 Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast, I'm your host Matt, and I'm Tyler, yes he is, and we're going to be talking about some Linuxy things, YouTube is letting me know that we're live, we've been live for 10 minutes bro, where you been? Anyways, yeah, speaking of that, we do record live every Saturday at three o'clock p.m. Eastern time, we're starting a little bit late, but not too bad, it's been worse. You can catch that at youtube.com, slash Linuxcast, if you want to watch us live, if not, the edited version always goes up on Monday, you can watch the edited version, which will mean better audio and video and all that stuff. So, outside of that, we talk about Linuxy things, and I have some things to say before we jump into our week in open source. The last two episodes have pissed off everybody, Tyler, we have no longer any friends. The entire Arch community hates our fucking guts. I don't know if you had a chance to see the comments on the edited version of the podcast from last week, but good lord, did we piss the Arch people off, like even though we said Arch was good, and man, I had an entire discussion with a guy about the title that I used, because I just asked, is Arch Linux still a good distro? Question mark, which is literally the question we asked ourselves and what we talked about, so absolutely not clickbait, but we had this whole conversation with this guy about clickbait, and then I had to ban him from the comment section, because he's got me, but it was the whole thing, it was really stupid, so we were going to take this opportunity to not apologize to the Arch Linux people, because we didn't do anything wrong, okay? Use which title you want to use, that's what we always say, that's what we said last week, but anyways, this week our conversation is not nearly as controversial as the last two, so we're taking a break, next week we're going to come out with like Linux Mint as a useless distro, or maybe all Gen 2 users are really weird, you know, something, I don't know, just got a top of my head, we're going to find somebody to piss off next week, but this week we calmed it down just to tad, but before we jump into our main topic, we're going to talk about our week in open source with Tyler, I assume you have some nicks things to talk about. What have you been doing this week in open source? Well, I've been working on an install script for my flake, that way you don't actually have to run through all the actual steps, which that's pretty much done, I've just got to go back through and I'm going to do some, like I've got to write some more, a little bit more advanced said commands for changing certain lines of the options, but you'll be able to like run through and this script will ensure not only you run everything on the read me, but you also change all the necessary options, been working on that, an update script, and I also added a thing called NH, which I'll also talk about later in the podcast, but NH is really nice, it's a nicks helper that gives you better output and stuff for commands, so I've replaced some of the aliases with my system with that and it just looks much better and makes the output a little bit, well, a lot more readable, so yeah, I've just been improving my system and also helping a shite ton, been doing a lot of support, like a lot of support this past week, so that's great, I did manage to try your flake or to install your flake one last time, but I didn't succeed, I'm doing something obviously very wrong with it, I'm gonna try again, I'm pretty sure that in your, at least in your initial documentation, are you able to use your flake with a user that already exists? Yeah. Okay, then I don't, then I have no clue what I'm doing wrong, maybe I'll have to actually sit down and ask you a question. So, I would just wait because over the course, most likely by tomorrow, a new stable branch will be released and also the readme will be changed to include either running the script in the repo or using a curl command to just instantly run it from the repo. Please, please, please tell me that you're piping that shit into bash. Yes, I'll definitely do that. Yeah. That's the greatest thing, you gotta pipe that shit into bash, just, you gotta do that, that's awesome. Sorry. I know it'll upset some people, but also others, it'll be like, oh, this is super simple, yay. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think at this point, I mean, everybody's spent so many years telling you not to pipe anything into bash, now you almost have to do it just to be a meme. That's the greatest thing. Okay, so I have done many things. So I have also been spending some time in Nix. And I because I'm on doing this long term review that I've been working on since October. And I want desperately to be done with this long term review, like really, really, really, really, really bad, like, desperately want it to be off my computer and to never see it again. Not the Nix is bad. Okay, just I'm ready to for something new is what is my point. And my my what's holding me back is flakes and home manager. And here's my thing, Tyler, if I were to ask you what a flake was, you'd have an explanation what a flake was, you just made a video about it. I watched that video. If you were to ask another person who uses, damn it, Matt, that's a microphone. Don't hit it. If I were to ask another Nix OS user, what a flake is, he'd have another answer for me and they would not be the same answer. Okay, you could ask 10 Nix OS users, what a flake is and you'd have seven different answers. Now there'd be a lot of overlap there, which is good, I suppose, because that means at least some of them know what they're talking about. But there'd be enough parts where you're different. It's kind of like that first time I installed gentoo and I had you and Josh and Ben and seven other people in my chat room trying to tell me how to install gentoo. Technically, you're all right. Also, you can't combine those things. And it's kind of that way with flakes. And I'm it just it's so fucking confusing for someone who doesn't get it. I'm not there. Cyrus in the in the discord says that once you get it, you get it and then you just kind of can go from there. I haven't had that eureka moment. I've been using the damn thing for six months. Okay, so I'm flakes particularly are holding me back from the long term. So I've decided what I'm going to do is I'm splitting it up. I'm going to make a video about flakes. I'm gonna make a video about home manager. And then I will make my long term review hopefully towards the end of March early April, because I really desperately want this to be done. And I'm just going to just spoilers. The NYX OS community is not going to be very happy with this long term review. And it's not be again, not because NYX OS is bad. It's just you are the perfect next user, Tyler, you got it, right? You understand it. There are a whole bunch of people who have used NYX for a very long time. They understand it. They're the perfect next user. But for me, I don't get it. And if you don't get it, NYX isn't for