 And today I am going to chat with my friend DarkZero of ZeroLinux. He's the maintainer of ZeroLinux. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. How are you? I can't complain. It's been an interesting week for me. Had some weather events I had to deal with, some power outages I had to deal with. But other than that, pretty good. I've got my health and... This is the most important part. It really is. Yeah. So, today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about ZeroLinux because it's becoming a pretty popular Linux distribution, I would say. I've seen, even before I made my video about it a few weeks back, people are asking me about it. And that's always a sign that there's general interest in something. When I start hearing about something on a regular basis, that tells me, hey, I need to check this out. And I was glad I did because I was really impressed by what I saw. So, you want to take a second to tell the viewers a little bit about yourself? Well, yeah, why not? I'm DarkZero. I'm from Lebanon. And ZeroLinux is one of the few, if not the only, Custom Linux distro coming out of these lands. And I'm very proud of it. It started off as a hobby, just like every distro does. But then I thought, why not share it with people that might share my vision and kept working on it. And I made a lot of friends, like yourself and many others in the YouTube sphere. And this kept on growing and growing and growing and growing. And now it has reached a point, I'm getting 30,000 plus downloads a month. Very cool. I never thought it would reach that. Specifically for a hobbyist distro that's not meant to be for the masses. You know, you cannot satisfy everyone. And when you build something for yourself and then you share it online, people start expecting things from you. So... Well, when you say you started it as a hobby, was it just purely your idea or were you pushed into it by other folks or was it just you one day decided, hey, I'm going to try this? Well, good question. Simply, it was out of frustration because I couldn't find a distro for myself that satisfied my own needs. And I've heard that before from other distro maintainers, by the way, because they say figures because necessity is the mother of all creations. I believe in that. Say, and I must thank Eric Dubois from Arco Linux. Yeah, he's awesome. For creating ALCI because without ALCI, zero Linux wouldn't have existed. Basically, it was a simple script. You just run it in in the terminal and it will build you an arch, a custom arch ISO, and then it's puzzle pieces as he puts it, Lego blocks. I just remove his stuff with my packages and it grew from there. And that's a great thing about Linux is the modularity. I mean, you can take stuff away, add stuff. Yeah, you can mix multiple desktop environments together and stuff like that. But I felt in love where all that began is me falling in love with KDE. OK, and some people will hate me for this, but the distro that may be falling in love with KDE is Manjaro. I don't think anybody would hate you for that because that might be the nicest KDE desktop people had seen when Manjaro bursted on the scenes. I mean, that was really like, wow, that looks a lot better than a lot of the other KDE distros at the time. They were very clean. Their their implementation is very clean. But I come from an artistic background. My mom was an actress. My god rest her soul. My uncle God rest his soul was a famous painter across Europe. He was so famous all over Europe. My dad is a director. I was into cinema. I'm visually I'm a visual person, basically. So I needed to create a distro using a desktop environment that allowed me to get my artistic point of view across. So KDE was the only one. I tried no extensions break with every update in no way. And with all the limitations, it's like putting gluing my feet to the floor and telling me run the marathon. Not going to happen. So KDE was the only one. And this is where I continued going. And the people what the people love about Zero Linux is not the default rice only is the fact that I offer them the choice. I am like you, a firm believer in freedom, freedom of choice. I don't like to bound people by all my decisions. So I was like, OK, if you want to, for example, even in the driver's section, I offered them the choice between pipe wire and pulse. I don't force them with either. I give them the choice with with every single application in Calamari is now I will be adding an option in the next release coming May 25th on the first year anniversary of the distro. I will be giving them an option to install to select which rice they want. Maybe they don't like the default rice. Maybe they prefer something else. I have five rices in the world that have been done. They can select whichever one they prefer. Now, that is that's very nice because I don't know of any other distribution off the top of my head that during the installation process let you select like theming options. I usually they they give you their their vision of a desktop, but it's just the one vision, but you're going to offer five several. Yeah, five, but that's post installed, not during installation. Oh, it's not during the installation. Yeah, it's post installed in my tool. OK, there's something called a rice switcher. They can switch their rice, but it's preferable. They do it as soon as they log in on first log on, basically, because it's going to replace a lot of settings and stuff. If they set up the desktop the way they want, and then then they try to switch, it's going to undo everything they did and replace it with a new stuff. But with everything there's with everything good, there are small drawbacks. Of course, I had to I had to weigh both. And and during those three months that I took off from releasing anything, it's a lot of decisions more than creating. And by by being a maintainer, a distro maintainer, it's 90 percent decision making, only 10 percent work. Right. So it's more more about the vision you know, coming up with more about, yeah, like a roadmap than actually doing the work itself. Yeah, you have since it became so famous. Now it's no longer about myself. I have to think of others without breaking the vision. So the way you do that, I discovered is you keep it yours. Like Zero Linux is not a gaming centric distro. You can game on it, but it's not what it's about. I offer the installation of different game launchers, but I don't optimize the distro for gaming. It's up to them to figure the users figured I give them a base. I'm glad you mentioned that because I was actually going to ask you about the gaming because the fact that it does come with so much stuff that would make the user assume this is a gamer's distro. Yes, I had this is part of the decisions I had to make. I was like, I don't game on Linux. I don't believe in gaming on Linux. I will never believe in gaming on Linux because to me, gaming on Linux, you're relying on another layer called wine. It's not a it's not a it's not an emulator. I know it's in the acronym, but just the fact that I have to rely on something underneath the game makes me uncomfortable. Now, we're going to get slightly off of Zero Linux for just a second and just personal opinions