 I'm your host Matt, and I'm your co-host Steve. He really needs to get a name tag. If you had a name tag, you'd remember his name. Hello, my name is Steve. It's probably working. I'll be your handler today. All right. So this is the Linux Cast. We talk about Linux-y things. It has been a couple weeks, Steve. We've had some time off. So last week it was Tyler's birthday and Josh was out. So we took the week off. The week before that I was without power for five days, which was crazy. And I know Steve knows how that feels. But here in the United States, we're not quite used to it. Also, no power whatsoever. We don't get random times on. So it was not great. But it was okay. We survived that. And then we picked up a shit ton of trees. Like a lot of trees. That kind of storm. The storm that picked up trees. It was like 140 mile an hour winds here for a while. Yeah. It was pretty intense. Anyways, that's in the past. That's the reason why we were off for a couple weeks. And we decided to go ahead and go along this week, even though we've been abandoned by the other two members of our crew. Like I said, in the pre-show, Josh is off at Linux Fest, Ohio. Then he had a few things that came up and he had to do. So it's just Steve and I, we're going to have some fun. We have a topic for you. We're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But first, as always, we talk about what we've done since the last episode in open source. So Steve, what's been going on with you, man? I've been ironing out zero Linux because something happened with my brain. It got unlocked. I got new ability unlocked in my brain. That's the way I'm going to put it. But I realized that I wasn't describing zero Linux the right way because it was coming across as a noob friendly distro when it wasn't. That wasn't what I intended for zero Linux. But I wasn't in the description, everywhere in the description, I was saying an easy way to install Arch Linux that you can shape your way the easy way. That easy way kept breaking my brain every time I read that sentence. And now finally I understood why. By saying the easy way, people thought that it was a noob friendly distro. So I had to take that burp away, the easy with that part away. And I added to the description, this distro is not for everyone in quotation. And I explained that on the download page with a small blurb with the help of John. Or Springles on my server. Shout out John. He helped me write the blurb in a very friendly way because the way I had written it was coming across a little bit too condescending or pissed off type of connotation. So we fixed that. And now I have to take action on zero Linux as well to make it not less noob friendly but to be perceived better, understood better. Like for example, I had PAMAC on zero Linux. And to me it was like I was going against my own ideology philosophy that it's giving the user the choice to shape it their way. But if I had PAMAC, the GUI, if you don't know PAMAC is the GUI package manager for Arch created by Manjaro. So by including PAMAC, the user that is coming to zero Linux will see that I already have a GUI package manager included on it. Why be curious and see if there's another one that suits me the best. There's already one included. So I was like, no, I got to remove that. So they get curious and they select one. For example, I recommend to people try something called BAUH. It's a pretty neat package manager that supports app images, web apps, EUR, flatbacks and other formats. And it has a notifier tray icon as well. And it's super customizable. So I worked on that aspect of zero Linux so people understand that there will be no hand holding on zero Linux anymore. Hand holding is not what we are about. So basically what you're saying is that you're turning zero Linux into gentoo? Not really. I knew you were going to ask that question. Well, Josh is in here. I had to. Well, of course. But what I'm saying is we need to, what I want zero Linux to be, I always wanted zero Linux to be is a distro that gets the necessary stuff out of the way, out of the box, but that will cause users to become curious and to start learning more because it's Arch. It's so flexible. They can learn whatever they want, whenever they want, because they would want to do stuff. And to do everything on Arch Linux, you have to read the manual. I'm not going to say the F part because I don't like the F part. It's just reading the manual. This is what Arch is. It's all about self-learning. Well, it's about learning, but also teaching ourselves how to rely on ourselves. We're having to rely on the creators all too much because hand-holding is, and Glorious Agro in Brody's Tech Over Tea today said the exact same thing. He was like, we create our distros. And there's a misconception when we say no hand-holding, we mean no hand-holding when it comes to issues outside what we created. With Zero Linux, it's the tool that rises. That's it, the configuration, the config. Support will be provided for that. But outside those two things, you have to learn on your own. You're not going to expect somebody to answer you at every hour of the day. There are time zones. There are times where we are all busy or stuff like that. So you learn by reading. So this will push you to read and learn and become self-reliant. So that's what I've been working on. Sorry, it was long-winded, but I needed to defragment my brain basically and reintroduce Zero Linux under a brand new light by being more transparent. And I was reworking some aspects of the distribution to make that more apparent. Yeah, that's what I've been doing. And the other thing is I travel to Dubai. I'm in Dubai right now, so yeah. Cool. All right, so I have done a couple things. So first, I used Disturbox last night to install DaVinci Resolve and actually got it to launch on Linux. It was... Disturbox is so cool. Which on what? On Arch? Arch, yeah. I tried to do it on Fedora. I tried to work on the Fedora Disturbox, which is weird because it's one of the supported distros or at least based on one of the supported distros. But I just opened up my Arch Disturbox, went into the AUR and downloaded it. And I'm still having a few issues with it, so I got to deal with some permissions issues because it's Linux, of course, you have to deal with permissions issues. And you've got an AMD GPU and that's an Nvidia-specific program. So how did you get past that? I got it launched, okay. Like I said, I still have... Right now, it doesn't have access to the host file system, so I can't really test it out. But I got it to launch, which has always been my... like the first hurdle. Most of the time, it just won't launch. So now... And you got to still figure out the GPU part. Well, Michael Horne, he's a fellow YouTuber. He has an AMD card and he got it to run. So we'll see how that goes. I need to use the proprietary AMD driver. Not sure if that's what I'll end up having to do or not. I'm still just messing around with it, but anyways, that's what I messed around with last night. The other thing that I did yesterday was I finished up the Linuxcast merch shop. So there is now a merch store that you can go to shop.linuxcast.org and there you'll find a whole bunch of really cool stuff. Are you using stream elements shop or which shop I use? I'm using, it's called fourth wall. It's what it's called. You can set a custom domain to that? Yeah. You can use custom domain. You can have your own little website. And it has a ton of different products. So like, as of right now, I have a whole bunch of t-shirts. I have a notebook. There's some mugs. There's some hats. There's going to be... Do they have cases for modern phones, at least? They have some iPhone cases and it looks like a Samsung case. There's a water bottle here, a framed picture of the logo, some beanies, stuff like that. There's going to be more stuff, but that's just kind of where I've started. So if you want to support the channel... You want to buy your own merch and wear it on the podcast? I got some samples coming, yes. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, if you want to support the channel, shop.linuxcast.org is where you can find all the stuff that I have right now. So that's what I've really been spending the last couple of days doing. And I have some pretty cool t-shirts that I've come up with. I kind of ripped off DT, because DT has a whole bunch of like cool sayings that he has on some of his merch. Now, I didn't steal any of his sayings, but I just thought I'd do kind of the same thing where I've come up with some interesting, you know, blurbs or whatever for t-shirts. I use... On my merch store, on all of my merch, I use ZeroLinux, by the way. Anyways, that's basically what I did. Alright, so... I don't think there's anything else that I really needed to share in terms of what I've been doing. I'm still going strong on OpenSUSA. I just made a half an hour video on OpenSUSA, so I don't really need to talk about it too much. It's just, guys, it is so good. But I've heard... I continue to hear from some people who just haven't had good luck with it, I think that's just kind of the Linux experience, right? Sometimes... Some bistros work fantastically for some people, not for others. Like, for whatever reason, I've never had a really great experience with Ubuntu. Sometimes it just doesn't work on my machine, for whatever reason. Same thing with Void. Like, a lot of people can get Void up and running on their machine. I cannot for life to get Void on my machine and actually have it working for very long, so... I'm not sure what's going on there. It doesn't really matter. So I think that's what some people just have a problem with when it comes to OpenSUSA. It just doesn't work with their hardware or whatever. I'm going to say one thing. OpenSUSA works just fine on my computer. I just can't get Fedora to work correct to stay stable for longer than a day. And I cannot get Ubuntu to stay stable for more than 15 minutes. Yeah. I think that's just the way things happen. Anyway, so let's go ahead and jump into the topic. So we got a big topic we're going to talk about today. And I'm going to frame it a little bit to see if I can't kind of shape the conversation before we jump in. So there's this idea amongst the Linux community. Now, first off, what we're going to be talking about today kind of is going to delve into Linux elitism for a little bit, so just kind of be prepared for that. But the idea, or there's an idea amongst some people in the Linux community that the more new users Linux brings in, the more diluted the Linux experience will be. So that was the word by word. Diluted was the word that I was looking for. Anyway, so the idea is that Linux is better when it's just for nerds and people who are really truly interested in Linux. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today. Do we actually want a whole bunch of... How do I say this nicely? Non-technical minded people coming into Linux community and, for lack of a better word, diluting the experience for the rest of us. What do you think, Steve? I think that we do need such people because it will help us maintainers, especially the distro maintainers specifically, understand better which angles to attack when we're working on our distros. And to make them more friendly, not easy... No, not friendly, sorry. Easier to get the grasp of because, as I said, some Linux distros like Zero Linux and ArchBase distros, not all ArchBase distros mind you, there are some ArchBase distros that target normies or new to Linux people. For distros like Zero Linux, it's an open SUSE. Open SUSE is amazing as a distro, as you said, I've tried it and it works. That's fine, I just don't like using zipper. But we need those people to start seeing Linux from different angles and attacking and fixing things from a different angle. So they work for different types of people. You use the word diluted. I don't think it's going to dilute. If it's going to do anything, we will start seeing a lot more as other people call stupid questions or questions that are too dumb to be asked, but they're not dumb. There's no such thing as a dumb question. It's just when we have the knowledge and we start thinking about, okay, we see that question as being dumb because anyone with a brain would know this. But no, that's a little bit condescending if we talk about it this way. It's disrespectful because there are people legitimately curious and have never used Linux before. So all their questions, most of their questions are going to be a little bit dumb, a little bit simple kind of questions because they're starting from scratch on Linux. They don't have previous knowledge. It's the first time they see Linux. Like for a Windows user, if I throw a Windows user a MacBook, they're going to have the same type of dumb questions. But if you ask them Windows questions, they're going to see our questions as dumb because we never used Windows, for example. I'm just using that as an example. But there's no such thing as something being diluted. We want more people to use Linux at the end of the day. We want to help the Linux world grow, but there's one fact that we cannot escape is the fact that Windows has the biggest market share and with hardware manufacturers working on their hardware for Windows, not for Linux. There are the niche hardware manufacturers like System76, what's the name of the other one? I forgot the name of the other one. They're building hardware for Linux, but those are niche. They're very small compared to the other, like NVIDIA, like MSI, like Logitech, like others. They target more Windows. The Stream Deck, not the Steam Deck, the Stream Deck targets Windows, not Linux. There are some developers working on applications to make it work on Linux, like Deckmaster. Thank you, Matt, for letting me know about that one. That doesn't mean that the hardware manufacturers are going to work to support Linux. This is a fact we cannot escape. Windows will always be the big one. It depends on users and their needs. If users need to use something that only works on Windows, well, they need to use Windows only. Linux for now is for the tinkers mostly. That's how I see it. Okay, so I agree with most of the things that you said, but let me do two things. First, let me talk about the other side of the argument, just for a minute, kind of play a little bit of devil's advocate and then explain why that argument is