you. That's that's that's the I mean, I just literally gave away the entire thing. If you don't get with the purpose of NYX, and here's nothing I would say if you're just going to use it as a regular distro, it's probably not the best thing to use. Like talked about somebody in the discord said they were using NYX. And then I asked them, well, why are you using NYX? And he said just because it's a good distro. And I was like, are you are you using the reproducibility or the ability to do generations? And he says, no, I don't want reproducibility. And I'm deleting all my generations. Like then why are you using NYX? That doesn't make any sense to me at all. I mean, you can but it just it's it's like buying a Lamborghini and then never driving fast. You know what I mean? It's kind of it's the way I kind of look at it. Like it's well, I gotta be honest, your perspective was my perspective. The first time I checked out NYX. I was like, it's nice. But all of the nice features about it. I don't need or I'm really interested in like making use up. So I was like, eh, I mean, no, not today. And moved on. Well, that's why that's why I think it's a wrong perspective. Well, I like I said, I think it's it's very much a distro. You know, this is gonna be a comparison that makes a lot of people angry. But NYX is kind of like Emax. If you get Emax and you can tailor your workflow around everything that Emax does, you're gonna fall in love with Emax. It's gonna be the best thing you ever use. If you just use it as a them replacement, you're not gonna see the point because you're not using what makes Emax special, right? And if you're just using NYX to web browser, you're not using the features that it comes with or the reproducibility, the ability to do the generations, the flakes, the home manager, all that stuff that goes along with it. It just feels like you're ignoring the potential of NYX. And that's where I'm at. Like, I think part of it, actually, the biggest part of it is just that I don't get flakes. I've had too many different explanations over what they are. I've had, you know, I'm just frustrated with the whole situation. But anyways, hold on, hold on. What give me two examples of two different explanations that you got. Okay, so I have yours, which is very much a the ability to basically use someone else's configuration for NYX, and install that, right? And then there's another one that I've heard is basically them being able to use it as a alternative to like a repository. So you had if you wanted to install a wait, hold on. My explanation of flakes was not that it is just an easy way. Like, if you watch the video, my whole explanation was what you're about to say with well, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't let me finish. You mentioned the git repository, which is the I told you seven different people that have different they'd have overlaps, right? They all mentioned the git repository. But one person says it's just for applications, you're using it for configuration. And those always those ones user files, ones binaries is the way that I look at it. And I know I'm I know I'm all wrong about it. I that's the whole fucking point is I don't get it. Yeah. Eventually, I'll get it. My biggest problem is I can't have people explain it to me. I've come to the conclusion that I can't have you sit down and say, Hey, Matt, this is a flake. Because I still won't get it. I have there has to be somebody out there who apparently listening to it through my ears isn't working. I have to actually go read this in like a documentation somewhere. I've tried to find some but the the flake documentation is like half a page long. I'm not sure if I was looking at the right the right documentation might have been. Yeah, when you search flakes and find the next OS page on it. Yeah, that's the right page. It'll explain to you the sections of it and how it works. Yeah. Anyways, just needless to say, I don't get it. I'm working on it. But the other thing the last thing I want to say is a little bit of a public service announcement. Do not ever I'm talking to everybody ever fucking mess with fan control on your computer. Just never do it. It's a it's a horrendous idea. So and I blame Nick's for this too because and there's no way it's actually Nick's fault but it happened at the same time I started booting back into Nick's on this PC. Because I always do the way I do a long term review is I install it first on my main PC on a separate hard drive. And then I get it all set up and then I completely ignore that hard drive. Because when I what I want to do is test how it how distro works after you haven't updated it for a long time. So like when arch you know if you go a long time without updating a lot of times it breaks I always that's why I do this test right and then I use Nick's on my other computers and more daily driver situation. So I was at the point where I was going to go test to see how Nick's would do after a long period of not actually using it and it worked flawless they worked fine. Not a single issue is awesome but for whatever reason when I booted into Nick's my fans started running full blast and I was like what's going on here because my my fans are always controlled by my BIOS. It has the speed control in the BIOS. It shouldn't have anything to do with Linux at all and I was like what the hell's going on. So I booted out of Nick's and back into open suzer which is my main thing and still my fucking fans were just sound like an aircraft carrier was really stupid. Not I went into the BIOS changed to the silent version of the the speed curve or the the fan curve and that didn't that changed it a little bit made them actually finally decided to spin down but it wasn't quite where I wanted to be because you know normally I want to be fairly silent when I record a video so I googled it like I never done this before and I was like is there way in Linux to control fan control and I was like you found out that it's there's a a binary that comes along with LM sensors that call fan control and you can actually change the fan control with a configuration file. Don't ever fucking do it. You're never going to get right. Leave it automatic. It doesn't matter. You you can spend hours upon hours just fine tuning up a percentage down a percentage up a degree down a degree. You're never going to get it perfectly right. I at this point right now I have it so the temperatures are at least right. Fans are still much louder than they used to be and it's driving me bonkers but I I'm gonna have to go back to the the automatic there's like an automatic profile or whatever with fan control and maybe that'll fix it but yeah so that's what I should use Windows. I should just use Windows as my way down to. Now we'll get you all sorted out dude. It's fine. Okay anyways that is what we've been doing this week in open source. Now we're going to move on to the main topic. Now Tyler you chose this main topic so I'm gonna let you do the lead in for it and while you're doing that I'm gonna turn my heater off because it's now way too hot in here so take