 So let's talk about Linux. Specifically, I've had people asking about what I run on my desktop or what I run on my laptop, and right now it's still KD Neon. I've been running Linux full-time as my primary operating system since I think about 2008, so roughly 10 years. I'm trying to remember exactly when I started, but it's been a while and it was very painful in the beginning. It's very easy to run Linux as your desktop now. Most of the arguments that people have is that it's just not an environment they're used to or this or that. The one argument that still holds a lot of water and it's still a problem I have is the gaming argument. Yes, I have my only computer that I own that natively runs Windows is my gaming system. Sorry, I know there's some Linux folks saying, but you can do this and it's too much and some of the games don't work as well. That's a different topic, but if you say I can't run Linux because I'm just too hard corporate gamer, you got me. I can't convince you otherwise because even myself I have a native one. But my computers that I run for my day-to-day business that I do all the administration work on, that I do everything that runs and supports my company, including me supporting all my clients, all Linux. And yes, my users run Windows and that's fine. The worst argument I've heard is someone says, well, you should feel the pain of your clients and run the same software. I'm like, no, no, I have work to do. I have to fix all those problems. And Linux has proven to be a very, especially in the last recent years, a very stable platform to have as your desktop operating system. And with so many things being web enabled, there's not many other excuses apart from the gaming one that why you can't run Linux as your full-time desktop. Now, I've been running KDE Neon for over a year now and I'm really happy with it. So I want to run down, me running KDE Neon, the methods by which I use it and some of the tools I use, and kind of give you an overview of it. Now, is this the dish show you should start with? We'll start there. Probably not. KDE Neon is wonderful and pretty in all kinds of fun stuff. KDE Neon is not absolutely the most smoothest system. They have done an amazing job of quashing bugs. I tried it a while ago and I had some issues here and there and it just didn't seem stable. So I've been with Ubuntu forever. They just seem to have a really good, cohesive, albeit kind of boring desktop, but boring is good because stable is what you need to get work done. This is bleeding edge stuff, so you end up with some quirkiness. But lately, the only quirkiness and probably the last six months that's actually caused any minor issue is the wallpaper keeps disappearing on my desktop, but not on my laptop. I have had no problems on my laptop. Seems to have run it fine, but the desktop, which is also why I'm presenting on my laptop, with the three-screen layout. One, harder to present on YouTube, but also that's where some of my troubles come in with a third screen. I lose wallpaper problems. Doesn't seem to cause, it doesn't really cause any productivity issues for me, but it is the one consistent annoyance I've seen, and they always seem to fix it. So an update will come through. I load the updates right away. I'm always excited. It's the absolute opposite of Windows. I'm excited when there's new updates. What new features did I get? Windows is always like, how long it's gonna take and what's not going to work? You know, looking at you, USB broken two days ago and did a video about that. Anyways, staying on topic here, updates don't bother me. I don't brace for impact. I don't, oh no, it's something bad is gonna happen. With the updates, they load, they work great, and they give me new features, but they occasionally break the wallpaper on one of my monitors at complete random, and it just won't let me put the wallpaper back, but then almost like the next day, there's always an update. So that is at least I will gripe about it that much, and you're going, Tom, you're griping about wallpaper? Yeah, it's that stable. That's my current complaint is the wallpaper. Everything else seems to work great. So let's jump over here, and let's start with the specs on my laptop. So my laptop is a Intel Core i5 5300U CPU. This is the mobile processor, and this is an IBM ThinkPad, and I've done a review. This is the same laptop I've actually been using for quite a while. I've done a review on it, and I'm still using it, it works really well. Now, first thing I will say, it's small, it's the X250, it's not super powerful, and that's also why I wanted to do this on this versus my really high-powered i7 laptop with 16 gigs of RAM and a high-end graphics card. So this just has the generic Intel graphics in it, nothing high-end, and that kind of speaks to the performance that you get out of KD Neon, and this is something that is making me really happy is that they've done a lot of optimizations, versus, before it was a little bit sluggish, they've actually gotten it down to even a 30% faster boot time with the latest update and latest iteration of this, which is really nice. Now, if you're not, I'm gonna give you a quick overview. If you're a little bit curious about how Linux works, this is a Ubuntu with KDE Neon rolling the distro differently. So you start with a base distro, and technically Ubuntu is based on a Debian, so it's the same family as the underlying, and then the desktop environment, or DE, as you hear a lot of people say, that's where KDE comes in, and KDE is a desktop environment. Right now, with the latest iteration of Ubuntu, you're getting the GNOME desktop. The GNOME desktop's nice. I kinda like the KDE one, but this is the fun thing about Linux. You can have the same underlying distribution, but then have different desktop environments that you come out on top of them. There's lighter weight ones, there's heavier weight ones, and that's actually where it's kind of nice. There's competition in the Linux market to provide you with a really good desktop. KDE allows the wobbly windows that you're seeing here, which is kinda cool, people ask about that, and I'm gonna show you a little bit of customizations that I've got in here, because that's one of the things I love about KDE, KDE in general as a desktop environment is it allows for a lot of customization. Plasma works great, and you're seeing my laptop tax right now, it's actually because of the screen recording is what's taking at most of it. So let me go over here, pull this up under each hop, and you can see it's pulling up some processor power, and a lot of that has to do with what you see right here, which is OBS that's running, Open Broadcast Studio. That's this tool here, and