 Linux as my daily driver. Well, it has been for about pushing 10 years now. I started in there with the desktop environments, using it instead of Windows roughly 10 years ago. So around 2009, 2010, I didn't set that date in a calendar. And over the years, you go from using Windows to fully using Linux to the point of, I'm a little bit not lost in Windows, but I'm gonna say it feels clunky to me. I still do admin work in Windows for my day-to-day business, but I'm not using Windows for it. I'm fixing people's Windows systems, fixing domain controllers, active directory, et cetera, et cetera. People misquote or misstate my intentions, thinking I just hate Microsoft. And this is just a flaw that people have in tech where they assume if you use one thing, you hate the other thing. I guess this probably goes outside of tech as well, but a lot of people make that assumption. I don't hate other things. I may choose not to use Windows, but it's not because I hate it, but at Windows, after using Linux, once you get comfortable in that environment, does feel clunky. It is nice though, because Windows has brought many of the features that we've enjoyed in Linux for a very long time to the Windows 10 platform somewhat. And I'm not gonna get into every little detail on there. And I'm also not gonna lie to you, I do use GIMP for editing. GIMP is not Photoshop. That was probably one of my big challenges that kept me on Windows longer. I used to do a lot of graphic design work and GIMP is not an absolute equivalent to Photoshop. It's very different. Once you get used to GIMP, it's a good tool to learn. It's a good tool to use. I do enjoy it now, but there was certainly some pain that took time of reading and watching, which the good news is just search for GIMP tutorial on how to do each thing that you can't figure out how to do and you'll find many of them on YouTube. No, I don't have links to them and they were so long ago. I'm not sure which the best video is now for that. I haven't done a lot of research in it. It's kind of a trial and error to get to where I'm at. Back to the topic here. What are my Linux desktop daily use tools that I'm using all the time? What do I load on here? How do I get my job done? How do I get my business up and running? So there's a combination of things here and I'm gonna include some of the business tools I use and the tools I use for video editing because they're kind of one and the same because there is a blend I've had for putting all these YouTube videos out. Yes, I spend at least part of, not every day, but part of the time, like today I'm producing a video so I'm gonna be using those tools. I'm gonna start with distribution though. And this is where people, when they start out in Linux, get super hung up. They wanna know what distro they should use. Now, big fan of Ubuntu was for a long time. It's kind of a boring distro but it's a good place to start because it's stable, it works, the drivers work pretty much out of the box for most situations. Then if you want a little more polish, PopOS came along and so now my recommendation generally for people starting out is go right to PopOS. It's Ubuntu with polish. You still get all the benefits of a nice stable base. Not exciting, I said stable because some people say but I like the bleeding cutting edge million features I get from insert name of distribution here. Yeah, I get it and KDE for example does have lots of bells and whistles so it's a popular choice and I've used KDE for a while. I've used the KDE Neon distribution for a while. I'm to PopOS, it works. It works really, really well. The updates are smooth, the whole system, the pop store, everything has just been great. I've got a couple of reviews you can find of PopOS but I'll bring it up and this is particularly running on my PopTop 480 which is actually a Lenovo ThinkPad L480 with the i5-8520 UHD 620 graphics. Nothing great here, nothing high end. This is my, well this is my only computer I use when I'm not at the office. If I take this home and I need to do technology work at all it's this here. Now the reason I bring up the distribution is one of the things I'm gonna pull up right here. I am currently VPN back to my house but I do have a handful of different VPNs I can hop to provided I need to be on a VPN. No special software to load other than and I've got a video on setting this up. It just loads the VPN tools that are built in. Now I've been a long, long time over 20 years. Debian user, so I'm really familiar with the Debian environment and so Debian based distributions or Ubuntu as well. All use app and using the app system does help to get these loaded is a little piece of it and I've got a video that shows how to set the VPNs up in here but it's really easy to be able to just go in here, set this up and manage the networking on here and jump to different networks. I'm already at the office so I don't need to do VPN there but I do VPN back to my house to synchronize certain things or if I need access to things. Now in the background here this question comes up a lot because I will do network engineering and wifi and this little utility which I don't know that it needs its