take us away. So for this one why do we hot distros? Kind of a general question but one that's really aimed just to start a conversation over you know what's the main reasons we do it and I don't think we should have a discussion over whether or not it's beneficial or you should do it because you can you can debate that till you're blue in the face but like what's the main motivation for continually trying out something new like what's yours? ADD. That's probably the most honest response anyone's ever given. Really it is and it's just absolutely is so when I was a distro hopper I consider myself not a distro hopper anymore. I'm a reformed distro hopper I have my my 200-day chip that I no longer distro hopping but the thing is is that when I was a distro hopper the reason I switched most often was because of boredom and I wanted something new. I enjoy on a mental level the process of wiping my hard drive clean installing linux setting everything up rewriting my window managers installing all the window managers I enjoy that process to the point where I could be paid to do it and be perfectly happy with my life like if somebody if somebody would say hey Matt start a business installing linux for people I would do that because I would be very happy to do it it'd be fun I wouldn't want to support them once they started using linux that'd be horrifying I don't want to actually talk to people no I just want to install the operating system over and over and over again for whatever reason it's a stupid thing I understand but that's just the way that it feels like I enjoy that process and for the longest time many times that's the reason why I would hop is because I would want to go through that process again and then I'd use it for a little while and then I'd get bored with what I was having and then I'd move on other times it was laziness because if something would go wrong it's much easier to distro hop than it is to solve a problem especially stupid problems so audio sucks on linux whenever audio would be terrible there was a period of time Tyler you remember when pipe wire hated everyone's guts like literally everyone's guts it doesn't matter every single time they did a pipe wire update something was wrong you know either they were treating your outputs as inputs you know they were having things wrong it didn't matter there was hundreds of different problems and every time they did an update they broke the entire audio stack my dumbass instead of you know either rolling back to the previous version of pipe wire or not updating it at all or using a distribution that didn't use pipe wire I'd always hop like oh this is giving me good opportunity to go use a different distro and see if audio actually works over there which of course it didn't especially if it used the same version of pipe wire dumbass that's the reason why I would always those are the two reasons why ADD and boredom and laziness those are the two reasons why I have but if we're talking about other people I think that there are many different reasons some of them I think that especially when you're new this is this is a big thing I know this happened to me but when you're new you don't understand that how easy it is to use a different desktop environment on a distro so if you install like Ubuntu budget which is my first main distro when I first came back to use linux for full full full time I didn't understand that I could go install GNOME or I could go install KDE on that version of Ubuntu I didn't really figure that out until much later so I figured if I wanted to try KDE or I wanted to try GNOME or I wanted to try XFC I'd have to hop distros I think that a lot of people don't understand that distinction where you can install desktop environments very very easily but they think that you can't so you have to install a different distro with that particular you know version of the desktop on it that you want to use well your point like you're saying laziness but it's really just avoiding fixing a problem I I mean I've been that person like I've I've hopped solely because something broke I don't know how it broke I don't know why it's broke I don't want to find out so I mean X distros been looking kind of interesting let's go give it a shot so yeah I mean I don't I don't know like I wouldn't describe that as laziness like I may just I may just be you know trying out like really you just want an excuse to go try out something new and you're using this as an excuse but either way like however you want to describe it like I think that's a pretty common thing even if you've been using Linux for really long time you know how to fix problems just when something comes up you're like good time to switch I've been or at least give it a shot like it seemed nice to me I I really I really have only ever switched just to see what something is like on my system because I think that's more I've never been the person that's very interested in running something in a VM I'm not very interested in figuring out you know how does something look or how does it run inside of a virtual machine like I want to know does it does it actually run well on my hardware is there any problems that's going to have with my monitor setup like all of those kind of things are the questions I have for different distros and that's normally while I'll check them out see them out see our arguments for this are well founded and we've had we have this experience but it doesn't explain the biggest flaw in all all what we've talked about so far is that we've both went back to distros that we know give us problems so yours you love you love gentu you know you've used gentu many different times over and over and over again same thing with arts really like josh is the same way I think in many ways he keeps going back to different distros that he's he knows don't necessarily work for him just because he is a stubborn fool all right so next doesn't like you josh just learn learn learn it you know it's just the thing right but I and I for the longest time that wasn't really me even though I did return to distros it's just mine was more of a rotation between distros that I enjoyed so the thing is I've never been a the oddest thing amongst my my distro hopping journey is that Ubuntu was never really a thing for me like I would use Ubuntu once in a while but it was never like I was never really happy there and because of that I would I would avoid it for the most part it was always fedora or you know everyone's you know I tried the next minute for a little while I suppose that's based on Ubuntu I used Debian for a while then and then it was back to fedora and then you know I used arch for a long time then and then it was uh the stupid this is the stupidest thing Tyler is that during my distro hopping journey instead of just realizing that they were all based on arch I would rotate between different arch based distros like it's literally the same fucking distro but I'd go to from arco to endeavor to garuda to you name it I used all of them you know manjaro for a long time you know I would just rotate between them like