 One of the really unfortunate things about having a YouTube channel with a rather large following is that I get a ton of messages. I get a ton of emails, a ton of messages on Mastodon and Reddit and other social platforms, and I just can't respond to any of them because there's just so many of them. I don't have time to respond to each individual email and direct message and things like that. I read them all. I definitely read everything you guys send, but I just I don't have time to respond to them. If I had to respond to everything, I would never have time to actually make video content or I'd never have a personal life, you know, it would eat up into some of that time. So I do read all of your messages and I appreciate you guys that do message me, but I typically don't respond to anything. But the other day I got our lengthy email from a viewer and he asked a couple of really important questions and I really wanted to take the time to respond to him. And it was such an important question that he was asking. I really wanted to do a proper video response to it because I don't want to answer this question just to him. I want to share it with many of you guys because I think it's a question a lot of Linux users have. So this gentleman, let's read a little bit of his email. He wrote to me, Hi DT, it's been a while, but I'm still following and watching your videos. If you have time to read and reply to this message, I would be grateful knowing how busy you are. And then he goes on to say, Recently, I went back to the video on moving from noob to power user that you made last summer. So I made a video about a year ago where I took Linux Mint Cinnamon and I went from noob to power user using Linux Mint Cinnamon. I showed you guys how you can start setting key bindings to open and close all of your programs using key bindings, using run launchers like D-Menu. I showed you how you could theme your terminal, theme your text editor, your GUI text editor, even things like Zed or G-Edit and things like that. And it's a really good video, especially if you're brand new to Linux. Go check it out from noob to power user. I'll link to that video in the show description. He goes on to say, After the many years that I've been using Linux, I want to still get away from working as a noob too much GUI and point and click. And I would say that's a good idea. It's really a good idea to get away from using the point and click method of, you know, doing everything with the mouse because honestly, it's hard on your wrist. Before you use that mouse, there's some health benefits actually to getting your hand off the mouse and putting your hands on a keyboard and doing as much as you can on a keyboard. The mouse, it can really start causing some carpal tunnel issues. So that's a good idea. Not just, it's not to look cool. A lot of people think it's an elitist kind of attitude. Hey, don't use the mouse, just use the keyboard for everything. No, there's real reasons why a lot of people try not to use a mouse or they get away from using standard mice and go to things like upright mouse or a track ball mouse, things like that. So he's on the right track here. Yeah, definitely try to get away from point and click reading further. He goes on to say, quote, I've tried to learn more about the command line. And after rewatching your video a few times, I have really jumped into my keyboard shortcuts and made some changes and additions like Super W for LibreOffice Writer, Super I for LibreOffice Impress, plus many of the suggestions from the videos. And that's a great thing what he's doing. And that really starts getting you in the mindset that it really doesn't matter what distribution you're on or what desktop environment you're on. Because if you're doing everything through keybundings, you're kind of bypassing the desktop environment altogether, right? Because it doesn't matter what the desktop environment is. It doesn't matter if you have the GNOME panel or the KDE plasma panel or what menu system you have there because you're bypassing all of that. You're just doing a hotkey to open a program and a hotkey to close the program, right? So you don't need any of that stuff. So that's already just using keybundings. You're kind of making the desktop environment kind of obsolete, right? It doesn't even need to be there. He goes on to write, quote, what really struck me and it had a lot of truth to it was your comment about once you make a lot of these power leading changes, the desktop environment doesn't really matter, which is what I was getting at. He goes on to say, and that is so true. I followed the video on what you did to Mint sentiment and replicated much of that on MX Linux, the XFCE edition that I'm currently using. The question that moves me to ask this is if the desktop environment doesn't really matter, what would be the best desktop environment and distro to be on to have and then put away? So what he's saying is, hey, if the desktop environment didn't really matter, what desktop environment should I use? And if the distro doesn't really matter, then what distro should I use? And obviously, if they don't matter, it doesn't really matter. I think that's the point of if the desktop environment doesn't really matter, then you really don't need a desktop environment. That's really the way to look at it. For example, if I go over to my desktop here, let me switch to my desktop. Of course, this is the X-monad window manager, but you can think of it as a desktop environment, it's just a desktop environment. I built a desktop environment is a