 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. Typically these questions and comments come from YouTube, library, Mastodon, Reddit, email. And the first question that I want to respond to is, Haiti, why do you call them distributions? They are just config frameworks. They are not like Linux distros. And what he's talking about here is things like Doomy Max, Space Max, Space Vim. I call them distros. You know, Doomy Max is a Emacs distribution. Space Max is a Emacs distribution. Space Vim is a Vim distribution. And he says, that's not correct. They're just configuration frameworks. You shouldn't call them distros because they're not like Linux distros. And this is not correct at all. I think he is putting Linux in a special category of software that's not deserved, at least not in this case, because a distribution of a particular piece of software, I mean, that can be anything. That word distro or distribution is not reserved just for Linux. And Doomy Max and Space Max, I know both of those actually call themselves Emacs distributions. They use that term on their websites and on their GitHub and all that. I think Space Vim also calls itself a distribution of Vim. And I typically like calling things by the name that the people that created that piece of software call it. So if they call themselves specifically a GNU slash Linux distribution, for example, I'm going to call it a GNU slash Linux distribution. And in this case, if Space Max calls itself an Emacs distribution, I'm going to refer to it as an Emacs distribution. I'm not going to say, oh, it's just a configuration framework for Emacs. I mean, what does that even mean? I mean, technically, all of your Linux distributions are just configuration frameworks on top of Linux, right? All your GNU slash Linux distributions for the most part, they're all using the exact same kernel underneath the hood. It's all the same Linux kernel. The same thing can be said with Space Max and Doomy Max, you know, underneath the hood, they're just running standard GNU Emacs, right? It's just the stuff that they put on top of it. You know, it's all that extra configuration and everything around that central core software, in this case, Emacs or with the Linux kernel if we're talking about a Linux distribution. But at the end of the day, any piece of software that's free software and that can be distributed and packaged up in a particular way, yeah, you can have distributions of everything. Again, that term is not reserved strictly for Linux. The next question is in regards to the fish shell, because I've made some comments that, you know, it's pretty obvious to me that fish is the best shell available on Linux. And I have several people asking me this, hey, DT, why is fish the best shell? So fish stands for the friendly interactive shell. And the F in that that stands for friendly is spot on. It's very friendly. It's very easy to use. It's very easy, especially if you're new to the command line. I think fish is a lot more approachable than something like Bash, for instance. Fish is much more customizable than either Bash or ZSH. It has some really cool syntax highlighting has consistent syntax. The auto completion feature in it is just great. And you know, this is stuff that's built into fish. I'm not even talking about how crazy you can get once you start customizing and extending it if you choose to do that. I typically just use fish out of the box. I don't really do anything. I don't install Oh, my fish. And you know, add a bunch of extensions, although there are a ton of them out there. And some of them look like they're really cool things that might be useful for most people to add to their shell. For me personally, one of the coolest features, though, is the auto completions because in fish, the auto completions are based on it reading man pages. So it goes out and it scans the man pages. And that's where it gets a lot of its auto completion stuff from it generates it from the man pages. And what this means is there some programs don't really have anything specified as far as completions for the shell. But if it has a man page, fish is going to scan that man page and come up with some auto completions for that program that otherwise wouldn't have it. The other thing about the auto completions is fish remembers recent completions. So it always is going to suggest, you know, something recent from your completion list that instead of having to cycle through some list in some particular order, it's smart, you know, if you just use something for from an auto completion list, it's going to suggest that last thing first, the syntax highlighting and fish is just spot on. So if you start typing something in the fish shell, at least in my prompt, I start typing a command. As long as I'm typing everything correctly, the font is colored blue. But as soon as I mistype something, or I type a command that's not possible, the color of the font turns red. It's letting me know, hey, this is not a valet command. So I might as well not even hit enter. I need to figure out what it is that I mistyped or I was trying to run a program that I don't have currently installed, you know, install that program first. And it doesn't just give you the red font for errors on commands. It also turns red if you have a problem with the options that you're typing the flags, you know, if something just doesn't make sense, it