 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos where I address viewer questions and comments. These viewer questions and comments typically come from the YouTube comments, Mastodon, Patreon, Reddit, sometimes through email. And the first comment that I want to address today goes something like this, and I've gotten this one many, many times. Haiti, your distro reviews suck. You can't look at a distro for a few hours or even a few days and really know anything about it. You have to live in that distro and you have to live in it for three to six months is typically what people tell me. So if you don't live in a Linux distribution for six months at a time, you really can't do a proper distro review. And maybe they're right. Maybe they're not. But here's the thing. I don't do distro reviews. If you look at when I take a look at Linux distros, various Linux distros, I don't call them Linux distro reviews. I don't claim to be reviewing the distro. Typically when I look at Linux distros, you know, the latest releases of particular Linux distros, I call them first looks or first impressions, not distro reviews, because I agree. If you're going to say it's a distro review, you got to live in it for a little while. But here's the thing. I don't think Linux distro reviews are important. I don't think they matter at all. I actually think Linux distro reviews are kind of garbage content. If I lived in any Linux distro for six months and then came back and made a video on it, it's going to be fantastic. You know why? It's because I lived in it for six months. I made it my own. I customized it. It will in no way resemble what that distribution looked like on day one. As a matter of fact, six months from now, you shouldn't even call it the name of that distribution because at that point, it's really DTSOS at that point. And of course, it's going to be fantastic when I review it six months from now because it's my operating system, right? I'm the one that hacked on it and customized it and made it my own. Really, I think I would be doing you guys a disservice. I think many people that do these lengthy distro reviews and by lengthy, I mean they live on them for a few weeks or a few months and then review the distro. I think they're doing you guys a disservice. I think they're doing the developers of those Linux distributions a disservice because the developers need feedback. They need to know what's wrong with their Linux distribution, especially when somebody opens it up and tries to install it, tries to look at it for the first time. That is the most important thing. Day one is much more important than day 365 that somebody spent on a Linux distribution. The last video I did was a first look and first impression of ArchCraft and I trashed that distribution and it was fair though. That was not unfair criticism. When I opened it for the first time, I couldn't even read the text and people are like, well, you just need to go and change the font. How do you change the font? Well, you go through the menu system. Yeah, the menu system you can't even read the first time you log into the distribution and the main developer of that distribution of ArchCraft needs to know that's a problem. And I'm sure I'm probably not the only one that's told him that, but maybe he doesn't think it's a big enough of a problem. But maybe after my video, maybe some of the criticisms he's going to get, especially from viewers of the channel that also take a look at his distribution, maybe he will finally address that problem. And if the developers of these distributions don't want to address some of these what I think are critical problems, especially when people are first taking a look at a distribution, then that tells you all you need to know about that distribution too. Now, I think I do a service here by doing these first look, first impression kind of videos, because really at the end of the day, first impressions matter the most. The next question is, hey, DT is brave truly the best option when it comes to web browsers. And I think brave is a fantastic web browser. I think it's one of the best options out there. So you know, there's a lot of web browsers out there. There's a million of them, right? But for me personally, I will not run a proprietary web browser. So I don't care how good Chrome is or Vivaldi or Microsoft Edge or Opera or any of that garbage. I will only run free and open source software. When it comes to web browsers, there's no reason not to. There's so many good open source browsers out there on my system. I have four or five open source browsers installed right now, including Brave. Also have Mozilla Firefox is installed, Qt browser is installed. I love Qt browser, bad wolf, which I've taken a look at on the channel recently. And I've probably got one or two others that escaped my mind surf. Now I keep my personal build of surf around as well. And all good browsers, especially, you know, Mozilla Firefox is probably the one I want people to really consider because I think Mozilla as a company, you know, they're all in on free and open source software. And I think Firefox is such a good browser. And it is the only mainstream browser out there that's not based on the Chromium engine. And unless you really want Google to completely dominate the web, and we're very close to that being a real possibility, once you get pretty much 100% of the web, people that view the web, view it using a Google web engine. Well, Google can make any web standard they want. There's nobody else to argue with them on any web standard. It doesn't matter what the W3C or any governing body says about the web, they don't matter at that point. The only thing that matters is the person that makes the web browser. And if everybody's using Google Chrome at that point, Google runs the web, they make all the decisions, they hold all the keys. And there's very few alternatives to Chromium based web browsers out there. Mozilla Firefox is the only one that has any serious chance of ever gaining market share to the point where it can