 before. But normally it's just a few minutes before it's time like to get ready to go live or pretty much go live. That's when we hop in. Yep. Yeah. We never, we're never, we're not the most prepared people in the world. But it works. All right. So we should be live according to the email that I just got. YouTube says we're live. So welcome to those of you who may and may not be in the chat. If we could get some yeas or nays on the audio. This is me talking. This is Matt speaking some words. Words, words, words. Now Tyler's going to speak some words. This is Tyler. Tyler is speaking words. Also, before anyone has time to comment in chat, yes, my webcam will be most likely out of sync. Randomly, if not this entire podcast, I'm on OpenBSD. We'll get to it. So I will go ahead and apologize for you having to bear through a laggy webcam. Should use a real man's operating system. I'm just going to put that out there right now. Maybe you are using a real man's operating system. You just, you get a tough aim, build your own audio server. Literally, that's pretty much what it is. I'm going to have to find out a way of, I'm going to have to figure out a way of synchronizing the audio and video inputs going into Chromium. I'm sure I can do. I'm sure I can. Well, if you can't, and you're actually going to spend some time on BSD, I'm not going to do this if you're going to hop back to Windows next week. But if you can't get a fix on BSD and you're going to stick around there for a while, I can add a delay in OBS. So that at least on the live stream, there would be a somewhat chance of you being synced up. But that'd be on my end. And like I said, your lag is not consistent. So it's going to be difficult. But I'm pretty sure I've got an idea of how I can solve the problem. And obviously that comes from me searching on Reddit and other places and people being like, Hey, so I've got this issue and I think I've solved it. Gosh, I think your audio setup is just not good. It sounds fine on my end. I'm even monitoring like you told me to do. And I sound fine. Turn it down a little bit, bro. You sound fine. Yeah. If anybody else notices that, then we can start messing around with the stuff. But like I said, I've done some recordings like tests after you bitched at me. I didn't just ignore you. I did search through it. And I did take off the extra compressor, which was left over from when I was using the hyal. That should be gone, I think. I hope I should actually look and make sure that I'm not talking out my ass filters. Yeah, the compressor is gone. I have a little bit extra gain. But other than that, it looks like it's fine. I mean, there's no base booster here at all. There's a limiter so I don't blow out a noise gate. So I don't even really need anything going on. Can we just pause for a second because I just saw something in chat that I mean, I have to relish this because these are words that I will never see on a screen again. Tyler's mic is the best. I just have to take that in for just a second. It is a good. It is actually said that it is a good mic is set on my floor over here. I gotta be honest, the hammy down mic that you've given me is not to be the best microphone like I've had. I love it. It's way better than the Blue Yeti. Way better. Oh, yeah. The pub mic is fantastic. A lot of people use it. J. Joe and everyone else in chat. Happy to see you guys again. Yes, yes. Welcome. We're going to get started here pretty soon. And that's somebody else comes through and tells me that I'm waved the loan out again, and not just Josh. Josh seems to be using some like high, high fidelity, like audio file headphones here lately. Yeah. Sample size of one. If you hear the dog crying, that's because the dog is crying. What do you want from me, little messy? You can't go out there yet. Maybe soon. Yeah. All right. My dogs disappear, so that's a little bit of a problem. There he is. There's buddy. All right. Let's go ahead and get started here. I think I have the mic low enough where I'm not popping close-ups all the time. Anyone hear my mouth breathing? Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. All right. You ready to go? Sir. All right. I'm going to go ahead and hit Start Recording in OBS. I'm going to hit Start Recording in Audacity, and I'm going to cough. Just going to do the good job of keeping that out. Yeah. The noise suppression is not bad, but it overreacts sometimes. All right. You can do the claps whenever you're like, clapping with the mic here is going to be a pain in the ass. This is going to be interesting. Oh, by the way, just so everyone knows, I kind of dropped my microphone when me and Matt first started talking. Yeah. Matt thought that there was an earthquake over here, and I was possibly dead. All right. This should be fun. Three, two, one. Actually, not bad. You're kind of in sync right now. It won't last, but... Not with that attitude. All right. Okay. So we're skipping the news today, by the way, everybody. So this will be the... Hi. You're not a good podcast dog, are you? No, you're not. Well, I mean, if the goal is to hear the dog in the podcast, he's doing great. I mean, I'd say have her on as a regular guest. Why don't you get up there and lay down and be a good dog? You could be a good dog. I mean, you're normally a good dog. Like you've been possessed by an evil demon. Okay. You've got to get that attention, man. Politics in the chat, really? Hullame. Seriously, don't take that nonsense elsewhere. Why would anyone post political stuff in a Linux podcast? What is happening? Yeah. I don't know. All right. Let's go ahead and get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Linuxcast. I'm your host, Matt. And I'm Tyler. He's in sync. Holy crap. If you're watching the video, just so you know, he's on... Well, you'll tell us what you're on, but that sounded bad. But the operating system that he's using causes his lips to be out of his webcam to be completely out of sync. So just know that if he looks like it's a Japanese movie and actually we should just make you black and white and then it would be perfect. I mean, people would understand. Darth Vader says he's watching both mine and DT's dreams. Yeah. I'm sure he's more highly produced than mine. So anyways, this is the Linuxcast. We talked about Linuxy things. We're going to talk about some Linuxy things. So just briefly, before we jump in an announcement, this is the last Linuxcast of this format. We're changing things up starting next week a little bit. We're running out of big topics. So we're going to just start doing more newsy type stuff next week. We're still... I'm sure that our first episode in that format is going to be very beta. So just, I mean, we're still in beta mode right now. So I mean, I don't know really what you're expecting from us. But anyways, that will happen starting next week. It's a little bit different. Same time. We do record this live every Friday around three o'clock p.m. Eastern time. Today, we're going to be doing a speed run because Matt needs to leave by four