it was literally just reinstalling arch over and over and over again and for no particular good reason because they all do the exact same thing in the exact same way I mean for the most part well they might have their own ways of approaching something but they all do the exact same thing and they in that they make arch easy to use with a certain rights by default it's like okay that's not a degradation of what they do at at all it's just if you're going to bounce between them all in a rotation and like do it for a long time like at the end of the day like you're not really exploring all that linux has to offer you're really just changing your themes yeah that's exactly true and you get you got you got way worse when I discovered arco and archcraft because both of them allowed you both of them have you know arco has a ton of different window managers most of them no one's ever heard of like they have one called dusk nobody's ever heard of the it's basically a dwm fork or basically it's just a dwm rice is what it is so that's all it is right it's dwm with some patches that's exactly as but it's a version that you can install it they actually have an iso of that thing and it's a thing like iswm fvwm and all these things right and I wanted to try them all and when I first started using arco Eric hadn't introduced the arco linux tweak tool yet so it wasn't as easy to install the other window managers as it was is now because now you can do it on an installed system you just open up the tweak tool and install it and you're off ready to go you'd have if you wanted to do it before you'd have to do it from the installer so I kept and kept reinstalling arco linux over and over again just so I could choose a different window manager that they offer it's the stupidest thing it's like it's the biggest waste of time but also I kind of this is stupid I miss it a little bit because it was a everybody knows this if you you installed linux almost certainly you're going to encounter some kind of problem like something along the way when you're in when you install something you know your audio is not going to work your bluetooth is going to be wonky whatever there's you're going to have to go search for an alternative to a different program because maybe it's not available in the repository something is going to be different right and that process of setting it up was always something that drew me in and I go back to this often is just like sometimes I miss setting that up to the point and troubleshooting those problems and and stuff but also there's a something to be said about just sticking on the same distro for a long time you know it's not something that I really saw until I found open susan and I think that at the end of the day everybody kind of goes I mean I say everybody that's a broad generalization but the vast majority of people go through this process of hopping you know hop hop hop hop and then eventually they find the one you know the the the pretty girl that you know you're going to spend the rest of your life with and it takes sometimes sometimes you got to be a man hoe and and hop hop hop hop between them and and and and eventually you'll find your one that was me with open susan it took a long time for me to find open susan you know and I didn't even amongst all my distro hopping I didn't ever really try open susan until you know fairly recently so I think eventually everyone finds their one and someone said so there is no plug and play distro and I don't think that was the point that you were making at all was that there's not distros out there that just will work for you it's your most you said it was a generalization generalization and so it's not always true but for most people most likely you're going to end up popping around and then finding one that you really like the most and then sticking with that one and I don't I don't think that's wrong at all I think that's literally what most of us have done we've tried out a few different things I think it's the same thing too like with grocery shopping you do the same thing you don't walk into the store and immediately buy the most expensive item like in a category you go in there you try one thing that's like the cheapest or whatever like you know you try that new thing you're like wasn't too good and if you get anything else you're going to get different options and then you're going to find one that you like the most to stick with that now if you're like me and cheap that means the cheapest item whatever yeah yeah well see every time I make that generalization that everyone distro hops there's always two or three people that come around like you know I started on a boot to and I'm still on a boot to 20 years later like first off broaden your horizons bro like seriously it's not a problem that you're doing that but also that's also not typical yeah like most people try out other stuff yeah and that's exactly most people don't aren't lucky enough for everything to work for them on the first try and most people when they switch to Linux aren't skilled enough to fix the problems so usually disrobing for them at least is absolutely easier than trying to find it especially Linux is really old now right it's well over 30 years old and if you're like most people probably start on a boot to and if they end up having a problem then they google how to solve that problem and the biggest benefit Ubuntu has is that there's a ton of people out there who have used it over the years and there's a ton of documentation out there that also the biggest downfall of Ubuntu is that there's a ton of people that have used it and there's a ton of documentation out there because if you go search for a problem on Ubuntu you can find a stack overflow or a stack exchange whatever thing from like 2009 and maybe that solution will still work maybe it won't but just because it exists doesn't mean it necessarily will so i think that for a lot of people hopping is just you know much easier a lot of the times also i mean we want to talk about reasons why people hop other than why we hopped some of it is just that the package availability i was gonna say package managers matter but really it's package availability because not every distro has every package that you want at least when i first started Linux that was absolutely as much different now because five packs and snaps exist but i think that if you go to a distribution and it doesn't have what you're looking for in terms of package availability easy package availability i think that you know it's much easier than to think well you know maybe that distro over there has more applications that i can use out of the box without having to jump through hoops and i think that's a that's another big one is package availability software stuff i mean that i would say that's definitely true there's a lot of people that have that have gotten into nix and been like okay i'm not interested in the nix programming language but i am interested in the fact that it's not just like a whole separate repo or something that has a ton of packages in it it's the main repo