also gives you an error. If you have mismatched parentheses or something like that, you know, it will error out, it will turn the font red. So you don't even bother wasting your time trying to run that command until you actually fix the problem. Overall, I think fish is just a fun shell. I think it's a lot more fun to play with fish than bash or ZSH. And I think that's a good thing. I think that would promote people to learn more about the command line because they probably enjoy spending more time at the command line using fish rather than something like bash, for instance. Now, it's not all the better roses. There are pros and cons to everything and fish. There are some cons. So one of the first things I noticed when I switched to fish for my shell is you can't do your sudo and then the two exclamation points, right? You can't do the bang bang, which is the two exclamation points in a row, which is an expansion for Hey, the last command you just ran, a lot of people, including myself, use that particular expansion all the time in things like bash, and it doesn't work in fish. Now, the good thing because fish is so customizable and extensible, there is actually a plugin that can give you that functionality if you desire it. So even though that's a negative, I would say it's a minor negative because you can actually get that functionality. If you really want it, the only real negative to fish is compared to something like bash, for instance, fish is a little slower, you know, it does things slightly slower than bash, because fish, of course, has all this extensibility and a lot of what they're adding to the shell, they're adding stuff for convenience rather than for sake of speed. So that could be a negative for some people, depending on the kinds of tasks they're doing in the shell. The next question I want to read is from someone that I don't think he's ever seen any of my videos. And I got this question from this guy. Hey, DT, why the fudge? Did YouTube recommend me this? I have no idea what's going on in this video. And he's referring to my Space Vim video. So I guess it's somebody that doesn't normally watch Vim content or tech related content, maybe not Linux content. And for some reason, you know, YouTube recommends you strange things sometimes. And he got recommended the Space Vim video. He didn't know what it was about, but he clicked on it and started watching it. I don't know why you would click on it. Maybe you thought it was about space, maybe he watches space related content, and maybe he was confused. I mean, that that could happen. And then, of course, he's getting this video about Vim, and he has no idea what's going on. I get that too. I sometimes am confused about what YouTube recommends to me on the YouTube homepage, because sometimes it's topics of stuff I've never watched anything on YouTube about. The other day, I actually did watch this video, though it those video had like, you know, 10 million views or something on it and it looked like it was a popular video. But I don't I don't know why it recommended me this video about this guy had a jar like a terrarium, a jar terrarium that he had been keeping for like 10, 15 years. And weird stuff was growing in the terrarium, little critters and plant life and everything. And I actually watched that video because, you know, it had a catchy title and a nice thumbnail and everything. And I watched it. I have no idea why YouTube was recommending that particular video to me because I don't typically watch that kind of content. I don't actually watch a lot of YouTube. I don't even watch a lot of Linux YouTube content because I just don't have the time. And I quite frankly, I spend so much time doing my own YouTube stuff. I'm not that interested in what everybody else is doing on YouTube. So typically, when I'm not doing this, I'm not watching YouTube. But I do feel this guy's frustration as far as what YouTube recommends to people. Sometimes sometimes it just seems like the algorithm is just way off. And the next question is Hey I want to make videos about Linux. Is it mandatory for me to be bald with a goatee? Well, I don't think so because I make videos about Linux. And most of the time, I don't actually have a goatee. Most of the time I'm clean shaven. And I've never been bald in my life because, you know, DT is not bald. DT has hair. Now, in all seriousness, would it help you if you were bald and had a goatee? If you wanted to be a Linux YouTuber, I think it probably would because stereotyping is a real thing. And, you know, people come to things with their own biases. So if you're going to make Linux content on YouTube and people open up that video and you're a good looking guy with a full head of hair, maybe you have long hair, maybe it's, you know, tied in a ponytail. And, you know, something different. You're clean shaven, right? You don't have that scraggly neck beard thing going on that so many Linux YouTube creators have going on. You know, people aren't going to take you seriously at that point, right? If you look like you're a normal person, you have normal social skills, you might even have a girlfriend or a wife or something. I'm not going to take your Linux content seriously. The next question is one I've gotten thousands and thousands of times. And I don't know why I get this question so often. It's, hey, DT, how do I configure my insert name of program