own review because it's really basic and simple but for wifi scanning, link quality, measuring in real time I've never found a UI like a whole graphical system that didn't work as good as Wavemon does right here. Wavemon being essentially written and working at the command line level here but graphics adequate enough. I don't think it's one of those things that requires more but from here I can go in and see things and be able to go okay I need a list and you scan and be able to see the connections, the connection speed and details about the connection. Pretty straightforward and easy to do because I have those details that you may want what's the RX rate, the bandwidth, the width of the channel, et cetera. It's Wavemon, apt-get install Wavemon and of course like I said distribution doesn't matter a lot if you're using a CentOS based distribution Red Hat distribution. I believe it's just Yum install Wavemon. It's available across a wide variety of platforms. I'm going to do a couple other command line ones. So this is T-Mux. I've got a video on getting started with T-Mux and T-Mux is great for being able to split the screen, SSH into different things. So another command line app I use would be T-Mux and of course Vim for editing. I've always just liked Vim when it comes to editing things but there is times when I'm not using it. So go over here to downloads folder and actually exit and we'll see the downloads of Vim. What is in here? Yeah, Vim got all my stuff, how is it set up? I have a link I have to my GitHub so you can have your Vim, your command line, everything set up the way I do with my T-Mux. All those configs are completely available for free and anytime you do customization to them so I'll go to my dot files. Git, poll, cool. All right, I didn't have a change in here so now I'm to the latest version of T-Mux for a change I had made to it in my config file. Git is another thing I have installed on here and I'm not gonna go all command line here in case you're clicking away from this video but I do use the command line quite a bit and including when I need to pull a project. So our dash F, let's just whoops. Get rid of everything in my Git and show you how I use Git real quick. So let's go over here and we'll look at this repository and I've talked about this as an Lancashire Updater and we'll show you I use Git all the time and it just makes it really simple. You copy this, we're gonna go over here and we're just gonna go Git, whoops, clone, not pull. Clone, drop that in there and now I've got this added in there. So I use Git a lot to grab repositories, projects, different things that I'm working on. It's a really quick way. Once you learn how Git works and if, you know, see these in Orkshaupdater and if I needed to update this project you would just go Git, pull, whoops, haven't shown what I've typed in today. Git, pull, pull the latest version. Make sure you always have it up to date. I may do some tutorials on Git. I'm not an absolute expert at it but it does become very handy when you're doing any type of tooling where you need different updates. Pull, find a GitHub project, grab the files you need, start running through it real quick, being able to work this from the command line. There are UIs for it but I've never found the command line that difficult to use, you know, very quickly. I can start pulling information here of things I want and not a big deal. Sorry, F, I always like to keep things clean. Now, I think that's for the most part, I mean, I could go on and on about command line utilities and I've got a couple of videos on it but for the most part those are the common ones other than looking at things like htop because I want to see what's running and how many processors it's using, et cetera, et cetera which we already know Chrome's going to be sucking up all the memory. So let's switch over to Chrome. Why do I use Chrome? There's someone shaking their fist at me about this. Chrome is integrated into Google very well because, well, Google makes it. I know it supports G Suite very, very well. My business life is G Suite. So people ask, why aren't you, I've hit someone ask why I don't use Proton Mail for business which kind of was a head scratcher. Maybe I'm unaware that they have some business use case that I don't know but yes, my business life is in and out of G Suite. That's how we contact clients is using G Suite. It's how we do our management of all of our documents, even our inbound lead generation is just a series of things on G Suite. And because it's so web-enabled, I'm not going to dive deep into G Suite but being web-enabled means it doesn't matter if it's on Linux or Windows, the platform's the same because it's all done in a browser. Matter of fact, this is one of those things where more and more things have moved to the browser including, well, Zen Orchestra and allows me to full VM management all through a web browser where I can spin up and set up and configure virtual machines, migrate and move them and all through a web interface so I have no applications to load. Matter of fact, the more things that load that it can load through a web browser generally make me happy