o'clock or so. So just if you wonder why we're moving things along a little bit faster than normal, that's the reason why. Although, given the fact that I'm apparently in ramble mode, we'll probably hear you around six o'clock. So anyways, Tyler, what have you been up to this week on Linux? Well, moving to OpenBSD. So that's why their webcam might be out of sync. I've got to work on... We've got to come up with a solution for that problem. But the reason I'm on OpenBSD is because I've pretty much gotten... I've been fed up with Linux just because it keeps making a liar out of me. And also, I'm not really keen to going back and putting Windows on this machine again. So anyway, the reason I'm not on Fedora specifically anymore is actually kind of funny. So I decided to do a live stream talking about me using Fedora, the pre-release, the beta that's out right now for 37. And it was phenomenal. I mean, I had an absolutely fantastic time on it. Wayland was working superb. It was awesome. It was just overall a great user experience. And then I did the live stream where I talked about how nice Wayland has gotten, how well it's treating me now. And actually just overall, I could not have a greater time with Fedora. I pressed the end live, but legit pressed it. And the second the live stream ended, I started getting screen flickering on Wayland, which is apparently a problem that can happen. And it wasn't tied to having any application open or anything. And it persisted over multiple reboots. So, yeah, literally I decide to tell the world publicly that I like Wayland and it's treating me nice and it's great. And it shits the bed literally right after that. That was very annoying. Okay. I would just like to point out that you were on a beta. Yes. You're on a beta. You should have been using the stable version and you wouldn't have had any problems. Well, I can't say that. I don't use Wayland. I don't understand this thing where people use Wayland and then are surprised when it goes bad. I mean, Wayland is just not ready. I'm sorry. And I apologize to the 10 people in the chat who are going to say, oh, but Wayland works fine on my computer. Well, good for you. Uh, for the rest of us who do more complex things than just browse through Chrome all day, you know, it's just, it's not ready. It has flaws. And I don't really think that that is arguable. It's just not there yet. It has. I don't say how you can argue that new technology will have problems. Like, of course, it gets new. It's just going to have issues. But again, my experience is not everyone's experience. I know plenty of people that are using the pre-release of Fedora and have been using it for way longer than I was and have not had any issues. It's completely fine. So I haven't tried the beta yet at all. And I don't think that I will, at least on heart. I might try it in the, um, I might try it in like a VM or something just for, you know, shits and giggles, but I probably wouldn't put it on hardware. I probably wouldn't even upgrade to 37 until 36 is out of support. Um, I'm just having such a good experience with 36. I don't want to jinx it. So also still, still not going to use Wayland. I'm just going to, I mean, right now I'm using Q-Tile. Uh, I do want to use the, the Wayland version of Q-Tile for a little while, but I doubt that very much that I'm going to go there and say, oh my God, this is a wonderful experience. I'm never going back to X or, uh, I don't foresee that happening. I just really don't. There's, there's going to be too many things there that just won't work. So like, I won't be able to use any of my Rofi stuff. As far as I know, Rofi doesn't work on Wayland. I may be wrong about that now, but at one point I didn't work on Wayland. Um, I know there are alternatives, but right now I'm like, I'm not interested in finding alternatives. I did that once. I switched from Windows, went to Linux, found my alternatives. I'm happy with those alternatives. I don't want to have to do it a third time. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I completely get that. That's Wayland. All right. Anyways, uh, so you switched to PSD. Now, uh, also, as I do every week when Tyler's using something new, bets on over under when he switches to the next thing. Um, uh, super chats for the bets. The sad part is, is almost every single person that would make a bet on how long, because people did were placing bets on when I'd move away from Fedora. And I have to be honest, every single one of them were completely inaccurate because they were all way too long. People were like, people were like two days, three days. And like, I'm not kidding. Like after the live stream ended, I spent maybe 24 hours doing constant reboots, trying to fix it and do everything. And then after that I was just like, no, can't do it anymore. I'll try something. I'll just go back and give OpenBSD a good another shot. It's been really good. You know, if you, you've been in sync since we hit record, I'm just putting this out there. If, if that album could go away, BST sounds like it'd be perfect for you because you liked, you liked the tinkering of it. Um, and you know, you like make videos about it. It sounds like that's your home. You just got to fix the little problems. Yeah. Yeah. That's really it. It's just rough around the edges. Um, my biggest problem with that, and you gotta remember, I've never used BST, but I'd be, I'd be very worried that an update would come down and just ruin everything. I've heard stories. Anyways, but that happens with, I mean, that's basically just using, using Arch. I mean, it can happen on Arch. I mean, really in all honesty, welcome to using software. Like updates can definitely break your stuff. Yeah. All right. So we did not do a, all right. So first I apologize for us being really, really bad at doing episodes right in a row. It's been completely my fault. Um, just some days I've helped some things just, it just doesn't fall in the place. We can't do an episode. Last week we were going to push back a day. Uh, and then things happened. It did not happen at all. So that's the reason why, uh, some of my experience, this is basically what I'm telling you that I've done for the last two weeks. So, uh, I was originally going to spend a week in Q-Tile. And, uh, I didn't expect, you guys didn't know me. I'm a big I3 fan boy. I3 is my jam. It's fantastic. And I still think it's fantastic. And it's still my favorite window manager, but after spending a week in Q-Tile, I've now spent a second week in Q-Tile. And it is very good. Like it is a very good window manager. Uh, people say, well, oh, it's coded in Python. Um, I'm not a developer, so I don't have this anger towards Python that a lot of developers have. I find Python fine. People say it's slow. I don't see slowness. Maybe it's in the compile time or something like that where they're thinking it's slow or something. I don't know. Uh, I don't, you don't have to compile Q-Tile once you, it's done. So, um, you know, it's just, it's really good. And I, I really, I've learned more. So I've used Q-Tile in the past, right? And at that point, I was really unwilling to learn another language. I learned just enough to be dangerous when it came to Python and, uh, doing some configuration in Q-Tile. This time I've learned way more about Python than I did last time. And I'm really kind of proud of myself, still not a developer, still doing everything in a completely the wrong way. I'm 100% sure, but I'm much further along in terms of knowing stuff, like how to import things from other files and how to change color schemes on the fly. Thanks to Martin Bilts from Source who did that in one of his videos. And I kind of built off from that, which is really good. Um, so I've had a lot of fun. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I'm in Q-Tile right now. That's what I've been doing. I only have one question because I know you've tried Q-Tile before. How is it going with like the multiple workspaces and multiple monitors? It's been working fine. Um, yeah, it's been working really good. It took some getting used to with the whole, the way the, like the workspaces can switch monitors and stuff like that. Once you get used to that. So basically what I've gotten used to, and I wrote this in a blog post, uh, last week, basically my big monitor, the one that I just got, the one that's 32 inches is now like the main monitor. That's where all my work happens. The second monitor might as well not exist. Like it just stores stuff. Like I never hardly do any work over there. And that's because when I need to do some, when there's a application that's on this screen that I needed to work on, I just press the binding and it shows up on this monitor. And I do the work here and then I send it back over to the other one. That's just, it's a storage place. As I wrote in that blog post, I don't know that I really like that workflow because it makes it feel like I've just have one monitor. I think Q-Tile would be fantastic for one monitor. Like if you just had one widescreen monitor, like 48 inches or something like that, like humongously, I think it would be perfect for that. Like probably the best way to manage her for that situation. Just because that's kind of the way, I think X-Monad would probably be the same way because X-Monad handles work spaces exactly the same way as Q-Tile, at least in terms of workflow. But I think for multiple monitors, it works fine. It's just, it changes the way multiple monitors kind of play a role in your workflow, at least for me. The other thing is, is that I've lived these last two weeks with 12 workspaces. And I feel so constrained, man. I was about to say, I was like, are you surviving? Like just barely making it? So almost always I use all the workspaces that I have. Almost always. Sometimes there's one or two that are empty. But it hasn't been so bad that I've added more. Like I have figured out how to add more on Q-Tile, which is something that I didn't figure out how to do before. The problem is, is that the way Q-Tile does their, like the way you assign key bindings for Q-Tile, unless you bind the workspaces to a specific monitor, then it changes. But by default, you, the way the key bindings work is that they're assigned my name. So if I wanted to create a 13th workspace, I could do so by giving the name of the key that I wanted to bind to. So for example, Mod P or something, you know what I mean? So that'd be workspace P. The problem is, is that all of the keys I have with Super and then just a letter or just a number, those are all pretty much all taken up with stuff. So I've, even if I wanted to find a couple keys on my keyboard where I could assign new workspaces, it'd be kind of hard because they're all kind of associated with something else. Like you can't do HJKL because those are the VIM keys. And you move around with Windows with the VIM keys, right? G and S and A are all key chords that I use for something else. Z and X are the ones that I use for text expansion. C and V are obviously CV, B, D and M are all for, wow, brain just completely turned off. Scratch pads, that's the word that I was looking for. So those are all for scratch pads. And then Q obviously is for quitting Windows, W is for the browser. Like all of my, I just went through almost all 26 letters and you guys kind of get the idea that I just cannot find a key here to bind to more workspaces. I can't. Well actually, and I was going to wait to see if you were going to mention this, but it actually gets worse next. It's not just you need, you actually need two because you need the mod and then the letter or number or whatever. And then you also need another one like mod shift or whatever, like whatever you're going to use so that you can actually like not just go to the workspace and send the work. Yeah. So 12 is pretty much the limit from the way I have it right now, just simply because all the other letters have stuff with them. And I didn't, I didn't realize what a mess my key bindings were until I was started to search for blank ones, like think something that I could use. And some of them, like my key bindings just make no sense whatsoever. Like the one for emoji is a, is a key chord. That's super S and then E. You know, some of them, that's not even the weirdest one. There's just some really weird key bindings that I have and I'm just used to, I can't change them now. I'd have to come, it completely ruin everything. That should be a, that should be a challenge. You know what I mean? Well, where we have to use someone else's key bindings for a week. Oh no. Like we could use larbs or something like Luke Smith's larbs, because he has some really weird key bindings too. I know a lot of people like them. I think we should definitely do that one time. Cause I know for a fact, like there's going to be at least one point throughout that experience that both of us hit a point where we go, I can't take that. This is not okay. Who, why would you do that? Cause that's, I mean, that's everything with key bindings. It's personal preference. Yeah. And like anyone who uses a weird choice, anyone who uses super shift, super shift C to close their window. I can't, I can't get behind it. Like I can't super shift shift, super shift C just does not work for me. Super Q has been the way I've closed windows since I've used a window manager, trying to change it to super shift C. We just blow my mind and probably make me not use the computer. Oh wow. Nothing would ever get closed. The worst one is I've seen key bindings for super shift Q to close windows and that one kills me. Cause I'm like, that's what I've always put to like kill the like window manager whole. Yeah. The whole window manager. Yeah, mine too. I never used that to kill a window and that one would scare, like I would almost never close windows. Cause I'd be convinced I'm about to kill my window manager. Well, can you imagine someone who does that as like someone who's really into EMAX and all their key bindings for their window manager are all key cords from EMAX like that. All right. So I was