about gaming on Linux. What are your thoughts about the steam deck? Obviously, being based on Arch Linux, the same that Zero Linux is. Do you think that will have any impact on like the broader Linux ecosystem? The fact that now you're going to have many, many more, hopefully many more companies interested in making gaming a thing on Linux. I am split in two halves on this. My view is split in two. On one hand, this is very important. I see it as a very positive point. This will increase the adoption of Linux because people are going to start getting introduced to Linux through the steam deck. Now, I know there are some people who hate Linux, Linux haters who are going to try to install Windows and I don't know about these people. If they buy a four or five hundred, six hundred dollar device, depending on what model you get and you wipe the OS that ships with it off of it, you're an idiot. I'm just going to say that, like, you don't buy an expensive device and then wipe the OS that comes with it off of it and install Windows. That's crazy. You must admit, not everybody is a Linux aficionado. But still, the reason that Linux doesn't have adoption, the barrier to entry for most people is they don't want to install an operating system. It's going to be the same thing with that device. No one's going to want to wipe out the OS and install something different on their steam deck. Nerds will. People like you and me would, but normal people know. On the other hand, for me personally, this is my personal opinion. Since I just said earlier that I don't like to rely on another layer to run my games, I don't see the steam deck as a triple A gaming device. I see the steam deck as a wonderful emulation device. OK, because I'll be able to play PS3 games on that thing. Which on my Raspberry Pi I cannot. Because of the the emulators that we have on Linux for various, yeah, especially retro gaming, I think that makes that device interesting. At some point, at one point, I had 90,000 ROMs on my various systems on my Raspberry Pi. I had a four terabyte drive on there and I was enjoying it, but I couldn't play anything past I think the PS2. The PS2 was and even the PS2, I couldn't play all the games, but it was very limited. So with the steam deck, I see I see myself buying this thing just for the emulation aspect. But as far as the Linux aspect of it, I see it increasing the adoption of Linux, especially that the OS was built on an immutable file system. People who are not who don't understand Linux too much, they're not going to unlock the system to mess with it and whatever. They're just going to use it as a browsing thing on a go. But it's not meant for that. People think that Valve created a desktop or a laptop, portable laptop on one side and a gaming device on the other. No, no, no, no, no, no. The desktop side is to do things that you cannot do from the Steam UI to add stuff to Steam. It's not meant to be used like but it can be used for many things. Linux is very flexible, but that's why I love the steam deck. It came at the right time. And I've always thought that eventually once Proton becomes even better, it wouldn't shock me if Valve starts offering other Windows software other than games that run on top of Linux. Like the people that complain about things like Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. It wouldn't shock me if one day those kinds of programs, those Windows professional programs worked under Wine and Proton and you couldn't just buy those through Steam. Yeah, it can only go up from here. And I think that would be great for for Linux adoption just because the last few programs that are really big holdouts that are preventing people from switching then would become available. I'm going to throw a wink and I'm going to say, who knows, maybe zero Linux on the Steam deck. Well, you know, now that we've got that out of the way that zero Linux is not necessarily meant for the gamer. What is zero Linux? Who's it meant for? What's the target audience? OK, it's for the thinkers. OK, simply put, it's for the thinkers. It's a base OS, very good looking, might I add. OS that goes with the tagline. And I can do you. What was it? I candy lovers wet dream is the tagline on the website. Yeah, and I candy lovers wet dream. Yes, because I work on the visual aspect. I tweak it to be in a general purpose OS. This is how this is the idea of zero Linux. Now, what you do with it once you get it, you can do whatever you want. It's Linux in the end. I'm not limiting anyone. I'm not. I don't. When I say not a gaming centric distro, it just means that I didn't go out of my way to make it to optimize it for gaming. But you can do it with the right knowledge. You got the ArchWiki. You got the whole web. You can just add the necessary stuff that is required to turn it into a gaming centric distro. But the roots of zero Linux is general purpose distro for the people who enjoy a good looking distro with all the tools required for a day to day use. Simple as for the person that wants to to customize their system. Really, it's for the, you know, if you're the kind of person that typically just takes anything, never customizes it. Zero Linux would work for that, too. But if you want to get creative, yeah, with your desktop, I think. Yeah. And general purpose. So you got all the browsers you need, the video. You can you can use it to do your video editing. And I was told by many users, one professional user, a person who has been using Linux for decades, I was told that zero Linux was so well optimized that it's even faster for video editing than any other distro he ever used. No, you know what editor he was using? I don't remember. I think Da Vinci Resolve. OK. That's what I would have assumed, too. But I would. So I without even knowing it, I optimize it for those things. So things become without you even meaning it. So I was working on it as a general purpose distro. I used to have Vivaldi when you checked it out. It had Vivaldi as a default browser, not anymore, partly because of your video and partly because of some users talking about how it's not open source. And I watched your latest, not open source. Yeah, I mean, distributions, some of them do ship non free software out of the box. And it's not a big deal for most people, but you will find you'll find enough of a percentage of the community that it's a big deal for. That's why I mentioned it. Me personally, it's not that big of a deal because again, many distros do that. But I did want I wanted to give you a heads up because I already know there are going to be people that complain about that decision. Yeah. Because you remember Manjaro had the same situation when they were they removed Libre Office for a proprietary office suite. And it's like, why do that? I think that's great if you want to offer it, but maybe don't put that on the ISO. Yeah. I reverted that decision and I went the safer route, the neutral route, neutral route by neutral. What do I mean? I didn't include Firefox. I didn't include Vivaldi. I didn't choose. No, I didn't include any browser that would create opinionated posts. I went the safe route and I included the cute or the KDE may be the KDE Falcon. Yeah, it used to be. What was the