maybe compete with Google Chrome. It used to be one of the most popular web browsers on the planet. It used to have 50% market share, maybe even more at one point, but it slowly eroded over the last decade to the point where now probably less than 10% of the web uses a Firefox based browser. And I think that's unfortunate. It's getting to the point where I really worry about the long term viability of Firefox and Mozilla as a corporation. So I know not everyone cares about the free and open source movements, but if you do care about that, you really should be running Mozilla Firefox just based on principle. And you should be promoting Firefox and trying to get as many of your friends and family to run Firefox. And it doesn't matter what they think about free software, open source software, Linux, most of these people are just normies, right? They're running Windows anyway. You see them running Google Chrome. Hey, you know what? I use Firefox and it's really neat. Maybe you should try it. And who knows? They might actually like Firefox. And the more people we get on that train, maybe we can reverse this very disturbing trend where Firefox just keeps losing market share to Google Chrome every single day. The next question is, hey, DT, are you a Buddhist? And people ask me that because of the statue that you often see behind me in my videos. I had that statue for a while and it's always been on the desk or a shelf oftentimes in a frame of the camera when I'm recording. And I guess just to answer this straight away, no, I'm not a Buddhist. I actually don't claim to be a member of any organized religion. I don't have an affiliation of any particular church, mainly because I don't see the need for it. Because I like studying all world religions, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, various other religions. I mean, I have a book of Mormon around here I've read, you know, I've read the English version of the Quran, you know, just whatever I can get my hands on. I find all of this stuff fascinating because I find messages that I can take from all of these various religions. Many of the spiritual gurus and these various religions, many of them are preaching the same message, right? You would be surprised once you study these things how similar they all are. Ultimately, they're all spreading that message of don't be judgmental. Don't judge other people, right? The obvious example is Jesus, you know, telling you to do not judge, lest you be judged, but pretty much every major world religion, anybody, regardless, religion, philosophers, you know, don't judge other people. Don't worry about what other people are doing because the minute you start being judgmental, the moment anger starts creeping in. Think about that. Every time you've ever been angry about something, it's because you took something personal. Well, the only reason you take things personally is because you're judging other people typically. So the minute you eliminate that you're no longer angry. Ultimately, anger leads to hate. Hate leads to violence. The next comment I want to address is, hey, DT, can you please interact more on your Mastodon account? And I got this the other day, and I thought this was a little strange because I do post on Mastodon nearly every day. I typically post on Mastodon every time I put up a new video, but I post other things on Mastodon. I'm not on Mastodon 24 seven, but I probably post on Mastodon once or twice every single day. And when people message me, I typically answer them. Now, I don't answer everybody mainly just because of time and because I don't always have a web browser open and getting my Mastodon messages because I'm doing things like this. When I'm recording, it's typically several hours the process. I don't have any distractions. I don't have chat up. I'm not going to have Discord, IRC. I'm not going to have social media of any kind up. I'm not going to get any notifications for that block of time. I'm sorry. So if you message me during that time, I'm not going to respond. And even going back afterwards, you know, if I have time, I might respond if I don't. That's just the nature of it. Obviously, my primary concern here is making content for you guys. I think that's your primary concern is you guys want this content. You guys don't want me to be your online buddy and chat with you on Discord or hang out on Mastodon. That's not what this relationship is all about. So ultimately, what I want to do is I want to put out good quality video content for you guys. And I can either do that or I can hang out on social media and pretend to be your online friend, but you guys probably already have enough fake online friends. You don't need another one. The next question is, hey, DT, thank you for all your videos. But regarding all of your recent videos about the free software movement, where do video games fit into all of this? And he especially asked about AAA video games because some of these AAA video games have millions, some of them tens of millions of dollars in budgets. So, you know, you got to pay all of these developers and artists and designers and everything and musicians to make these gigantic AAA titles, you know, these video game titles, how can you do that and have them also be free software? Won't AAA games always have to be proprietary because that's the only way they'll ever make their money back to pay for the development? I don't think that's the case, though. People seem to put video games in a category all by themselves. Like there's something different with video games, you know, you can't open source video games because you can't make money, but all the other open source software projects out there, they're doing okay. Well, not all of them, but there are plenty of open source software companies out there that make billions of dollars developing open source software. How's Red Hat doing? Red Hat, and of course, it's been bought by IBM, but they were a billion-dollar company before IBM bought them. How's Canonical doing? They're a private company, but you can bet