probably about to break this faith. I was like, no, no. Okay. So I have a confession to make before we move on to the contact information and downloaded EMAX again. Nella? No, hell no, hell no. Okay. No, no, do me max. Yeah, I'm trying to see how old you were. All right. So the thing is that I do a lot of markdown writing. That's why I do, I do all of my work work in markdown in an app called mark text and mark text is really good. But I've had multiple situations over the last few weeks where I will latently save something after I'm in the middle of something or whatever, I'll save it. I hit control S and it says that it saved. I will close mark test text or something will cause mark text to close, whether it's my, you know, I shut down my computer or whatever. And I come back and it didn't save. And that's just, that's not okay. Okay. Not when I'm like, I mean, it's never much. It's usually just a few words, but it's just, that's not an okay thing. So I've been looking for a different markdown editor and I haven't found a really good one. I know people say obsidian is really good, has too much weird knowledge based stuff in it. I don't really need. So I downloaded Emacs that has a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, so Emacs is, is nothing. I don't think that I'll make a video on it. I've made too many videos. And I'm pretty sure the last video I made was I'm never trying Emacs again. So I don't want, yeah. Well, I mean, here would be the interesting thing. If you do make a video on Emacs, it should be like months from now when you've like become a like full Emacs user. And you should just do a video like just, just about Emacs, but assuming that everyone else is already like into Emacs and knows everything that you're talking about. Those are the videos that crack me up so much about someone who like, because there's a lot of these videos where people are like explaining Emacs, but they're explaining Emacs to somebody who's used Emacs for two years. I'm like, what? I don't, I don't know what you're doing. Okay. Can you do that key chord one more time, but slower, please? Okay. Moving on to the contact information. You can get in contact with us in any number of ways. Like seriously, there are tons of ways. Most of these can be found at thelinxcast.org slash contact that has all of my contact information has all of Tyler's contact information. You can get a whole of us through many different social media networks, Fostodon or Macedon, Twitter, Discord, all that stuff. All that stuff at Twitter is at thelinxcast.org slash contact. And speaking of thelinxcast.org there, you'll find links to all of our episodes all the way back to season one of the show. So if you want to get caught up on some really bad podcasting, go check it out. It's really good. And I'm not just talking about the ones that we started like at the beginning, like seriously, a couple of weeks ago, bad podcast, I'm sure. So go check that shit out. It's good. Also, you'll find weekly blog posts there from yours truly. I blog about stuff, whatever's on my mind. It's a stream of consciousness. I do one blog post a week. There will never be more than one blog post a week because I don't like doing blog posts, but I've been forcing myself to do it for science. Anyways, youtube.com slash thelinxcast is where you can find all of the videos, obviously. Tyler is on YouTube and he has actually made streams in the last week, which is... And I'm not just saying this. I swear to God, I mean it. There will be videos coming pretty soon. By pretty soon, I mean a couple of days. Right. Anyways, you can find all of his stuff at youtube.com slash Xenio G. You can email us at email at thelinxcast.org. Support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash thelinxcast. And I think that's it. I don't actually have it in front of me. So I was doing it from memory. You guys should be very, very impressed. It's not as if we haven't done 100 episodes of this where the content information has never changed. So anyways, yeah, all that stuff, that's contact information. Make sure you email us, feedback, all that stuff. We're happy to hear from you. We do get your emails. Like I do get your emails. Like if you email me, I'm just a horrible, horrible person that actually responding to emails. So if you have emailed me in the past week or so, or longer than that, sadly, know that I got it, I probably read it. I didn't reply to it because I'm an asshole. Also, I'm just really, I'm just really bad at replying to emails. My own mother could email me. I'd probably respond within a month. I'm just saying. I'm the same. So if anyone's emailed me and I haven't responded, it's the same, man. I'm terrible. Okay. It's not because I don't like you or I read it and then just threw it away. It's because I genuinely haven't even seen it. Sorry. Emails for old people. That's not even true because I am old people. I'm just really bad at it. Don't take offense. There's one guy at the beginning when you first joined that we kept saying, we just started, we kept generalizing like things about the older generation, like my generation, you know, and older and they got really mad. That was just a joke. It was not true. Don't cancel us, please. Moving on to the main topic. So yeah, we're skipping the news this week because we're going to do news next week. That's all we'll do as we said at the beginning. So the main topic is the news I totally forgot that we were going to skip. Yeah. So you're saying you have read your email. Josh, if you send me an email, man, I did not get it. So you, I would have known if you had sent me an email. Plus you have like 12 other ways of getting in contact with me, by the way. Emails. That's so true. Josh has no right to complain about not sending an email. Anyways, moving on to the main topic. The main topic this week is about the Linux community. Now we've talked in the periphery about the Linux community in the past. And we've talked about toxicity in the Linux community in the past and how horrible the Linux community can be in the past. Okay, hold on a second. Again, I really should not have the chat in front of me because I don't know how to pronounce your name. I own. I, Ian, I don't, I'm sorry, I'm butchering that, but I bet TLC is 20 something. No. I'm closer to 40 than I am to 30. I'm just going to put that out there. I was born in 85. Now Tyler, he was born in 97. So he's, he's the younger one. Even though he looks older than me. I don't know how this works. I do not take offense to that at all. Anyways, yes. Anyone not seriously, I do not need the chat in front of me. You guys are just distracting me like crazy. Anyways, so the community talked about how bad Linux can be, right? How bad the Linux community can be in terms of toxicity in terms of not helping people have done a RT FM video in the past. So what I wanted to do today was do two things. So the initial question was, does the Linux, does Linux need the community? That was the original question we were going to start off with. And