 Hey everybody, welcome to the Linuxcast. I'm your host Matthew and I'm joined by Martin. Hi Matthew right there. Yeah I'm doing pretty damn good. It's, oh I'll tell you what, December, it's December 20th. It seems it feels like this year just started. This time is just going so fast man. It's crazy. It's been long but it has gone by quite quick. I was saying the other day I just can't believe the day. How quick it has gone. Given all that we've had to put up with but there you go. It has been a crappy year but it's almost over. Ten, eleven more days. All right so. Thank the Lord. Yeah, yes. So this is going to be a little bit different of an episode. Normally we would say hey what we've been doing on Linux this week then we'd talk about some news. But this is the last episode of the year. Last episode of season four and we're going to do something a little bit different. So after the contact information which I'll get into in just a second we're going to talk about five things we've done or noticed or been you know kind of paid attention to in Linux this year. So that's what we'll be doing for this episode. But first contact information. If you want to get in contact with us you can do so at the Linuxcast on Twitter. I'm at MTWB. Martin is Martin Twitter. You can find all those links and all the links that I'm about to share with you in the show notes in the video description below. You can subscribe to all of our podcast feeds and so on at thelinuxcast.org. You can find us or contact us via email at thelinuxcast.gmail.com. Starting next year we will have our very own email you know email address so that will be changing. But for now the linuxcast.gmail.com You can like us on Facebook at facebook.com slash the linuxcast and don't forget to subscribe to YouTube to us on YouTube where you'll find different videos of certain varying qualities. I pissed a lot of people off by making snide comments about Linux Mint so that was pretty good. Oh also you can also if you really want to support the show you can do so at patreon.com slash the linuxcast. I created one of those things because that's apparently what people do now is create Patreon pages for no apparent reason so I did that. You know I watched your Mint video. Well I say watched I turned it off actually. I don't blame you. I watched it three quarters and I thought oh this in Linux Mint here I knew it was going to be for you. Get back to watch. Yeah yeah you'll be an art snob. Looking down on the normos. Yeah I was just use a boon to man. It's just a boon to it's just the prettier boon to. All right anyways we'll have to do an episode where we have a talk about Linux Mint because I have a lot of opinions on that. Anyways so what I figured what we do Martin is we go back and forth you know I'll do one you do one. Yeah sounds good and you can go first if you'd like. Oh excellent. Well as I'm new to Linux this year everything that I have actually learned is new essentially so just now to down a couple of things that just pop out to me. The first one was basically making a switch to Linux so on Linux about 98 percent of the time I just literally log into Windows do what I've got to do and come straight out so I mean that's my first one. So what distro are you using now as your main distro are you still on Linux Mint? No no I'll switch to KDE and then like that so I thought I'd give KDE Plasma ago and I've been on KDE Plasma for about two months I think now. So are you using like KDE Neon or are you using it in Kabuntu? I couldn't tell you to be truthful is it based on Kabuntu? Slightly not 100 percent to be fair. I think that proves a lot of people's point that the distro just doesn't matter. I know exactly it just does such a good job I mean I can't remember you've said that you've threw me a curveball there but yeah it just works and KDE is beautiful but you can get lost in customizations. Yeah I did that many times all right so my first one is I've transitioned this year to using window managers only I've spent most of my year in I3 I think I probably some of this was partially in 2019 as well but um for the most part I spent my entire year perfecting I3 for my use getting all the key bindings the way I like them you know I switched themes many many times but mostly the you know the key bindings and stuff stay the same and I transitioned using a key binding like a demon so that I can transition between window managers easier but lately I've been using DWM which is DWM is kind of like the arch Linux of of window managers because everybody uses it looks down on everybody else who uses something different so it took me a long time to figure out because I know no C programming language at all just none I took a little bit of it in like my first year college but I was just was not good at it so it's it's been a journey the last month or so learning how to uh configure this and you know config files and stuff to getting it getting it to work the way I wanted to work and now I don't I have a hard time switching back to I3 so I can see why people look down on others because it's so it's so good it's so fast it's awesome um it's also it's also hard to set up I mean obnoxiously hard to set up and the the the documentation that they provide is by far the worst documentation out of any window manager I've ever seen it's so bad it's like they purposely wrote it to um be unhelpful like like it's just it was not good so you pretty much have to you're pretty much on your own or watching youtube videos in order how to do stuff so um yeah that's that's probably the biggest one for me is what I've you know I'm I've maybe spent an hour in a different desktop environment all year um when I have to use a different desktop environment I use KDE um and then there was that brief period where I used some windows because I had to