wrong. So just know that what I'm about to say I don't actually think. By bringing in more new users, the attention of developers, specifically of most open-source software, not only distros, but basically everything, will be focused on support of those new users instead of bringing in new features and making their software better. That's one area that you could argue too many new users take away from attention and development resources. That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that the more new users you have, the less special Linux feels. Now, that's an ephemeral, very superficial type of thing, right? A lot of us... I think that even people who are aware of feeling this way do feel this way somewhat, that if you use Linux, you feel a little special. You feel like you accomplished something worthwhile, something that other people can't or won't accomplish. It's the source of Linux elitism. We all think that we're special because we use Tux. And I think, like I said, everybody feels this somewhat. Not everybody. Actually, what I should say is that there are a lot of people out there who just use Linux as a tool. It's not special to them at all. They use Windows too. They said at their computer, they do a job and they go smell some grass. I don't know what that grass thing is that you want me to smell. I've never seen this. I've never even seen a picture. I don't care to. But for other people, Linux is an accomplishment. It's a hobby of some sort. I know that's the way with a lot of us, not for everybody, but... And especially for that group, it tends to be the more new users, the more or less technical users join in on the fun, the less it feels like an accomplishment that we think that it is. Now, every time I say that stuff, people think that I think that way. I don't actually think installing Linux is an accomplishment that you should, you know, get on a t-shirt, although maybe you should get it on a t-shirt. I'm just saying that there are people out there who feel like it's an accomplishment. If you install Gentoo, actually, Steve is a good example of this. When you first installed Arch for the first time, the vanilla way, right? You feel very accomplished because when back then, it was a thing, right? It was a process, right? It's not like a script like it is now. What were you going to say, Steve? I was just going to say that I never installed Arch. You've never installed Arch the vanilla way? Oh my God, you've been banned. How can you be an Arch fanboy and never have installed Arch the vanilla way? The first time I installed Arch was using Archify. Okay, well, we're going to have to... I'm very frank. I don't like to lie to people and I'm not pretending to be someone to know more than others. I'm going to say that I was like everyone else when I saw my friend, Ermano Ferrari from EF Linux, because he used to make, now he works a job, so he cannot make the same kind of videos as today, as he used to, but he used to make a monthly Arch install the Arch vanilla way videos. I got scared. I was like, nah, I'm not going to do this. It's too involved. In my ADHD, and I recently discovered I have this thing where if I choose an action that takes too long, I suffer from anxiety and I start feeling like the walls are closing in on me and I can no longer breathe, that kind of feeling. So doing it the Arch vanilla way is too involved, too long, and I was afraid I was going to suffer that again, so I never tried it, but Archify is kind of similar, but it's in a TUI fashion. You just tab space to select the options you want and it was still involved because you had to select the packages, you had to select the, and you had to partition your hard drive the manual way, but a little bit less involved than having to type the Wi-Fi stuff because everything has been taken care of for you, but now with the Arch install script, I can breathe. There's going to be an entire generation of Arch users who have never had to experience the vanilla way of installing Arch and have always had the Arch install script and then there's going to be the older generation who had to install it the old-fashioned way. Back in the day, I had to install Arch, it took me 45 minutes and I walked both ways, uphill in the snow and all that stuff. So there's a bifurcation there as well, so the thing is, like somebody in the chat said that Linux is not an experience or something like that. For a lot of people, it's not an experience, it's just a tool, but for other people, it is. And for those people, they're inviting a whole bunch of new people, like the Steam Deck scared to crap out of a lot of those people because it was going to bring in a whole bunch of new people and it was going to make Linux feel less special. Now, like I said, I don't think that way. I'm more along the lines of what Steve thinks and I think that we can even go further. And I hate to break this to everybody because it's going to definitely be breaking news, but eventually someday Linus Torvalds is going to die. I mean, we're all going to die, but he's definitely going to die too. He's not immoral. Same thing with all the other Linux kernel developers and the people who develop Firefox and the people who develop OBS and Blender and all the open source tools that we know and love, the people who have created them and are developing them, they're going to retire off. Like recently with the developer, the creator of them. Yeah, yeah. They're going to die. It's sad to say, but it's going to happen. If we are a closed community that isn't welcoming to new users, we're not going to find people who are willing to replace those people when the time comes. We need fresh blood in order to bring in people who are going to be interested in how Linux works, how the kernel works, how it's developed, bringing in new thoughts. The kernel developers have been very open to the idea of bringing in Rust to the kernel. Some of that is because the newer younger people are more interested in Rust and have been able to bring that idea forth. It's that kind of stuff that is going to be needed as time goes on and the people who have been leading Linux for the last 30 years start to retire. Eventually, it's going to happen. We need the new generation to be able to be interested in that kind of stuff, to be able to learn. We need people who are in their teens. The way you're trying to phrase it is we need new, fresh, curious minds. Developers and stuff like that. I think it's going to be harder for us this time because back in the 80s and 90s when computing was just being invented, obviously computers have been around for a long time, but people just first started getting actual computers in their homes during the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. They got these computers. They were curious about how they worked and kids in their teens or whatever were tearing them apart, learning how they worked, how software works. They were learning basic and they were learning early versions of C and C sharp and all this stuff. They were very curious about how computing works. Today's generation, I hate to make this sound like an old guy, but today's generation doesn't feel as curious about how things work as the