like the main repo's got like 80 thousand plus packages to a lot of people like package availability is definitely a factor in what they choose or what makes them interested in something which i'm glad you said that's not as true now with flat pack and stuff because i mean flat pack app images snaps have definitely changed people's perspective on whether or not that really matters i mean for most things flat packs are where the actual official vendor like vendors package is going so you probably just want to use that anyway so it doesn't matter but again that's not always true so i i think it's absolutely right that flat packs have changed everything but people don't even really think of it that deeply right it's just very much people want it's one of the reasons why you and i had such a problem with with elementary os right they started to use flat pack and flat hub but then they only did a portion of it right they had to prove every application so when you went into elementary os six or whatever was you didn't even have access access to things like librae office or firefox you had to enable that beyond that right and i think that flat packs have indeed changed not just not just flat packs but snaps and ryan in the chat mentioned app images go away go away with your app images um nobody nobody outside of nerds actually use app images although here's the stupidest thing actually i brought them all but yeah the funny thing is is i hate app images but i have to use one because my kid in live is broken and i don't know how to fix it so i've had to use the app image of kate in live to actually you know use kate in live and god i hate i hate app images with a fucking passion dude like every so i'm much too lazy to figure out how to add it to my rophy right i i know that there is a way to add it to my rophy i know it's very easy i don't care okay so because i'm a stubborn fool every time i want to open up kate in live i have to bring down a scratch pad do dot slash kate in live and the rest of the nonsense and then we'll open up kate in live from the terminal it's just the stupidest it's the stupidest way to have to open up a a package or application i know there are ways around it i know there are easy ways around it these days that's the way you used to have to do it but i'm doing in protest that's the reason why but anyways the the the whole the whole point is that snaps and flat packs have made it so made it easier for developers because they only have to package things once and it's available basically everywhere but also it's made it easier for consistency so it used to be like when you used to use arch and i used to use arch one of the things that was always the most infuriating was that the version of obs that comes in arch is different they don't compile it the same they take a lot a lot of the stuff right you know it doesn't it didn't have web docs for the very longest time it it took a long time to get the youtube integration all this stuff right they are always way behind on that kind of stuff because they want to for whatever reason compile the minimalist version of obs and then when you went to debbie and you'd have a different experience when you went to ubuntu you have a different experience when you went to fedora you'd have a different experience every single one of these would have a different version of obs and every obs is slightly different right with flat packs you just download the flat pack of obs and it's going to be the same in ubuntu it's going to be the same on you know fedora and arch and all that stuff and that's another benefit that this has kind of led to and i think that i think that in a lot of ways and once you get past your initial curiosity of what you want to use and i think that flat packs make it much easier to both hop and to stick around because it's not because you don't have to think about what packages you have available you don't have the motivation you don't have that motivation to hop so you can't say well i can't i don't have the right version of obs because you have that version of obs on your distro no matter what distro you've chosen so flat packs have both made it easier to switch because you can use the same version everywhere no matter what distro you're on but also it's removed one of those things with reasons why you'd switch no obviously the other reasons still matter but i think in in many ways that one software availability thing flat packs have kind of and snaps have have solved that problem for a lot of people so i don't know i i still think when it comes to a distro option it plays a role as to whether or not you're going to need to use one of those or whether or not those are pre-installed flat pack and snap so i mean so it's still like no matter what you're how you're going to get packages will always matter to some extent and to some people when it comes to what they choose on linux so i mean and and also too like if i if i wanted to play around a lot with flat packs i could totally see myself just installing fedora only because i know that's going to be flat pack haven like obviously say the same thing with like if i wanted to mess around with snaps a lot i'd probably use ubuntu just because i know i'm not going to find anything weird with snap somewhere else granted i shouldn't period but i mean i could easily see that being a good reason for hopping and doing something over there yeah i have images are unnecessary evil i'm sorry i just i just read the line i i didn't read any further than that but that was just crazy i was like i mean i wouldn't call them evil well in a way they do provide a third backup options for when nothing else works which is the reason why i'm using the one app image that i'm using what they desperately need to do with app and i think this is just a complete fucking tangent but app images would be fantastic i think if all all they did was when you clicked on them from your file manager they installed automatically they they there was like a script that ran on top of it or whatever that automatically put a desktop file in wherever it needs to go and you're done like it just works right i know that i understand josh there's a tool that does it i don't want a fucking tool okay i gotta it should do it it's just like if you're gonna like here's the thing if your packaging format is essentially the exact same exact same thing as an executable binary on windows just make it run exactly like that have it place a desktop file and let it do all of that by default there also there's no way that you could tell me that this is impossible or hard to do like you already have dependencies for app image so like make one of those dependencies a daemon that does this whenever an app image is executed yeah i mean there are probably many ways of of doing it but they just don't and you know that's the developer's prerogative that's fine but that's also the reason why i just refuse to use them as much as possible because it just like i i kind of it's one of the reasons why i want flat seal on flat pack to be a dependency like everyone everyone should have