 So, I just came across a YouTube video that said change is coming to Linux. And basically, the guys talking about how there's a lot more people coming to Linux and that's upsetting some people who have been in Linux for a while, which I do agree with that point of it. So, I've been using Linux for 13 years. And in his video, he was talking about how the people who have been using Linux for years are upset that a lot of people are coming over and using proprietary software, which is completely understandable. So, let me explain here, a lot of time people go, oh, Linux is more secure than Windows. And other people are like, oh, no, it's not. Here's the truth. The truth is, Linux can be more secure than Windows because of the way it does things. But when people come in, Linux can be, it's free and open source, so it can be anything you want. So, if you come over and you want to make Linux just like Windows, you can do that. You can do a lot of things to make it just like you can make it look like Windows, act like Windows. The thing is, the more you make it like Windows, the more it's going to be like Windows where it's going to be bloated. It's going to be large. It's going to have security flaws, and the kernel itself doesn't really secure you from those things. It's how the user works. So, one of the things I tell people, and I see a lot of people doing this, even people who've been around Linux for a while, is there are times where you might have to go find some software yourself. But almost everything you need to do, if you have a decent distro, the packages you need are going to be in the repositories for your distro. And you should stick to those, in my opinion, as much as possible. Very few times do you need to go out of those repositories. Now, if you are great with computers, and you have a great understanding of them, you could go and you can vet software yourself and figure out, is this secure, is this not. But for the most part, most people don't have, don't do that, don't know how to do that. And even if you know how to, you don't have time to do to check all the packages you have. So, having a good distro with repositories that are checked and maintained by package maintainers who know what they're doing, not only do they have a chance to check the software and make sure it's secure, but they also check it to make sure that it's compatible with all the other packages on your system. That's why sometimes these distros, sometimes like with Debian, you'll have unstable testing and stables, because not only do you need to make sure this program is stable by itself, but you need to make sure that it's not going to conflict with other packages on your system. And when you have lots of packages, that can take a while. So again, a lot of users come over and I did the same thing. Back in 2006, when I first tried switching Linux, so I've told this story before, I had tried Linux here and there, I heard a lot of it, I really wanted to try it, but every time I go to it, I end up going back to Windows because there was something I needed to do in Windows. So one day, back in 2006, I said to myself, I'm going to try this Linux thing. I'm going to install it, and I will not touch Windows for two weeks. After two weeks, I was hooked. I was using Linux for everything, everything but video editing. And it took three or four more years before I finally switched over my video editing to Linux with Cayden Live. Still somewhat unstable, but when you've got a stable version of it, it worked great, and it's very, very stable right now. But even though I had switched to Linux, besides the video editing, I had dual partition. Even when I was doing stuff on Linux, I was really still trying to do things the Windows way. I was big into using, on Windows, I was using batch files or visual basic when I was writing stuff. And when I switched over, I wanted to get visual basic running. Now, here's a program. Oh, what was the name of that program? It was just, I just had it. Anyway, there is a program. It's probably in your repositories. It's for designing software. Their mascot is like a little shrimp or something like that. Oh, I'm drawing a blank on the name of it. Anyway, it was somewhat, would let you take visual basic code and code from a lot of different languages and compile it for Linux. I also tried using wine to get my program. If I was doing simple dialogues and stuff, I could get my programs running in wine. And I tell you what, it was just a headache. It was horrible. And it's like, why am I doing this? And finally, I just figured out how to do things using free and open source programming languages. But there were a lot of other things. I was trying to use wine. I was trying to do this. I was trying to get all these. I said, oh, I'll just use Linux and get all these programs. I like running over here. And it just, it doesn't really happen. But as soon as I accepted, instead of going, oh, I'm using these packages, let's see what's available on Linux. And you know what? Yeah, sometimes it's hard learning something new. But give it a little bit of time. You'll get used to it and you'll probably end up liking it better. And that's pretty much what happened. And now, besides drivers and maybe some video codecs, I don't really have any proprietary software on my system. And it's great. And I get there's no such thing as a perfect system. Even if you buy hardware that you have all these drivers that are free and open source, which is hard to find hardware like that, and you replace the BIOS, as we all know, the processor has operating systems on it. The proprietary software, there's really nothing you can do about. So there is no perfect system. But you should try to limit your proprietary software, your dependency on it. Because things just are better that way. And I tell you what, it's like you still just look at the size of applications. Just that Windows alone or Windows install without Office, without Photoshop, just basic Windows. It's huge compared to what I would consider most distros of Linux to be bloated these days, which come in like a one and a half gig to two gig ISO, which is compressed and usually