previous generation did. It just kind of feels that way. It's a generalization. You're very right about that because everything now is becoming more convenient. It's convenience over anything else. The younger generation... The pre-built computers are becoming so good that building them is no longer as needed as it used to be. Everything is so targeted towards convenience, convenience, convenience. People are more used to things like the iPhone and the Android phones where it's a closed thing. There's no tinkering on it whatsoever. It just works the way that it works. Even when the iPhone first came out, what was the big thing you did? You jail broke your iPhone because you were curious about how it worked and you wanted to install your own icon packed and you wanted to be able to reply to a text message without opening the message application. All these things that you take for granted these days, you couldn't do in the early days of the iPhone. Innovative people created Cydia and kept looking for... They were looking for ways into the Apple ecosystem so that they could actually jailbreak it and stuff like that, the hacks and stuff like that. And Apple hired half the people who created those apps and integrated them into iOS. Yeah, so that kind of thing... Do people still jailbreak their iPhones these days? I'm sure there's some people that did, but it's not in Europe. Oh, I can vouch for that. One of them being a longtime friend, if he can't jailbreak an iPhone, he will go mad. But it's not as big as it once was, right? No, it's very small. Yeah, because it used to be huge. If you covered in the early days of the iPhone, there were iPhone blogs, like the iPhone blog to be, that's where one of my friends and I met. You're talking to one. Yeah, well, anyways... IGXIS, IG33sdas.com. That was me, that was my friend. We had a podcast like this, talking about jailbreak apps, how to jailbreak your iPhone. It was a whole community. We were successful. We were getting donations. My friend was able to attend and advertise IGXIS at an event where Sarek, the creator of Cydia, was and basically we had a presence there. So we were big in the jailbreak community, but that no longer exists. The blogs, the jailbreak blogs and all that are very, very small now. Actual websites dedicated to jailbreaking your iPhone. It's not there anymore. It's dead. And that's the kind of thing that I'm worried about. With kind of the future of Linux is that the newer generation just doesn't seem to be as curious and to tweaking stuff. They're used to using Windows that doesn't have a lot of choice. They're used to using Chrome OS these days. I mean, Chrome OS is like the thing now in schools and that does have a lot of choice in terms of actually doing stuff. And even if, even the choices that do exist are oftentimes put behind parental controls because the schools don't want you to mess around with your machine. So you got to use it the way that it's supposed to be used. It's like the hype. What scares me the most is that for now and at this current point in time, Linux is sort of like you said, it makes people feel like they accomplished something when they use Linux. This is how it makes them feel. And what scares me is it's a hype. It might die just like jailbreaking died basically because there's a lot of podcasts and a lot of people talking about Linux and everything, but nothing that pushes you users because we keep talking about all of us. We're not safe from that. We're not innocent of that. We keep talking about the toxic part of Linux in every discussion. That scares people. They start getting scared. They start thinking in their minds, okay, I'm curious about Linux, but there's all these podcasts and there's all these news articles, blogs that keep talking about the toxic aspect of Linux. We don't want to join that. We don't want to join the toxic community without even them realizing that by using Windows, they don't have a community at all to begin with. Hold on a second. I have to disagree with you there because I had that thought too that Windows doesn't have a community, but they definitely have trolls. See, you have trolls. I'm talking about community. Well, I think their whole community is full of trolls because I made a video recently about Windows and oh my goodness, the trolls in that comment section is just kind of nuts. It's insane. Yeah, but what I meant by community is helpful people helping each other out. Yeah, because Windows you cannot do anything with to begin with, so it can't have a community. The only thing communities you have is the modding community for games and stuff on Windows, but that's it. Yeah. Hammaboo, I'm probably mispronouncing your name. Thank you for the super chat. They say, I only care about Linux because of the user freedom, otherwise caring about Linux makes as much sense as caring about stamp collecting. And as somebody who knows a few stamp collectors, I'm very offended on their behalf. They care a lot about stamp collecting. I think that the word for that is philately, by the way, just to be a nerd about it. But hey, people have hobbies and Linux can be a hobby. So I know for most... For now it is a hobby. The way Linux is today, it's more for tinkerers and hobbyists right now. It's not really... It's not being picked up really seriously by serious people. I mean, desktop users. I'm not talking about companies because they already use it. All right, so we can kind of transition into that just a little bit. So the market share of Linux has gone up a little bit mostly because of the Steam Deck. Approximately half the Linux users out there now seem to be using Linux on the Steam Deck, whether they know it or not. I do think... I don't know if you were on the podcast yet at that time or not, but when the Steam Deck was first announced, Tyler and I discussed the idea that the Steam Deck would kind of act as a gateway drug to the rest of Linux. Tyler was, I believe, and I may be misremembering this, but he was of the opinion that some people would use the Steam Deck and then eventually that would get them into using desktop Linux on their other machines. I was of the opinion that they just used it as a gaming machine and they wouldn't even know that they were using Linux if the experience was the way that the Valve wanted it to be. I think that... The transition because this is very... very thing that I wanted to transition into because, yes, the thing with the Steam Deck is more and more handhelds are coming out and at some point there will be that diamond in the rough that's going to dethrone the Steam Deck and it's going to be running Windows. The Steam Deck is sitting on the throne right now and is enjoying its its leadership, but I don't think the Steam Deck is enough. We need more hardware handheld manufacturers to start using Linux on their handhelds but the way I see it because you got the IA NEO that's coming soon you got the ASUS Ally, ROG Ally and they're coming out with a newer one after that. Lenovo just... They're all using Windows. Lenovo just announced one that has a huge screen and it's fairly cheap. Well, yeah, it's... I understand what you're saying there, Steve, but I don't think... I think that the