we will answer that because there has been some talk specifically from the menjaro people that the community is not needed. It's, they don't really need their community. And so we're going to talk about that. But I also want to talk a little bit in terms of a positive aspect of the community. So we'll transition from one to another. So Tyler, do you think that Linux needs the community? Or would it be perfectly fine just to have Linus Turvolds and his crew doing the kernel and then a few distros or whatever that just do their thing without any community input? I'm looking at you, GNOME. So what do you think? It is an interesting question with, I would assume to be a common sense answer. Sure. A piece of software can exist without a community, which by community, you can have a whole bunch of definitions for what a community is or what it means to you. But I guess in this context, the only definition of community that matters is we're talking about users, like a group of people who use the software. If software doesn't have a user base, then it's not necessarily that the software like shouldn't exist or anything, but it's the software can't get better. And what I mean by that is it can't get better in the sense that matters. Here's a great example. Google Stadia had very advanced tech going on behind it. The tech behind Stadia in their game streaming service was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. They've killed it. There was a whole bunch of terrible decisions made to platform-wise, but that's besides the point. The reason it died is because no one's using it. So if you don't have users, it doesn't matter how awesome the software is, it can't improve or be meaningful in any way that matters. To me, I don't see a world in which a community for a piece of software doesn't matter. What's your opinion on that? Okay, so before I get into mine, there are a couple things that I want to say. So first, there are examples within the Linux community of projects that don't really take community input well. So GNOME is one, obviously, Manjaro is kind of another one. Really small projects that are just one person. For example, VIM is a really good example of a project that doesn't take community input all that well. If you look at the commits for VIM, it's just a creator. That's all there is in terms of commits there. It's just the dude who created it. He doesn't really like to take community input. He does listen to people, but any commits that go into VIM, he does. That's the reason why NeoVim exists because they wanted to take it into a different direction and they wanted to have a more community focused version of VIM. You can see NeoVim has done that. If you look at the commits for NeoVim, there are a whole bunch of different people who do commits on their GitHub page. There are examples of this working both ways. Despite my feelings on GNOME, GNOME is a project that flourishes without community input. They pissed the community off all the time. Maybe not so much right now, but in the past, they've removed things that the community really wants and has had really harsh opinions on. They've had a desktop environment that was really, really freaking slow for years. They just never fixed it. Really, GNOME didn't start getting even usable until Ubuntu switched back to GNOME and started pushing stuff upstream. They do take community input from big corporations, apparently, but not from the general community. There are examples of it working kind of both ways. My opinion on this is, of course, like you, it's definitely something that you can have an open source project. Obviously, I just listed a couple where there's just a small group of people that are in charge and they make all the decisions. There's no large, like, open source effort to develop or support a project. You can do it that way, but you limit yourself to ideas just from that group. One of the greatest things about open source is when you have a somewhat large group of developers working on stuff is that you can take ideas from multiple different people and kind of have a more open and maybe broader view on the direction of the project. It can make it so that your project gets new features and has different areas of development in something that you just can't do with just a few people. But it also, obviously, like this is the big one, it gets you a broader workforce of volunteers. If you're just having like just one person or just a group of people that you're close to, like these are the only people you allow to develop, you're limiting yourself to just those people. You are shutting yourself away from the workforce of volunteers that probably happily take some of your projects and try issues or whatever and fix those. If you don't accept pull requests from the community. I know I keep going back to people projects that are on Git because that's usually the community place where people develop together. Obviously, this stuff works beyond that. In terms of the main question, do projects need the community? I think the answer is, of course, for the most part. And I think it also goes a little bit deeper because, excuse me, because I mean, whether or not a project takes feedback from the community at all or well or whatever is it's definitely like you can make an argument based off of whether or not they need to do it or they benefit from it. But an even more thing is it's like you need a community. You, at the very least, whether or not you're going to listen to them is a whole different debate or topic, but you at least need the community. Again, even if you're not going to take the feedback, if no one, if in a public space like the Internet, if no one is interested in what you're doing, eventually, like psychologically, you're going to stop doing it because there can't be anything more self-evident than what you're doing is meaningless than when you put it out online where literally almost everyone on the earth, most people, granted there's still a lot of people that don't have Internet access, but most people on the planet have access to Internet. And if none of them find what you're doing interesting, you have no community at all around your project, whatever. Eventually, psychologically, it's going to click that you're doing something wrong. No one out of millions, possibly millions of people find you interesting. Or your project is so niche. You know what I mean? Nobody cares, right? It's the same thing with starting a YouTube channel. If you start a YouTube channel and nobody watches your videos, it's really hard to keep making YouTube videos because why would you bother doing it? It's a little bit different because with YouTube and creating content like that, the best way to get a community is to continue to create content. With an open source project, it's a little bit harder because you're not continuing to update stuff, but there has to be a source of an audience to begin with. You have to have like a lot of times projects become popular because they were shared by someone, like a YouTuber, or