name of it before? Okay. Conqueror. Yeah, Conqueror. Yeah, Conqueror with a K. Yeah. While you were talking a few minutes ago, I was actually showing the viewers a little bit of your website. I was giving them a little preview. This is not actually live on the web yet. You say this particular website is going to go live soon. This will be a replacement for the current ZeroLinux.xyz. Yes, sir. This is a sneak preview or sneak peek at the upcoming design for the website. This will come on the first year anniversary on May 25th. And it has been designed by a fellow Lebanese web developer. And he's doing an amazing job. When he showed me the first draft of the website, my jaw dropped. I had to pick it up. Yeah, I mean, it looks really slick. Even though it's kind of flashy, it's also got a minimalist kind of quality to it. Isn't ZeroLinux flashy? It goes with the theme. It really does. I mean, yeah. If you do me a favor and scroll down to the FAQ section, click on the FAQ section. Yeah, I've got it. And we'll click on. Yeah, it will show question frequency as questions. And those are curated by me through a lot of troubleshooting. I had to pick the right questions and answers. And those will be changing when the new release comes. But this is where basically they will find all the answers. And if you scroll back up to the home section and I need to, this is very important, you show. This is near and dear to my heart when you click on disclaimer. Next disclaimer. Yeah, this is very important. Is that the major project's announcement? No, it's under... Oh, the disclaimer. I see it. Yeah. This is where I clarify what ZeroLinux is. This is near and dear to my heart. I had to really choose my words carefully, not to upset the people. But I just basically, not to read everything, it basically explains that this was made for me and myself alone. And it wasn't meant to support a wide variety of hardware. I can already, to sum it up, it looks like you're basically saying ZeroLinux isn't meant to be all things to all people, basically. Yes, because you get a lot of people that think a project has to be everything to everybody. And you're basically stating up front, this is what this is. This is the goal. I don't care about the rest. That's my words, not his words. Yeah, my words. I was very careful not to say that, not to say I don't care. It's just that I am one man doing it. Right. It's like, why don't you? Why don't you support, you know, all 50 different desktop environments and window managers that are available in the repos? You know, that's or why don't you support Wayland? You know, why don't you? Why don't you, you know, all this new technology that springs up overnight, man, you got to support that right away. To answer that question is very simple. I include, I give you the freedom to do so. I always there are things that I when I feel I can offer something to answer your request, instead of including it by default on the ISO, which I can, because at that point I will I will be requested to support what I include on the ISO by default. Right. But I offer the choice to the user. I tell him, OK, you want, for example, Wayland. Just click a button in my tool, it will install Wayland and enable it for you. But don't expect me to provide support for it. Exactly. At your own, do it at your own risk kind of thing. And, you know, I went a little over the top by summing up what you said, but your disclaimer is pretty straight to the point. As far as you're only interested in Katie Plasma as a desktop. And if you're packaging things specifically for the zero Linux repos, don't have dependencies that require something that's not a KDE desktop, right? So don't pull in, you know, GTK, you know, rewrite. I get that, which makes sense. Like in the end, I mentioned what will not be supported hack installs because I had a lot of requests to support the dual booting with a hackintosh. Cloud server installs. But that would be so hard to like, who's going to test all of this stuff? Yeah, you would have to have a hackintosh yourself to just to make sure that stuff works and well said, well said. Cloud server installs. A guy came on my server and he was like, can I install it on my Linode? Like it's a desktop environment. Linode does not does not use it. That stops. It's just only terminal. And other de's and WMS. We went over that custom other kernels. This is a very big issue. Kernels are a very big issue when I was actually going to. I was going to ask you specifically before you get on this rant, what kernel does zero Linux ship with? And then arch just the standard generic kernel. And but you can install whatever you want. But I will not provide support because the kernel is the core of your system. If you start messing with them and you encounter issues. That's your problem. If you compile your own kernel and you break something, that's that's not. Yeah, like LTS, even LTS people trust the LTS because it's long term service. But the LTS on some laptops, it causes sleep wake issues. The Zen kernel causes the Linus not found sometimes on some laptops. I cannot provide support for that because I don't use that kernel. And other people that require me to add support for touch devices like the what's it called the surface book. So the tablets. Yeah. This is another unless you have that hardware. That's another thing you can't possibly have all of that hardware yourself. The test, you know, that's my point. The whole disclaimer basically is not have the hardware you have to provide support. I can point you to the right direction. But how am I to test this to confirm or deny that this fixed words or not? So yeah, this is very important. This disclaimer is very important to me. Because is it just as strictly, though, is it a limitation of just manpower? Just there's not enough people limitation of manpower and hardware availability. Right. I'm only alone doing this. And to explain alone alone is not it's not. I need people. I prefer doing things alone. I'm a one man army and I prefer that because if you add people, you're going to add more variation to the equation. Yeah, I think typically things have become more complex. Yeah, this guy wants this. This guy wants that. I'm a one man show. It will always be a one man show. I will I will accept input from many people. Now I have another Lebanese guy with me in the group. It's a 100 percent Lebanese distro. I have another kid with me, a gamer king on the server. He's amazing at pointing out issues, giving great ideas, great implementations. All I do is make it happen. He comes up with great ideas and he's very creative, basically. And the audio switcher, the rice switcher, they were all his ideas. I credit him for the ideas. I just implemented them. So it's a it's a group effort, but I do everything alone. And I'm the only one who decides what stays and what doesn't. And I think that that makes sense, especially early in a project's life. It would be important for you to know everything. That's actually going on because if you start relying on too many people, especially early. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would cause you some issues, especially when I there was a guy I was thinking of adding to the team. But unfortunately, he was a pro window manager guy and window managers just go over my head. I tried them config writing multiple conflict files and it would have taken maybe 10 years to get to what zero links is at today. But the thing with various desktop environments and stuff like that, I tried the first year is always the rockiest for every distance we test, we experiment. I experimented with no, I was released known version, but it kept on breaking and breaking and breaking. And I had to host a hundred packages on my on my distro just to include on the ISO and whatnot. And I couldn't keep up. It was end the limitations and whatnot. And there was also a XFCE edition as well, because when I first tried your distribution on the website, it offered two different ISOs at the time, or at least the website said it did. But I think you'd already taken the XFCE ISO down after I took it after the video. I took it down after your video because it was too much to handle. I was like experimenting and I thought to myself, if I do any other desktop environment, no matter how good. It's spitting myself to thin concentrate on one thing and do it good. You see a lot of distributions, too. Like I remember when Linux Mint had more additions than they have now. They just took down the KDE version. Yeah, because and I understand why because you're doing so much with these GTK based desktops with Cinnamon and Monte, you now introduce a whole new suite of programs that you weren't using at any of the other desktops. It didn't make any sense. Have more than one GTK desktop. And or in your case, like if you wanted to do LXQ, I mean, you could still use all the KDE apps in that. That makes sense. But when you're mixing GTK and Qt, then it just adds more headache. Once I feel comfortable that the KDE is done, I might add another Qt-based distro. Which brings me to the subject that is very important is the KDE desktop is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger than I ever thought it would be. Now it supports Wayland, which I need to include into support for on the ISO. It took me two weeks to figure out how to set X11 as a default session, not Wayland. Because when you include Wayland on the ISO, it's automatically the default. The default, yeah. I think GNOME does the same thing. Or at least it seems like every distribution that ships with GNOME, it defaults to Wayland. I don't know if that's a choice that the distro has made, or is that a choice that GNOME makes? I don't think so. I think they just didn't, they added it and they didn't really bother. But guess who made me figure out the issue? Who? Fedora. Well, that would make sense. They implemented config. It was very easy. It was basically adding one line to SDGM.com. That's it. One line. And it took me two weeks to figure it out. Let's go a little bit more meta, a bigger question, because we've dived into the desktop environments. But why Arch is a base? How did you get into that? Because I mean, we kind of skipped ahead there. Very simple. I tried Mint like everybody else did. It was the Debian base. The very next distro I tried after that was Manjaro. And since I fell in love with KDE on Manjaro, I tried to add KDE to Mint. And by that time, already KDE was already removed by Mint. And of course, the KDE you're adding, especially on the Debian edition of Mint, would just be straight from the Debian repos, which is not a great experience. I go as far as saying straight from hell. Yeah. And the defaults, many people don't know this because most people don't install a distro like Arch or Gintu or some, you know, where you get vanilla KDE, but the default settings are horrible. Yes. I agree on that. And I did a lot of digging on Manjaro. I didn't know that Manjaro was Arch-like distro. It's not an Arch-based distro because that's a big misconception by users. It's not an Arch-based distro because it is not. It doesn't use the Arch repositories. They use their own. Right. So it's an Arch-like distro. Don't make the mistake. But I didn't know it was Arch-like. So I had to do a lot of digging to know what is it based on? Why is it so awesome? Ubuntu does the same thing. I don't know if Ubuntu even mentions Debian anywhere on their website. And to be fair, Ubuntu maintains their own repositories as well. But still, for transparency, I think you should be upfront about things. Yeah, that's what I wanted to bring up later on. But once I discovered that it was an Arch-like using their own repositories, I was like, Arch, what is that? I go to the ArchWiki, I suffocate. It's too big. The ArchWiki was too big, too overwhelming. And I tried to join the community and ask questions. Everybody knows this. So I'm not saying anything new. The Arch community is the most toxic out there. This, everybody knows. There's a few other bad ones. Yeah, but Arch has... I'm not saying Arch isn't, but I'm just saying there's a few other bad ones. I don't know. It has bad seeds on their forums, but I don't think they maintain their forums. They just created them and left. Yeah, what we should get into this, too, is because I was actually going to ask you, which we already talked a little bit about your website that you've got someone working on that. As a distro maintainer, do you find it hard to both develop a distribution and then maintain that web presence? Because it seems like most distribution, almost every Linux distribution I know of, they don't care about their websites at all. They don't care about any web presence. They just all let it go because the devs just want to be a dev. They just want to code. Okay, this is a very good comment, because I am the kind of person on my social media. If I get a request, if I don't answer it immediately, because I put myself in the shoes of the person who's requesting help, they're not going to wait. They expect help immediately. I expect help immediately. Like, when I go to a support website, I expect help. I don't like forums because forums you have to post and wait. And then wait. Yeah. See who answers. I cannot do that. The forums, which brings me to my forums. My forums are good, not necessarily for the person asking. The forums are good for the next guy, because now it is cached in search results. And the next person searching for it can find the answer. If they use search. Well, yeah, nobody searches for anything anymore, right? But my forums are not for people to post, not mainly for people to post issues. It's mainly for me to post, well, it's mainly for me to be Eric from Arc Linux. Eric does videos. I create posts. I like written posts. And I was actually going to mention, when I was talking about distro maintainers, having a hard time juggling, like maintaining a web presence. Eric does something interesting, because I said the Arc Linux websites are a bit of a mess organization wise. Yes. But he's not really focused on that. He is putting all of that video content on YouTube. And in many ways, I think that's a good idea. I like that. That's a great idea. Yeah. Great idea, because it's visual. You see the messages. You see how things are done, instead of capturing, having a multitude of screenshots on a post, and having a seven page document. It's right there in front