 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 the comments on the videos posted on YouTube and Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments, they come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first question I want to respond to is, HeyDT, I have to use Discord. I wish I didn't. Do you know of any open source Discord clients? So I get these kinds of questions kind of on a regular basis where people want to interact with a proprietary service of some kind, but they want an open source client to the proprietary service. And usually you're not going to find these kinds of things out there. If Discord had an open source client, which it might, I haven't researched this topic, but it's kind of pointless because you're still going to be using the Discord servers, right? You're still going to be using their service, their proprietary back-end just because whatever front-end that you're using to interface with their proprietary back-end, just because that interface is open source doesn't make Discord itself open source, right? You're still using a piece of proprietary software. And I get these kinds of questions a lot with Discord. I've also gotten this question a lot about Telegram because I mentioned I don't use Telegram. I've never used Telegram. I'm not a chat kind of person anyway. Same thing with Discord. I don't hang out on Discord just because I'm not that kind of person, but also because they're proprietary, right? And then oddly enough though, Telegram does have an open source application, a front-end to the Telegram service. Now, Telegram's back-end just like Discord is proprietary. It's closed source proprietary. So just because their application, you know, which you download to put on your phone or whatever, just because that might be licensed under a free license, it doesn't make that proprietary back-end any freer. I hope that makes sense. I also get this question sometimes with like payment processors, you know, why use things like a Patreon or PayPal, things like that. The entire banking industry is nothing but 100% closed source proprietary software. These banking industries, the global financial markets that are run by governments is all 100% proprietary software. It doesn't matter if whatever web application, website or mobile phone app that you're interfacing with these payment processors or, you know, buying stocks or, you know, trading crypto, whatever it is you're interfacing with, all of that stuff is proprietary software even if you're logging in, you know, via open source front-end. So at the end of the day, there are some things that are really tough to get away from proprietary software. For example, anytime you use your debit card or your credit card, anything with money is all proprietary software. That's probably something that we're never going to crack in my lifetime. Things like Discord and Telegram, though, there are alternatives. Like if you really want to get away from Discord and want an open source alternative, I would suggest looking at Matrix, which is a protocol that has a ton of open source clients to the Matrix protocol. One of the most popular ones is called Element. I've done some videos about Element in the past. Moving on, Haiti. I've got a question. I hope it gets collected for Haiti. I'll see what I can do on that. At some point you mentioned that you don't work in IT. How did you end up so well-versed in Linux? I've discussed this on previous episodes. I keep this very brief. The reason I know a lot about Linux is because I use Linux. I've used Linux for many years. Most of my adult life, I've been a Linux user. I've used Linux either on and off, working with web servers and things like that, my teenage years, building websites. And then here in the last 15 years or so, I've been strictly a Linux desktop user. It's the only operating system I run on any of my computers. Naturally, in that time, you learn a little bit about the operating system on your machine. How did you learn so much about Windows? Many of you guys were Windows users or maybe currently are Windows users. Some of you would say you know a lot about Windows. Did you ever work with Windows in a professional capacity? No, right? The reason you know Windows is because you used Windows all of those years. That's the reason I know so much about Linux. It's just through years of use. And the next question comes from another content creator. Actually, he writes, Hey, I was going to record a desktop environment tier list last week with my wife, but she convinced me to do it this week instead. And now DT got ahead of me in a day. So this is from Nice Micro, a really good Linux channel. You guys should check out his content. And he's right. This happens all the time on YouTube is where you plan a topic. You've got something you plan to talk about. And then before you get a chance to record the video, in some cases you record the video, you edit it, but you haven't published it yet. And then right before you're about to publish it, somebody else publishes a video on the exact same topic. Now, does that matter? No. I quit worrying about this a long time ago because I make so many videos. I made about 1,300 videos. So naturally I make videos on topics other people have covered. Maybe sometimes other people have covered within 24 hours, 48 hours of the video I'm putting out. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's not like anybody owns these topics, right? Just because I made a desktop environment tier list last week on my channel doesn't mean you can't make one last week as well. It's not like your list is going to be my list, right? You're going to have a completely different opinion anyway. You're going to have a completely different take, even if we're doing the same topic. And in many cases that's good because a lot of people enjoy when these content creators cover the same topics. You get three or four of them talking about the same topic, especially if they all don't share the same opinions, because that gives you some different viewpoints on these things. So my advice is don't worry about what video content creator has made, what video and what topic and when. Don't try to time things, right? Just plan out the content you want to make and when it's made, put it out there. Let the chips fall where they may. And the next question, hey DT, at what age did you go bald? I'd use her permanently. Moving on, hey DT, what if one day you make a video about generic keyboard shortcuts that transcend the window manager? Well, I really don't need to do that because honestly keyboard shortcuts already do transcend the window manager, all of them do. These keyboard shortcuts, they're not necessarily tied to a particular window manager or desktop environment. You can of course change all the key bindings if you prefer. But for me, I use the same key bindings pretty much in every single window manager I use. I've got 15 different window managers probably installed on my main production workstation. And I've got a lot of the same key bindings in all of them. And I'm talking about tiling window managers, floating window managers. You guys have seen me sometimes play around with the GNOME desktop environment, KDE Plasma. And even in those full desktop environments, I typically use a lot of the same key bindings that I use in like my tiling window managers, right? I use Super Enter to bring up a terminal. Super Shift Enter to bring up a run launcher. Super Shift C to close the window with focus, right? These are just standard key bindings that I'm used to. I've grown accustomed to over the years. So I just use them in everything. And I can use them, again, regardless of window managers. So it's not like these key bindings and the window managers are like tied to each other. That's not the thing. Now, the command that the key bindings run, sometimes the commands are tied to a window manager, but the key binding themselves, not so much. Moving on. Hey, DT. I love and use Qtile and love your videos. One question, though. Are key cords working correctly for you? Using a key cord breaks the workspace key bindings, which is super plus one through nine. And a Qtile restart fixes it, but it's a pain in the tuchus. Can you check whether you have that problem or not? Yes, I do have that problem. I'm glad you've mentioned that because I noticed this problem crop up not too long ago. I don't log in to Qtile that often. I'll check in on my Qtile configs. Like, I don't know, once or twice a month. I live in X-Motin-Ed most of the time. So it's not something that annoys me that much. But I have noticed that when I first log in to Qtile, yeah, super one through nine doesn't work to change the workspaces. And it has something to do, I guess, with the key cord section of the config. So what you can do, yeah, just do a super shift R to restart Qtile. And oddly enough, when you reload the config, the super one through nine keys works again and it never breaks again. It's just when you first log in that first time, I don't know why that is. I'm assuming that it's a bug with Qtile. Probably needs to be reported. It's probably a bug report that needs to be filed by you or me. Next up, hey, DT, you should make a Linux documentary film. You've also got a good voice to narrate it. I don't know if I'd want to make a Linux documentary film. That sounds kind of boring to me. As far as narrating a documentary, I'd love to do it. You know, Morgan Friedman's style. Morgan Friedman's got that great voice and he's often tasked to narrate things like, you know, space documentaries, nature documentaries. And I would love to do something like that. The salmon swim upstream to spawn. This is to ensure the survival of the species. Now the grizzly bear attacks and eats the salmon. The circle of life. Moving on. Hey, DT. As-salamu alaykum. Well, alaykum As-salam. Let's suppose Xmoned never existed. What would you choose instead? And is it a 100% alternative to it? So if Xmoned never existed, well, there's a dozen other window managers that I quite like and could live happily ever after in Qtile being an obvious choice. I've done so many videos about Qtile on my channel in the past and Xmoned and Qtile are practically the same Qtile is really trying to be almost an exact clone of Xmoned in a lot of ways. Awesome Window Manager is another one that I've lived in long term for, you know, months at a time, various points in my Linux career, right? I would be happy as an awesome Window Manager user. I could be happy as a DWM user. I could be happy really with practically anything. I mean, I could use BSPWM. I could use i3 even. i3 is not my favorite Window Manager, but I can make it do what I want it to do. I can use floating Window Managers like OpenBox at the end of the day. I can make most of these Window Managers do what I need them to do. Heck, I can make GNOME do what I need it to do. One of the things as you become more proficient with the command line, with the terminal, maybe you use extensible text editors like Vim or especially something like Emacs where you spend most of your time in those particular programs. If you spend most of your time in a