 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. These viewer questions and comments they typically come from comments on the videos that are posted on YouTube and on library. Sometimes these viewer questions and comments come from Mastodon, from Reddit, from email. And the very first question I want to address is Haiti, honest question. At this point of the timeline is it worth it to start a YouTube career on Linux instead of focusing your efforts primarily on sites like library? So he's asking why be on YouTube if library is exploding in popularity, which it really is. And the monetization program on library is actually really good. It's probably better than on YouTube. Typically on library, you make more per view on library than you do per view on YouTube. It just is a better monetization program because your viewers, they tip you, you know, all the money you get is from your viewers, you know, they donate LBC's library credits to you. And if you put out good content, you're going to make money on library where the problem with library though is even though it's becoming more and more popular, you're still not going to get nearly as many views on library as you are on YouTube. And it's not like when you make video content, you only can be on one platform, you should actually be on multiple platforms just to be safe to reach the most viewers to get the most eyeballs on your content. You should be on multiple platforms, but also you want to be on multiple platforms in case one of the platforms you're on goes belly up, right? Maybe YouTube goes out of business or maybe YouTube goes crazy and decides to ban all Linux content and delete all the Linux channels off of YouTube. Well, luckily, I've got all of my videos synced over to library as well, so I can still direct people to another platform to go view those videos. All is not lost because I have this backup, if you will, this backup plan already in place. And the person that asked this question, he asked, you know, is it worth it to start a YouTube career about Linux rather than on library? It really doesn't matter the topic of the channel. Obviously, when you're talking about Linux and free and open source software, being on a free and open source platform like library makes sense. That's why I'm on it. But at the same time, if you're preaching the message of free and open source software, right, if you're trying to get people away from proprietary software over to free and open source software, then at the end of the day, you probably are going to have to interact with people that run proprietary software. And where do they hang out on proprietary platforms like YouTube and Facebook and things like that? If you only hang out in places where free and open source software zealots hang out, then really at the end of the day, you're not changing hearts and minds because everybody there already knows about the free software movement, right? At the end of the day, all you would be doing is preaching to the choir because that's not the right crowd to be preaching that message to. And the next question I want to address is, hey, DT, if we call YouTube content creators, YouTubers, what should we call library content creators, librarians? And that is actually the correct answer. That seems to be the term that most people kind of throw around. If you're on forums regarding library, the library discord channel, library subreddit and things like that, they typically refer to library content creators as librarians. Now, the weird thing with library isn't there's not just one library, there's not just one library website. You've got library.tv as a front end to library. You also have odyssey.com as a front end to library. So many people that publish the library actually say that they publish to odyssey because that's the front end that they use. It's all the same platform, though. I mean, what are you going to call people that publish exclusively to odyssey and refer to themselves as odyssey content creators? Well, I mean, obviously the name reflects the epics that were written by Homer, you know, so I guess you could call the folks on odyssey homers, but that sounds kind of lame. I would probably call them V travelers, virtual travelers, kind of like YouTube has VTubers. Yeah, we'll just call the folks on odyssey V travelers. Moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, just a small thing on your videos. I think it would look better if your face cam was inverted. That way you would be looking at the screen instead of away from us. Okay, so typically where I have my camera, which is not where I have my camera today, typically I have my camera like off to the side and at an angle, you know, because I record in a very small room, I cannot have my camera directly in front of me, except when I'm doing this kind of video here. But when I'm looking at my triple monitor screens, you know, I can't have a camera in front of me because the room is just too small. I can't put the camera far enough away to actually get good focus and everything. So what he's saying is maybe have the camera instead of on the right side of my triple monitors, maybe put my camera on the left side of my triple monitors, because typically I'm looking at this screen or I'm looking at that screen and I'm looking away. Well, I have a triple monitor system no matter where I put it on the left side or the right side. At some point I'm going to look at one of the other monitors. So I'm never going to be looking at a camera while I'm looking at my computer monitors. I just can't do it, not with the space that I'm currently recording in. The next question is, hey, DT, you are against proprietary software, but you are using a Linux kernel with proprietary blobs. Why he shouts and all caps? He goes on to ask, I mean, you could use the arch based distro parabola, rather than arco or manjaro or mainline arch, which all have the traditional Linux kernel that has proprietary blobs in them. Yeah, I would love to be able to use one of the 100% free as in freedom distributions like parabola or like geeks, which I've done some videos about geeks in the past on the channel, really like that distribution. And I tried to get that thing installed on my main production machine. It wouldn't install properly. I've tried to install various 100% free distributions on my three laptops behind me. And those Linux Libre kernel distributions, they don't work on any of my laptops because Wi Fi drivers, so many Wi Fi chips in all the popular brands of laptops that are out there. So many of them require a proprietary driver. There's no open source driver. And if there's no open source driver available, you can't use a Linux Libre kernel, or you're never going to have Wi Fi on that machine, unless you change out the Wi Fi card, you know, throw out the one that you got, go buy one that does have a free driver and install that. Yeah, you could do that. But most people are not going to change out hardware in their computers or change computers entirely, just to run the Linux Libre kernel. That's not the case for me. I'm a free software zealot, but I have thousands of dollars worth of equipment, you know, in these computers that my tower, the laptops and everything, I'm just not going to throw away perfectly good hardware, just so