of you. Because when you tell people to go read a wiki or read a man page, I'm not reading, but they'll go watch a video. I've got no problem with that. But when you ask the question, if I like to maintain a web presence, I can juggle those two, because I love being available online. Like on my forums, whenever somebody figures out the solution to an issue in zero Linux, I dig for the solution on Eric's YouTube channel and I convert it to text. Yeah. And I personalize it to zero Linux while writing the text. I love writing. I used to have multiple blogs, and I felt like if I don't post on a daily basis, something was missing in my life. So I do maintain an online presence, and especially on social. Another thing that makes zero Linux very interesting, according to my users, is they get an instant reply. They never have to wait. They rarely have to wait, rarely. Only when during Easter, like for example, I'm not going to be available. Holidays, people understand that though. And I have... Or they should anyway. And I have two Easter's to juggle. I have the Catholic Easter and my Easter. So... Well, so you've got a family of different traditions, so now you've got to celebrate Easter one week and then the next. Yeah. Like, I'm Orthodox. Well, I guess that's nice. Yeah, I'm Greek Orthodox, so I have to celebrate mine next week. And this week is my dad's, so... Well, you got to take two weekends off, huh? I just take it. Yeah, I won't be going to the store for a week. You get two Good Fridays and two Easter Sundays. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I wanted to briefly ask you, because I'm sure I can imagine some of the answers to this question, but when you got into developing your own distribution, surely there were some things that surprised you as far as the difficulty along the way. What were some of the things that surprised you? Like when you started working on this, wow, this is harder or more work than I had imagined. Okay, bash scripts. No, I was going to ask you about... Because I was going to ask you what language you do everything and you do bash scripts mostly? Yes. Okay. I just Google how to do one thing. Like, for example, boss audio and pipe wire. Since I have the audio switcher, it's a bash script. I think everybody does the Stack Overflow thing, where you just find... Stack Overflow is a lifesaver. You must admit, it's a lifesaver. Oh, I use it all the time, yeah. Yeah, so I figured out how to do this like today. I figured out how to edit instead of... Here's an example. The way I began doing things, for example, to add a line to a file. Before, I used to delete the file and do W get the new file instead of it. I was like... And as I started learning more, I started using the said command. And today, only today, I learned how I can use the said command to replace a specific line in a file. Yeah, you can actually... And not many people know this. SID is really interesting because you can actually specify a range of lines to replace. So it's not just a single line. You can go tell it, find this paragraph or this block of... And replace the whole thing, yeah. Yeah. And if you look at... If you get some time and look at all the scripts I have, I abuse the said command. I abuse it. Everyone has their favorite little things. I'm like that. If you ever look at any of my scripting, I love AUK. I use AUK for everything. And people are constantly... Why are you using AUK with it? You could have just used something much simpler to do this task. It's like, it's just what I learned. What did you get comfortable with? I'm comfortable with using the said command. I use it a lot, especially for Grub, for example. If you want to, because Grub by default is set to a resolution of 640 by 480. I don't know why they like to... Legacy reasons, yeah. It's very painful. It is. So I had to set... During the install of the bootloader in Calamaris, I tell it to set, replace the 640 by 480 by 1920 by 1080. I think most distributions these... Well, not most. A lot of distributions, though, usually change that resolution, especially the console resolution, because that 640 resolution, that's way too small. Because most people these days are using 1080p monitors, at least if not 4K monitors. Well, a lot of my users are using potato laptops for some reason. Why do I attract potato laptop owners Well, I can tell you why. It's the Linux aspect. There is a certain quality to Linux that lends itself. There's a lot of people that imagine Linux is that operating system you put on ancient hardware that nothing else will run on. And that's true. Maybe not with Plasma. Plasma, it is fast and quick. As long as you have 8 gigs and above. And you got a decent IGPU. But if you have a potato laptop from like 25 years ago, no, please. And I have to learn how to say no to people. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to say no to people. I'm very open. And I like to say yes, you can do this. But I learned quickly while maintaining zero Linux that you got to set expectations. You mentioned earlier that you started with Linux Mint as a first distribution. How long ago was that? You know how many years ago? You're not going to believe this. I'm not going to believe this. Oh, I probably will. 18 months ago. 18 months? Yeah. That's not too shocking. I've been using Linux as a whole 18 months. Yeah, because I've seen the same thing from people that have used Linux for a year or two. And you'd think there were pros. Like they know everything about, you know. By releasing my own distro, I kind of inadvertently gave that impression that I know everything. But let me set the record straight with you and so your viewers can understand. I do not know how to code. Every single line of code is copy-pasted and modified to suit zero Linux. It wasn't written from scratch. Here's a tidbit about me. I don't know how to create anything from scratch. I've never, in my whole life, created anything from scratch. I've used other people's work, modified other people's work and made it mine. Yeah, but that's where everybody gets started. Everybody gets started by taking something that's already been created and then usually trying to recreate it themselves. Like nobody, very few people have an original idea when they're first learning. The idea is not being original. It's like, for example, if I wanted to replace one thing with another, I learned how to do it using other people's work as a draft. And then I remolded to fit zero Linux. But I never created anything like dissertations like in school, back in the 80s when they asked us to create dissertations. You did everything in WordPerfect. Was it WordPerfect? I can't remember. WordPerfect was around. We wrote this one, two, three on my dad's MacBook 2 VI, which was discontinued after nine months of being created. But for dissertations, I used to read books, take sentences from the books and shape it into a dissertation. Never write a single sentence from my head. Okay. This is how uncreative I am. I just use, I cannot, it's a weakness I have, but I turned it into a strong suit. Well, if you've been using Linux for 18 months, let me ask you another question, because as a somewhat new to Linux user, and there's many of them