to look just like yours? And I put it on every single video. If you read the show description, I have a link to my GitLab has all of my dot files. Anything on my system that's worth configuring and I want to keep the configuration for myself, you know, when I reinstall, I have my config files in my dot files repository on my GitLab. So if you're wondering how to get your window manager or whatever it was that you saw in a video, a terminal emulator, a text editor, whatever it is, you know, I want to mine configured exactly like yours. Go grab my dot files and it will be exactly like mine because that's exactly how I turned mine into that is like when I reinstalled my Linux distributions, like if I formatted the hard drive right now and reinstalled how I get that back, I just go grab my configs from GitLab. And that's what you guys should do too. Now there is one caveat to that is that config files change over time. So if you watch a video of mine from three years ago and ask me, hey, can I get the config file for QTAL from that video you did three years ago or from my terminal emulator I was using three years ago or VIM three years ago, yeah, those config files have changed, maybe changed dramatically since I made those videos. There's no config file to go and grab at that point that's going to be like what I did in that video. Hopefully it's still kind of the same, but it may not. So there's that to consider, but either way, I'm not going to take time to help you configure whatever it is you're asking me to help you configure. Go look at my config files. Hopefully that's what you're after. If it's not after at least you taking a look at my config files will probably help you get it configured to your liking. The next question I need to address is one I've answered a few times before I think, but it keeps coming up. It's, hey, do you have a discord channel, an IRC channel, a rocket chat channel, a telegram channel? I don't chat online. I don't hang out in chat rooms. I don't. That is not fun to me. That's not productive time. And I refuse to do it. I've been like that my entire life. I will continue to be like that. I do have a discord channel and I do have an IRC channel. I am never in those channels. I will never be in those channels. I created those channels, mainly just what I have the discord channel because I sometimes do need to log into discord for other reasons. If somebody wants to use discord for a voice chat or something, if somebody wanted to interview me and say, hey, can we meet on discord? I have discord installed. That's basically why I have discord or we were gaming or something. And that's what all gamers use. I guess for in-game chatting or whatever. I have discord installed. I don't I don't often use it, though. I can go months at a time without launching discord. I just have it there just in case. IRC, the same thing. I have an IRC channel. I haven't actually been to my IRC channel, probably in months. Literally, probably months since the last time I logged into IRC. Rocket Chat. I don't know what that is. Telegram. I don't really know what that is. I've heard the name. I don't know what those programs are, but it doesn't matter that's me chatting with fake online friends. I'm not interested. That's a waste of time, and it's not productive. And to be honest, it's not productive for you guys either, right? Because at the end of the day, you probably have other things you need to be doing than to have that chat window up on your computer screen. If you're at a computer and you have that chat window up and you have time to talk to people about things that don't even matter, then you should actually be doing the work you should be doing on that computer. If you don't actually have any work to do, then get up from that computer. Quit sitting in front of that computer if you have nothing to do on the computer itself chat, right? Go outside. Do something physical or you want to do something educational. Read a book or if you do want some social interaction, don't interact with fake online friends because those people are just pixels on a screen. You want social interaction, go spend time with friends and family. The next question is, hey, DT, is it possible to make music open source and has anyone done it yet? So the term open source is not applied to music, but there are free licenses associated with music. What you're talking about with music is creative comments. And there's like five or six different types of creative comments licenses that you can apply to music. And what this does, it lets the licensor of that music, the person that actually created the music, it allows that person to retain copyright of the music, but it does allow others to copy it and distribute it and to make whatever use of it they want, sometimes for commercial reasons, sometimes not. But for personal reasons, it's always good. You know, the creative comments, all my videos on YouTube are actually licensed under a creative comments license, which means you can pretty much redistribute my videos, however you want. If you want to use my videos and some of your videos, that's fine. You know, so that's the creative comments license. And that's typically what you're talking about when you're talking about free as in freedom music. Now, where can you go and find some of this creative comments licensed music? There are several websites on the internet