because it's recording at full 1080, it taxes the processor a bit, because we're doing all this, but the animations still remain really, really smooth. The only thing you're hearing a little bit is the fan noise from the laptop. This laptop's generally silent, but it's taxing a bit. Now I've only got eight gigs of RAM in here, which is fine because that's, it doesn't, actually most of the RAM is generally taken up by the browser, so eight gigs is perfectly fine to keep things running. Matter of fact, even with the browser open until I get a bunch of tabs open up, you can see right here on the side is the physical memory. So let's start with some of the widgets that I have over here, and let me just minimize things out of your way. And the first thing I kind of like is the way the widgets work on here. So if I want to add a widget, I go over here, and you have all kinds of things you can add and features on there. Some silly ones like comic strips, I can set a device notifier over the side, CPU load monitor, and then each of these widgets can be customized. The ones that I've chose over here and I'm like changing them out is CPU load monitor, memory status, and hard disk IO. And this is something I always want to know is something taxing my hard drive, what's going on with the network, and how much memory do I have left if I have too many things opening. And one of the things I run a lot of is Kaden Live, which is what I edit all my videos with. I've done a whole open source workflow with talking about this. And this is also easier to present on my laptop as well, because it's down to single screen. So if we open recent, and let me find something in here. This is my son, but you can see it runs through here pretty quick. And this is where I'll do my editing. And even with this open, still now we're only up to 1.9 gigs. So it's still pretty lightweight on memory. And this is important. And this is a big objection people have with different desktop environments is, how heavy are they on the memory usage? Katie has really come a long way because they used to be on a heavier side and now they're much lighter weight. Now my browser of choice for a few reasons is still Chrome. I really do like Firefox, and I do have Firefox on here. And Firefox works really well on Linux as does Chrome, but just everything syncs really, really well with Chrome with a lot of the Google tools that I use. It's always not given me a problem. And until recently, Firefox was always a little quirky with a few things. Now with the latest Firefox update, I have considered switching back because they now seem to be a step ahead of the Chrome world on a lot of things because of the new engine. So that's so philosophical debate and I'm just used to using Chrome. For now I'll keep using it, but I keep both browsers on here, especially when I'm doing testing of websites and things like that, we make sure all of them are on there. Now with KDE Neon, you have your software center. And this was really bad about a year ago. This has become really nice now for loading different applications. So if you're looking for an application and you know what it is, you can go through here and they've got them all nice grouped together. So here's your applications. We can find different calculator apps. We can find different games. It's if you want to load something like I have a leave your office on here. They've got this nice tiered out look for the discovery tool that I like a lot. It's how you get apps on here and kind of give you a little bit of a background. The way it works in the world of Linux is you have app repositories that are maintained. So you don't have to go and download and find other third-party software. So that helps mitigate the risk because the apps are very curated and made sure that bad things don't get in there. It's not absolutely impossible. There is no such thing as an absolute pool probe system. But this is actually why Microsoft themselves are going to a store style platform is because once you get everything from verified sources and a vetted source, you have a better chance of having a secure program versus some random website that created software. Now you can load third-party software, of course, in Linux and you can add third-party repositories as well that are trusted. These are other ways you can get software on here but the ideal way, if you're new to Linux, you don't want to have any risk is just get things out of the app store itself, essentially what this is. So this is the Discover tool and it's also nice to weigh its scale. So if it sides over here, it'll actually start scaling down and watch the, it goes to a single mode. So then we can go through each program and go back to each other one from there. Now the other things that used to have a lot of problems doing was loading any of these. Sometimes it would get stuck loading so they've really done a good job of bringing all this up. Now they also have in here a lot of plasma add-ons which is plasma is a part of the display interface. So you can even get different themes and everything else. So you can do a lot of customization and add widgets and add features all right here. And if you could say, you know, I don't like the icons in here. I want to choose a different icon theme. You can do that. You can start picking, customizing and playing around with it without ever having to go try to download some random thing. And as you notice when I'm going through this, we're not running around through the command line. Now I'm still, because I do a lot of server admin on Linux, I spend a lot of time still running things in the command line in all of that work. So you still can do, you know, app to get install, well, sudo because I'm running as a user. And I can still install, you know, apps and things like that. So I can just app to install Kden Live or any other apps that still works from the command line. You can still update from the command line but this tool handles all of it for those of you that are new to Linux and want to get on, you know, want to get started and go, hey, I just need these things loaded. So that's your applications manager for Kden. Like I said, they've come a long way. It works really, really well. Some of the other software that I use in here and we'll just run through them real quick here. So I got the web browser. I run a screen tool a lot for screen snippings. And this is just, this is great. And the reason why is, let me show you something here. People ask me questions all the time, how do I do this or how do I do that? And I grab something, you can set a delay. I've got a one second delay because it's usually enough for me to have a window open. I click the edit button. I go, this