because I don't have to load software on my computer and I only have one platform update. When I update Zen Orchestra to the latest version, me and every one of my texts that log into it always are saying the same thing with the same version. That goes to our invoicing software. Yes, I still use Invoice Inja. Once again, web-enabled, being able to do that. All of our invoicing and automation of payments all through a web-enabled platform means nothing loaded on there. Now, I will cover, because on the topic of finance, K My Money. This is cross-platform, by the way. I'm running in Linux, but you can run this in Windows. This has been what's managed my company's money for, well, I think I started using it in 2013 and I've really, really enjoyed it. I'm not a QuickBooks fan at all. I know QuickBooks has a web-enabled platform, which is not a fan. And K My Money, I have a video on this. I need to probably do a new one because K My Money has gone through a lot of versions and had some updates and it keeps getting better. But it functionally, if you dig around and find, well, I'm probably one of the few people I think I've seen that's done a video on K My Money. It's a simple process of you get bank files. I import them in and do an alignment of all those bank files from each one of my bank accounts and drop them into to do my P&L, transaction lists, et cetera, et cetera, and understand how the business is. Well, it's, as I may call them, KPI or Key Performance Indicators of your business and also money management. I need to figure out where all the money is because the IRS cares greatly about that and making sure all of this information is properly put together is really, really important. So I've been using K My Money, like I said, for quite a while. Now, how do I sync all this? Because obviously I'm using my laptop but I probably do this on my desktop too, right? You gotta have that backed up. And I'll just throw up Sync Thing. I've done several videos on this. Sync Thing is my favorite way to do this. I know a lot of people are big, big fans of own cloud. And to me, I like keeping my threat surface much, much reduced. We load Sync Thing on a couple systems. We sync it across a VPN, which that's why it says this is disconnected now. If I open the VPN back up, it'll reconnect. I have it connected to that, you know, so it's all going through encrypted tunnels. But by the way, Sync Thing also sends things over an encrypted transport layer. So it's not like a huge worry, but hey, why even have things exposed? But this allows me and my staff, we just load Sync Thing. We have a shared documents repository that we know is very locked down and private and not shared within the third party and also synced off site. This is, I've done several videos, like I said, so I won't dive too in depth on it, but it works really, really well for keeping everything in sync. And it's really lightweight, as you can see here, using all of 39 megs of my 16 gigs of RAM to keep on this particular, same about four gigs files, 2,090 files all in sync. And there's more on different systems in our office and outside for synchronization. Let's only close that. All right, now getting back to GIMP. So GIMP is not Photoshop. It is not a replacement for Photoshop. Where are my text features and all this fun stuff? I don't know, I don't see them because they don't exist in GIMP. They just are missing some features. It is a learning curve. It is not like you just need to learn how to do this compared to Photoshop. And I say that because it was a long time Photoshop user and it took me a long time to get off Windows because of Photoshop. And I used to just run Photoshop in a VM for a number of years until I just forced myself to learn GIMP. Once I've learned it, yes, pretty much most, every video thumbnail for the last maybe two years or longer has been published by GIMP and edited by GIMP. So most of my channel is done with this. It's part of my open source workflow is using GIMP. Now producing the videos, as a matter of fact, this video itself is being produced on OBS. You don't see it running on the laptop because it actually runs on a studio computer and you will cringe a little. Yes, I use Windows on the studio computer because it just works better because of the little switchbox that I have right here. I've talked about that in my studio video for those wondering. So I use OBS to record when I'm recording in my office studio versus when I'm recording here. So I do have OBS installed on my laptop. I don't record it as frequently from my laptop but when I do live streams, it is there. So OBS is great, the open source version, but then I do use Windows on the machine that's actually recording and connected to the camera because it works a lot better with this. Yes, there's the Python library. Yes, I'm aware of it. It needs to get better. So we'll just throw that out there. It's okay. Now, file management. The file management's actually not that big of a deal to me using the built-in file manager for here for POPOS. Works great. I don't have a problem with it. Allows me to have SSH connections into different things. I can just quickly go here and