um for the most part I just friend or Matt so Martin your second one my second one is the community um whether it's the online podcasts youtube um whether you're meeting small groups um it's just a with the feeling of being in a community because I mean we're only a smallish pool compared to the rest of the computer market share um and just to remind people that it only takes a like or a comment on a video a question answered or even a review on steam for a game which you liked or dislike whichever I mean all this goes out to help the linux community um gain a bit more traction and uh moving it that little bit forward or you could be like me and make crappy youtube videos or like me and be a crappy sex co-host hey you want to know what when I was doing this by myself I felt so stupid you know because so it's really dumb to talk into a mic and not actually be talking to another person so you've livened up the podcast quite a lot have I kept you saying yes it's in this mud world it's uh talking to yourself is not fun it makes you question your uh mental acuity um anyway so my second one is less um so I'm a big firefox user I like firefox quite a lot um but I don't always use firefox but now that I've found out that you can actually go through and basically create your own look and feel for using css I spent quite a lot of the year tweaking my firefox setup uh so that I have all in like one line and it's you know just really cool looking um and the community surrounding I mean you're talking about community um like there's a whole subreddit for this kind of stuff and you can just go through and you can get help and and share your say share what you've done so far it's really cool um but it's another one of those time-sinking things because it's like like you're talking about with katie you can kind of get going to a rabbit hole customization um yeah everything it seems like everything I discover on linux I really like to do has that same rabbit hole and it's like one rabbit hole right after another so you know I spend hours and hours theming my window manager so that's you know a different color scheme or you know different icons or whatever and then I do the same thing with my user chrome dot css for firefox and then you know I do the same thing for you know my terminal emulator and it's just it's a it's a surprising thing that I ever get anything done because I'm always just constantly tweaking things because I always have to okay I found a new tool I gotta learn how to do it and then I can you know I get into like I like I got um we were talking a few weeks ago I finally got uh npd and ncmp and peeps some terrible name for a music thing you know just play music in the terminal um oh yeah yeah I spent hours tweaking and theming that at least I got to listen to music while I was doing it so it's just everything's a time I just put so much time and all that stuff anyways your third one my third one is the amount of free choice available um whether it's software distros desktop managers terminals I mean the just the amount of actual choice I mean when I stuck on windows I literally kept to my same couple of programs but you can always find it either a fork or something similar to windows if you're used to that but it's just absolute choice I mean it's staggering and I mean people put all the time in it for nothing just for the satisfaction of um improving of the people's um workflow so I mean yeah I think definitely the free choice available sir our third choice all right so my third one is that I discovered Zim and um it's really weird that I've put this on the list because I'm actually thinking about switching away from Zim because of course I switched away from things all the time I found something new in shiny my attention span has been not good for the last 20 years anyways um it completely transformed the way I take notes when I was using it um because I could go through and create like my own little wiki create links and embedded links and embedded pictures and files and all that kind of stuff um and it's really helped me write outlines for you know the fiction that I write or plan videos and stuff but I haven't I haven't been I've noticed the last like week and a half I haven't been using it nearly as much because I've moved most of my scripting for videos and stuff to uh notion which is not an open source application unfortunately um but uh and I'm you know me in my terminal application so I'm thinking about moving to to Vim wiki which is Zim is basically a GUI version of Vim wiki um but I liked the visual way Zim did markdown that's the reason why I didn't choose Vim wiki to begin with but I'm thinking because I'm such a nerd that I'm going to have to go try Vim wiki again um we'll see how that goes because I mean all my notes and stuff were in Zim and I don't know if I want to try transfer them all over but we'll see um that'll be a project for next year all right it's an easy task transferring you're able to drop your or do you have to rewrite them all out again or no I should be able to just transform because the Zim just saves them as text files you know so that when you when you nest something like a child link in your wiki it saves it that parent link becomes a folder and everything else just goes in that folder right all right yeah so you can just I should just be able to transfer more where the problem is Vim wiki saves everything as .md files which is markdown right so um but I don't know why I couldn't just go through and rename every give just change the extension on all the Zim files to md because it because yeah yeah Zim uses markdown it is just a really weird um version of markdown so it should work I don't know I haven't actually tried it yet so we'll guess we'll find out excellent right sorry my fourth one virtual box um I mean I know