is the thing you want to point at. And then I copy paste this right into whatever my reply is to an email. This is a real common thing I do when I'm showing. A lot of times I got to instruct people where something is, this is my favorite way. If people wonder how your reply is so fast, like shutter, there's the window snipping tool. Shutter is essentially a, to me, a lot more advanced version of it because it'll also keep a collection of all the things you've recently screen-shotted. So these are screen shots I sent for an ad run we did and the results of that ad run, just grabbed a screen shot of it and sent it out real quick. So shutter is a great tool for that. OBS obviously, Caden for screen recording. OBS is really good for that. It's a, that is cross platform and that loads up really well on here. It's natively in the store. Caden live, of course, for video editing. Now I, for those of you that wonder, because I do run a lot of virtual machines on here, that actually runs great inside of here. I'm not gonna start this up in a moment. This is how I test other distributions, but VirtualBox, Oracle VM, VirtualBox Manager can't say enough good things about it. If you have a couple things that you need to run, and for example, I call this my Windows 10 support system. Sometimes, because I don't spend all my time in Windows 10, I keep it up to date and occasionally there's a tool or a thing I need to do for a client or they want me to test a piece of software and I just pull it all up in a virtual machine. And I also, because of the way Windows 10 and pain in the butt updates that it is, I run it every now and then just to keep it up to date. It's a fully licensed, properly licensed Windows 10, but I have found I get broken licensing errors because I frequently do this and we're gonna clone it. We're gonna do a linked clone. Before I load any software to keep my original one clean, I start with a clone or I start with a snapshot. It turns out that causes a licensing error. So every now and then I gotta say yes to a stupid window in there. I don't know what Microsoft's policy is on that. I cloned it, but I'm not running two instances of it. So I think I'm within the license of it. I don't know, this is where Microsoft gets a little bit confusing to me because I don't want crap loaded on my computer if I have to test software for a client or some special, we have a client with special tools that they have us load on here to connect to things because it's all Windows based. Well, that's what this is for. And I can go into a network, still run my Linux, still feel secure that my machine's working well and then tie in a virtual machine of Windows on here. So for those people when you're doing support administration like I do, especially when it's server support, if there's some tool that only runs in Windows I have to run, I have that ability to do this. So that's the virtual box on there. It's also great because if you need to jump into Windows because you have something like Photoshop, for example, and you can't run that natively on Linux yet, not well, someone's going to say, yeah, I know you can get it running under Wine which is an emulator essentially for Windows. It's kind of like an emulator. I know it's not an emulator, but let's just, for namesake, it lets you run Windows programs inside Linux but it doesn't work that great. It works good for some things, not for others. It's still a band-aid on a system, it's not native. So Photoshop can run great inside of a virtual machine and I do have a subscription for Photoshop and I use that inside of there, it works great. So that's my solution for if I need to do Photoshop and the replacement for Photoshop, someone's telling you, Tom, what about GIMP? Okay, I run GIMP. I use that for all of my workflow for things like my YouTube thumbnails and things like that. So it works good for stuff like that but on the other side it just doesn't handle things near as nice as Photoshop. So I can do templates in here and I've done my templates for my YouTube channel. So this is the templates that you're used to seeing. I got them all controlled inside of here. They work well. It handles it pretty nice. It gets the job done. It's not a great solution because the text layers are terrible inside of GIMP here. They just don't handle text near as smooth as Photoshop does. Also when it comes to layers, yes, it has layers so I can control and make different pieces of the layers visible. But the downside to all of that is it does not do easy, oh, I wanna put a drop shadow. It's not a one-click thing. So for those of you that are used to Photoshop, you're gonna find GIMP very lacking. There's lots of little workarounds. I've been doing tutorials trying to get better at it. I've got it into where it fits into my workflow so I don't have to spin up windows just to go to Photoshop just to edit things like the basic thumbnails for my YouTube channel. But overall, if you've got power work to get done and this is why we have a Adobe subscription for our web development side of the business, you just need Photoshop to get the website graphics added and things like that. So my main web developer, which isn't me, she's using Photoshop all the time to get things done. That is a lacking part in Linux. But GIMP does work for all your basic editing needs. Let me start closing some of this stuff before I open here, close that, close that. Now other tools I use. I really like Genie which is a code editing tool. So if you're looking for something to, I don't know if I have anything recently open in this computer. So okay, something real basic here. It supports a lot of different languages and it does all the code highlighting. So it's not a bad development environment. It's got links if you get in, I don't really compile much. I mostly just dabble with some bash scripts usually for system in stuff. But you can integrate a lot more for development on here. So that's nice. It's, you know, all these tools that I'm talking about are in the repository so you can just install them through the software installer. Other tools I use on here, I got a look. So these are those things I use them so much and always think about it. So I use sync thing, I've talked about that before. No need to go into a whole demo because it just runs in the background to sync up the files on this as I change them with my main server. And I actually don't have it running all the time. And the reason I don't have it running all the time is it doesn't need to. I'm only doing it when I know I'm editing something. I open up sync things so I want files to sync but I keep my laptop to the bare minimum because most of the time this laptop, which I do use at home, this