problem there is too full that part of it is just kind of beyond what we're talking about today. It's a Valve problem that they don't come out with new products fast enough. They're a very small company. That's a Valve problem but it's... what I'm saying is because of Valve's problem of not sticking and releasing more hardware iterations it's not gonna help the Linux adoption because as I see it right now and we were talking about this earlier the increase of Linux adoption because of the Steam Deck is only temporary unless something else comes out and continues the hype. So, just one thing on that. Valve needs to release, actually release Steam OS for other manufacturers to use, which they have not done yet. They said they were going to do it but they haven't done yet. Two years ago? At this point, I don't think that they're actually going to do it. I'd be surprised now if it actually ever happened. But just to go back to the main topic here I think that even with the added influx of the Steam Deck whether it stays or goes that's kind of beside the point. No matter what happens Linux is always going to be I think you said it earlier, Linux is always going to be a very small portion of the market compared to Windows. And I think that that's kind of the point here is that yes we're going to have various influxes of new users over the course of the years. Things like this. But they're coming and going. They're not sticking. That's the thing. We don't need them all to stick. No, I'm not saying we need them all to stick. We need more to stick. I agree with that but I'm just saying is that no matter what happens, it's always going to be it's going to be like Mastodon. So when Twitter and Elon did its thing, Mastodon had this huge influx of users. A vast majority of them left after a few weeks. But some of them stayed. And Fostodon is now invite only also. It's slow and steady wins the race and more and more people. Yes, there'll be these big, large influxes of people who come to use Linux and then eventually leave. But some of them will stay behind and it'll just keep happening until it just continues to grow very, very slowly. But my point was that Linux is never going to be huge therefore the people who are worried about the whole dilution of the Linux experience don't need to worry about it all that much because it's never going to be I think that the people who are really truly worried about there being too many noobs and Linux are in their minds thinking that someday all the people who use Windows 10 are going to come use Linux. It's just never ever guys, I love I love Linux. I want Linux to succeed. I want Linux to win. I want a whole bunch. I think everybody should use Linux. But you got to be realistic. Every time before you say anything, every time, so we did this with Windows XP and everybody was really excited because when Windows XP went out of service everybody was like, oh my goodness, all these people are going to come to Windows and it's going to be awesome. Linux is going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Didn't happen, right? They moved to Windows 10. That's what they did. Or Windows 8, I guess, Windows 7, whatever it was. Not a Windows user. I don't know what the order is. Numbers are confusing. It doesn't matter. Anyways they went to the next version of Windows. They just didn't even think about coming to Linux. When Windows 7 went out of service everybody in the Linux community was like, oh, this is our chance. This is going to be the chance for Linux to be awesome. A whole bunch of people are going to come use Linux. It didn't happen. They moved to Windows 10. When Windows 10 goes out of service in 2025, this is the exact same people are going to say this is Linux's chance. We're going to finally have a whole bunch of influx of Windows users because these poor souls who are abandoned on Windows 10 hate Windows 11 and Linux is their only option. It's not going to happen. They'll move to Windows 11 or Windows 12 or whatever happens to be the next one. Because Windows is all they know, and when they are eventually forced to move to something else Windows is their only choice because they don't, either they don't know that Linux exists, they don't care that Linux exists, or Linux is too nerdy for them. There's another reason this raises two things. The reason also why not more people stick to Linux. We're not talking about how many people try Linux. We're talking about people who stick to Linux. There's a big thing that plays a role in people not sticking to Linux is there's way too many choices for them. I'm not talking distro specific, like too many choices, app choices that do the same thing not even differently, just a different name that does exactly the same as the other package, distros and other things. They keep distros for example, like zero Linux, like hobbyist distros like zero Linux. That will come, they will live for two, three, four, five years and then all of a sudden disappear because we are just hobbyists. We don't do this for a living, we don't raise we don't make money out of this, we're doing it and sharing our hobby with the community out there and allow them to come and use Linux, but we'll disappear and people don't like to, they're too afraid to rely on something that will eventually die. But there are those big distros, like Manjaro, like Fedora, like Opensuza all the company back distros those will live on and on and on and on and on, but there are smaller distros, like us they use our distros, they love our distros, they fall in love with our distros, but we disappear and they say oh, I joined Linux and I tried Linux but that thing died on me and how am I going to trust to go to another distro what makes me trust that it's not going to die and this is one thing that attributes to the fact that it's not growing and when talking about Windows, did you know that in 23H3 I don't know why they're calling it H3 there's no three halves of the year it's Windows it's Microsoft so they can divide the year into three halves I don't know, but in 23H3 there will be ads in File Explorer it's finally coming and the pop-ups have already started coming from Edge where they're advertising Chrome as a malware browser and now they won't allow you to set a default browser because if you receive an advertisement or something you want to click on a pop-up from an application, even if you have set the default browser to Chrome or whatever browser you prefer it's still going to open those links in Edge, it's not going to allow you still have to go through the set by file type and by link in the default programs thing so you're going to be spending 15 minutes just setting each file type and each link type manually. We can agree that Linux or that Windows is terrible what I'm saying is Windows by doing this they're de-favoring their own operating system for Linux but this is the game now it's a game it's a whack-a-mole game because Windows is going to be terrible become so terrible that users are going to get so annoyed they want to try something else but they cannot stick to Linux because of the reasons I cited earlier it's a whack-a-mole it's a ping-pong game they're going to go to Linux, not enjoy Linux because