flat seal installed it's an absolute necessity if you're going to use a bunch of flat packs you should have it installed this should be the same thing they're having a separate tool that you don't have on hand it's like i'm gonna pick on the genom guys it's like having the extensions manager on genom not installed like this is a thing that for a lot of people is a is the first thing that they install and if you don't have it pre-installed that means that they have to know that it exists and they have to go install it and then they can do that their work but it that for whatever reasons we've made some of some people are going to say well you know it's a security issue you know because they don't you know they don't want to have access to your your your path or whatever and you know i can i guess i can understand that but it's just it bugs me because you've used a mac before and i've used a mac before one of the coolest things about mac is the way that install most applications opens up a file shows you a shortcut to your applications file you drag the icon into your applications file and bada bing bada boom it's fucking installed that's the best thing ever that's the way everybody wants to install an application nobody wants to see a fucking wizard i mean seriously if you ever if you're on windows and even to this day you install like a printer driver window it look printer driver wizard it looks like it was developed in 1995 like it just does nobody will also can we talk about the fact that most of these windows open up in like an 800 by 600 pixel like window and then they want to give you their you love yeah in there that's like a 42 page document that you're supposed to read through inside of that tiny window like come on the the worst ones are where you have to manage to get your cursor over the scroll bar because it will not let you continue until you scroll all the way to the bottom like okay so first off i'm smart enough to understand i'm not going to read it just because you force me to scroll to the bottom doesn't mean i've read this thing it just means that i'm smart enough to use a fucking scroll bar you know it's just the stupidest thing ever but but on max the thing is that the the that ability is to take the binary shove it in a path somewhere and then automatically it shows up everywhere applications are that's really cool and app images had that potential because that's what they are they're just an executable binary that you click on and it runs all they needed to do was create the ability to drag that somewhere and have it run that'd be awesome but which ironically this we are describing the way linux and unix works you have folders where binaries go and then they're accessible everywhere like this should this should not be rocket science and also we as a community should not have to it is weird that we have to ask for it and it's about time that we don't have to ask for it anymore and it's just the way it works because that makes sense like have me put app images in a location and then the app images are just accessible yeah if they had done that they would have won the game like literally that's the that's exactly okay so you wouldn't have to deal with snaps and the proprietary nonsense and loopback machines you wouldn't have to deal with any of that on flat pack you wouldn't have to deal with all of you know having six different versions of mesa installed as a flat pack just because all of them use a different version because app images are the contained thing that you want to just click on and use they would have won the game like everyone would have used it would have been the package format to beat and they failed it's it's a complete I understand guys that there are app image loyalists out there very very much fervent believers the app image is the best format and the thing is is you just might be right but because they missed the opportunity to do it in the right way you're forever going to be in third place barely used and and that's just that's just sad because like I said I think that the general concept is fantastic the execution was shit yeah it is very sad because I mean they'd have they'd have an uphill battle let's say they fixed all of what we were talking about and it functioned beautifully beautifully tomorrow do you know how much popularity they're up against like even if they did that it would probably take a lot for people to want to go back because people have gotten used to now using flat seal and the loopback devices on snap like sure your your format fixes a lot of that it's better but I mean we've already gotten used to it yeah well then I mean they would have had a hard harder time than I'm probably making it out to be just simply because we know that fedora and Ubuntu weren't going to adopt them fedora has flat packs and that's their baby and they're going to promote flat packs and then you know canonical has snaps they're going to do snaps but the thing is is that the community oftentimes decides you know what wins in the end and they you oftentimes like if system d had been horrible when it came out like okay so what's horrible when it came out if system d hadn't been well developed and well adopted by other distros it it would never have become a thing like it would have just been a fedora and red hat thing and that would have been where it has but because it was adopted by distros outside of it it became the norm right it's the same reason why flat pack is kind of one because other distros have taken it and actually started to use it and app image could have been that thing and then flat pack would have just been a fedora thing right you could have seen things like mx linux or you know maybe arch or whatever it would have been arched because there's no way arch is leaving the a bar behind you know other distros could have used app image as their thing and especially the ones that are very anti-corporation the ones that don't want to have to rely on flat pack because it's basically developed by red hat they don't want to to rely on snap because it's done by you know canonical right app image could have been that thing if it had been good so like okay so there are people talking in like josh keeps mentioning app image d i will remind josh the app image d did not exist when app images first came out and that's what we're basically talking about is when they first came out i mean we understand that there are tools now but that's like releasing a you know it's like having a car but not having the key of it until 10 years down the road you know it just sits there you can't use it you know yeah so we let you buy a car for 50 off right now but i give you the keys in six years like well i still spent 50 on a car like i own it it looks pretty but you can't use it it's just a big fancy paperweight you know it's like it and it's not i mean it's obviously not that bad you could use app images but it was a tedious process and it's just you know i i think that the reason why i always talk about this is is that there there's a part of me that was a mac user pack in university that had