is my only computer at home besides the gaming one, that if I do any client work at home, it's always done on this because it's kept secure because everything's set to be encrypted on these. And by the way, just a security practice in general because laptops especially because they're so portable are very high risk. Everything on this is encrypted. You put a BIOS password on it. It has an encrypted drive which is when you're setting up and loading in these Linux distros that ask do you want to encrypt your home folder? Yeah, or you want to do a whole drive encryption even better. This even has encrypted swap file. That way not even a swap file, if anything goes in there, it's all encrypted. So if someone were to take this, I would be agitated because it's missing but not worried that it's missing. So when you're dealing with that, that's one of the reasons encryption is so important. Do that from the beginning. It makes recovery if you ever have a problem really, really difficult. Just always back up. I'm not worried about anything on here because that's why I have sync thing on here. Anything I'm doing in real time is being backed up when I'm actually working. So no concerns there. If it goes away, whatever. It sucks if this laptop died. It'd be terrible if someone stole it, it'd be angry but I'm not worried about security and that is still an utmost concern in why I keep the most minimal amount of services running on here because I don't want anything externally accessible. Now getting back to how Katie and Ian handles things, let's talk about files real quick because I'm out working on things. I love the file manager. It, Windows feels so clunky to me all the time and it's because of the way the Dolphin File Manager is really just, it's nice, it's pretty, it lets me handle things in a really simple way and so let's open up something right here. Like I don't hope this isn't bad. Oh yeah, one of those old electronic kits, I stayed a picture of it that someone had I thought it was kind of cool. So you get this, this is kind of inclusive with it. These aren't third-party apps. This is built into Katie and Ian. You get this G when views, I'm sorry, I'm reading it bad but what this allows you to do is if you open up a graphic, you can then jump through the graphics and it gives you nice little thumbnails of everything so you can go through and look at stuff but it integrates into the file manager so I don't have to do anything and by default I have previews turned off but I can also preview them here by this. So you get this really flexible file manager and let's go a little step further. Let's open up tabs. So here's all the different tabs I have open and this allows me to take a single instance of the file manager and have everything managed to have but I could just as easily, let's go ahead and open a new window and now I have it opened over here. Now it's very smart about remembering the preview setting was open so it had it back on but if I turn it off and we're gonna close this it wants to know if I quit all the tabs are current tab. You can say don't ask you again, we're gonna quit. Previews still off and if we open up a new window again previews still off. You can set defaults but I like the way it remembers what you last did in a very clean way to make files easy to go through and you have all these here where you can just break them out to different formats, trees. The file management's really really easy. You also have the recently saved documents today, yesterday, this month, last month, other groupings for documents and images. Now something else you're probably going but I gotta connect to my Windows server and things like that through Samba and I'm like yes. I'm out of a habit of doing this but it has a network discovery tool. I'd like to type in the addresses. I usually know exactly what I'm gonna access and the way you do that is like this, SMB colon slash slash and IP or UNC path of the name. Whoops and I should type it right, 3.4. That just connected to here. This is actually an open share and boom. Right here is things I'm working on. This is an open share we have but you're probably say okay, what about ones that have passwords? Sure, customer file. It prompts you for the username and password to connect to that. So you can connect to Windows shares on your Windows box or in this case this is actually a freelance box. I can connect to those shares and get onto the system, no problem. If this password protected the last name for a password and a blazing bucket is kind of our joke one and so is this one. Well, this one's not a joke one. This was when we were just dumping things back and forth over here playing around but these are some of the test dev servers that I was copying back and forth. Now speaking of that, let's talk about what happens when you copy things inside of here. So let's go through and where's a big file? Do I have anything big? All right, here's a website back up. So we're gonna copy this and we'll just paste it right here. Now you're used to probably the Windows dialog that comes up, you can force these to come up by default, each job that's running just goes down here and you can expand it out and this is a notification panel. I can pan, I can have it on top, I can break it out but I like it right here. It's kind of where my notifications go. It tells me the speed at which it's transferring. I know it's doing it and I like the auto hide at the bottoms. I like to maximize my screen real estate but yeah, I can see which jobs are running. Now this actually groups all my jobs. If I'm running a render for Kaden Live or anything this works perfectly fine in here as well. It just a standard tray notification for things like that. So it keeps it really clean and simple so now I know that's working in the background. I'm gonna go ahead and close that tab. Minimize this real quick just to get things out of the way and I can look at my network monitor. Hard disk IO now is going nuts and okay, so I can see that things are happening and by the way, if you look over here at the physical memory, we're still not using a lot of memory to get this done. Also when you mouse over things, you can see their status and for example this, I can see is about halfway done copying that file. Now, also if you notice when I bring the mouse up to the top corner, I like this. You can do all the different alt tabs. I like the simple ones but this can be very customized in here which I'll jump into in a second but this allows you to quickly tab through things but I actually I find myself because of the way the mouse one works just go into the corner and jump into whatever it is I'm looking to do and moving it over there. Now the other thing