 Welcome to another edition of HeyDT. HeyDT is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. These questions and comments are typically taken from the comments on the videos that are posted on YouTube or Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first question I want to respond to is, HeyDT, what's your stance on YouTube going to war with ad blockers? Well, my stance on this is that YouTube and any platform as well as any content creators, whether they be video content creators or print journalism, whatever it happens to be, anyone that is thinking that ad block is evil or somehow prevents them from being able to make money, to be able to monetize their work. I think these people really need to rethink their whole worldview as far as working on the internet and being able to make a living through anything internet based. Because honestly, if you're relying solely on ad revenue for anything, then you are setting yourself up for failure. And for one thing, the whole ad network scheme on the internet with Google ads and you know, things like that Facebook ads, you know, it's it's not. I'm not going to say it's immoral, but it kind of treats the content consumer really badly because think about it. I've got to watch a one minute ad, two minute ad or whatever that runs in front of a video that I'm not even sure that the video is appropriate for the information I'm looking for. What if I get 10 seconds into that video and the audio quality is really bad to the point it's you can't even hear the message and you then I wasted two minutes watching an ad to then watch 10 seconds of a video to realize this video is a bad video. I'm not going to get anything out of it for whatever reason. You know, it could just be that the video I thought it was on one topic, but it's really on a different topic. But I had to be held hostage watching an ad in front of that video. You know, it's one thing if you find value out of a video and that's one of the things I love about the donation model, asking people to support you with things like Patreon and you know, any other kind of crowdsourcing kind of platform where you're asking people to support you either through one time donations or monthly donations or whatever it happens to be. If they find value in your content, then most people will gladly throw a couple of bucks to that creator. And the same thing with print journalism or, you know, internet journalism, the same thing with whatever content, whether you're writing books, whether you're doing audio podcasts, right, people will give you money if people enjoy spending that hour or that two hours a week listening to your weekly podcast or whatever, you know, they will gladly donate because, you know, for that couple of hours a week, you know, you really give them some light, right? You are like this shining bright light in a otherwise dim world for that hour or two a week. And they'll gladly give you a few bucks. You shouldn't have to hold people hostage with ads, especially the kind of ads on the internet, whether it be those forced ads in the middle of a video or whether it be pop up advertisements and things like that on websites. What if I'm going to read an article and I get bombarded with all these pop up ads that I got to sift through, click through, maybe I got to take a survey, you know, whatever it happens to be. Maybe I got to even sign up, which I really hate that kind of stuff where you have to sign up for an account to actually read something that's on a website. And then you get there and the information is either not good or it's not the information you were really looking for in the first place. So I really think with that whole that that old school paradigm, that ad model is kind of a dead model. And what you're seeing right now with people throwing a fit about it, we saw Linus Tech Tips throwing a fit about people using ad blocks in their browser, it's evil, it's immoral, you know, they're stealing, right? And the same thing with YouTube, you know, trying to force people to watch ads. What this is, this is the end of the ad model and they know it. And these people that are complaining, this is the the death throws of that old school ad model. It's about to die. And quite frankly, I'm glad. Moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, do you prefer flat packs over other packages? No, I don't prefer flat packs over other packages. I really don't prefer any package format over any other package format. If I want a piece of software, if I need a piece of software, I don't care what package format it happens to be packaged under. Some packages are only packaged in a particular format, whether it be a dead pack, you know, if you're running a Debian based distro, for example, maybe it's a native Debian package. Or maybe it's a third party Debian package that you have to go and install yourself, side load yourself, you know, with something like G Debi or whatever. Or maybe it's available in a third party format like Snap or Flat Pack or App Image. Maybe it's one of the specific programming language package managers, something like a Pip or Cabal or Jim, you know, all of that stuff. Cargo, if it's a program that I need to have, I really don't care how I get it, right? As long as I go to that particular package manager, it installs the program I want and the program runs. What the hell does the package manager matter? It doesn't, not in my opinion. And the next question. Hey, DT, what is your recommendation for remote desktop on Arco Linux? And he's goes on to write that Chrome remote desktop does not work properly. And it shows me a desktop on my computer, but it's not my desktop and none of my programs will open. I can see the XFCE desktop and that's it for a quick fix. I've installed any desk and it works, but it's slow. Okay, so remote desktop. So when people say remote desktop, you know, they typically mean I want to be able to graphically do things on a