they cannot trust it for lasting too long they're going to go back to Windows, get annoyed at Windows eventually they're going to go to Mac because Mac is the only constant thing that doesn't change so you think that Mac is going to be the ultimate winner out of all of this I'm steering that way but if Linux and Windows don't, I don't know they don't stabilize of sorts I don't know what other word to describe it the only stable constant is Mac. Mac hasn't changed really, it just changed looks and how small things at the back end but generally it's still stable and it's still the same OS it has always been and I'm not a technical person when it comes to Mac OS although I used to work for Apple but I still don't know what the inner outs and whatever of Mac OS are and I haven't needed to format my 2016 MacBook since I bought it in 2016 it's been running and it's been running the beta versions of Mac OS it has never run the stable versions and it's still running flawless the problem with the argument of Mac being the winner is the prices of Apple if they had cheap computers I guarantee you would be absolutely 100% right if they had like that that's why I said I'm not really sure I'm in the mindset it's just that the prices of hardware are way too high Apple would win the day if they just put their operating system out there for people to use on all hardware like here's a copy of Mac OS you can install it on whatever you want they'd win like almost instantaneously well let's put a different way if Mac OS became a true competitor to the market because honestly they're just as small as Linux is basically I mean yes they because of their prices they have a small portion of the market compared to Windows just like Linux does if Mac OS and Apple's hardware and all this stuff was a true competitor to Windows what would happen would be that Windows would try harder to be good right now they don't have to try hard to be good because where are you going to go you can't go anywhere most people can't afford to go out and spend $2,000 on a Mac so most people when they need a new computer if their computer app is literally burning the house down that's when they'll go replace their computer then they'll go to the Best Buy or the big box store they'll go to Amazon or whatever and they'll buy a $400 or $500 computer that's what most people do you can't get a Macintosh for less than $699 and that doesn't come with a monitor right if you want an actual computer you're going to be spending at least $1,000 probably more and most people just don't spend that amount of money on their computer it's just they tool for them that argument if you're talking about desktops it might hold water but when we're talking about laptops these days PC laptops are getting high up in the price that's the reason why Chrome OS has become so popular is because you can buy a Chromebook for like $300 or $400 there's still the Lenovo out there the Lenovo $600 Lenovo but if you want to get something in the performance range of a MacBook you're paying MacBook prices even in the PC realm another thing that we have to consider Steve they aren't even buying computers anymore they have phones they spend a thousand dollars on a phone rather than paying it they think well I do most of my computing on my phone I spent this much money on a phone why would I buy a laptop when I don't need one or why would I buy an expensive one I'll just get a Chromebook or I'll get an iPad or something that's fairly cheap here's the argument this is very especially with Samsung phones and I'll clarify Samsung has something called Samsung DeX and that Samsung DeX is amazing I've seen it I've experienced it in stores they demo it with phones becoming as powerful as they are today and having the Samsung DeX feature on board which allows you to use your phone as a desktop with a few limitations of course because it's still a phone OS after all but you can do your office work basically your Excel spreadsheet because Microsoft Office exists on Android and on iOS it's a big surprise but you can use it as you can do your work you can do your word, your Excel spreadsheets your database, your PHP your web development all that on a freaking phone connected to a screen and a keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard and a mouse so yeah, your argument is super valid 100% but if you have an iOS device that's not an iOS phone an iPhone that's not an argument because iPhones will never be that and even iPads will be that because iPads are so damn limited they have gotten more powerful as time goes on the iPad they're getting powerful yes but they're not getting feature unlocked to be used to replace desktop every time a new iPad OS comes out people are like it's getting closer and closer to being a computer it's not the OS on it will never it's creating its own thing Apple's creating its own idea of what a touch operating system should be when it comes to something as big as the iPad and it's never going to work precisely the way people have experienced computers for 40 years it doesn't seem to be Apple's vision if it had been Apple's vision to do that they would have done it by now and they would have just you can see that they're trying to bring Mac OS and iPad and iOS all together a little bit where the applications on them kind of flow between the three of them but the operating systems themselves couldn't be more different iPad OS and iOS are kind of similar and based on the same things but comparing it to Mac OS they're different they may look the same but they function different to continue your argument they're allowing you to use iOS apps or iPad apps iPad OS apps on the MacBook because the MacBook is ARM based now but you're still using the iPad apps they're not optimized for a MacBook so you will end up with a mobile app on the laptop and same for the iPad for example Instagram still doesn't have an iPad friendly app so you'll be using an iPhone version of the on the iPad remember the first versions of the iPad where they really didn't have a lot of applications so you could run iPhone apps on and then there was this little button down in the corner where you had to press two times and it would blow it up it's the same situation right now between the iPad and the iPhone and the MacBooks they all run ARM processors but developers are not optimizing their apps across the Apple ecosystem it's still fragmented on the Apple ecosystem it's the same reason why Android tablets really haven't ever caught on because the developers haven't ever really adopted it so let's we went completely off to a left turn there no it's still related the point of all this is that the choices that people have when they switch to a different operating system if they're whatever are almost entirely hardware related when they are when they're considering making a choice like this what they're considering isn't what operating system to use it's what computer to buy so they go into Best Buy they go into Fries or whatever electronic store they have there's an electronic store called Fries here in the United States but anyways they go into the electronic store they go online or whatever and they look and see what computer they can