you get on here is virtual desktops that allow you to do that too and we're gonna move this, more actions and we'll send it to a different desktop. It's over here, move to desktop two. So that's on desktop two. Now I got the desktop set to be side by side and this is a virtual desktop. So this one's on this desktop and this one's on here and I got it set to switch over here at the bottom. What this allows me to do is have a bunch of things open that I'm working on copying files and I can jump over here to a different screen and you can build these as many as you want so you can customize the ad virtual desktop or remove virtual desktop or configure desktops and I can set all the different options in there to have as many as I want. Two is generally enough for this laptop. I generally even on my desktop only use two of them because it's not imperative that I use them all the time but sometimes it's handy when I have all the things open for editing a video but I need another desktop because someone says hey I got a question I want to work on this I don't have to close or move any of those windows they can say exactly how we set them up because a lot of times especially when you get a three screens of real estate you want all of the settings to be exactly how you want and once they're there you're like okay this is how I want to look on this side and move it over. So let's jump back over here and I'll put this back on the main desktop and we'll say move to desktop desktop one go back over here and now let's talk a little bit about some of the customizations. So I don't think there's really a lot of other apps that I run all the time. I mean there's LibreOffice is on here and some of the usuals those are kind of boring I don't know there's much I can really show you that you're like yeah I've seen LibreOffice. I don't run Microsoft Office matter of fact I hardly use LibreOffice and someone's gonna be upset but yes we use G Suite for everything because it's so much easier just to go through and have a series when we're working on a project we collaborate not all in the same building and we want to work with people on it especially where sometimes it's outside contractors on there we just put a spreadsheet together and share it amongst people for a project so there's not we hardly use any of the office tools natively on any of the Linux desktops that run here at my office. So that's like I said I can't get too much deep there's just not a lot of other things that I'm doing in here I do have things loaded that I played with but they're not like my day to day applications that I'm using. So let's talk about customizations which they've done a nice job of this too so we go into system settings I minimize this again. It's nice this is where you can choose the themes you can easily choose different things I like the breeze theme but you can take any theme that you have there's a subset of pieces to the theme like I like the breeze theme for look and feel not breeze dark but then for the desktop part of the theme I like the breeze dark and then the cursor theme I chose just the breeze theme then the splash screen I kind of like this look but you can choose this one here to the new mix which is actually kind of cool to play with that one too you can spend way too much time in here so if you're a person who likes customization this becomes a game into itself of all the just craziness you can do for customization font management icon packs you can load and these are a lot of things you can get on there they've even added a modicon support for loading some of the different modicon sets that come in here and how they look and how they're displayed throughout the system you can change the styles of the applications fine tuning radio button radio boxes every little piece of how things look can be customized so you're looking at this here you can say oh what about this or what about this and what you're seeing is this is a simulation of what it's going to look like and yes this one is called MS Windows 9x I can't remember if it came to falter I loaded it but if you like the way the Windows 98, 95 the Windows looked in the 90s you can change the combo boxes and everything over to that and it's kind of novel I like this it's a more modern look for there you can also change the way the window decorations look so this is the one I'm using here but you can change this look here and you can see that like this is the up and down windows and it'll you know maximize minimize you can change it to this look you can also load more looks now you can also customize other apps so this is the KDE environment this is the GNOME GTK application so you can run even though something may have been designed for the KDE environment and you have other things designed for the GNOME environment there's a crossover and they will run each other's applications but when they run they can be skin differently so that's where you get these options here and it allows you to change some of the GTK themes and how the window decorations work for that then we get into desktop behavior and you know basic like display tool tips but desktop effects this is where once again you can go crazy and play with all the different things and I don't feel like touching them right now because I got them customized the way I want so I'm really happy with them but I like the way the translucent windows when things are under each other away like how it's faded and you can see what's below it and it goes in there these are all like very customizable magic lamp that's this I like magic lamp it's really novel it's just a cool effect I don't know it makes me happy you can say and I was probably a person who didn't like all the desktop effects at first but I don't know once you get used to them the eye candy there's a lot to be said about fun UI design it's still very functional it doesn't as long as it doesn't detract from anything I think it's great this is screen edges and this is where you can actually set all kinds of things for the screen edge now I played around with it and I forget to do it now I've accidentally screwed it up I was having my screen lock be the opposite side so this brings me here but then you can set like the screen lock to be one of the other sides with screen locks so I'm just back to the security hygiene I don't walk up like part of my procedure of getting up for my desk is control alt L to lock the screen that's have it so I don't know I was trying to see if I would be slicker that way but you can customize different configs and once again this is Linux and it's very flexible which also means you can even create scripts that run based on where you put the mouse in the corner and how you do things