it's available in other systems uh I've never had any reason to use it until now um or I could say it's brilliant just brilliant for trying out distros um slight learning curve to get on to it I think you've done a video on it also haven't you um but once you've got used to it and know we know it works and things like that it it it's just just great just save burning usb's or dvd's or nuke in a laptop to stick a new um distro on so yeah fourth one's virtual box just mainly for tatting about really which is what we all like to do it's really saved me from from distro hopping quite a lot because you know when I want to try a new distro I just put in a virtual machine yeah um it it's not it's way easier than vert manager so I've been trying to find out how to figure out how to do um vert manager because you know a lot of the youtubers use it and you know because I'm following the crowd but it's just I have not been able to get vert manager to work I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong um that'd be another project for me um because of course I got to do all the cool kids are doing um oh well yeah why not so my first three I focused on positive things that you know I've you know discovered or been doing over the years for the next two are less positive things although this this next one turned out well so if you followed the last couple episodes you'll know that I had to get out of my linux partition and boot into windows in order to do the podcast because uh I bought a new audio um I I bought a focus right or focus scarlet solo audio interface and so I could use my hila my hyal pr 40 oops um thing um and I wanted to use them but the problem is that skype for whatever reason would not recognize the scarlet solo as an input device it would recognize it as an output device uh so I spent had to be three weeks I mean Martin you know this I every time I had to log in windows I bitched about it for pretty much the first half of the podcast and then most of the second half of the podcast it was it was not a good time uh but this last week uh after learning everything I could learn about jack d and jacks the qjack ctl and all this stuff I mean I I got into a real really big rabbit hole of linux audio things I I'd never heard of before and I'm still not even close to a um like an expert or anything but it turns out that if you use pavu control which is just basically the front end for pulse audio it's which it's basically what you see if you go into kde and go into the audio setting this basically pavu control um it's the same thing if I you know I went into the advanced settings and changed the the microphone the scarlet solo from uh from one it went from uh I can't remember it from one setting to another and all of a sudden it worked it was like one setting in that one half and that was the problem and all of a sudden it worked so I can I I have my microphone going so that it's doing you know in Skype I have my bluetooth headphones so the audio is coming through there and I have audacity going it's it's working perfectly um hopefully so I mean it's just it's been this when I first started using linux you know I had I mean I think everybody experiences where there's just those complicated things that you you know you see everybody else do um but you can't really quite figure it out yourself and you spend weeks and weeks and weeks trying to learn this one thing that probably should be easier than it you know it seems to be um and I mean everybody has that when they first start but this is the first one I've had in quite a while where I just ran up to that wall where I just could not figure it out um but I finally did so that's my fourth one brilliant right five security so no personal data is going to be sent to the mothership and I'm in control which is exactly how it should be and exactly how I like it yeah um yeah I was reading something I can't quite remember there's they were talking about because Microsoft brought their windows defender this last year to linux and people kind of argue about whether or not linux needs a virus your protection um is that something you'd ever run your your linux to be fair um I don't download any illicit software or things like that um and I'm always careful of what web pages I do click on but yeah I mean I'm windows always a defile wall running and I mean and which memory and processing linux use I should use a firewall I was using it in mint because it's got one set up nice and handily I don't think there's one in kg neon um at the moment it it's just being bothered for me to download one I mean I'm quite a light user um but yeah I think it's a benefit to anyone whether you think linux is not not safe from attacks malicious attacks malicious codes viruses things like that so I I agree yeah you should really use one oh I don't if I were gonna use one though I don't know there if I were going to you I wouldn't use one from Microsoft yeah it does seem yummy right I mean to be fair um I want an open source one yeah I could understand what you're saying but I mean Microsoft have got years and years under them with defender and defender is good yeah there's no two ways about it I mean I used to have a third party a vast and all different ones there's quite a few reasons I would install Microsoft Defender way before I installed McAfee and McAfee yeah and they're just not may have just pop ups and pop ups and things like this so I mean I must admit it um I probably would use Defender all right well you let me know if you end up doing that because I want you know what your experience was because you can be the guinea pig this time all right so my last part my last one is um I'm on the hunt so this is kind of more like a thing I'm going to be doing for the year ahead I guess um but it's been something I've been looking for