 Welcome to another edition of HeyDT. HeyDT is a series where I answer viewer questions and comments. Typically these viewer questions and comments revolve around some of the content I've made recently on my YouTube channel, but some of them are just general, Linuxy type questions. The first question I got was HeyDT, what's the difference between theming your terminal and theming your shell? Can I just theme my shell and forget about theming my terminal since the terminal always takes the shell theme? Well, this is kind of confusing. So there is a difference between the terminal and the shell, and a lot of new delinix users get confused by this. So your terminal is actually the terminal emulator. It's that program that you pull up that you type commands into, right? That's the terminal. The shell is the program running inside the terminal. It's the interface inside the terminal. So we're talking about the bash shell or ZSH or FISH. You know, that's the shell. What you see as the shell prompt, that's the shell. And when we talk about theming the shell, oftentimes that's typically what people are talking about theming that shell prompt. You know, whether that shell prompt has your username at local host or whether it prints the working directory in your shell prompt or whether your shell prompt tells you whether you're in insert mode or normal mode, assuming you're using the VIM bindings in your shell. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about theming the shell, typically. When we talk about theming the terminal, that's completely different. We're talking about what most people think about when they think about theming. We're talking about fonts. We're talking about colors. So we're talking about changing your font face, your font size. We're talking about your 16 color palette that you set in your X resources. If you're using your X VT or X term, or your 16 color palette set in ST or alacrity or termite, you typically do that in their own config files. But that's what we're talking about theming the terminal. We're talking about changing the fonts and changing the colors. When we talk about theming the shell, typically we're talking about theming the shell prompt. Recently, I made a video where I said that Linux Mint may be better for beginners coming from Windows than Ubuntu. And I got some questions and comments regarding that. But let me sum up the majority of some of the questions I got around that. It typically goes something like this. Hey, DT, I thought you said Linux Mint should die. I thought you said that Ubuntu and Mint were basically the same distro with a different desktop environment. And I thought you said Arch Linux was the best beginner distro. All right, so I have made three videos in the past. And one of them was a news commentary kind of video. And part of the title included the words Mint should die. And that was basically me paraphrasing the title of an article because the title of the article was a little lengthy. So I just summed it up in this particular article that the title of it was Mint should die basically. And what the author was suggesting was at the time Clem and some of the Linux Mint developers were a little tired and frustrated about all the work involved maintaining Linux Mint. And they were starting to voice this kind of thing. And this particular news article, this author said, Hey, you know, why don't you guys just quit working on Linux Mint and just work on the sentiment desktop environment, which the Mint guys also develop as if you just focus on one thing instead of trying to do this entire distribution, just focus on the desktop environment, you know, you won't be as overworked. It would be kind of neat to because then mint instead of being a distribution, it's really just the sentiment desktop environment. It becomes kind of distro agnostic, right? You can get that mint experience on any distribution, you can get it on, you know, Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch. And a lot of people trash that particular author and that article, especially, you know, a lot of the mint fanboys. And I know I made the video on that particular article and I said that I understood where the author was coming from. He made some very good points in that article. But I guess, you know, the when you get fanboyism, nobody wants to actually read the article, you know, they they only want to see what they want to see. And a lot of people only want to see what they want to see when they read the title of a video. And if I title it mint should die. Well, that those are my words. And I think that even though in that video, I didn't think mint should die. I don't care whether mint lives or die. I don't run Linux mint. I don't have an opinion on that at all. I don't have a dog in that fight. I don't really care one way or the other. My only point was I understood where the author of that article was coming from. And there were some people, especially in Linux journalism and Linux YouTubers that unfairly trashed the author of that article. And I was trying to, you know, show the other side of that. Now, the next part of that question was I have said in the past that Ubuntu and mint are basically the same distribution with a different desktop environment. Now, those are my opinions. That is my actual thought. Yes, Linux mint is essentially Ubuntu with a different desktop environment. I mean, there's differences, but the differences between Ubuntu and mint are minor compared to the differences between, you know, Slackware and Red Hat. You're right. I mean, in all practical senses, once you get under the hood, mint is a Ubuntu. Now, yes, they have different desktop environments in my video the other day about mint being better for the brand new user coming from Windows is because the desktop environment means everything to the new user. So yeah, for the new user, yes, mint makes a lot more sense than Ubuntu because they're going to be more comfortable probably in cinnamon rather than GNOME 3 as far as their desktop environment. But for more advanced users, you know, again, once you get under the hood, once you get away from the desktop environment, you know, just you drop into a command line or drop into a TTY prompt or something, right? It's the same distro. And then the third part of that question is I made a video where I said Arch Linux might be the best beginner distro and it might be for certain users kind of like in my Linux mint video the other day, I said Linux mint might be the best beginner distro for new to Linux users. I prefaced that they have to be new to Linux users coming from Windows then Linux mint might be the best beginner distro. But then I also added the caveat that, you know, it's for typical computer users