but the easy one to me really is this right here is just being jump up the screen and go to there so let's go down touch screen options where you slide and things like that don't have a touch screen so not really relevant automatically lock my screen after five minutes and the off chance that I somehow walk away or get distracted it'll just lock automatically I rarely see that because I'm used to the like right here keyboard shortcut which is customizable control alt L just makes me happy and I think that's the fault virtual desktop customizations and how you want those to switch you can customize all the different keys you can make hot keys to certain desktops I have control F1 and F2 if I'm on the keyboard to be able to jump between them I don't really use this I've tried it it's a work in progress it's kind of a novel idea you can go through and create activities and load all your windows out exactly how you want based on an activity so I set up one called video editing where it opens up all the programs and lays them out exactly how I want for there and then you can go back to your default screen it's novel it doesn't seem to be all that wonderful this is that task switcher we talked about here so it's on the basic one but let's look at the let's look at something cool looking cover switch apply and you may have heard this from I think Windows had this for a while or does I don't use Windows enough anymore so I don't think about that part of it I just fix Windows I don't really play with little things inside of there but they've got little things that you can do like this now they look cool on here I know Windows had this one for a while I think they came up with the arrow theme or something in Windows it's kind of cool the only thing I got to say about the way these navigate is they don't work as well on a three screen because they want to spread across three screens and this is where I think the eye candy detracts I like the simple things on the side here because I know what I'm switching to is I can just see a screenshot of each one and that to me looks better so that comes back to simplicity but you can control these on here I don't know someone asked about what alt shift back tab alt shift if you hold I'm holding down alt tab but if I hold shift it rolls through the other way I think that's what they mean by it back tabs someone asked that that was a key and I said no different scripts to do different things you can run scripts on here like I said in customized way things do you can create window rules so you can create individual behaviors for certain things based on description, based on appearance and fixes so you can customize different things nothing I've just say I'm not really playing with it much shortcuts for things once again lots of hotkeys you can set and configure global shortcuts standard shortcuts, web shortcuts not really using they don't do a lot for me start up and shut down if you have background services auto started services that I want by default like shutter wants to be on there I do use this I probably should have mentioned this I don't use it often but this is kind of a neat remote desktop tool and I believe this is open source and available on windows as well I could be wrong about that but you can actually group together and save servers in here and I don't so you can RDP into them VNC or SSH which I remember you can try it for SSH yeah I can SSH in but my servers don't support anything but keys and it wants password so novel for some actually clicked on that I always just use it for RDP you can RDP into Windows servers here and it actually creates a tab view so if you have several RDP sessions open it'll connect to all of them like that I don't have any RDP servers I can handle it get into don't use it that often but I guess it does start on there which I actually don't want it to start on startup and you realize it was because it just probably hidden down somewhere here all right running background services hardware detection things like that these are other extra things I these are actually all the defaults so I don't really think there's much you need to do there boot splash this is kind of neat too you can control how it boots up and what it looks like you can set it to I have it on details I want to see everything on start you can set it to basic text or just the way the Ubuntu text or a pretty screen that tells you nothing and it just boots up it I like to watch everything scroll by boot up there is different file search functions and indexing so if you can't remember where you put files I don't use these very often but it does have this built in so you can search for it and it can be customized the way you index it personalization user manager now kitty wallets kind of a neat thing that I don't use at all I've seen it it's kind of cool so you have different ways you can save things and securely don't can't really talk much about us don't use it we have the user manager here which is kind of novel so it's if you want to add another user to there you can put all that in but all of these users by default are not connected or federated with any type of authentication server that's how that works in here in case you're wondering so it doesn't have someone asked about domain admins and things like that that's doesn't how this works it does not connect to some type of server that federates and authenticates which I'm absolutely fine with so if that's where Linux so to speak can be lacking is good federated control it's not as clean as it is in Windows we're used to it with the domain controllers and things like that ways to do it but that's a different topic you can control how the notifications come up in here they got little customizations how you want to do things I this is all that default as well default applications I'm not gonna say this is a default because I changed the web browser be Google Chrome but once again easy to change and man Microsoft when you change something in there they bug you are you sure you want to change watch oh look Firefox can be default Google can be default no one bug me that they have a better browser they want to drive me nuts about telling me in there yeah you can also this is another nice thing if you are using two browsers you can say in an application based on the contents of the URL choose which one or run a different command where you can take the command differently but you can actually have a choose when you send each one I'm fine with defaults into Chrome when I open up Firefox it's generally I'm pasting into URL I want I'm gonna discard the changes I just use console which is the default console one which works perfectly fine you can change all the file