that experience of dragging the binary to the folder and it's like that that experience say all the shit you want about mac there's many different things you can say about mac back then they didn't have the privacy thing you didn't have to worry about app shield or whatever literally you could download whatever the fuck you wanted and put it wherever you wanted like that's the way it worked i remember i got some old so it doesn't i know it doesn't work exactly this way anymore there's a lot of privacy and security shit that goes in the in the middle of it but at that point you could take this thing drag it to that and i had that experience and every time i see a flat pet or an app image i had i remember that experience like this could have been that but it's not therefore it sucks and and then pro bono or whatever his name is he hates me you know so yeah that was that was an interesting we had a little bit of a divergent there Tyler about we a little bit of a tangent if you will but i think that's okay great great yeah without tangents the life would be much harder i truly believe that all right so do we have anything else to add on to this the last thing that i want to say is that uh you should we said the beginning that we weren't going to say this that whether you should or not but i should i still want to say you should distro hop don't be the person who just finds your distro right away that's fucking boring don't be boring go distro hop try other some other distros and then if you also this this section right here of man talking this is definitely not opinionated at all like this is just objective fact you need to go do this now this is just just i understand if you if you if you got it's here's a huge metaphor have you ever do you ever watch hg tv like the house channel Tyler i mean i've got family members that do i don't all right so if you ever see there's a show on there called love it or list it okay and basically the idea is that there's two people that are the hosts of the show and the one will remodel your house the other ones of real estate agent and they're trying to show you a house that you could move into and at the end you have to choose whether not to move out of your house that's been newly renovated or stay there in the newly renovated house and most people will obviously stay in the house that they were already in because now it's basically a brand new fucking house why would you ever move and that's the whole point of this is that you know it's really hard if you found your distro the first sister you use if it's really really good and it works everything bluetooth works audio works it has all the applications you want you know the package manager is something that you enjoy all of this stuff there's a lot of support the community is fantastic that perfect situation if you found yourself in it it's really hard to move away from it but you should you absolutely should if that's your first experience and the reason why it's just because something is perfect doesn't mean that there's something not more perfect out there also it gives you something to compare it to it's it's i've never i haven't going back to the manhole thing ever from earlier like if you found your one person that you you fell in love with like high school or middle school or whatever you know that's great i'm happy for you but you don't know what you're missing out on if you actually didn't float around a little bit you know you should break up with that person float around the field a little bit then go back just you know there's a reason there's a reason why matt singles like everybody knows oh god that's the best that's the best thing ever oh come on no no you losing power the lights just fucking flickered hopefully hopefully i don't lose anything maybe it's time for us to start wrapping up yeah clear blue fucking skies out there and it's gonna do that shit live in a bfe anyways dating advice 101 with the linux god there was that show back in the 90s with um adam corolla and dr drew god nobody's gonna remember that uh i could i could be the dr drew in that situation it's like the i don't remember the name of the show is like love love shack love the love show some i don't know it was like love after night or something yeah it was that i think it's like that yeah good luck i know dr drew i don't know you're talking yeah he's actually still around he's he's he's actually a big point of odyssey which is really fucking weird like a small ass fucking world anyways yeah god damn it this is like the fourth time i've hit my microphone today i'm i apologize for that hopefully nate can edit that shit out love line that's the name yeah okay really fucking old guys all right anyways let's go ahead and move on to the last part of the show no no no we've had our hilarity anyways the last part of the show is the nuggies of the week so every week we we talk about an application or a tip or trick or something like that that we can share with you all usually it's an application and this week is no difference we call them nuggies the week because i've been bullied into it so tyler good lord i just hit the fucking microphone again this is ridiculous anyways tyler you're nuggie of the week mine is nh which is it's short for yet another nyx helper and it's i've just replaced a lot of my like flake update like rebuild commands with it it just is like kind of a wrapper for sudo nyx dash commands so it and the the main reason you would want it is it gives you much cleaner output in the terminal i inside of our show notes i did link to it but just for everyone inside of the live stream for right now i'll link i'll post a link to it but if you're using nyx highly recommend trying it it makes errors much easier to read actual relevant information from that error it's just overall it's a it's a big improvement to actually using nyx i don't know why nyx doesn't just make this the way the output is done it's way better and probably should be the way it's done but it's great so yeah that's that's my thing of the week nice i've been playing around with a lot okay it's nice mainly today i've been watching someone else play around with it for a week being like yeah i should add that that looks really nice cool all right so my nuggies have been very much themed the last three weeks or so i've i've talked about this i've been reading i i read a ton of books every year now i'm not some crazy person like if you get on book talk or booktube you hear that some of these people who read like three or four hundred books every year not that crazy i i read 40 to 50 sometimes 60 books a year it's it's a reasonable amount four five books a month and you know every once in a while i'll read a little more and it's great but like i said i ran out of space and i've been doing the digital thing so i've been it turns out there are other thing good reads that i've known about good reads for a very long time it could have been around for a long time but there are a ton of different applications that you can use to basically track your reading now i there's a couple of them that i'm