that are going to watch this interview, how has your view of Linux changed from when you first made the switch to now that you've used it for a little while? Because I'm sure there's a big change now than when you started. It might shock some people. I still don't believe in using Linux as your only operating system. Okay. So you still dual boot? Yeah. Okay. New dual boot. Windows or Mac? No, I have a MacBook. I don't need them. My MacBook is so recent. It's a 2017. It doesn't, with a touch bar, so it doesn't support Linux. But I dual boot with Windows 11 for only one reason. Like I mentioned earlier, it's only for gaming. Okay. I only boot into Windows once every three months. Once every three months before the update? Well, for updating everything, because we, unfortunately, I'm from Lebanon, so our internet is capped. So I don't know, out of the blue, they decided to give us Sundays unlimited during the entire day. Okay. So I wait till Sunday, one Sunday every three months to updates accumulate for games, as you can imagine. I update all my games and play the Diablo for an hour or two, and then we boot back to Linux. Because to be frank, since I started using Linux, I cannot see myself using Windows on a daily for general tasks, because it's got a blue screen on me. It's going to decide to reboot and install updates on me. You know, I've heard from so many people that were worried about the same things when they switched to Linux from Windows. I've got a dual boot because I'm going to miss some things. And then they start using Linux and they realize after two, three, four months, I've never logged back into my Windows this whole time like I didn't need to do a boot at all. Well, that is true for me because I only boot to update and to play Diablo. Diablo and Doom are the only two games I play. I've ever played in my life and I've been playing those two games for the past 20 plus years. I'm not a varied player. I don't play online games. I just single player and I cheat. Of course. Everybody, I mean, that's the point of single player games. You can do whatever you want. Exactly. It's the aspect of Linux a little bit in games. Online. That's a little harder to cheat, especially nowadays because of all the anti-cheat detection. I have an account on cheat happens. The lifetime account on cheat happens that gives me access to trainers. So I'm like, good. So I play the games for story, for the story. I don't play it to lose or to gain experience or anything. It's just for the story. I like to watch the story as a movie. Since I come from artistic background, I like to watch the story as it unfolds while I'm playing. I just started God of War just because out of curiosity and now it won't launch. So. No, that's unfortunate. So I went back to Diablo. Unfortunately, that's another thing. People sometimes talk about the limitations of Steam and Proton. You buy these Windows games on Linux for Proton and sometimes they don't launch. But then you know how Steam works on Windows. You sometimes buy games on Windows on Steam. They won't launch. Like it's the same thing. It's like you've got the same problems no matter which OS you. Exactly. And on Linux, what I love now on Linux is that Steam just. OK, some games need updating. But a lot of games like Doom Eternal, for example, just runs, just works. And it works better than on Windows because Windows uses half your RAM without doing anything. Well, that's yeah. That's the overhead of just launching into their particular desktop environment. Yeah. With no plasma. Plasma and people like to criticize it as being heavy or bloated. No. But typically when you launch a plasma desktop, 500 megs, maybe, of RAM. I mean, it's nothing compared to Windows. I mean, way less than Windows. Yeah. The Windows on a cool boot, on a cold boot, it uses three gigs. Right. That's because of all the telemetry and stuff in the background. Telemetry, yes. So on Linux, just add Lattedoc to Plasma. You will cross with 1.2 gigs just by adding Lattedoc. And I cannot live without Lattedoc. And people criticize 0x for looking like Mac. I didn't do it because. I don't know if that's a critique. No, but. Because many people like Mac as far as the workflow. So I don't think that's necessarily a negative. Well, I cannot live without the doc. I got used to it so much that I cannot live without it. I have 32 gigs of RAM. So it doesn't hit me that much. But anyway, Linux I use on a daily basis. I cannot live without Linux anymore. After 18 months, even after zero length, this is a hobby distro. So which brings me to a point where I need to say, if it disappears one day off the internet, don't be surprised. This is a hobby. And I'm a 42 year old person. I cannot keep doing this forever. I'm not making money out of it. It's not paying my rent. It's just a hobby. I need to learn more and more about the nitty gritty of Linux. And this is allowing me to do that. It's an educational process, right? Many people don't understand this. And I've told people this about me doing my YouTube channel. The reason I started this and doing these Linux videos is not necessarily to teach people. Although that's nice. It was to teach myself because when I have to explain stuff to other people, it teaches me. I become it becomes more ingrained. And you'd be surprised. The best way to learn anything is to have to teach others. Yes. And it doesn't matter what that is. Just teach somebody else something and you will learn it much faster. Here, I'm using my store as an excuse to introduce Linux to people. Yeah. Like I got on Linux and the other day, the lady's reply was so funny, I burst out laughing. I told her, she brought me her laptop. She asked me to install any operating system as long as it worked. I explained to her, I'll install Linux for you. It's very simple. And I wasn't going to install an immutable file system like Fedora server brew. I told her, Linux, you know what her reply was? No, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want virus on my laptop. I don't want virus on my laptop. Virus. Virus. It's not a virus. I told her, I installed Fedora server brew on her laptop and now she's the happiest she's ever been. And her laptop is from 98. 