associations I like the way it's all teared out you can search things in here but you can also just do as a pull down this is easy way to change all the file associations and what program opens up with them or what in this case it actually lets you pick more than one and then when I right click on a file I can then by default replace the top one but I can right click and I can easily send it to the other one and I keep that really clean this is actually a nice way and I'll open file managers if I can't find something open with so Ocular or Gimp can open this so with both of them I can choose which one or other and yet another one in there so the way the file association works is really nice in Linux it's very handy to me so switching things not a big deal if you want to have more than one viewer for a thing that you want to you know so you don't have to be dedicated to one and I have to go through the trouble of it you can just right click on the file by double click it opens the default one right click opens all the ones you have in the list here that's a very handy tool default locations for things for personal files you know, auto start path, documents, downloads so you can customize this if you want it to be not the defaults these are all defaults launch your feedback, bouncing cursor and that's when you launch an app you'll see the cursor way around I don't really use any six accessibility options but it does have all those sticky keys keyboard filters, gesturing and screen reader so you can zoom into the screen so if you have trouble seeing things they're small and I gotta admit, I've thought about turning it on now that I'm over 40 this is a 1080 screen I think it's a 12 and a half inch screen so yeah that's a thing these are the different, nope discard these are the different wifi's which is kind of cool this is real easy to access the entire list of them you can also access it, whoops that's me scrolling around the mouse too much you can also access that here with the network settings and be able to configure networks and network settings where you can go here to the connections and I like this for the wifi security and stuff like that I can go through and it will let you view the password that's actually really handy sometimes so I can see what the password was it's one of those things like there's hacks to get it out of windows so even though they don't display it there's tools that would extract it for you so I like the fact that I can go here and here's something that doesn't the demo one I can show you the password and it's a wifi security show password and the password is whatwifi because that's my favorite password for demos if anyone wonders what that are temporary is that when someone asks you what's the password, whatwifi of course the joke's getting old with my employees they don't think it's funny anymore but these are all the little network settings so you can have a per network and then here's your wired network settings now this is actually kind of a neat feature you can hit this little plus here and create multiple profiles for the wired so instead of just having one wired setting you can choose which profile wired setting you want I don't usually use that feature if it is kind of neat that you can and the only time I really use this one having to hop between multiple physical networks I'll create a series of profiles so I gotta hop on this network, hop on that one and then you can just click them and matter of fact because there's nothing plugged in it's not gonna show up but it would actually list them right here and you can just click between them and swap back and forth between different IP settings so okay I'm on this network on this network and flop back and forth very simply without having to type it in but with the network settings you can put in everything this is all set to DCP with an outside DNS server which I changed this from time to time but you can manually add multiple networks matter of fact one nice thing is when you're adding these if you notice how it has a lot of them you can bind multiple IP addresses very easily in one menu to one network interface this is so flexible and it's something that makes me really happy because when you're trying to work on a troubleshoot networking Windows is the worst because it pauses when it DCPs for so long I can create a multitude of networks on here in seconds and hop between them without thinking about it and it's very very fast Windows is like no let me just think for a little while let me put the little spinny thing over your network interface and chew on this idea for a while which I don't understand why Windows 10 is so bad about that because Windows servers aren't Windows servers actually when you set network addresses they seem to sit them fast Windows itself it's just substantially slower Windows 7 was bad Windows 10 is much worse you also have all the security settings in here so if you have IPv6, IPv4 or any type of 802.1X security authentication to tie in there that's definitely can be done and down here at the bottom we got the VPN so whenever I'm out of the office I VPN and we use a open VPN along with security certificates that's mostly loaded inside of here I think there's one thing you have to load if I've got it I believe I have a tutorial on this or maybe I should do a tutorial on exactly how to configure Linux to use the VPN and make sure that gets connected but it works it works great to connect to the office back with open VPN or any VPN service you know if you're using a private like PIA I've added those in here too I'd get it out of here now but you can connect to whichever one you want with the open VPN they have different proxies if you want to use that I don't really do any of that timeout values for connection preferences SSL preferences which is kind of cool because you can then go here and remove any CAs yourself if you don't want them in here so I thought that's kind of cool that they make it very accessible for who the signing authorities are whether or not you want to configure any cache settings, disk cache if there's any cookies for certain things the way network cookies work browser identifications little details like that you can have these credentials back for your credentials use access SMB shares that's all in here Bluetooth not visible from devices fix it, I don't care I don't really have my Bluetooth here I never use anything Bluetooth on here that often but I guess I could I don't really listen to headphones or anything with it so that's the only thing I probably would use you can customize your input devices display and monitor how speed works on different things OpenGL you can customize this is all a default it works perfectly