afford whatever computer they can afford they're going to buy it's most likely to be running Windows but some people do have to consider Apple if they have the money they may at least know that they exist the one thing that they don't do absolutely don't do is go into Amazon or Best Buy or wherever and say hey that computer runs Linux let's buy that one because it doesn't exist you can't go into a computer store and buy a laptop that runs Linux technically okay there's going to be somebody in the chat that says Matt basically runs the modified version of the Gen 2 kernel therefore it's Linux blah blah no no it's not it's like saying Android is Linux it's not what we're really talking about here the point is you can't go buy a system System 76 is one of the largest Linux based vendors right they could become the savior of Linux if they put their computers in stores if they had an agreement with Best Buy or something like that to sell their computers in stores I don't think it ever happened because the problem is is that the people when Best Buy sells a computer they have some obligation not total obligation but some obligation to support it and to sell it right so they have to be able to explain people why that thing there is different in running something else and why it's good if they can't explain why it's good to someone why it's different than say Windows they're not going to carry in their stores you just transitioned into something that happened to me just today today I was telling you about it before we went live but when I went to the Virgin Megastore you know I'm in Dubai we went to the Virgin Megastore and one of the employees there I was asking about the idea pad Lex 5 because that's what I was looking into but he was like why do you want the idea pad this is what the employee should ask the customer because I worked in sales and that's how it works he asked me I told him Linux he was like Linux for hackers no you want to hack so I sold the idea of Linux to him because he was I felt his curiosity about Linux when he asked I told him that I needed I wanted it for Linux I saw it in his eyes that there was valid curiosity in there I know how to read people sometimes so when I started I sold that person on Linux and he went home downloaded okay zero next I sold him on zero Linux but okay shoot me it's my distro so he went home downloaded it and he sent me a message because I gave him my number and it's a temporary number it's a burner because I'm leaving after 15 days so don't worry but I sold him on the idea he downloaded it he tested it and he liked it and he was like I think I'm going to stick to it but you need curious people this is what we're saying we need curious people and curious people willing to stick and you have to have the right distribution for that you have to and the reason not many people stick to Linux is because there's no good support community I don't think it's about no good support community the support community is toxic not always what I was going to say is that it's more it's too all over the place so if you want to if you're using Ubuntu you have to know to go to the Ubuntu place to get that support if you're using Zoran you have to go to there's no general Linux support say you decide your first distro is going to be 0linux and you know that it's based on Arch right you know that it is based on Arch and you're having a problem with 0linux but you know you catch Steve on a bad day or whatever he's not around you can't ask him questions so you head on over to the Arch Linux forums and ask a question on your 0linux install that's when things become toxic okay because guaranteed they're going to say well you're not using Arch therefore we can't help you and obviously they'll say in such a friendly manner that you're going to have a pleasant experience right down the road that's the problem that's the problem it's not that the communities themselves are inherently toxic it's that they're toxic towards other distros and then there's the very high possibility you're going to end up in a loop support loop they're going to send you to that point and that point is going to tell you to another point and that guy is going to send you to another guy and then it's going to end up in a loop if they even bother sending you places and don't just belittle you and tell you to be you're being an idiot so there's a lot of problems let's summarize it there's a lot of problems that are too many problems that are not helping Linux helping Linux adoption and as we said Linux will always be this thing that people will try from time to time that will be curious about then get bored with and like glorious agro today said on Brody Brody's thinking Tech over T he said always be their problem on Linux that will cause people to go I've got a flash windows back to windows I go that's always going to be there unless windows become so bad like windows millennium edition maybe then more adoption I think that the future of Linux is to remain an operating system that is just kind of slow and steady growth and that there's a peak to it I could see it getting to 5%, 6% or something like that I don't foresee it ever getting further than that just to kind of bring it back to the main topic and then we can be done is that because that's true let's just say 6% the ceiling we're never going to have to worry about the influx of horrible new user coming in and making it horrible experience there will be a lot of new users but not speaking I don't see a lot of users speaking I mean we could talk about how we would go about fixing that I think more a collaboration of that requires people like these throws will come coming and disappearing but the big ones will always remain we need the big ones to agree on something called standardization without standardization across the board on Linux it's going to be fragmented the fragmented part is a whole other conversation but I don't think that I agree that it needs to be collaboration on the software aspects of Linux because I don't think that's going to ever happen the digital aspect the ideology, the philosophy hold on a second I don't think that it needs to happen on the digital level either I can see the argument I don't think that it necessarily needs to happen what absolutely needs to happen is what we already mentioned is that support needs to be generalized across everything where if you are having problems with a manjaro you can go get help in the arch forms and act because of it people need to be more empathetic towards people who use other distros and maybe don't know that they're supposed to go to the manjaro forms or maybe they couldn't get help on the manjaro forms because the people in the manjaro forms are idiots I don't know that the people in the manjaro forms are idiots I'm just general claim don't at me, I'm sure there are plenty of fine people the community over manjaro are not very toxic I'll put it this way they have helped me before solve a lot of my issues I wasn't making claims that they are I'm just saying that that's a scenario I'm not saying that you did a lot of users think that the manjaro community is a toxic community they are not they just don't do it in a very good way all the