go SFTP, whoops, colon slash slash and jump right into, let's go to dozer. And now I can SFTP into that particular machine. I already have my SSH keys in because, and I haven't done a deep dive of this when you SSH, which I would say it seems obvious because it's built in, but it is one of the utilities to use a lot. So if I were to go to SSH dozer, the way that auto completes is in your SSH directory, let me exit out, cd.ssh. SSH in this, oh, I've got to start from the command line, cd.ssh. You will see right here a file for authorized keys and public key authentication is what I use and then inside of there is it.config. All right and what you're seeing here, I just want to make sure I show exactly how I was doing it so I LSLA config is a symbolic link to Tom LTS, bash grips Tom SSH config. And what this actually is just my simple way of any time I add a server and I'm not going to list them all in there, it's got a lot of servers and information and I'm going to do a separate video on SSH and how the config files work. This allows me to have properly named systems in there and then sync those systems, especially when I'm working on a project, I just drop them in here real quick, but they in turn work hand in hand with the same names that you have when you're in the file manager, which is kind of cool. So you see it here as tank. Now, another side of this is what about window shares? Well, that's pretty easy too. So SMB 192 1683 from Ford, we're doing an SMB share. We go to the studio folder, I'm going to connect anonymously but I could have logged in with the login and here's some of the files that are in the studio share. This is an SSH one and they all get mounted and then you can go through a tab view. So open tab, videos, go here, I can now copy and paste them between here or even open tab again, et cetera, et cetera. And this nice tab view makes it really easy to manage a bunch of things that I have open and manipulate files. And a lot of my main police channels files is dragging them into Kaden Live. Kaden Live, definitely an app I love to use. It is how almost all of the videos on this channel are done, the first handful of videos I used a tool called OpenShot. I just didn't feel robust enough. Kaden Live is amazing. I'm going to do some more videos because they keep coming up with more and more versions. I've definitely donated a couple of times and helping out with what they refer to as their code sprint and trying to get more features in there. And then people will right away compare this to some of the more premium, expensive, open, non open source editing platforms. No, it's not going to be as full features them but for my channel and what I do, I'm not a person who needs lots of advanced effects. I just don't bother putting them on my channel because I don't think there would be any value add to what I do. This works great. I have some videos where I spend a little bit more time in production, and those were also produced with Kaden Live. And once you kind of learn the nuances of what you have to do in Kaden Live, it works pretty well for getting things done. But yeah, it is not going to be, it's not like any of the premium products out there that are for pay. But like I said, look at my channel, you'll see what I've done with it. And pretty much anything in the last two years has 100% in the last two years. Maybe in the last three years has been produced. I've probably in the last three years has been produced with Kaden Live. Definitely a great program. And yes, that's my Tesla on there. I got more Tesla videos I've been wanting to do. I've actually shot a bunch of stuff for it. I just haven't had a time to do all the editing. This is actually in the fall. And yes, it's the winter now. So yes, I'm behind on those. Those are sometimes harder for me to produce. Now behind that is Genie. Love Genie. This is a great tool. Matter of fact, if we go over here, what do we have that we can drag in here? So Genie will let us do code editing. So let me go over here. Yes, I like Vim, but you know, hey, sometimes you want to do something a little bit nicer and not when we erase that. So let's just look in the downloads folder. We'll drag in a JNLP file. You can see it can do the formatting and everything else. It looks pretty nice. And actually, let's go back over here real quick. Let's clone something there. So let's do that. Move over to get. Whoops. Clone that in there real quick. So we have some files. Home. Get. And then from here, we're gonna go and let's just pull these two files in there. Let's drag them in here. Hey, look how we can jump from section to section on this. Genie's just really nice for doing this. Definitely handles well so I can find files. Search and replace. Pull things out of there. It recognizes a large variety of formats. So you can go through here, reload as, recent files, new template, HTML, Python, Java. So many different options in here, which I really like. So it's like I said, a very great tool for doing this. And when you're doing a search and replace, you can do things globally, document only sections only, et cetera, et cetera. It does have hooks to build things and tie