fine you can select the test picture be grayscale RGB so you can do calibration on here this is kind of nice so if you have some tweaking you really want to do to make your screen look exactly how you want but all my displays including this one are IPS displays and out of the box they look great so this is all set at default multimedia options volume, things like that I will note so if any developers listen to me they have chose not to have a stereo option in here so if you want left and right balance they've just completely skipped out on that part I don't know why and I think this laptop might be mono but my desktop is not and it's annoying because there's no right and left balance on there so yeah and this is kind of like you used to in Windows the default hardware so you can choose what the default outputs are you can actually choose them in here as well so when you're adjusting the volume options whoops you can go through and customize that now you may have noticed something let me show you here so here's this and here's this when you launch something from down here it brings you the same menu but it does, it skips out on all the submenus that you hear when you start with the settings which is kind of nice so you're actually not going somewhere different to see this and you may have noticed you're linked so let me move it so it makes it easier to see I slide this it slides right there so pretty cool the way that works because it's gonna it's not an unfamiliar you don't have this weird multi-menu thing especially Windows 10 it's gone that way there's more than one way to do things and I've got things kind of convoluted they just give you a cut down version because you're only accessing the part you want so that big connections menu there versus the connections menu here when I go to configure network connections it doesn't have the big list on the side but the same menu it's just a cleaner version of that menu when you launch only that menu I like that quite a bit that's really nice power saving options by the way Linux versus Windows on a laptop laptops never had Windows on it but I seem to be getting the same expected battery life that Windows users got so I'll take that for what it's worth and battery life is very subjective because processors modern processors throttle up and down based on usage so when I'm just typing away and not really taxing the processor this thing lasts forever this battery on this is amazing so but I'm generally not taxing actually most time I'm spending in a terminal when I'm fixing something on a server that hardly taxes at all there's not much processing power going on Katie connect is neat I haven't used it but it allows you to connect your phone and allows you to interface a lot with your phone right here on your desktop see notifications and things like that printers oddly they work fine I've been amazed with the printer support that Linux has built in so those of you wondering how do I print things I can't guarantee every printer works with here but I will tell you all the ones we've had at the office never have a problem matter of fact I've gone to clients and tested their printers one and I'm trying to figure out if they have a driver problem and plugged my computer into it and prints right away like it says no problem detecting your printers you hit add printer it's actually really smart it goes through and it's going to find I can manually do whatever I want but that this is what amazes me it just scan the network and discovered like this new cannon we just plugged in here it discovered these other printers here it's it's fast it finds printers on the network like you wouldn't believe so you can just go next and yes and install these printers sometimes it doesn't detect the drivers or well so you have to like tell it what type of printer it is but the list is outstanding the support's really good in there and how you want to handle removable devices if you want to pop up or just open an application I leave this at the Fox A always wanted to ask me what to do because I don't always want to do the same thing so that's that's kind of how that goes in there but that's kind of the overview of using KDI NEON my review of it the way it works I'm really happy with it it's absolutely solid and great for handling things handling running linux instead of windows it's really not having any problems with it you know what I mean I can't really say that there's a problem I have or something I can't do besides run Photoshop of course or play video games but everything else because I do everything in a browser I can code if I need to with Genie to get things done I spent a lot of times in WordPress or SSH in two different devices from here it's a solid way to run I don't worry about the updates overall I'm really really happy with it it runs wonderful on this laptop which you can probably pick up for a reasonable price because this laptop is a few years old and you're watching me run this smooth as can be while running OBS on here and it just works we record the podcast on here and everything else using actually that's why it says podcast when I record some of the podcast stuff we use different input devices to OBS and you know all the production things we do from video editing to editing the thumbnails my entire YouTube production I've done entire videos that I filmed when I'm out of state on this laptop running Linux and it works perfectly fine so if you're like I said if you got the gaming excuse I get you if you have to run Photoshop yeah I can't eat photoshop it's definitely more powerful than GIMP but give this a try and there's actually a lot of games in here maybe I'll I don't play a lot of the games at all that are available in Linux but there maybe there's a couple gaming channels if you type in like the Linux gamers there's a couple people out there and I think HexDSLs in our YouTuber they cover all the games in there so maybe we'll if you do switch to Linux and they play Linux native games which does not mean free some of them are paid games that have native Linux support so there is a lot of games out there and maybe if your game does have Linux support your excuse is Kibosh then you can just actually switch to Linux that's your desktop and go from there so hopefully this was enlightening about how I run Linux and how I use it and how it works and what KDE Neon looks like so it's kind of a combo review of KDE Neon and me running Linux full time but take it for what's worth leave your questions and comments below or if there's a specific subtopic you would like me to cover out of this let me know and I'll try to cover it for you all right thanks for watching if you like the content here like and subscribe