they're making bucket loads of money these days. How's companies like SUSE and Oracle? How's Microsoft doing these days? Now, Microsoft still makes a ton of money on all their proprietary projects, but Microsoft, more and more, is getting into open source, and they're not getting into open source, you know, to hemorrhage money, right? They're getting into open source to make money. We all know that you can make money with free and open source software. Stalman proved this way back in the day. When Richard Stalman first started the free software movement, Richard Stalman, of course, helped create GNU Emacs, and that's free software. And Richard Stalman, for a while, actually made a pretty decent living just going around and giving support for Emacs. You know, people wanted support, and he was the guy. He created it, so, hey, we'll pay you to come teach us how to use Emacs and do this and that. He also, I think, sold physical copies of Emacs, because it's, the source code is perfectly free, but he actually put it on, you know, physical media, floppies or whatever he was distributing back then, Emacs on. And of course, people would pay for that. I mentioned Red Hat and Canonical. How are they making money on their Linux distributions? Well, they're making money through support. They're not selling their Linux distributions. That's free. But if you want a company support behind it, you know, you want us to actually support your company, you know, in these deployments of Red Hat or Boon 2 or whatever, you know, you pay a support contract. Now, getting back to how these AAA video games can make money. I'm not much of a gamer. I don't know much about the development of these games, and I don't actually play video games. So I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but everybody else is able to make money on their free and open source software in some way, you know, besides just having to close source the software. So I'm sure these AAA titles could do that too. They could make money by selling some kind of service, subscription services for something. The problem with the gaming industry is they've never been a part of the free and open source software movement. Nobody's ever tried to open source any video game, really, anything that mattered. And I think that's the problem is we just have to have one company make a stand, one AAA company, you know, just make a stand and start putting out open source games and figuring out how they can make it work, how they can make money, putting out open source games. And the minute you have one company try it and succeed, everybody else will get on that bandwagon with us. The next question I want to read is, hey, DT, if your only goal is to spread the message of free software and spread the message of freedom, why are all your videos monetized by Google? He's talking about on the YouTube channel, all of my videos are monetized ads play and, you know, Google makes money on those ads and they give me a small percentage of, you know, the ad revenue on that. And this question makes no sense because we've already mentioned the free software movement has nothing to do with me making money from Google ads. It's a weird question. But I'm going to chop off the front because the front of his question really has nothing to do with the second half of the question. We're just going to take the second half. So forget about the free software movement and freedom. Let's just stick with hey, DT, why are your videos monetized on YouTube? I think Fita just asked that. That makes more sense. And sometimes people do ask this other than the obvious, hey, you monetize your videos so you can make money so you can get paid a little bit for the work you put in. But really most YouTubers, when they start monetizing their channels, most YouTubers make most of their money with other sources of revenue other than the Google ads that play on your YouTube videos. Most of them are making money through sponsors, corporate sponsors or affiliate links or Patreon or PayPal donations. You know, they're monetizing their work in other ways. Typically, they monetize their work in several other areas. Many of them make so much more money in those other areas other than the ads. Some YouTubers do turn off the ads on their channels. Very few do this, but some do. And those that do are making a critical mistake. You guys that are watching, if you have a YouTube channel, and I know many of you guys that watch my content also have channels of your own, if you have a channel where you've met the threshold where you can start monetizing your videos with Google ads, you need to do that. And it's not about making money or anything like that. You need to do that if you're planning on staying on YouTube long term, because if you're not monetizing your videos with Google ads, why the hell would YouTube even want you around? Because you don't make them any money. Think about all the videos I put out. I've put out like 800 videos in the last three years. Think about all that storage that YouTube has to store my videos, all the bandwidth I suck up from all the views I get on my videos. I cost YouTube a ton of money. If I don't let them make that money back by actually running ads on my videos, then what's to say one day they just cancel my account, just delete it. Because all I'm doing is sucking up bandwidth and costing them thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars a year, and they're not making any of it back because I refuse to let them show ads on my videos. It's ridiculous. And to be honest, I think it would be unfair for people to do that because when you think about how much money Google spends to host YouTube videos, they need to make money. Otherwise, the platform is just going to die and there will be no YouTube. So you need to let Google run those ads. And there's no reason not to. You're going to make a little money yourself as well. Because the minute you turn those ads off, think about all the big YouTubers in the last few years that have had their channels deleted and