remote computer, a remote desktop computer where I actually see it's desktop. You know, if it's running GNOME or KDE, I can open all the graphical applications and do all the graphical things on that remote computer. And I want to specify this because, you know, on Linux, typically when we talk about remoting into another computer, it's typically command line. We're talking about SSH, typically, which SSH that works. And matter of fact, that's typically what I do because if you're comfortable with the command line, you don't have to worry about the problems with doing this graphical remote desktop stuff because it is not good. As he writes, he has problems with it. I've had problems with it in the past. And even when these programs do work, he mentions that he's got any desk to work, but it's slow. Yes, all of these remote desktop programs are going to be slow because you're trying to run essentially a full graphical desktop server, you know, trying to stream that from this computer thousands of miles away in many cases, you know, to your local computer, that's slow where something like SSH where you can just get to a command prompt that's on the remote machine and then just enter your command line utils or any of you familiar with the GNU core utils, make whatever changes you need to do on that machine through the command line, if you can. Now sometimes you actually do need to be able to do something in a graphical environment on a remote computer. He says Chrome remote desktop isn't working. I've never really used that. Any desk does work, but it's slow. I would say that's normal. You're not going to make it fast. Another one he didn't mention, but I'll mention I've used Team Viewer in the past. Team Viewer works pretty well. I'm pretty sure that Remina, for those of you familiar with the Remina remote desktop programs typically use for things like SSH, VNC, I believe it also does have RDP protocol, support RDP is the remote desktop protocol. I've never personally used that to do that sort of thing. I've only used Remina for SSH, but there are options out there. If any desk is working for you, I'd say stick with it. If you want to try something else, Team Viewer, I've had pretty good success with on Linux. And the next question, hey DT, how warm does it get in your office with the lights, etc., or is there AC? So he's talking about the office I rent, you know, all my videos. For those of you new, I actually don't record at home. I actually rent an office as a YouTube studio. And you know, this room is about a 12 foot by 15 room. It's a single room office. And I've shown, you know, the various lighting and everything, the whole setup in this room. And with all the lights and the three monitors, the computer, the threadripper CPU and this computer, does it get warm in this office? Yes. I would say it is once I get here and turn on the computer and the monitors and then the lights, once I've been here for about an hour or so, I will say it's probably a good 10 degrees warmer Fahrenheit in this room than it is outside in the hallway and the rest of the office suites in this building, right? So it does get noticeably warmer in this room while I'm recording. There is AC, there's central air in the building, right? But still, it's going to be warmer in this room than everywhere else. I do have a fan. I never plug it up because obviously I don't want fan noise to come across in my videos, but I do have a standing fan that's not terribly loud, but still it puts off enough noise. It would be picked up on the video. So I typically don't run a fan, but it doesn't get warm enough to really bother me as long as I'm not doing like an extremely long recording where I'm recording something for, you know, three, four hours. And then it probably would start to drain me a little bit. Moving on. Hey, DT, how are you so tan being a computer geek? And then he's got a little winky emoji. And then it says, you must have an outside job. So actually I don't have an outside job for about the last three years or so. Really since COVID and the whole shutdown, YouTube has been my full-time job. I actually lost my job during the shutdown of COVID. And then I've just kind of transitioned to being essentially a full-time YouTuber, if you will. Although I wouldn't say YouTube is necessarily a great living. You know, I'm able to pay the bills with this. As far as me having a tan, I'm actually pretty wide. It's probably just, you know, some of the lighting in this room. There's some orange lighting. I've got some orange and blue and some white lights. But, you know, there's a little bit of a daylight effect on one of the lamps that I've got set to a pretty orange color. I'm not as tan as you might think. I'm not so white that I'm like a ghost. I'm not translucent. I do get out on occasion, right? I do spend some time outdoors. I do work outside at my house, especially during the warmer times of the year. I actually do mow my own yard. I actually push mow it. It typically takes me about an hour and a half to mow my yards. I've spent all that time, you know, once a week out in the sun. And, you know, I do occasionally go outdoors for hunting and fishing and things like that, you know, depending on the time of the year. So I do, you know, I'm not one of those computer geeks like you're talking about. I'm not one of those people that never go outside. I actually much prefer being outdoors and away from tech than being in front of tech, right? I could gladly walk away from everything tech related and live like a nomads life or, you know, go off grid and just live in a hut in the middle of the woods somewhere. I could be okay with that, right? I'm a little bit of a luddite to be truthful. Moving on, the next one is a comment. This comment, for context I should mention, about a month ago on the last episode of HeyDT, I had somebody write in and say, HeyDT, my wife really likes your voice. And I responded with, that's not