window manager plus a bunch of other stuff. That's all a desktop environment is. So in my case, my desktop environment, I chose the X-monad window manager. There's X-monad, the window manager controls windows. It's a tiling window manager. As far as the desktop environment around it, that's all the extra stuff that typically things like GNOME, Plasma, XFCE bundled together. Compositor, I use Compton or Pycom now as the compositor. For a panel, I chose the X-Mobar panel, but I could have chose a dozen different things. If I wanted different panels, I have a system tray over here. This is Trayer that has the icons here. This is the system tray icons. Now, if I didn't want a system tray, I don't have to install one. Or if I wanted a different system tray other than Trayer, there's a few other standalone system tray applications I could have used. I'm setting wallpaper with nitrogen, but I could set wallpaper with FEH, or I could set wallpaper with X wallpaper. I could do all kinds of things. I've got several daemons running in the background. I've got the Emacs server daemon running in the background, so I can pull up Emacs quickly. I've got several of those kinds of programs running in the background. My session is LX Session, that's the pull kit program, the authentication program that's always running. So this is my desktop environment, right? It's essentially my custom desktop environment that I put together. It's not a desktop environment that somebody that maintains a distribution told me, hey, this is your desktop environment. Here's all the programs built into this desktop environment that we've decided are your desktop environment. You don't get to choose your network manager, your clipboard manager, your system tray application, your panel, your menu, your run launcher, right? Because all of that's already decided when you get served up a full desktop environment. So once you start becoming the power user, the power user is really not like all of a sudden you went from being, you know, not knowing much about Linux to all of a sudden you know everything about Linux. That's not when we say power user, it's more about customization. When you become one of these people that want to have ultimate control over your desktop where you want to pick and choose each and every application and customize each and every application to your specific needs. That's what we're talking about with power users. And when you get to that point, desktop environments don't matter. And typically you're not going to get one of the big desktop environments because they're not going to serve your needs because you're going to want to pick and choose different parts of your desktop environment, you know, different clipboard managers, network managers and volume managers, things like that, that they get in your way. If you're using a big desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma or Cinnamon or XFC, you're better actually just building your own desktop environment. And what I would suggest is if you like floating window managers, so if you're used to floating windows like in GNOME and Cinnamon and Plasma, then what I would do is give OpenBox a try, the OpenBox window manager. And it's very customizable. I've done a lot of videos on OpenBox and most of them, you know, in the early days of the channel, about three, four years ago, right? But they're still relevant today. And OpenBox is fantastic for a floating window manager. Of course, the more you're doing with keyboard shortcuts and key bindings, I would strongly suggest maybe taking a look at a tiling window manager at some point. If you want a good tiling window manager that's easier to get into than most, i3 is pretty new user friendly. The awesome window manager is new user friendly. And Qtile, honestly, is pretty new user friendly, too. And if you want some custom tiling window manager distros that already have the tiling window manager customized a little bit for you, so you don't have to start from a complete blank slate, ArcoLinux has tiling window manager additions for practically every tiling window manager known to man. Getting back into the email here, he goes on to write, if I understand correctly, the base for something like Mint is the same for each desktop version. And it's the specific features of Cinnamon, Manté, or XFCE that decorate the distro. So, yes. So your underlying base distribution, the kernel and the init system and the GNU core utils and all of that. Yes, that's the base system. And then what you typically see, the GUI you see on the screen, your login manager and then your desktop environment. Yeah, that's just the very top layer, right? Once you scrape all of that away, yes, your underlying base distribution, you know, it mints the same, no matter if it's Mint, Cinnamon, Mint, XFCE, Mint, Manté, still the same package manager underneath and all of those Mint utilities. And then he goes on to write, my other question deals with my everyday distro. I began my journey back in the early 2000s with Ubuntu and GNOME 2, which was my journey as well. I started around 2008 on desktop Linux. I actually was using Linux on the server back in the 90s. But my first full time living in Linux on the desktop was Ubuntu with the old GNOME 2 desktop environment. He goes on to write and then he went to GNOME 3 and he spent a little time with the Zubuntu with XFCE until I had some concerns about the direction Ubuntu was going and moved for a number of years to Mint Manté since it was taking me back to the days of old Ubuntu. And what he's talking about here is, of