time but they are very helpful okay let's go ahead and wrap this thing up let's go ahead and move into the last section of the show which is the thingies of the week so Steve do you have a thingy of the week what was my thingy of the week I forgot I didn't have a I don't know man it's not in the show now so I have no clue of knowing oh okay so alright I just I recently discovered during my during my work on the rework of Xerox basically on a software manager a GUI software manager package manager for for Arch Linux it's called BAU BAUH it's really good it's really good I recommend users try it because PAMAC there's so many variations of PAMAC and one that is called PAMAC no snap one PAMAC you are PAMAC all PAMAC this PAMAC that and they're all basically PAMAC with things disabled whereas with BAU I don't know how to pronounce BAU BAU whatever BAU whatever it's a great package manager it supports app images it supports web apps it supports snaps I don't recommend I don't enable snaps so yeah it supports various types of package managers it's super customizable themable you can it has a tray icon and notifier update notifier thing in the tray and the icon you can customize it you can customize both aspects when no updates are available and when updates are available you can create your own custom icons for both you can create your own custom theme you can and it's a QT based app apparently and it's wonderful especially on KDE and it works it's very simple to use just enable and it supports parallel downloads the only caveat is you cannot set how many parallel downloads enabled or disabled it needs to be more granular but it's a very neat little package manager graphical package manager since zero Linux now ships without a GUI package manager leaving the choice up to the user so if you want to try one on Arch whatever distro you're on doesn't have to be zero Linux it's on the AUR just yay or paru-s that's the AUH try it out and enjoy okay so my thingy of the week is a little script called mirror magic or mirror sorcerer and it only is good for you if you use openSUSA so one of my main complaints on openSUSA during that video that I made recently was that zipper is slow mirror magic is a tool for openSUSA that makes them faster it makes zipper faster and while I would still claim that zipper is slow after using this it's not nearly as slow as it is out of the box so I'll leave a link to this in the show notes as well as usual and if you're using openSUSA mirror magic or he calls it mirror sorcerer in some of the documentation here so I don't think he actually shows a name I'm not sure which name you want to go so what you're saying is mirror magic is kind of like rate mirrors on art but for openSUSA kind of it's not it's kind of like that it doesn't quite go as far as like reflector it's just completely automatic you run it and it goes it makes your mirror situation better everything's closer and it's faster it also changes a few of the settings for zipper obviously it doesn't enable parallel downloads because those don't exist honestly if they had parallel downloads zipper would be 100 times better than it is I have a question for you since you are openSUSA user I know there's a GUI package manager for openSUSA is it Octopi? on the KDE version they just use discover I know on the KDE version I know what they use because that's the one I tried and I had discovered and it pissed me off they have discover on the KDE version I'm not sure what they use on the GNOME version on the GNOME software probably on the XFCE version they use I don't remember what they use I uninstalled it so I can't tell you but they use something else as well but they don't use Octopi Octopi is horrible man here's the thing since I was on the hunt for a GUI package manager other than PAMAC I remembered that I always had Octopi in my tool as an optional package manager and I remembered that I have Octopi with the Octopi notifier thing in the system tray and the only caveat for Octopi is it doesn't support flatpacks it doesn't support anything except the local AUR sorry the only bad thing about Octopi is that it's terrible it is bad I'm sure it's very powerful but you can't figure out how it works I've tried to use it all time I figured it out but you are much smarter than I I've never been able to figure out I only used it for an hour I figured it out I'm going to highlight a package to install if it has dependencies it will automatically highlight those dependencies for you and if there are optional dependencies set by the package builder it will offer you those optional packages via a pop-up window to uncheck whatever you want to uncheck and that's it but where it gets complicated is when it's dealing with AUR PKG builds then it gets a bit complicated for me it kept on failing for whatever reason and it's not very granular because it displays everything in the terminal window at the bottom for me it's not intuitive it needs a pop-up maybe it's gotten better since the last time I used it I haven't used it in years because the last time I used it was when I used Manjaro that's it for this episode of the Linuxcast we record this live every Saturday or at least most Saturdays around three o'clock Eastern time every once in a while we take days off but for the most part we're here recording there's usually two more of us and we have a good time it's usually fantastic so you can definitely join us live the Linuxcast is available on YouTube you can head on over there if you want to watch us live youtube.com slash the Linuxcast I did not do any of the contact information this time so we should probably do that now you can find all of our stuff by going ahead and over to thelinuxcast.org where you'll find previous episodes along with the blog post that I post occasionally you can find Steve he's on mastedon at fosterdon.org slash at zero Linux yeah yeah with the next all those links or whatever you can find thelinuxcast.org slash contact you can find all of Steve's other stuff his discord his YouTube channel all of his stuff is there as well you can head on over again the merch store is still there shop.linuxcast.org I'll probably be pimping that for a while until I forget that it exists I probably won't do that and I want to say one last thing today the comedy version the clown version of myself didn't exist because there was nobody to bounce the comedy off of we have Josh and Zany all you had was the grump this time it's okay that's alright anyways so that's the contact information you can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash linuxcast you can support me on kofi at ko-fi.com slash linuxcast if you'd rather use that instead of patreon also you can support me on youtube and all that stuff youtube.com slash linuxcast thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the challenges wouldn't be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very much for your support I truly do appreciate it again live every Saturday three o'clock p.m. eastern time with awesome podcasts so make sure you subscribe make sure you hit the like button head on over to Steve's non-existent youtube channel anymore and subscribe to him follow him on mastodon we will see you next week