all she likes. Well, then I had somebody also write to me with this comment, HeyDT, my wife also really likes your voice. And you guys make it easy sometimes. But yes, your wife does like my voice when I whisper in her ear, by the way, use arch. The next question, HeyDT, is there a GUI radio player that you'd recommend? And he's asking specifically for a GUI radio player, a graphical program for radio players, because I've done some episodes discussing ways to play internet radio through the command line, as well as through Emacs, which Emacs is a GUI program, but most people don't really consider a GUI program as text based, right? He wants a proper graphical radio player. And I would recommend a couple of different things. So the first one I would recommend is Shortwave. Shortwave is a native GNOME application designed for playing radio. And it's actually a pretty damn cool piece of software, right? It's not bad. Another one that you might check out is GNOME radio, which is another obviously GNOME app. I've never personally used GNOME radio. I've opened it a few times. But I don't know much about it. But one I have tried on occasion is TUNER, which is a application that was created by the elementary project. You've probably seen TUNER on elementary OS, if you've ever used elementary. And it works pretty good. Moving on, the next one is a comment. HeyDT, my dream is to become a BearGit repository. And people wonder why I sometimes tell you guys that I don't read my comments. It's stuff like this. What am I supposed to do with that? And the final question on this edition of HeyDT is, HeyDT, what do you think about the future of privacy around 10 years ahead? So he's talking 10 years in the future. What will privacy look like? And he goes on to write, will we have even less privacy or maybe even more? Well, I've got to be honest. I'm actually pretty hopeful as far as privacy goes, as far as going forward. I think we've reached somewhat of a turning point. Part of this has to do with the free software movement, because free and open source software for a long time was fighting uphill battle, right? It was all proprietary software all the time. And here, especially in the last 10 years or so, a lot more big corporations. I'm talking billion dollar, trillion dollar corporations, even corporations like Microsoft and Google, all these corporations are now on the open source bandwagon. So just the fact that more of these companies are creating free and open source software, free and open source software typically is going to be more privacy respecting than proprietary software. That's just typically the nature of it, because the code is open for everyone to take a look at. Everyone can audit the code. And you're not going to do something too scandalous or nefarious, right? If you're doing free and open source software, because everybody will see it, where proprietary software, you know, it's a lot less, it's a lot less concerned with your privacy, right? So I think the rise of free and open source software here in recent years is actually going to push us forward in that area. Another area that I think we're winning in is I see more and more people starting to get off of social media. I see the big social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, those two especially, right? Those were much more popular platforms just a few years ago. Now I talk to people all the time that don't have Facebook accounts, that don't have Twitter accounts, or they used to, but they no longer have accounts on those platforms where just a few years ago, you guys know this, everybody had to be on Facebook. Everybody had to be on Twitter. You weren't on Twitter. You weren't a real human being. You were just cut off from the rest of humanity. That's not the case now. There's a lot more people in my camp, you know, the camp that shuns all social media because it is just horrible from a privacy respecting sort of angle, right? Social media is absolutely the worst thing as far as the internet, right? It's actually, I think the internet, I think the web is just beautiful technology. There's so many positives that come along with the worldwide web. Social media is a scar on the worldwide web. It's a pox on the web, but the message is getting out there, that free software message of, you know, these evil corporations like Metta, Facebook and your Twitter, you know, Google even some of the things that it does with certain social aspects of some of its platforms like YouTube, for example, which we're on right now. People are starting to understand that these platforms are not good. And in many cases, they're not just good for your privacy. They're not good for your health. There's been many studies as far as mental health studies that it is not good this social media addiction that so many people have. And people are starting to get the message just a few years ago when I told people about the evils of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people would look at me like I was crazy. They still do. I mean, there's still people that, you know, when I start talking like that will look at me like I'm crazy. But there's a lot more people now that have actually heard that message from other people like it's starting to spread like more and more people are starting to jump on board. So how will privacy look 10 years into the future? And here I was specifically talking about internet privacy, not necessarily offline privacy. But internet privacy, I think, I think we're going to be in a better place 10 years from now than where we were 10 years earlier. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Armored Dragon, Commander, Angry George Lee, Matthew, Methos, Nate Erion, Paul, Pete Sartron, Fedora, Reality's for Let's Red Profit, Roland Sola, Street Tools, Devler, Wargent 2, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode of Haiti would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.