sometimes if you ask me these questions I tell me what you want out of this I want why are you interested in free DOS I'd like to know what you think you could get out of it because that might help me understand what we're even talking about here and the next question comes from a recent video I did about getting poly bar working inside X-mone ad and in my poly bar config for X-mone ad poly bar doesn't work right with X-mone ad it's just there's a bug there's some issues with it the way it displays workspaces it displays workspaces all out of order jumbled up it on different monitors it'll have different orders for all the workspaces it's a mess and he writes hey DT do you have pen workspaces in the poly bar config set to false that may fix it I don't have that set to false in my config and the reason is setting it to false makes it a worse situation than what it actually is so if I set the poly bar config and to pin workspaces set to false what it does is now I it displays all the workspaces on all the monitors but each set of workspaces on all three of my monitors are out of order so I've got all nine workspaces on poly bar but on each monitor they're displayed in a different order that's confusing that's extremely confusing like I can't work with that especially people using my configs they're not gonna know like what each workspace is set to a number right super one super two super three but if they're all jumbled up out of order you don't know the number you'd have to hit the key to actually switch to that workspace that's an issue so I actually set pin workspaces to true and that's a little weird but at least you don't get confused as far as what workspace you're on and what order they're in because now what it does is the monitors the monitor that has focus shows all the workspaces in the correct order now the monitors that don't have focus they only show one workspace and that's the workspace that they're currently on and that's okay like it's not the way X-Mone Ed and X-Mobar it's not not the way I'm used to it but it works it's not again it's not ideal but it works but setting pin workspaces to false actually breaks things in a much more serious way and this is a known issue with X-Mone Ed with poly bar and the X-Mone Ed guys are actually trying to fix it I think they've actually already patched it in fact but the patch is for the next major version of X-Mone Ed which who knows when that will be released a few months from now maybe a year from now I know when the last major version of X-Mone Ed got released 0.17 it was released well over a year ago but it didn't appear in Arch Linux until just a few months back like we waited I think like nine or ten months after the official release of X-Mone Ed 0.17 before it actually hit the arch repos and that's probably what's going to happen with the you know 0.18 or whatever the next major version is it's probably going to be released and then for whatever reason Arch really lags behind especially on half school stuff it may be a year a year and a half before the patch version that actually makes X-Mone Ed work correctly with poly bar finally hits the repos moving on to the next question hey DT I and installed Arch Linux and on top of it I installed DTOS by default my machine now has Nuvo drivers but I need CUDA to mine crypto so I needed to install the Nvidia drivers but then as expected things didn't go well it's always a pain in the took us to install graphics card drivers can you make a video on how to remove Nuvo drivers and install the Nvidia drivers so I'm not going to make a video about it necessarily but I will tell you exactly what to do right now because on every machine I've ever had they had an Nvidia card on Arch Linux on any Arch Linux base distribution all you need to do is install the Nvidia package so if you're using the regular Linux kernel then install Nvidia the package Nvidia and reboot the machine and it should automatically default to using the proprietary Nvidia driver rather than the Nuvo driver that's all you need to do if you're using the LTS kernel so if you installed Linux dash LTS for the kernel you need to install a Nvidia dash LTS driver so the regular Nvidia driver doesn't work with the LTS kernel and vice versa so make sure if you're on the LTS kernel do Nvidia dash LTS for the driver there's also a Nvidia dash utils package that you probably want to install and you mentioned CUDA CUDA is a separate package I believe in the Arch repos I believe it's in the standard repos just as CUDA and really once you install the right driver just reboot the machine you didn't give me a lot of information you said you installed the Nvidia drivers but then things didn't go well but then you didn't tell me what didn't go well like did you reboot and get a black screen because that will happen if you didn't install the right Nvidia driver for example if you were using the LTS kernel but you didn't install the LTS Nvidia driver you'll reboot and get a black screen not a problem drop to a TTY install the right Nvidia driver Nvidia LTS in this case reboot everything should work the next question it's actually really a comment hey DT I'm just letting you know that I will never use a window manager because I'm very happy with GNOME this however will not deter me from watching your awesome videos cheers and that was a video I did about configuring open box and well thank you for watching the videos I appreciate the kind words saying they're