course, GNOME 2 eventually reached end-of-life GNOME transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. So GNOME 2 was dead. So using GNOME 2 on Ubuntu was no longer an option because they either had to move to GNOME 3 or what they ended up doing is they created their own desktop environment, a fork of GNOME 3 called Unity, which I liked Unity. It was okay. Not in the early days, it was kind of buggy, but it was better than GNOME 3, especially in the early days because the first few versions of GNOME 3 were very buggy. So I can understand, especially in that time period, people looking for other options. And if you really liked GNOME 2, Manté was a fork of GNOME 2. So it made sense. Yeah, go to a Manté distribution. So he went to Mint Manté, find choice, and then he goes on to say a few years ago he discovered MX and he's been using it. And he said, a few problems with some programs that are written for Debian-based distributions not exactly working correctly with MX. I've had to have the actual Linux developer, if I drive, work with me to modify his scripts to get it to work. Along with that, I hear feedback that MX isn't a mainstream distro. And maybe I should switch back to a distro that is more mainstream like Ubuntu or Mint. Well, my comment on that is, well, I mean, what's a mainstream distribution? Who decides what that is? Obviously, some distributions are bigger than others. You know, obviously Ubuntu is the big elephant in the room, right, Ubuntu's king. And it has a corporation behind it. Of course, that matters. But what does it really matter? You know, I mean, I run ArcoLinux. ArcoLinux is, I don't know how many users ArcoLinux is. It's gaining popularity, but a very small team behind ArcoLinux is not. I wouldn't call it a big distribution. Most people, I'm assuming, wouldn't call it a mainstream distribution. But what does it matter? Right, it's a Linux distribution. And if the distro doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Use what you wanna use. It's not like you're married to your distribution either. It's not like you pick a distribution and that's the only one you ever use. In your email, obviously, you've hopped a few times. Me, I've hopped dozens of times, right? Again, you're not married to these things. Use it, use it. If it's working for you, keep using it. When things aren't working for you, hey, move to something else. It goes on to write, however, what you hear a lot of the time is that Mint with Cinnamon is the best distro for beginners. I am not a beginner, but not an expert, but you're helping teach towards that direction. But more of an experienced user. So I'm feeling that as an experienced user, I shouldn't be using a beginner distro. Am I wrong feeling that? And would I be best to leave MX and go with either Mint or Ubuntu? Thanks as always for your wise guidance. And I didn't include his name here because I didn't contact the guy and let him know I was gonna share his email here publicly, but I do appreciate his message. And what he's asking here is, okay, Mint with Cinnamon, people often say it's one of the better distributions for beginners. I've made that comment as well. I think Mint is great for the new to Linux user coming from Windows especially because Cinnamon kinda has that old school Windows paradigm. The point and click, let's get to the bottom panel and open up the start menu and search for a program and then click on it. Yeah, most people are gonna be comfortable with that workflow. I think most of the flavors of Ubuntu are very similar and they're pretty good for beginners. So yeah, Ubuntu's great, Mint's great. If you wanted to use one of those, yeah, go for it. MX, I actually like MX. I've actually put MX on some family member machines so they've broken their laptops, their Windows installations, they bring me their laptops. Hey, can you fix this? And I'll throw various Linux distributions on them but I've run MX on those friends and family computers. I'll put them on MX and most people have had nothing but good things to say about that. So MX is fine too. Really, the distribution you use, the main thing, especially once you get away from the desktop environment, you start using window managers, standalone window managers. So you're not taking the distribution as it comes to you. You typically, you'll wipe out whatever desktop environment that came installed on it and you'll create your own desktop environment. So none of that stuff really matters. What really matters is the underlying base system that we talked about on something like Mint or Ubuntu or MX. It's what package manager does it use? How are the repositories? Can you find all of your software in those repositories? And the thing with Ubuntu and most Ubuntu-based distributions like Mint is the repositories are really good, right? You're gonna find most of the software you're looking for in those repositories. MX, I believe MX is basing off of Debian. I think Debian's stable and you're gonna find a ton of stuff in the Debian repositories as well. So the repositories are good. The thing with MX, I think it's based on Debian stable so the packages may be a little older. Now, as you become more of an experienced user, as you say, you may not want to be on a really stable distribution like Debian stable or distributions based on Debian stable because those packages can be old, right? You're not gonna have the absolute latest version of anything on Debian. So you may want to go to something a little more bleeding edge, obviously Ubuntu. If you stay on the interim releases and update