terminal, does it really matter what Window Manager or desktop environment you're using? No, because typically you open a terminal and then you're in the terminal, right? You really don't care about desktop management stuff at that point. The same thing with Emacs. Really, if you're an Emacs user, typically you open Emacs and then you are living in Emacs essentially for most of your session on that computer, right? It doesn't matter what Window Manager or desktop environment you use. So for me, I guess if you've wanted my favorite Window Managers that are not Exmonet, I would say number one for me would be Qtile. Number two would be the awesome Window Manager. And number three, I'm going to go DWM. And the final question on this edition of HeyDT is, HeyDT isn't the Snap Store closed source or is it just the GUI app on Ubuntu? So this question comes up because I did a video recently about me installing some Snap packages on my computer because I was tired of the standard Arch packages breaking on update. So I installed some packages like KadenLive and YMP and LibreOffice as a Snap pack. And isn't the Snap Store closed source? Now the Store if you're talking about the graphical software center, that's just the GNOME software center that interfaces with the Snapcraft Store, right? So no, that is actually open source. Now the back-end to Snapcraft, all of that stuff is closed source. So yes, there is a closed source proprietary element to Snap as far as canonicals back-end servers, that's proprietary. Now the Snaps themselves when you install a piece of free and open source software, like I installed KadenLive, YMP, LibreOffice, they're all licensed under a free license. Even though I installed them using a Snap, they're still free and open source software, right? Just the fact that I installed them via Snap doesn't change the fact that those are still free and open source programs, right? And the same thing with proprietary software, most people will use something like Snap, Flat Pack App Image a lot of times to get proprietary software that won't be in your standard repositories, especially things like Ubuntu and Debian. You know, you're not going to find a lot of proprietary software like Discord and Telegram and Spotify and things like that in the standard repositories, typically how you go get those? Well, you'd use something like Snaps. And the fact that, again the back-end of Snaps is proprietary really doesn't affect the packages themselves. The packages are still proprietary even if Snap open sourced their servers Discord, the Discord Snap would still be proprietary, the Spotify Snap would still be proprietary. So don't conflate the two because I've had some people think that because Canonical's servers are not open sourced on this stuff, that the Snaps selves are proprietary and that's not really the case. It really doesn't affect the software that you're installing whether it's proprietary or not. Now do I wish Canonical would open source all of the Snap stuff? Yes. And I think they might do that eventually. Canonical has started things in the past as proprietary and then eventually open source them. I know years ago Launchpad was proprietary right? The service was proprietary the website, all the back-end stuff was proprietary and then eventually the community kind of got on Canonical's case hey, you make this free and open source operating system of BoonTube, but you know you got all this stuff that's also proprietary so do you support free and open source software or not? And you know the community kind of got on Canonical the community loves to trash Canonical and eventually they open sourced Launchpad and when they open sourced it, they did all this work to make proprietary Launchpad open source Launchpad and nobody cared. The community nobody uses Launchpad right? So you know we loved saying hey you need to open source this you need to open source this and then when they open sourced it, nobody wanted to use it anyway so the people that were complaining really didn't want to use Launchpad they just wanted to complain that Canonical had this proprietary stuff and I know some people that have worked at Canonical have made the comment that the reason they haven't worked that hard to open source some of the snap stuff yet is because they know they're going to do all this work and then even when they open source it nobody in the community is really going to care and I think they do have a point there but I also think there is a point to be made that it would still be just goodwill. It's goodwill to the community a show of good faith just to have everything open sourced even if at the end of the day yeah does it really make a difference as far as is anybody going to find it useful and do anything with it maybe maybe not but still as a show of good faith I do hope that one day Canonical open source everything as far as the snap servers and snap craft and all of that. Now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Gabe James Matt, Maxum, Mimit, Mitchell, Paul, Wes, Yabald, Homie, Alex, Armadre, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, George, Lee, Maastrum, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archon, Vador, Polytech, Realities for us Red Prophet, Roland, Steven, Tools, Divler William, Willie, these guys they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon they are the producers of this episode of HeyDT 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 I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free open source software subscribe to distro tube over on Patreon Peace