1998. I can believe that. I installed Fedora, Fedora server brew. It's not the perfect performance because it uses non desktop. Well, at least she's got a gig of RAM, a single gig. Yeah. One gig is fine for Linux desktop use. The only problem one gig is going to run into is as soon as you open up a web browser. You will not have a web browser. I added you were trying to go old school. Yeah, kind of because of the nature of the laptop, but it was an old Q, I don't know if it's Q-based because Q came after 98, right? Can you give after 98? It looked like conqueror, but a much simpler. It could have been the Qt tool kit actually, I think it was around before GTK, but you didn't see it on Linux because Qt was actually proprietary software back then. So I installed something that looks like conqueror. I forgot the name of it. It was a weird name, but it was very simple. No extensions, no nothing, but at least it supported the new HTTPS protocol. The new protocol, HTTPS. Because there wasn't HTTPS previously, but it now uses a much modern version of that. And it supports it and it looks a little bit like conqueror, but as long as it works. And I installed one application for chatting for her. It's called Ferdy. I've heard of it. Yeah, I've heard of that. All of her chat clients are open in this web app instead of having multiple clients eating up your RAM. I had to balance, okay, it has only one gig of RAM. So just by loading the desktop, it's using 300 megs of RAM. I mean, it almost at that point really needs to become almost like everything in the browser. Just set it up like a kiosk where it launches your browser and that's what you get. Yeah, I just added four icons on her panel at the bottom. I dropped her panel at the bottom because she's used to Windows. So not for it to be too different from what she's used to. I dropped the known panel down to the bottom, added the start menu. I forgot the name of it. And I added four icons. I added the browser icon, the web app icon. Oh, a media player, MPV for watching videos. And a fourth thing, I forget what the fourth thing was. And that was it. And that's what she uses on a daily basis. She uses WhatsApp and Telegram and Twitter inside Ferdy. Yeah, they all have web clients so you don't need. Yeah, they use on Ferdy. She opens the browser. And the browser, when you open the browser, it only uses 20 megabytes of RAM. So that's a big, oh, and the browser doesn't support tabs. Yeah, I remember the early days of the web. And because tabs weren't really a thing. Until I think Firefox. Yeah, until Firefox came around in 2000 and 2003. Yeah, yeah, it'd be a few more years. Yeah, yeah. But she was very happy and that's just to tell everyone that even if you, I didn't tell her what was Linux. I just gave her a laptop that works. She didn't care what was on it. If you can do that, do it. It's sneaky, somewhat. Oh, I do it all the time. And don't tell them what you install. Yeah, you don't have to tell them. They're just going to use their computer and you'll never hear from them again unless something breaks. But it never breaks. Because they don't do anything to make their computer break normal people because they're not going to update anything. They're not going to do anything weird. If it's working when you give it to them, it's going to still be working. And again, it's Fedora server blue. If you don't have a file system, you can't break it even if you want to. Yeah, because you just roll back. I mean, if something major happened, you could just roll it back to the last state where it was working. Yeah, just one command. So I am privy to, I am lucky enough to have a store to use to introduce people to Linux. And to sum everything up, zero Linux is kind of about that. It's to introduce people to Linux while looking good. Because more and more people like visual stuff. They don't, if you give them something that looks bad, they're going to hate it immediately. But if you give them something that looks good, they're going to be intrigued and more interested. Yeah, I would agree with that. So this is the main purpose of zero Linux. You can build it to whatever you want. That's the beauty of Linux. You don't have to rely on the maintainer to create it for you. I just give you a good base to work on. It looks good. It's well optimized. Now do your thing, learn and build. And a lot of people do that. But there are some people, they want spoon feeding and hand holding. You got both sides of the coin basically. You're always going to have that. One thing we should talk about before we wrap up, where do you see the future of zero Linux? Like short term, long term, you got some goals that maybe you want to share. Yes, like I was saying earlier, the future of zero Linux is still unknown, but the point of zero Linux is to get more people on board of Linux. The future, nobody can tell the future. Of course. It could disappear in a month's time. It could disappear in 10 years' time. I mean, neither one of us could even be here tomorrow. I mean, that's out of our hands, right? Yeah. Our off switch is with the one. So zero Linux is off switch is in my hands, but. There is a bus factor with zero Linux then. If something happened to you, God forbid, would that be the end of zero Linux? At least has it? No, okay. I am currently with every distro. I think it happens with everything. It happens. I'm always interested in people who want to continue the project. I don't want to kill zero Linux. It is too good and too much sweat and tears went into zero Linux because I can promise you, as a distro maintainer, don't think it's easy. It's not an easy job or thing. You're going to get a lot of haters you have to deal with. You have to learn how to deal with the haters. You're going to get the people, as you put it in your video, who are very, how shall we put it? Well, how do you put it in your video? Well, one of the things I will say is when you do anything publicly, you have to interact with people that maybe normally you wouldn't. You see it's almost like a study in psychology because you really see there are so many different types of people out there. Many of them are not yet complete. Like they haven't really formed a proper personality just yet because they don't interact well with others. And unfortunately, you have to be able to overcome that. Yeah. That's what I'm learning current. I'm learning how to overcome that and step out of myself and put myself in that user's shoes. That's the beauty of Zero Linux is that it's teaching me how to interact with people as much as it's helping people learn about Linux. Because after you're done with Zero Linux, you know, no matter what you do going forward in life, you will learn so much about people just from doing this. You really will. I've seen both sides of the coin so far. I've seen the negative side and the helpful side. And I am lucky enough now to have over five people that are helping the project. I learned recently about XFS, the file system. It's one of the best I've ever used. I tested it on one of my spare SSDs. It's great as a file system. But very stable. Used a lot in servers XFS still to this day. That's why it's the default starting the May release. I wouldn't have known that if my friend didn't tell me about it. So I'm learning through others. And there's another way you learn, and that's the best part of creating a Linux distro. Once you put it out there, people are going to get issues. And how do you make a distro better is by fixing those issues or finding solutions for those issues and those solutions working. Oh, I learned that I can do this and this and that with Linux. I didn't know that. This is how we learn. The users are shaping the distro, not me. They come up with ideas. It's a community-based thing. That's what I love about it. And so far, I haven't had a lot of negativity. The only negativity I had is when I tried to remove Wayland. When I tried to do that, a lot of people were like, oh, it's like stripping people from oxygen. I'm like, what? Not really. Not really. Not really. It's a broken system. I shouldn't have included it in the first place. All right. That's one of those things. Yeah, once it's there, then you try to remove something people will complain. But