into more development that I don't usually do. Mostly I'm just editing config files and this is a quick way to do it. Especially anytime you've probably seen me do videos on how to do some raw editing on like a PF sense, Genie's kind of my go-to easy way to do it. Vim is too, but Genie's a little bit nicer in terms of being able to work it all in the GUI here. Virtual box. Love virtual box. I've got a couple of videos on this. I still use it. Zen Orchestra and Zen server maybe for my back end and stuff we do for a lot of clients, but on the other side of that, stuff I need to do locally, which the only thing I even loaded on here at the moment is Tails when I was doing some playing with the latest version on there. This is great. I usually have a few other things loaded, but then I delete them because this computer is fast, but not super fast. So what I'll do is I'll update them on my main workstation and then re-import them. So this is that in between where I've purged them and then I'll import a Windows VM. Sometimes I need to spin that up on a meta client and it's nice to have that. So I can snapshot it, run a Windows VM, passing through as needed. It does have USB pass through support. Usually not necessary. Usually I just have to run some application, which I can create a snapshot. So I will load something and then destroy the snapshot or special thing I had to do for the client. So no big deal there. Virtual box is free. It works great. I don't even bother loading the extra enhanced extensions that I know are proprietary and apparently somewhat controversial because I know they're trying to get people for license fees for it. Now one of the other things is shutter. I love shutter. Now I know other people will talk about and I've used it. Have you tried Tom, Flameshot? Yes, Flameshot is pretty neat, but I'm not the biggest fan of it. Flameshot is kinda cool. It adds some context and things like that. Maybe it needs its own video at some point, but Flameshot is just not my favorite when it comes to grabbing these things. As a matter of fact, it doesn't even show in the bar here, does it? Nope, it's hidden. There's a way I could probably display it, but I don't care enough. With shutter on the other hand, I do this all the time. This is my favorite thing to do with shutter. I do this. I click edit. I go to this and I tell people this is where you're supposed to click. This is so frequently things I post on. Well, replies to messages and stuff like that. People always ask me questions. You'll see this in the forums. I'll just throw a couple arrows on there or throw a couple texts over there. I also frequently, to remove location type data that I may have, that's why there's a screenshot in here of something else. I'll take a picture and I know I can strip it out. I just frequently will grab a screenshot with shutter of a picture of a thing. Also, it allows me to do that same thing. I can quickly go in and grab it and then mark it up and be like, I'm pointing at this, you know what I mean? And then you kind of get the idea. I can quickly edit something. Or the other thing you do with shutter that is frequently done is this right here. It has a blur tool. So I'm like, well, that's private information we're gonna hide. And now I have part of it hidden and arrow pointed to what I want to point to. And then this gets posted. You'll see me post these on Twitter all the time. Twitter or any other social media platform or just in forums replies when I'm in discussions with people like, hey, click here, click here or I'll show something out of my system but I don't want to share certain personal information out but show people how to do something so that works really well. A couple other things I will mention and we're gonna scroll down here real quick. I sometimes do like ZenMap. I do know how to use ZenMap from the command line. ZenMap makes it easy, it's simple. Yeah, you're not running as root. It does work better if you run as root but you can throw a target in here, do a quick scan and three dot one, two, 200 and we'll just do a quick scan. Scan and you can start building data information very quickly, host services, et cetera, et cetera and hey, cool, we know what's open on this particular network. Ports, hosts, topology and you can start diving into this real quick and then save this file, send it out and start processing and enumerating a network very, very quickly. I just started enumerating all this information in here so it works pretty well for that. I'm gonna close anyways. So ZenMap is in there and so is Wireshark. Wireshark is really a great go-to when you're trying to do network diagnostics. It needs its own video but a lot of people are familiar with it. Look it up, Wireshark just likes to dive into it and great for doing network packet analysis. Couple of runners up on here. I mean, they're important to me because I use them. We do our communication through signal and one of the important things, I have a review of signal I probably should do an update reviews. I've added so many features is when I communicate with people I don't necessarily want it all to be perfect forever permanent records I