every six months, you get fresher packages. Mint typically is a little older. Ubuntu LTS is gonna be quite a bit older. It's more along the lines of something like Debian stable. Have you ever tried an arch-based distribution? Because many of them are quite user-friendly and I think you would be impressed with the repositories. If you're kind of new to arch, you've never really given it a shot. I would strongly recommend, especially since you mentioned you're an XFCE user, have you ever tried Manjaro XFCE? Manjaro is really gaining popularity in the last few years, I would say Manjaro is actually a mainstream distribution if you're looking for one because they've really made arch popular. Like they've really brought arch to the masses and the flagship edition of Manjaro is actually their XFCE edition and it's good. Like it's really good and the great thing with Manjaro is the arch repositories are the best in the business. Arch because you have the AUR available, you will find every program you could possibly want to install either in the arch repositories or in the AUR, the arch user repositories. You will actually have better software availability in arch than you ever had in Demian or Ubuntu. Also, you're gonna get the latest packages because Manjaro, which is based on arch, arch is a rolling released distribution. It's constantly rolling, so you're always on the absolute latest version of your software. And finally, I would say what you're talking about where people are telling you that this distro is a mainstream distro but this other distro is not a mainstream distro or the distro that you're on is for noobs and this distribution that I'm on is for lead hackers. Ignore all of that. Anytime somebody tries to tell you what distribution to run, especially if they're trying to tell you what distribution or desktop environment to run and you didn't even ask them about it, ignore those people because those people are typically trolls and they have extreme bias as far as distributions. Many people, unfortunately, many people have this kind of team mentality where I'm on team Mint or team Fedora or team Gen2 or whatever distribution and I want everybody to run that distribution because I'm on it and you gotta be like me. Just ignore people like that, they don't matter. So there's no such thing as a noob distribution as far as there's no distribution that's only for noobs. I could run Mint, I could run Linux Mint happily for the rest of my life and be just fine. Could do anything I wanna do on Linux Mint just as I can do on Arch or Gen2 or Slackware or whatever, you know, elite hacker distribution. And that's the same thing with those distributions, they're not for elite hackers, anybody could install Arch, right? Anybody that can read can go to the Arch Wiki and read the installation page and get through an Arch install. It is not hard. It is not hard at all. Is it harder than installing Mint? It takes a little longer, you know, where Arch you have to enter a few things at the command line, but just a very few things. Like it's really a quick installation for Arch. So it's not like there's a clear dividing line, like this is for noobs, this is for power users. No, no, that's not really the way it works. And I would ignore anybody that tries to tell you that that's the case, anybody that tries to tell you what Linux distribution you have to run or what desktop environment you have to run, just ignore them. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. Anyway, I don't know if I answered your question. The fellow that wrote this, I'm not gonna share his name. You know, we wanna protect the innocent here. I didn't ask him for permission to share this. So that's why I didn't include his name here, but I do appreciate the lengthy email. And I do think there was some good stuff in here. And I think a lot of people actually have these questions as far as a distribution and desktop environment, especially once you become more experienced. Like many of us have been running Linux for years now. Linux especially really exploded in popularity back in 2006 to 2008 because of the rise of Ubuntu. So you've got a lot of people that maybe don't consider themselves power users, but they've been using Linux for 10, 12, 15 years now. And they're really comfortable using Linux. They're experienced, they've been using it forever. And they're wondering, hey, is there anything else out there, am I really, am I still running the distribution that I should be running? Am I still running the desktop environment I should be running? Hey, feel free to look around. It's another thing, check out virtual machines, virtual box. Install all the distributions you wanna test out in virtual box. It doesn't hurt anything. Try them out in a virtual machine, see what you like, see what you don't like. And then don't be afraid to hop. Again, you're not married to these distributions. There was a time period a few years back where I could be on a different distribution on my main machine like every month. And that was okay, it was fun. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Absi Dallas Gay, Blue Mitchell, Alan Akami, Archfix Out 30, Chuck David, the other David Dillon, Gregory Lewis, Paul, Polytech Scott, Steven, Sven, Wesson, Willie, these guys. They're the producers of this episode without these guys. This lengthy rant wouldn't have been possible. This show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to help me out, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Compared to Windows, there is no mainstream Linux distribution.