now for people that are more tech savvy, more computer literate and maybe more adventurous. They want to explore Linux. They want to learn Linux. They want to deep dive into Linux. Then Linux mint would probably not be my recommendation for those people to start on. You know, I would give them something a little more challenging, something that involves a little more work. And so some of the arch based distributions like Manjaro or Arco, or if they're really interested in learning just go straight to mainline arch as your beginner distribution. There's a lot of people that actually do switch to Linux and actually start with arch Linux. It's not that unusual. The next viewer question is, Hey, DT, do I need to use a terminal at all with Linux mint? I feel like any Linux user that's switching from Windows to Linux, if they choose Linux mint, they don't have to use a terminal at all, right? Well, this is actually true for 90% plus of the Linux distributions that are out there these days. Desktop Linux distributions and with mint, Ubuntu, elementary, you know, SUSE, whatever. If you don't want to use a terminal, yes, you don't have to because a terminal is not required for you to install most Linux distributions out there. And then once you get it installed, if you choose not to use the terminal, well, that's your choice. You choose not to use the terminal. So yes, you don't have to use a terminal with Linux mint or any other Linux distribution for the most part, desktop Linux distributions anyway. But you should use the terminal 100% everybody that uses Linux should have some working knowledge of the terminal because at some point you are going to run into a problem with your desktop. There's going to be an issue with your Linux installation. And there's going to be a problem you need to solve. And most of the time, the only way to solve it is to bring up that terminal and put some commands in the terminal and run those commands. So it's it's extremely difficult to get away from using the terminal all the time, unless you are of the mindset that, hey, I accept the fact that my Linux system may break on me at some point. And because I refuse to use the terminal, I'm not going to fix it. I'm just going to format the drive and reinstall Linux mint or whatever it is I'm running. Yes, you can be like that. I think that is a rather poor world view to have that you're just going to avoid the terminal at all costs. Just learn a few basic commands. Watch some of the terminal stuff I've done on the YouTube channel. This stuff is not that hard. At least get to the point where you're not scared to update your system at the command line or install or remove software at the command line. If you just do some of those basic tasks that you do on a regular basis, start doing those in a terminal at the command line. Then when you really need to dive a little deeper in the command line and do some other stuff, it's not that strange. It's not that alien. It's not that foreign because you've at least used the terminal a little bit. The next question is, hey, DT, why do so many Linux programs end with the letter D? What is the significance or the importance of these programs that end with the letter D? So he's talking about things like system D and network D and login D, Upower D, Cron D, Tumblr D, things like that. There's so many of these programs running on your system. If you pull up a terminal and fire up H top, you will see that there are several programs running on your system right now that end in the letter D. What does that D signify? It signifies that those are a daemon. They are a daemon, a background process that's always running and it's running so that some other stuff can can use that daemon later. For example, you know, I have a daemon on my system running right now for Emacs. It's always running even when I'm not using Emacs. Why? It's because when I start Emacs, Emacs will load faster, right? Because technically it's kind of already running anyway. You know, if I was using the URXVT terminal, I could have a URXVTD daemon running in the background where technically URXVT, it's kind of always running, right? Anytime I pull up a terminal, it should open faster. Everything should run faster. Now the downside of using these daemons for things like Emacs and your terminal, things like that, is when the daemon crashes, typically you lose all the programs that were running using the daemon, all the processes that were using that daemon. So if I was using the Emacs daemon and I had a bunch of Emacs client windows on my screen, if the daemon ever crashed, I lose all the work I'm doing in Emacs right now. All the Emacs windows are going to close if I had, you know, 20 of them open. You know, I'm going to lose all of them. Same thing with URXVT. If I'm using that daemon for the URXVT terminal, when the daemon crashes, I lose all the terminals that were open and I lose all the work that I happen to be doing in those terminals. But that's getting off the topic of your particular question. The answer to your question is what does the D signify? It signifies that that program is a daemon. The next question, hey DT, you are a hypocrite because you advocate free and open source software and you use YouTube. Or here recently I've gotten this one because I did that video the other day promoting online anonymity. Hey DT, you are a hypocrite for saying that everybody needs to be anonymous online, yet you post on YouTube. First of all, I've gotten this question thousands of times since starting the YouTube channel. I keep getting this question. Why are you a free software advocate and you're on YouTube or other social media platforms? I also have a reddit account that I use sometimes. Obviously I'm on Patreon. You know, Patreon is not exactly a free and open source kind of site either. But why particularly am I on YouTube? That's the sticking point, right? Because Google owns YouTube, Google is evil, YouTube is evil, right? Well, I make videos. I want people to watch my videos. I want people to watch my videos that promote free and open source software. I want people that maybe have never been exposed to this message that they need to get off of proprietary software and move to free and open source software. I want to get to as many of those people as possible. How do I get my message out to as many people as possible? I put my videos on YouTube. That's how I do it. If I put my videos on some alternative platform, a free platform and I'm on free platforms, by the way, I'm on library. You can watch all of my videos over at library.tv lbry.tv. But I don't get nearly the amount of views on my videos on library as I do on YouTube. And it's kind of strange for me to be on library, promoting free and open source