for a while I've been looking for a replacement for LibreOffice because LibreOffice is kind of terrible um and all the other ones I've found have basically been clones of Microsoft Word and I don't I just don't care for that so I'm trying to find a office slash word processor replacement that I can use um knowing me I'll probably try to find something that's in the terminal just because you know hello nerd um I know there is like a something called word grinder but I want to I want something that will allow me to take all my documents that I have right now which are all saved in ODT to um be able so I can you know cross-compatibility compatibility I haven't found anything all great I know word grinder will do the open document format but the formatting is just all kind of wonky and they have their own proprietary I mean whatever that they want you to try to transfer it to and I'm not I'm not really into I want to have the option of going back to uh LibreOffice if I have to so that's something I'm going to be look on the lookout for for this next year and continuing on until I find something different so far I can't really pinpoint the reason why I don't like LibreOffice it's just one of those things is kind of clunky it just feels slow to me I don't know maybe it's because everything else I use is in the terminal and so fast um anyways that's me as you can tell I like the I like the terminal and I'll mention that over and over again so um let's move into our apps for the week so these are the last apps of the week of the year so Martin you can go first right my app of the week is WALC and that's W I L C um it's a snap or an app image um well what it is it's basically whatsapp desktop client for your Linux system it just makes things easier I mean if you're sending files or pictures or you're having long conversations it's just easy to take it from your small screen and just slap it on the desktop so this is way better than what I've been using I've been using something called what's desk um yes I was using previously um the rambox I'd said before um but I was having a couple of problems with it last week I think that was affected my audio because I had Skype running in it and whatsapp so I've had to look around and came up with this but it's brilliant if you're sending pictures or anything like that nice and easy all you've got to do is hold your camera up to it yes you go to whatsapp your options I think it's web something web and then you just scan the QR code on your desktop and all your conversations come up on your um pc and obviously you can save the files onto your pc what what's desk is similar but it's wonky like you can tell it's like in a container it's like has these what large black borders or whatever it'd probably be different if I you know yeah that does look better if I change the size you know so it's not full screen but it doesn't like fill up the whole screen when it's full screen so I might look into this the problem is it's it's a snap and I don't have snap d installed so I'd have to install snap d um there is an app image available I'm using oh yeah I mean um so you could give that a try so it's not in the yet seems oops sorry it's not in the aur which is really I mean it just hurts my heart to see app that looks this good not to be in the aur I mean it has to be useless if it's not in the aur right I'm just no all right I'll definitely give I'm gonna leave that tab open so uh now that I've I've established myself as an arch snob let's continue on to something um Luke Smith is a youtuber and he uh he has different tools available most of some of his videos are like really really weird um but his Linux stuff is usually pretty good and his he has a tool called mutt wizard so in my quest of finding uh terminal applications to replace everything I do uh I wanted to start using neo mutt and that's it's a it's an email application that runs in the terminal and the problem is if you set it up on yours by yourself you have to deal with finding the IMAP server of gmail or whatever email servers you use and make sure you're on the right ports and all this nonsense if you use mutt wizard which is I've linked in the show notes you just run a command enter your username and password and it sets it all up for you um it's it's simply just worked it's kind of awesome uh it's not for everybody because you really so many emails now come through an html um and this is in a terminal so you can't view html so you'll you have to kind of put with that kind of stuff I still have evolution installed so when I need a view of email and I don't feel like going to gmail.com because I still use gmail one of these days I'm going to switch to like proton or something but proton if you want you know like the actual features you have to pay for and I'm not quite to the point where I want to pay from email yet yeah well you mean you know I'm just I don't use it that often and well I don't know if I'm gonna spend the money um I'm a cheap you know so be anyways so that was a good episode um martin actually that was our last episode of the year so we'll be back in january with season five um and we we should have some really good topics coming up we'll make sure we do some controversial stuff and we're gonna I think we're gonna try to do some like uh distro reviews or something we'll we'll each install of the distro and I like the virtual machine we'll use it for a little while and we'll we'll talk about it should be fun um anyways I'll be coming up in june yeah we're coming back in january um I hope everybody has a safe and happy holiday season or whatever holiday you think and I think everybody can just be so grateful that 2020 is finally being over right too right too right so that is it for us this time we'll see you in 2021 excellent have a great holiday period boys