awesome videos and I understand hey if GNOME is working for you and you love the GNOME desktop environment keep using it as I stated earlier in the video we all make our own choices as far as the software we use and if GNOME is working for you keep rocking it and the final question is one I've gotten a lot and I do need to address this in some detail so let's get into it hey DT what makes you stick with DTOS being a build script to be run on an existing arch installation as opposed to an actual full Linux distribution with a Calamari installer but one of the things when I initially made this post installation script for DTOS I had a couple of reasons why I didn't want to build a proper ISO and use the Calamari installer the first one is I didn't want DTOS to actually be recognized as a real Linux distribution I didn't want to be responsible for an actual Linux distribution because if I'm if it's a real Linux distribution then every single problem on that distribution if you install DTOS the distribution right any issue you have you're going to come to me with it I don't have time I don't have time with it right so that was originally the reason I can't be the lead dev or the lead maintainer of a Linux distribution I have got too much other stuff on my plate right I make videos about Linux that's my job that's what I enjoy and that's what you guys enjoy I'm assuming that's why you guys watch my content do you want me to shut down my youtube channel and just maintain a Linux distribution I don't think most of you would want that and I know I wouldn't want that so that was one of the two main reasons why I wrote DTOS the way I did is being a post installation script rather than just building a proper ISO the second reason I did it is I actually think and this has been something I've talked about in the past on camera but I really think we have too many Linux distributions out there many of them do the same thing many of them don't necessarily have to build their own high so's so many Linux distributions out there could do exactly what I'm doing with DTOS hey just run this post installation script that adds some repositories to your pacman.com and then you know run the a package install list right where it installs a bunch of packages from now the DTOS core repository that's on your system you reboot the machine voila you've got DTOS right most Linux distributions could do this most arch Linux based distributions could do exactly what I do with that DTOS script without needing to build an ISO and fool with the Calamari's installer and and to be honest I think it would make sense for people to do that I know kind of why they don't it would cause headaches honestly the way I do DTOS being a post installation script rather than its own ISO it actually causes me a lot more headaches doing it that way than it does if I would just build an ISO because now I'm responsible for DTOS how it runs when you install it on top of arch Linux for example or manjaro or arco or endeavor the hundred other arch Linux based distributions that are all doing their own unique things you know that's very hard to write a a post installation script like DTOS that will work on all 100 of those arch Linux based distributions very difficult where if I didn't do that if I just built my own ISO I wouldn't have to fool with any of that but I'm going to keep DTOS as a post installation script because I do think I do wish more distributions just did things this way because I could envision a world where instead of everybody just building their own isos you just add your own repo right you just add a repo and there you go you've got your new distro and I think that's a smarter way to go and I see I see other people coming around to that idea as well because at least scripts I see a lot of them especially on arch Linux there's so many arch Linux installation scripts out there that try to automate the process for installing arch especially you know before arch had its little easy installer now what is it the arch dash install ultimately is is there a right way or a wrong way to do this I mean doing the post installation script or just building an ISO there's pros and cons to each and that's for me there's pros and cons to each now for you the end user I really don't think there's really not a lot of pros and cons for you because you're going to end up with the same thing I mean yeah with DTOS you don't have a Calamari's installer right you don't download an ISO and just run through the Calamari's installer okay just download Manjaro right it's the same thing download Manjaro run through their Calamari's installer and when you're done you know get clone DTOS and then run the DTOS script and you know just let that run for about 10 minutes reboot you got DTOS so for the end user it really doesn't add any pain points to you for me the pros and cons kind of outweigh each other I mean I could do it either way I've chosen this way for now and it's working now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of this episode I need to think Gabe James Maxim Matt Mehmet Mitchell Paul Royal West Armor Dragon Bash Potato Chuck Commander Angry George Lee Methos Nate Erion Paul P's Archimdoural Polytech Realities Realist Red Prophet Roland tools Devler and Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys this hey DT episode 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 sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on Patreon peace