they've been kicked off the platform. What's the one thing that they all had in common before they got kicked off the platform? They were all demonetized, right? It got to the point where Google couldn't show ads on their channels because advertisers didn't want to be associated with those channels. So the minute these large YouTubers, they can't be monetized in any way, why the hell does YouTube even want them on the platform? Because all they're doing is costing Google money at that point. You're actually costing Google so much money that it's in their best interest to find a way to cancel you. And the final question for this edition of Haiti is Haiti, why did you decide to start making YouTube videos in the first place? Because recently, I've been required to make some YouTube videos for work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And I totally hate it. I'm curious what attracts other people, including you, to make YouTube videos? That's a great question. I think, like most YouTubers, I started out with absolutely no idea what I was doing and with really no plans. And that's seriously how I started out. When I started out, I really, I didn't watch YouTube. I didn't know much about YouTube. I didn't know anything about audio or video or they didn't have equipment. I had a crappy webcam or crappy microphone. And I didn't know anything about audio editing, video editing, creating graphics as far as creating good thumbnails and things like that. I went into it with zero knowledge. And I think that's what most people on YouTube do. And you start doing it. And I decided one day, I see other people making these videos on things like YouTube and Facebook and other platforms. And some of these people just have ridiculous videos they're putting out there, you know, goofy stuff, you know, cat videos or, you know, people that are really talking for 10, 15 minutes, but they're not really saying anything the whole time they're recording. I was like, you know what? I'm going to put out some good content. And I'm really passionate about Linux. So I'm going to put out Linux videos. So I came up with a named distro tube and I just started making videos. I just started recording myself with that crappy webcam and that horrible mic. And, you know, I enjoyed it. The very first time I turned on the camera and started recording, I realized, you know what? I'm pretty good at this. And by good, I'm talking about speaking to people. I'm good at public speaking. Most people, when they turn on a camera and have to just start speaking off the cuff, this is not scripted. Very little that I do is actually scripted. Most of it is I just turn on the mic and the camera and I just start talking to you guys. And for some people, that's difficult because of nerves. They know this is basically public speaking right now. When I turned on this camera and started talking, I know potentially I'm talking to thousands of people right now through that camera and I'm okay with it. It doesn't bother me at all. So the more I did it, the even more comfortable I became at it. And then the more I wanted to get better at the whole process, then the more at first I wanted to learn about audio and bought some better audio equipment, started learning about audio editing. And then after that, I wanted to learn a little more about video, video editing. And then I wanted to learn about the whole process of thumbnails. And, you know, because so many people on YouTube, the bigger YouTubers tell you it's all about the thumbnails. That's what attracts people to your videos. I wanted to learn more about that. And then I needed to learn more about the rest of the process, creating titles and descriptions and everything else. Then you need to worry about the lighting and there's so much involved. Now, and people have no idea how much work is involved just making a video. And as one of those people that enjoy learning stuff, I'm one of those nerds. I like learning stuff, especially Linuxy stuff. And, you know, obviously I'm using Linux to do all this. And I've just had a blast. It really has been fun. I've been doing this for nearly three years. I've made 800 videos in three years and it's a ton of work, a ton of work. Thousands of hours have went into this and it's been enjoyable. You know, I think that's one of the reasons, you know, so many YouTubers burn out. And I think the main reason most YouTubers eventually burn themselves out and just have to quit all together is because it's not enjoyable anymore to them. Maybe it was never enjoyable for them. You know, many of them go into it maybe not understanding the amount of work involved. They didn't know what they were getting into in the first place. I knew this was going to be a lot of work. So I'm fine with that. Many YouTubers just don't find it enjoyable because they're not doing topics that they actually want to cover. You know, they're chasing views. So they're making content that they really don't want to be making. That's not really them. Many of them are not themselves on camera. You see these people that are putting out these false personalities on camera and when you are trying to be fake for several hours every single day, of course, you're going to hate that. Of course, you're going to burn out. You know, I would hate that. I could never not be myself. That's one of the things, you know, I want to be genuine in my videos and you guys, again, if you have YouTube channels out there, be genuine. Don't ever try to be anything fake because the minute you start going down that road, you are going to be the next YouTuber that burns out. Now before I go, I do need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devon, Fran, Art5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donny, Dylan, George Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this edition of Haiti wouldn't have been possible. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because DT, he doesn't have any corporate sponsors. It's just him and you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.