going to be talking about but i want to try them first there are a couple open source things that you can use on linux to track your reading some self-hosted stuff so i'm going to try those out before i recommend them but there's one on ios that i've been using it's on android 2 it's called bookly and it's pretty good it's not the best one that i've tried but i've been looking for ones that has features so the one that i was i recommended last week called it was called bookshelf and it was very minimal on the statistics bookly has way more statistics has more fuller and more usable graphs and stuff so i i prefer this one over the one that i talked about last week i will also say that it's cheaper if you want to get the pro version than a lot of the other things that you can try i i will also say though that if you use both android and ios the subscription is not transferable which is just the most idiotic thing i've ever seen in my life but whatever so yeah bookly is is really good like i said there there are a couple open source things that i i'm going to try out that i asked for recommendations i masked on yesterday or the day before for open source ways to track your reading basically just you enter the book that you're reading you can track your progress and it gives you statistics not only how long you've read but also things like you know the the genres you prefer the most the authors that you've read the most of things like that and i want i like that kind of statistics because it kind of keeps you motivated and the one of the things i like most about books bookly is it does kind of gamify it a little bit so you can set goals and you get like badges and whatever it's not it's nothing you know useful or anything but it gives you a little it's just a little bit more you know things that you can you know pay attention to and kind of motivate you to do some reading especially when you're in the middle of a reading was one this one fantasy novel right now it had the most boring fucking smut scene i've ever read my life like seriously you it takes some really i mean we're gonna go r rated here for a second but it takes some really bad writing to write boring sex i mean it takes some really really bad writing to to write it and this was this was the most boring sex i've ever read in my entire life because this was really really fucking bad and and for whatever reason this author who's writing an adult fantasy right this is not like ya where they have to like censor stuff a little bit so like you can't say you know man parts the actual words and why right this is an adult fantasy for adults and for whatever reason this author has very much an aversion to actually using the words so they use the same euphemism over and over again to describe certain parts of the body and god it was just so fucking repetitive his avocados like oh god like it's a good thing the rest of the books actually been fairly good because that's that smut scene was just absolutely horrible so okay so result no i do not read erotica this is the most dangerous ever probably i know i can't help it but it's seriously i've been reading books in fantasy novels sometimes have romance in them fucking bite me it say happens okay like there's nothing wrong with it like i just happened to enjoy some books to have fantasy and or romance in them whatever there's also vampires okay and they don't sparkle they're like real like kick your ass each each you kind of vampires well i'm sorry but if they don't sparkle sparkle they're not real vampires and also like who cares like i want them to shine like diamonds outside yeah they got the fucking rihanna song there in the background all right that's it for this episode good lord we that was all over the damn place but it was fun so if you want to watch us live we do so again every saturday on the linux cast youtube channel youtube.com slash linux cast we uh don't simulcast this anywhere else by the way so if you want to catch it it's a youtube exclusive because hashtag we love google mostly it's just laziness anyways that's where you can find us live every saturday three o'clock p.m eastern time you can also find all of our contact information by heading over to the the linux cast website which is at available at the linuxcast.org there you'll find all of our previous episodes all the way back to season one also several blog posts that i post up there i have several blog posts to go there but i haven't put them up yet but there are several that are already there you can why is it that every time every week tyler i get to the section of the fucking podcast and i can't fucking learn words like every week like it's not it's it's i'm perfectly eloquent and well enunciated through the entire podcast for an hour and then i get to the contact information and my brain goes fuck you i'm tired i'm going home okay it's the one part where it matters that's why it's like it's like your brain's doing the thing where like you studied so well for a test you know all the answers then you sit down get the pin in your head and then everything gets wiped in a second i don't know what my name is anymore anyways the linuxcast.org is where you'll find all that stuff you can find tyler who does youtube videos at youtube.com slash zaneo g you can also find all of my stuff and his stuff at the linuxcast.org slash contact there you'll find our discord servers and our links to mastodon and odyssey if you're interested in that i think my link to my peer tube instance that i'm that i'm available on is there as well so you can find all that stuff at the linuxcast.org slash contact you can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash linuxcast tyler also has a patreon stuff his stuff is also linked on that page as well so if you want to support him you can do so from that link which i don't have memorized one of these days he'll actually get a URL that i can remember and i'll pimp him out as well that sounded really really bad just now that i thought about it all right it's all right you can pin me out don't worry there won't be any kind of charges or cases that come off against you don't worry i'm not that i'm not that kind of person anyways all that stuff available there give us contact also if you listen to the audio version of this and you want to leave a a review on apple podcast we'd really appreciate it even if you don't listen on apple podcast head on over to the apple podcast page leave us a review it really helped the channel because that's where the vast majority of people actually listen which is on apple podcast so head on over there leave us a review we'd really appreciate it thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube because we're all absolutely amazing without you the challenge would not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support without you this is seriously i probably wouldn't even get up in the morning just you provide motivation for me to continue that's that got really deep there for a second i don't know why anyways thanks everybody for watching we'll see you next time on the linux cast