they were shared by the Reddit community or something. That's how people there's no feed, there's no open source Twitter feed where just new projects just kind of pop up. I mean, there probably is. Of course, now I say that there probably is one of those things where there's like a bot that tweets out random open source projects from GitHub that probably exists, but the discovery of new projects kind of relies on Reddit and Twitter and Discord and stuff. It relies on those things for people discovering your projects. If nobody can discover it because you don't have a community, like as Tyler said, it makes it hard for you to stay motivated to continue to develop it. I mean, unless you're developing it just for yourself and you don't give a rat's ass if nobody else uses it, in which case maybe you didn't even share it online. You know what I mean? And that's the thing that a lot of people don't even take into account. Like, no matter what, when you're creating or I wouldn't say no matter what, but in most cases, if you're creating software, even if you have a vision or you have an ideal and I got that from sugarcane in chat, even if you have a vision or you have a goal in mind with software, that it doesn't matter whether or not other people use it, the community of that software is you. Even if you're making it just for you, you have your community. You are the community. As extremely niche and as singular as that is, it's still true. You are developing it for you, so you're the community. If you're creating something like software, you're not just going to make it so that you can literally throw it in the trash bin. Because if you make a piece of software and you don't use it and no one else uses it, then why the hell did you make it? You might as well just throw it in the trash bin. You haven't made anything. So when it comes to motivation, you pretty much need a community. You need someone to be using it. And I'm not afraid to say this because I'm sure we're about to get into it, but I'm completely ignorant and have no idea about what's going on with Manjaro and I'm saying that they don't need a community. But just hearing that statement at face value, which I'm sure that people and groups of people, which is what Manjaro is in all projects, group people making something, people are complex. So I'm sure that I could be missing out on some details or what they truly meant by it. But at face value, saying that you don't need a community is stupid. Even if you're not going to listen to them, that's a totally different statement than you don't need people. Manjaro, I'm pretty sure, has developers that would like to get paid, even in some small way, for what they're doing on Manjaro and their free time that they're dumping in developing Manjaro. Without a community, there's no way that you'll ever make money off of what you're doing. There's no meaning behind it. If every single person that uses Manjaro disappeared tomorrow and they had no one, no one would use it, no one would touch it, why would the developers keep developing? It makes no sense. I agree and I can't tell you the details around why they said that. I just know that they said something of that vein. It's been a while and I think it was responding to maybe E-Buzz Central. I think that that's where I got that notion from, because he had some kerfuffle with the Manjaro developers. Anyways, they've obviously had some weird interactions with the community in the past where they've taken code and used it as their own. It's really weird. I'm not sure all the details there, so I really shouldn't comment, but this is a transition into the next part where I think it's more positive and why it's so baffling that some people don't want to have community input and stuff like that, is that the community of Linux is absolutely amazing. We've talked about this before in some detail, but the idea that you can live as a Linux user, as a Linux developer, without experiencing what it means to be actually a part of the Linux community is disappointing. It's not impossible. You can live in a silo and be a loner in the Linux community, just like you can't in any community. You can just use Linux and maybe you don't even know it. You could be the proverbial fly on the wall. You can do that. Maybe you don't even know you're using Linux. I mean, I know a lot of people who don't. They had their Linux installed on by someone else and they just use Chrome and do jigsaw puzzles online all day. That's what they do. They don't know they're using Linux. They don't care. So it is possible, but for the people who explicitly install Linux on their own, it feels kind of sad to me if you feel like you don't want to be a part of the community. And I think that this is where the negative aspects of Linux kind of come in because a lot of people, they come into Linux and they hear all these great things about how awesome the Linux community is and how easy it is to get help and all these fantastic places where you can find like-minded people and then they discover the assholes. You know what I mean? And that turns them away. Like maybe they continue to use Linux, but they never seek out friendships and relationships with people. They never get involved in discussions, never watch podcasts or get into the podcast chat. They just don't interact in that way because they had that initial really bad experience. But that's what makes it so a little depressing because in broad strokes, the Linux community is the absolute best thing about Linux. Both you and I have had negative things to say about Linux itself. It can be hard to install. It's obviously not this most stable thing in the world. Wayland hates us. Pipewire hates us. We have all these things to just go wrong all the time. The one thing that has never let us down is the Linux community. It's the one place where you and I have both found friends. We found each other through the Linux community. That's the one thing about Linux that is consistently overall very, very good. And it's- Well, and I think this is, it highlights a problem with people because the Linux community, we're kind of a, we have a twofold issue where when we let anybody in, like if you want to become part of the Linux community, there is no barrier to entry, like at all. So anyone can come in and with that comes people who are new. For one, Linux is completely free. The other options cost money. So we're more likely to get younger people in the group. And younger people don't know how to articulate dislike for something. Like I'm, shit, I'm 25 and I still fuck up a lot. Okay. So like as a young kid, I'm sure that like when it comes to trying to articulate that, because with Linux, there's thousands of choices. You can choose anything. Like just try and choose a DE and see like within 15 minutes, you've got 23 different options, which one's the best. People don't, and so like for people who don't know how to articulate their, their preference and dislike of certain things or, you know, whatever, it gets complex. And it's very easy