uncompressed. This is probably about four gigs. To me, that's still bloated. But at least you have a full Office suite with most of those. You have GIMP for photo editing. And it comes with almost all the software that commonly is used by people. And it's still a quarter, if not smaller than a standard Windows size, because proprietary software tends to get bloated. It's just the nature of it, because especially when it's a big project, these companies don't want even their developers knowing how everything works. So people work on portions of the code, and they don't ever see other portions of the code. So this lot of code is overlapped. And you also have things suites like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, I mean, where you can get these different parts of it separate. They're not together. They're not sharing the code. They're split where they should be serving code. And you look at something like LibreOffice. It's a much smaller in size, because your Word documents are going to use code that your spreadsheets use, and it overlaps. It's not bloated. And there's lots of reasons that proprietary software gets bloated, but that's a lot of it right there. Another thing he talked about in that video was how newcomers to Linux get the RTFM read the manual. I tell you what. When I switched over to Linux, I don't remember anyone ever saying that to me, and I had lots of questions. But every time I had a question, I would search for it first, then I would go and say, hey, I'm trying to figure out how to do this. This is what I figured out so far. I still don't get it. And people would help me. The only time I ever see people say to read the manual or get some sort of nasty answer like that is usually, and I've done this myself, someone will come in to a forum or a chat room or an IRC and be like, how do you do whatever? And I will highlight and copy their question, put it into a search engine, and get a result and be like, here's your response. And the person didn't even try. Now, maybe that person did search, saw the answer, and just didn't understand it. Well, in that case, they should explain that when they're asking the question, hey, I'm trying to figure out how to do this. This is the answer I found. I'm not getting this part of it. You need to get better at asking questions. If you're getting a nasty response, it's because you either didn't do the legwork or you're doing a poor job of asking the question. And yeah, people can always be nicer. I can be a little sarcastic responding to questions sometimes, but usually it's because when you're answering lots of questions, it's kind of a waste of time when someone could have just put their question into a search engine and gotten an answer. And sometimes, there's a whole nother topic, but sometimes I'm trying to find answers for stuff on topics I know nothing about, so I start searching and I'm searching and I'm not finding my answer, but eventually you'll find not your answer, but maybe a wording or a phrase that is different. It's what you want, but it's the more proper term than what you're searching. You can take that and search and then you get the results. But do a little bit of legwork before you just expect everyone to do something for you. But yeah, this has bothered me for years. I think it's great that people are coming over to Linux, but what is the point of switching to an open source operating system if you're going to bog it down with proprietary software? And again, I'm far from perfect, but I continuously tried to weed out the little bit of proprietary software I use. I'm currently doing that a lot with my phone because there are three programs that I mainly used or had used on my phone. Google Photos, Google Hangouts, and Google Maps. And so far, I've been able to replace these two. Google Maps is very hard to replace. I'm trying to use OpenStreetMaps, but it isn't quite there. And it's a safety thing driving around. You don't have time trying to fumble around with your phone trying to figure things out. But I'm trying it. I'm trying it. So that's basically the pretty much the last piece of software that in voice search, which I'm also working on open source applications to try to get some sort of voice search. But those are the one and a half things that are left. If I can get rid of Google Maps, I might be able to do without the voice texting typing. Anyway, sometimes it takes a little bit of sacrifice, but I'm continuously moving in that direction. And I've been doing this for 13 years, and I'm still not there. And I probably never will be there. Again, there's always going to be drivers and codecs. But the more we use free and open source software, the more companies are likely to offer it to us. If you have two options that do something and you have your proprietary and your free, and everyone starts choosing this, this company is not going to survive unless they make changes. And that's what we need to do. Anyway, yeah, just a thought. Your computer, you do what you want. If you want to put a bunch of proprietary software on there, but then you can't go, oh, this Linux is running horrible. It's no better than Windows when you start getting malicious software on there or it starts running slow because it's bogging down or updates get broken because of some proprietary package you have. That's it. You got to understand that the people who are upset about this are people who are trying to help these newcomers, not scare them away. Maybe they could be a little bit better about explaining that, but yeah, when you're switching from Windows to Linux, there's a lot going on and maybe you're just not getting what these people are saying, but stop and listen to them. You've heard so much about how great Linux is. You've heard about how great, how much these people love free and open source software and so much that you've now are trying to make the leap. Maybe you should listen to them and understand why. So you don't make the same mistakes you've been making over on the Windows side or whatever side you are coming from. But that's it. That's my thoughts on that. I thank you for watching and I hope that you have a great day.