software. When I imagine that more than half the people probably that use library already know about free and open source software. The reason they're on library and not on YouTube is because they love free and open source software and they're trying to get away from Google and YouTube. So at that point I'm kind of preaching to the choir. If I post on platforms like that and never post to, you know, the proprietary platforms like YouTube or Facebook. Yeah, they don't have a Facebook account. But if I was one of those people that really are out there trying to get people to get away from Facebook, who are the people I need to be getting that message to? The people on Facebook. So it might be useful for me to have a Facebook account at that point. As far as the online anonymity portion of that question, hey, if you promote online anonymity, why are you on YouTube? I promote the right to be anonymous online if you choose to. I don't choose to be anonymous when I do these videos. There's no point in it. And besides, if you really needed to be anonymous because you were fearful of imprisonment or fearful of people persecuting you in some way, then why would you be recording yourself on video at all? I mean, if I was really worried about that, I wouldn't even make videos, much less try to be anonymous in a video. So that is just a silly question. The next comment is interesting because he doesn't address me as DT or Derek. He addresses me as some other name. He says, thanks, Lex. Do you use Emax to plan how to kill Superman? No, I don't. But that's a great question, because what you're really asking me is what's some of the stuff that I do inside of Emax? Obviously, you can use Emax as a text editor, but here recently some of the other stuff I've been doing more and more inside Emax. I really love using the Elfied RSS reader inside Emax. I really love MU4E, the email client in Emax. The other day, I found a really cool Mastodon client for Emax. It's just called Mastodon. Look for the Mastodon plug-in. I think it's in Melpa. So I have been using Emax more and more for stuff that's not related to text editing, because I still think Emax is probably the best operating system on the planet. I haven't used it yet to plan how to kill Superman, but I've never really been a Lex Luther kind of guy. I've always been more of a fan of Dr. Evil. And the final question I got was, hey, D.T., can you do a video or a live stream where you let your viewers send in their dot files and you critique their dot files live on camera? I think it would be a good help because you can highlight the good and the bad practices that people put in their dot files. No, that seems like a terrible idea, to be honest. I think you think these dot files are something they're not. I think you're thinking that these dot files are like people's code, like they're programming and they have this code and I can go and find the bad practices as far as you shouldn't have had this particular syntax here, this spacing here, things like that. Dot files are not like that. Dot files are simply people's preferences for their particular programs that they use on a daily basis. So your Bash RC is just your preferences, what you like to do in Bash, your Vem RC, same thing. It's just your preferences for when you're using Vem, you know, your key bindings and the plugins you use and things like that. I would never critique somebody's dot files because I would be critiquing the preferences, what they like to do in their particular programs. And it's always, it's your workflow, right? And you figure out the stuff you like for your workflow, put it in your dot files. I would never, you know, tell somebody that their dot files are wrong or that you shouldn't be setting that you should be doing it like this, because this is the way I do it in my dot files. I would never do that. Now, I do think it would be interesting if we had some kind of central website or central repository where people could contribute dot files, their particular dot files. So other people could check it out and maybe, you know, see what other people are doing in their dot files, take what they want, leave the rest, that sort of thing. I think that would be neat. I would be open to maybe setting something like that up, you know, maybe a website or maybe just something on GitLab where people can just push their particular dot files, you know, and we can all have one central location. That way everybody can check out, you know, these 100 different bash RCs that people have contributed. That way people can see what people are doing, you know, because everybody's doing something different. And you might see something that that person is doing in their dot files that, hey, I like that. I'm going to take that. Or they might see something in your dot files that they like and they start using some of what you're doing. I think that would be interesting. But again, I would never personally do a video, you know, just pulling up people's dot files and telling people that this is bad and that's good. That that seems kind of strange. So that's all for this edition of HeyDT. If you guys would like to, you know, send in a question or a comment. Typically, I don't, you know, just ask for comments for this particular show. I just occasionally I read my YouTube comments and if it's something interesting, I just jot it down. I know I'll eventually get around to answering it on camera. So that's where I get the questions and comments from typically they're either from the YouTube comments or from people over on Mastodon. Any of you guys, if you're not following me on Mastodon, you really should have got about 3,000 people that follow me over there. And it's really nice because, you know, the YouTube notification system is kind of broken. But if you're following me on Mastodon, you don't have to worry about YouTube notifications because every time I post to YouTube, I also get a toot over on Mastodon. And, you know, if you're following me on Mastodon, you'll get notified of that toot on Mastodon. So if the YouTube notification system is broken, you'll still receive something from Mastodon about me posting a new video. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael Gabe, Pablo, Nate Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Arch 5530, Chris Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tabas, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. I would also like to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen here. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, again, this episode you just watched wouldn't have been possible. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. You'll find DT over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.