I can run the Linux Libre kernel. I mean, that's a step too far. I will, however, be more careful in the future with my purchases, especially with laptops, because laptops really the one sticking point for the most part are the Wi Fi drivers. And just make sure that the Wi Fi chip has an open source driver, and you'll be good. And that's what I'm going to do. Also, if you're buying a laptop, like that's a gaming laptop, and has a dedicated GPU, a graphics card, make sure it's not Nvidia, because you're not going to run an Nvidia card without using the proprietary drivers. There are open source Nvidia drivers, but they suck really, really bad. And nobody pays a lot of money on a high end Nvidia graphics card and then uses the crappy Nuvo drivers. Everybody uses the proprietary drivers. So I would have to make sure that it's either the Intel graphics or AMD graphics on the machine as well. Moving on to the next question, Haiti, I want to learn to use the terminal. I already shaved my head. What's next? Well, shaving your head is a good start. But the next thing is just go read. Well, it depends on what kind of learner you are. Are you one of those people that likes to read something? You can go read a wiki or read a book or an article or something and just absorb that knowledge. Are you a visual learner? Do you need to watch somebody do it on a video, like a YouTube video? So if you obviously want to see somebody do these kinds of commands, they shell commands in action, check out some of my older videos. I've done plenty of videos about the terminal and the command line. If you need a book, one of my favorite books, people often ask me about good Linux books to buy. And this is one of the best purchases I ever made here. This is the Linux command line and shell scripting Bible. And this thing is great. It's kind of thick, but don't let it scare you. It's actually, it's got a lot of examples and a lot of little snippets of code published in it. And it really will teach you the best shell, the GNU core utils, and some basic scripting. So I highly recommend that book. Again, if you want some YouTube videos, obviously, I've done some videos on the command line. And there are literally hundreds of other Linux YouTubers out there that have done basic terminal kind of videos. And the next question is, Hey, DT, why do you always allocate so little resources to your virtual machines? You have a 12 core 24 thread thread ripper, yet you only give the VMs one core each. So I give it one core, which is two threads of the CPU. And I give all my VMs four gigs of RAM. And that's plenty. I don't need to give them more than that for showing you guys these distros on video. Yes, I could give them more than that. If I was actually using the VMs to do work that then I would probably give the VM as much CPU and as much RAM as I could. But for purposes of my videos, my first look and installation kind of videos where I take a look at a distribution for the first time, I want to give it a normal amount of system resources. And my 12 core thread ripper, that's a pretty good CPU. And one core, two threads of that thing is plenty for any Linux distribution to run. The same thing with RAM, four gigs of RAM. I mean, I'm not, I'm not video editing in these, these virtual machines. I'm not running Blender and doing any kind of animation or anything that requires, you know, 128 gigs of RAM or whatever, you know, four gigs of RAM just for opening up a few programs and, you know, checking out the web browser or opening the terminal running a few commands, that's more than enough. And I also want to make sure that it's always a fair comparison from each distribution to the next. So I always give them the exact same system resources. I'm always going to give them one core, two threads of my CPU, and I'm always going to give them four gigs of RAM until the day where those kinds of system resources are no longer feasible. But the great thing about Linux is Linux isn't system resource heavy, right? This is not Windows. This is not Mac. The system resources I'm giving these VMs is more than enough for just taking them for a spin. And the final question is, hey, DT, you mentioned that you use all three shills, bash, ZSH and fish. I'm wondering about workflow and what each shell is used for. Okay, now I am not a normal Linux user, especially normal Linux desktop user. I have not just bash and ZSH and fish installed on my system. I also have the new shell installed. I think I have conscious installed. I have probably two or three other shills also installed on my, I have like eight shills installed on my machine. Why? It's because I do video content about Linux. And sometimes I need to check out these different shills. People ask me about things specific to bash, specific to ZSH, specific to fish. And that's why I mentioned that I have all three installed. And I often use all three, not at the same time, but you know, for various different things. Like when I am doing scripting, I'm always going to be in the bash shill if I'm scripting, especially at the command line, because I'm just used to the bash syntax, I'm always going to be in bash for that. Other than that, I'm going to be in fish. If I'm just moving around the file systems, you know, doing CD and LS and move and copy and things like that, you know, my preferred shill for that is fish just because of the great auto completion and the syntax highlighting and all of that comes with the fish shill out of the box. I love the fish shill, but scripting with the fish shill is completely different than bash. The syntax is different and it confuses the hell out of me. So I always try to do scripting in bash. If I'm just using the command line to install, remove software or whatever it is, I have been to be doing, you know, most of the time for that kind of stuff, I'm going to be in fish. And even if you use ZSH or fish, you're probably always going to have bash installed on your computer anyway. Even if you never use it, typically bash is the default shill on most Linux distributions. The only exception I know of is Ubuntu switch from bash as the default shill over to dash a few years back, but even Ubuntu still has bash installed on the system just in case it's needed. But I would once again say that I'm not a normal Linux desktop user because I do this video content, you know, I have all these shills installed on my system just so I have them handy when I need them and can play with them on camera. But that's not something that you guys need to do. You guys don't need to be proficient in bash ZSH fish, conch and the oil shell and all of this other stuff. You know, typically you're going to pick one shell that you like that has the features that you want and you're going to stick with that one. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Apsi Dallas Gabe, Lou Mitchell, Alan Akami, Archie 530, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan Gregory, Lewis Paul, Scott Wesson, Willie, these guys, they are the producers of this episode of Haiti without these guys. This show would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel doesn't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. And if you'd like to help me out, support my work. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.