to sound like an asshole, even if you're not an asshole, even if you're not trying to be rude, it's very easy. If you're, if you've not very socially developed to come off as an asshole, when that's not your intention at all. And then also we, because the barrier to entry is so low, and most people, if not almost everyone who is truly into the FOSS ideals and mindset, we are all freedom of speech advocates. Like you should be able to say whatever you want. If I disagree with you and think what you're doing is wrong, I should be able to say it. If you disagree with me and think I'm being a stupid, entitled douchebag, you have the right to say that. Perfect. And with that comes a community that doesn't kick out assholes. So assholes can stay around. And I think we've had a discussion on whether or not that's a good thing, but at the end of the day, it, yeah, and it's, but, but at the end of the day, I think it does more good than harm. Because I mean, people who become assholes or become very antagonistic and stuff, you're only going to further them by kicking them out of a group. Like those people are only going to get more ostracized and more upset and more agitated. So I think, I think with the Linux community, what keeps some people out of Linux for a few years or possibly their entire lifetime, they'll never come back and check it out because some guy was a super douche to them. They have no interest in coming back. If I feel like for, for a lot of those people, it's, there's nothing like that's not a wrong perception because you probably did have a terrible experience with a douchebag. But I would hope that over time the, the ideal of allowing that person to have their voice and allowing them to show off who they are and you be able to decide whether or not you want to interact with that person ever again. It's a, it's a valuable trait and a valuable thing to have, especially in a group of people. I mean, this is me personally, but I don't, I don't think there's any better kind of community than, than one that is actually willing to let the people who others wouldn't allow to talk and maybe don't even want to hear from them, at least give them a voice, like let them talk. If you don't want to listen, don't listen. I think that's a good trait to have in a community. All right. Yeah. So two things. First, Nate Pick, thanks for the super chat. I appreciate that. Another thing is that they're having a debate over whether or not Windows is free because you said that all the other options cost money and Tyler is wrong technically they, the, you can get Mac and Windows for free, but he was also right in that you pay in other ways. Well, I mean, saying that it's free is completely disingenuine. Like, technically, yes, you're right, but the only way you're going to get a copy of Mac OS, obviously, I mean, legally, of course, there are much more shadier ways of getting things, but the context of legality, the only way you're going to get Mac period is by buying a Mac, which I don't know if you don't include the cost of the operating system in like $2,000. Like, okay, cool. That's your own decision. Sure. The laptop's worth two grand on its own. It definitely didn't manufacture it for like 500 bucks. Okay. And then also on the Windows side, it's just disingenuine because like home is free. Yes. But with quite a few stipulations. So the thing is, it's free now, but the reason why it's free is because everyone has a Linux license and they've had it for years. It came with a computer somewhere along the line or Windows. Yeah, I mean, Windows, I'm sorry, Windows license. Everyone has one. Somewhere they picked that up along line, whether they bought it with a computer or they got it like me when they literally bought it on a CD and it came on a little card with the 25-digit number you had to read out. Somewhere along the line, you paid for Windows. You just might not know it. You bought it with a piece of hardware and that activation key got attached to your Microsoft account. So you paid for Windows. You did. You just may not have paid explicitly for it. Also, they steal all of your data and take the soul of your children. So you pay in other ways. They're trying to shove one drive down your throat. Yes. Yay. Anyways, try uninstalling Office and also welcome to McAfee, bitches. Anyways, the Linux community is absolutely amazing and we have numerous examples of that being true. And we've talked about the whole bad Apple situation many times in the past and what we could do about it, how it could be handled. And really, there is no solution for that because even in a community that is well-moderated, like if you are on a social media site that does moderation, moderation is imperfect no matter what because it's a human thing that they have to do. Either it is a software system that was created by humans that is not perfect or it's done by actual humans who also interpret rules in different ways and stuff like that. So moderation itself is not perfect, but the Linux community is completely unmoderated and having it so that you would moderate the Linux community in some way. I don't know how we'd even begin to do that. It's just not a very good... I don't think it's a very good idea. I also think it's completely impossible because the Linux community is not just like Twitter. Twitter exists and is a one monolithic thing, right? It can be moderated in theory. That's the most important part because we're spread across multiple platforms. Linux can be a large... Different projects, yeah. Like you can't put all Linux community underneath one Discord rule set. It doesn't work. There's no auto mod, right? So the thing is that it can't be moderated. The solution to fixing the asshole problem in the Linux community would be moderation, but that's impossible. It can't happen. So instead, the solution is to grow thicker skin. And it sounds like an asshole solution. Like you just kind of have to take it, but you kind of have to. That's kind of the solution for is to realize that you're on basically a forum of people where anybody can say whatever they want. Unfortunately, that includes the negative people and you just kind of have to put up with the negative people. And if you can do that, you then will have access to the vast majority of people who are really good people and are willing to help, are willing to perform, willing to form friendships and relationships and take part in events and meetups and all this stuff. All that stuff. That's the only way you improve too. You can improve if you're not... Personally, you won't grow if you don't hit things that challenge you. And there's nothing more challenging than being nice and courteous to an asshole. That's the best way to piss them off too. Seriously, if you encounter someone who's being a dick to you, be the nicest person right back to him and it'll either make them angrier, which is highly entertaining, or it will confuse them. They don't know how to respond. They'll just wander off in confusion. So you encounter a dick. Be nice to that