if you just don't offer them anything to begin with, then it'd never been a problem. All right, so. And from here on in, to say one last thing, from here on in, 010s will only be KDE. I will not add any more desktop environments or window managers unless the team grows. And a maintainer can. Right. You would need somebody to act as the maintainer of that addition because you can't do it. Right. No, I can't. I barely have time to maintain one addition. Right. And I know KDE so well now that I feel so comfortable playing around with it. I juggle with it. It's like I can do whatever you want with my eyes closed. And KDE does have its drawbacks. I understand them, but I am different than others. I accept them because I know in time they will be fixed and they will be addressed. And I'm a very patient. I learned patience by creating zero Linux. I've never had a choice before. So now I'm very patient like it used to take. Have you ever suffered the issue with any distro? But you're using ARCO so you might have seen it. When you try to reboot your system or shut it down, it sometimes takes a while. The system D stop jobs that take like 90 seconds. And sometimes you don't want to wait the 90 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. But what you should do is if you're running the shutdown command, always do shutdown now to tell it, hey, just I don't care force quit. Don't run those stop jobs. Not in the correct order. Instead of doing that, I found a fix. Now it does that on all the time. You edit using the set command again. Of course. You edit the system.com in ETC system D. No, well, that would make sense. Yeah. I added that file during the installation in Calamaris. I added that command to the final shell process. It edit, it sets those lines. It turns 90 seconds into 30 seconds. It turns one minute. There's one job set to one minute. Five minutes. Sorry. Five minutes. I tell it one minute. I shorten everything. So now you use it. I've never been that annoyed with it, but I can understand some people reboot their computer because they did an update and they're trying to get right back into it. And they don't want to wait a minute and a half. But it's a minute and a half. Come on. But people, a lot of people use that as an excuse to hate system D. Yeah. So I found a fix. No, everybody's happy. Well, any final thoughts before we go? Anything else you wanted to mention that we didn't get to? Yeah. Like I mentioned on one of your previous live streams, if you want to use ARCH, please understand what you're getting yourself into. ARCH is a very big rabbit hole. You should learn to do your own research. Don't expect people to handhold with you and give you all the answers. You have to use Linux as a whole. Yeah, that's just life in general, to be honest. It's a discovery. It's a discovery. You learn with the beauty of Linux, you can shape Linux into your dream OS. Can you do that with Windows? You don't want to be dependent on anyone for anything at the end of the day. If you're dependent on somebody else, then you are very, very vulnerable. Yes. If you depend on someone to solve all your issues, and you're not ready to do your own research, it's specifically when it's related to your own hardware that no one owns. So please understand what you're getting yourself into when you go to Linux. Not to be negative about Linux. Linux is amazing. You can shape it and mold it into whatever you want. Can you do that with Windows? No, you can't. Not said. Well, would you like to disclose any kind of contact information if people wanted to get ahold of you or even just information about learning more about zero Linux? Yeah, you can visit my current website at zerolinux.xyz which will become the website that... Yeah, that's the website I showed earlier. Yeah, that Derek showed you earlier. I'll show again here. And you can find me on Twitter. Then you've got social links on the website to Discord, Patreon, YouTube, GitHub. You can get all your information. I forgot to add Twitter. My Twitter handle is at TechZero, G-E-C-H-X-E-R-O. You can find me on Twitter. And I also have Patreon. If you want to help the project continue, it'll be nice. So if people do want to contribute, whether it be through financial contributions or helping the project out with code or documentation or anything like that. You can visit the forums or Discord or Telegram. Those are the... Mostly active on Discord and Telegram. And you can find my forums via my website. I post a lot of need tools. And the forum is not a place to ask for support. Let me be clear about that. It was never meant to provide support. It was just there for me to post guides, tutorials, and to help you discover new tools, new scripts, stuff like that. If you want support, hit me up on Telegram and Discord. You will get instant help. That's a promise. That's a guarantee. I will answer you no matter what time it is at night. I'm up until 5 a.m. So if I don't answer you, I feel bad. So you will have primo support, tech support. Very nice. Well, thank you for hanging out with me and chatting with me today. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to do this little interview. And I want to wish you the best of luck going forward and best of luck to ZeroLinux going forward. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And I hope also DTOS becomes a distro if it will ever become... I've got so many weird plans with it, like the roadmap thing. I got to figure out exactly which directions I want to go with various things. I'll just tell you that I dug through your code. Although I don't understand a lot of code, as I said earlier, but it's interesting. There are some interesting decisions you've made. And you were right last time that I didn't install Emacs the right way. That's why it was taking 30 seconds instead of the time it should take. I'm learning to Emacs slowly because I'm a Nano guy. So I like the name of the channel. You know what? I didn't even know that you use Nano when I created the Jitsie channel here. We're meeting on Jitsie and I emailed him and I told him meet in the room called, I can't use Nano because that's for me. If you've ever seen me try to use a Nano on video, I literally can't use it. I can't remember the key behind it. Well, it's not about not using it and not liking anything. It's like I rarely do edit in terminal. I use K write like a human being. I use K write. I edit, save, it supports, I'm done. Why do you complicate your life? If you like something simple on Linux, don't be afraid that people look at you weird. And Linux, no. And one last thing I want to say this because a lot of people, because I'm going to share this locally here in my circles in Lebanon. No, Linux is not for hackers. Linux is a normal desktop. It's a normal operating system. It's not made for hackers. We're just normal guys. If we keep repeating it enough, maybe people will believe we're just normal people. I don't really think Linux is for hackers, maybe because of what's it called, the distro for hackers. Callie. Callie Linux. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you hanging out with me DarkZero. And peace. Happy Easter. Same to you. All right. Take care, brother. Take care.