that have large repositories of CC music. And one of the most popular ones is Bandcamp. There's a site called Bandcamp.com and they have a ton of music that's licensed under the creative comments license. YouTube's Audio Library is another good place to find free music, free as in freedom. And Jemindo. Jemindo, I've taken a look at its license. It's not necessarily a creative license. It's kind of restrictive. So technically, I wouldn't call it a free license. But if you go to Jemindo.com, you can get music that you can use for free for non-commercial use. But it does apply some restrictions with the Jemindo license that are not there with a standard creative comments license. And the last question is, hey, D.T., love your videos, man. Can you make a video on how to stop distro hopping? I can't stop distro hopping. L-O-L. All right. So I feel this guy's pain here because I've done a lot of distro hopping in the past. I have been a distro hopper at certain points in my Lennox life. And you guys saw some of this in the early days of the YouTube channel. That first year or so that I spent on YouTube, I actually hopped a lot on my main production machine. But really, in the last couple of years, I just quit doing that. I almost never hop. The only time I hop now, at least on my main production machine, is if I feel like I need to because something's broken, something's not working, or I've had the installation going for a number of years, maybe two, three years. And I just feel like, hey, it's time to do a fresh install. Let's just get all some of some of the unnecessary cruft off the system. And the best way to do that sometimes is just to do a fresh install. So I feel like a lot of people do go through a distro hopping phase, and most people will eventually come out of it because it's just a natural progression of things. I think it's one of those things, you know, there's so much pain involved when you have to distro hop. It really is, you know, having to back up all your data and then go through the installation. Some of these GNU slash Linux distributions are very time consuming in the installation process. You can spend several hours installing some of them. So I think it's one of those things. Once the pain has reached a certain threshold, once the pain is large enough, right, you're going to stop distro hopping. You're going to reach that point where it's just no longer fun and you're just going to stick with whatever is working after a few months or maybe a few years using Linux. You start to realize all these Linux distributions are basically the same anyway. What's the point in hopping from distro A over to distro B when the end result for you typically is the exact same thing. Some of the things that really influence me to finally just swear off distro hopping because it was pointless. The more time you spend at the command line, the less likely you are to distro hop because once you get away from all the graphical applications, you know, because under the hood is where all the magic happens on Linux. And when you get under the hood, especially once you get into the shell, you're just your standard bash shell or fish shell or whatever. Once you get to the command line, it's all the same, right? Every Linux distribution is the same at that point. So the more time you spend with that, then you don't really care what distribution you're running a boom to gen two for door. It doesn't matter. They're all the same. Another thing that you can do to help you break the distro hopping habit is start saving your config files, your dot files, kind of like I mentioned my GitLab earlier, start doing that. Start saving all of your config files to a GitHub repository or a GitLab repository. And then it doesn't really matter what distro you hop to because you're always going to bring your config files in, you know, your distribution may change. But essentially the user experience never changes. And once it gets to that point, then why distro hop because there's essentially no change in the user experience. So why bother installing a different distro? And the third thing I want to recommend on how to break the distro hopping habit is start using Emacs because and I'm not even kidding. Once you start using Emacs, you start living in Emacs all the time. You start using Emacs for everything. Emacs really becomes your distribution. It really doesn't matter what good news slash Linux distribution is running underneath Emacs. Emacs really becomes your operating system at that point. And I think those are the three things that really influenced me as far as there's no need to distro hop anymore. Once you spend a whole lot of time at the command line and start to learn using the command line all the time. Once you save all your configs to some GitHub or GitLab repository and once you start using Emacs, the distribution just doesn't matter anymore. Now before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. I need to thank Michael Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Devin Fran, Arch 5530, Academy Chuck Claudio, Donnie Dillon, George Gregory, Kelliff Devils, Louis Paul, Scott and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode of Haiti wouldn't have been possible. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. You'd like to support my work. Look for a distro tube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.