person because sometimes people who are assholes aren't assholes all the time. They're just having a bad day. So being nice to them doesn't cost you anything. And also, if they're an asshole all the time, it will either confuse them or piss them off more, which will just provide you with some free entertainment. So that's always my option when I find someone who's being a douchebag. Just be nice to them because most of the time they don't know how to respond to it. Oh, thank you. Thank you for thinking of that. I mean, this should be pretty self-evident, but be sincere when you're being nice to them. Sincere niceness to someone who's being really rude to you, I would say more times than them just getting more angry. They just get extremely confused. That's the really likely one. They're like, what the hell is going on? It's just when you're upset, you're not ready for someone to be nice to you when you're like hurling insults at them. It's just like, what's happening? The easiest way to, like in a real life, real life argument, if you're fighting with someone and you don't know how to end the argument, just hug the person. They'll stop yelling at you. That's going to confuse the fuck out of them because you're hugging. Wait a minute, I was really angry and now I'm getting a hug. Where did this go? It's in interesting ways. My one line that I would say is probably the best one to use in those situations where someone is upset at you or just upset in general. Just say, I don't know what's going on in your life, but I genuinely hope it gets better. That one right there is normally what I go with when someone's really upset. Yeah. All right. The Linux 2. The Linux 2. Thank you for the super chat. I appreciate that. All right. So those are our thoughts on the Linux community. I'm sure we could go on for another little while, but it is four o'clock. It is time. That was a speed run, if there ever was a speed run. So we do have thingies of the week to talk about. So we're moving on to the last portion of the show, which we have creatively entitled thingy of the week. We could have called it any number of things. App of the week, pics of the week, tricks of the week. We could have called many things, but those were all taken. So we called them thingies of the week. Get your mind out of the gutter. That's not what we're talking about. But anyways, we have thingies of the week. Tyler, your thingy of the week. Mine is lemon bar. I've never used this before, ever. I just tried it out on OpenBSD, because I saw someone had like a, I can't remember, like they were using, they just were starting it up and using it on XenoDM, the login manager that comes with OpenBSD. And so I decided to give it a shot and try it out. And so far I'm actually pleasantly surprised with the simplicity of like how it works. And I mean, it's not bad. I actually enjoy it. So I don't know if it comes like default on like most Linux systems or not. I know I've seen it like plenty of people using it before. You can obviously download it from the AUR, but I think you have to build it everywhere else. It has been a long time since I looked at it, so I could be wrong now. But yeah, it's a good bar. Yeah. All right. But pleasantly surprised. What about you? What window manager are you using it in? Oh, I'm using CWM right now, one of the built-in OpenBSD window managers. And it's a floating window manager, but it's got a lot of tiling window manager like aspects to it. So it's probably like, for people who like OpenBox, it's very kind of similar to OpenBox. Again, it's not like a copy or anything or trying to be like OpenBox, but it's kind of similar. So been enjoying it. Yeah, cool. So my thinking of the week this week is something that I've talked about before and wasn't that impressed with. And that is Faustodon. So Faustodon is an instance of Mastodon. And if you remember, if you've watched the channel for any amount of time, you know that I've made a video on Mastodon before. And I was not impressed with it simply because like we were just talking about with the Linux community only. Mastodon, at large, where you have no filters whatsoever, is really, really bad. It takes the magnification of the small Linux community and opens it up to the whole damn world. And there are way more assholes. And there's a lot of really bad shit on the federated timeline of just opened up Mastodon. It's not a great place to be. You can filter that stuff out and you have to do it manually. Or you could join something called Matt or Faustodon. Faustodon is a Mastodon instance, but they've filtered out quite a bit of the stuff like, you know, child porn and stuff. That's why you don't have to see any of that stuff. Oh, thank God. Yeah, right. So some people call that censorship. I call that just I don't want to see that stuff. So I'm happy to be there where there's some censorship, I suppose. But anyways, Faustodon is a much nicer place of Mastodon. And it obviously focuses on freedom of source software. So a lot of the people who are on that instance deal with Linux and open source stuff. So yeah, Faustodon is really good. And I've been spending a lot of time on there lately. And I have a set now so that when I tweet something, it also appears on Faustodon. So that is so you can get my stuff both ways, which is nice. So yeah, Faustodon, check that out. Faustodon.org is where you'd find that. Check it out. So that is it this week for the Linux cast. We will be recording again live next Friday with our little bit of a change of a new format. So that should be fun to listen to. If you want to watch live, you can do so on youtube.com slash linuxcast. We record live every Friday around three o'clock p.m. Eastern time. Join us in the chat. You'll happily distract us when you do funny things in the chat, especially if you start arguing about Windows. We're gonna you'll see you'll just every once in all, you'll know that there's a somebody doing something funny in the chat because I'll just be over if you're laughing my ass off while Tyler's talking. He's not saying anything funny, but I'm laughing at the chat. So that happens a lot. So if you see my weird facial expressions and you're like, what is Matt making those weird facial expressions? Yeah, I'm interacting facially with with the chat. Anyways, it just happens. So before we go, I should take them home to think the current patrons, patreon.com slash linuxcast is where you can go if you want to support me. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing people. Seriously, without you, the channels would not be anywhere close to where it is right now. So thanks so very much for your support. Again, youtube.com slash linuxcast. If you want to watch this live, if you want timestamps or watching this afterwards, timestamps do appear on the post recorded thing on YouTube. It just usually takes a couple hours because I, you know, I come back and do it later. So definitely if you want timestamps, come back later. They'll be there. Thanks everybody for watching. We'll see you next week.