should say of things so I use signal to create ephemeral messages and what I mean by that is even discussions I have with my wife or kids or whatever I like them to be encrypted because I can not even because there's something super to hide but it's my choice and my ability to use encryption therefore I do and I like those information to expire so I set timers on all of it. I always set messages to expire 24 hours, 48 hours, et cetera you can do that in signal and it works really, really well and it's a great way to have encrypted communications. We've encouraged tons of our clients to use it so we can message them via signal and be able to have it encrypted if we want to send them a piece of information not through text and signal does tie to your cell phone which does bother some people because then you do have to reveal your cell phone number yeah but I'm talking about communications between personal friends and the last one I'm not going to pull it up because there's a ton of private messages in there that does not require you to divulge your cell phone number is going to be key base I have a review of that I need to do an updated one they've done an amazing job of adding features of it key base is great it has become a go to for group conversations that I can also know are encrypted and ephemeral which I want them to disappear as well VG won me an Xavier for example we have a couple groups and I have several hacking discussions going on and we like those messages they don't need to be dug up five years from now or permanently in there we share what information you want if there's some nugget of information or we share a GitHub repository I don't use my chat as some deep reference because that's clunky to go remember I remember like six months ago you mentioned it let me search for every GitHub link you ever do in there no, no, no I pull those out start the repositories follow them where I want to follow them on GitHub I pull the information that's relevant out I know the rest will expire that discussion we had can expire I'm fine with that there's enough permanent record of my online activity kept everywhere else and as I kind of stated several times and once again here I have this is all we're talking about is my business life not my personal life my personal life would be separate and I use other browsers for that that's one of the ways you can keep a clear separation between business and personal that's a different topic and I'm actually personally not online as much or as present this is talking to you on YouTube is so part of my business life I consider it but I just want to do this video talk about the daily usage on there I don't have any problem running my business on this couple other mentions are like yes we still use SolarWinds which is web based so I can manage client systems and that so much my job is spent doing network engineering or working on servers for clients you're just SSH'ing in and stuff like that for remote access we like ScreenConnect been using it connect-wise control for a long, long time it is cross-platform in both ways not only can I support people using other platforms even though I'm using Linux the reverse is true I can connect to Linux boxes if I need to so people running Linux can connect to a ScreenConnect and go out and remote control that way as well that's the platform we're using for that I think that's it for the list I can leave links down below but yeah, this is all great tools and like I said, I don't have any problem with doing daily usage on Linux but doing it for years has not been a problem it's how I run my business it's not really been an issue for those times I do, there are always some special one-offs like I said that do require Windows for example, we have a couple clients that use a very specific Cisco VPN yes, we spin up a virtual box that we have on our server that we then remote into to get to the client's network because they only support getting in via the Cisco app that they have and it just doesn't work right in Linux so therefore that system is designed for that those are the one-off use cases yeah, that's why virtual box is installed in here and that's why we do only time we really have to use Windows in here is when we're doing that type of one-off work and I will at least mention people are gonna ask about, but Tom don't you play any games? Yes, I do, one of my favorite games that I play and we'll at least show this just so you know I do play some I don't have Steam on here actually don't really play any games that aren't in a repository so, but this one, I got a thing for Tetris and this is great it's, I think it's called Bash Tris it's Bash Test Tris it's great, I can sit and play this for a while if I'm stuck somewhere waiting for something and I don't have, I don't feel like reading this is just a great way where you're waiting for a circuit turn up to kill a little bit of time so with that I'll leave you and I'm gonna go play some Tetris because once I start I can't just end, I gotta play it more and more alright, thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you wanna carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time