 Hey everybody, welcome to the Linuxcast. I'm your host Matthew Everett. I'm joined by Martin Burke. How are you doing, Martin? Well, I'm doing well, Matt. How's yourself? I'm out of practice. I don't remember how to do a proper cast. It took me a while to figure it out. Uh, it's been a while. Uh... Oh no, yeah. That's rummaging around for the microphone to be fair. I couldn't find it. Well, it's just been a while since we've done a show. It's alright. Stuff happens. So, uh, you've been doing anything cool on Linux lately? In short, no. Um, still under lockdown here. They're lighting restrictions. So, I've been trying to escape my hole and get out in the garden and do some things. I have dusted off my Pinebrook Pro, though, and in the hopes I can do a bit of work outside. Um, so, I mean, I'll probably will stick under the distro, won't it? But, currently, it's really in Manjaro. It's all updated fine. But, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. I think Manjaro, at the moment, is about the best for the Pinebrook Pro. Uh, just a quick note. I think they're releasing some for you guys, aren't they, with your keyboard? I think they've put some pre-orders. So, if you want to, um, get a Pinebrook Pro if you, um, go up onto the .64 website. I mean, it's the best bang for the book you're going to get, to be fair. I'll take a look at it. I wish you had more RAM. Yeah, that's what I think. I don't know whether to sell it, get a good price for it, because, I mean, it literally does sit here doing nothing off, getting out now and again, and just wait for the next iteration of it. But, no, it's not too bad, to be fair. For what we use it for, it's fine. But, yeah, I know what you mean about the RAM, but it's just going to have less tabs open, really. Well, I won't be able to do my video editing. What do I look, you know? No, no chance. Um, I think it was Jason. How about you? Hey, wasn't Jason Manjaro that did the, he tried to do, um, Kaden live on, like, the Raspberry Pi or something. That was fun. Uh, so, I did my first live stream this week on the YouTube channel, which was a disaster. Um, I mean, it went fine, but the audio was horrible. Uh, and during the time, I looked at the, at Awesome Winner Manager for the first time, and I cannot get my head around Lua, like, at all. Like, it's just completely beyond me. It was, that's where really the disaster came in, because I was just looking at the docs for Awesome, which is written in Lua, right? And I just couldn't figure it out. I mean, granted, it was my first time, so I didn't, I haven't spent any time with it beforehand. So maybe if I spend a little bit more time with it. But I think Lua's going to be one of those, um, languages that I just can't get a hold of. Kind of like Haskell, which is what Xmon has written in. I just couldn't get my head around them. So that's what I've been messing around with. I've also been scripting a little bit. Uh, but I'll talk about that a little bit at the end, because I actually wrote a script that I'm using as my app of the week this week. That's something. Oh, cool. I see a certain YouTuber was bigging you up. Yeah, yeah, this sort of too, mentioned this time too, which is crazy. Went from 400 subscribers before he did that, and now we're at 2220. So. And the main thing is that you kept your subscribers tuned in, because I'll do that. I'll check out this channel and you'll go, oh, yeah, this is okay. No, actually, I'll unsubscribe, but you kept them and grown on it. So props to you for that, Matt. Yes, it's been pretty good. I was actually, I mean, you should have seen, because I watch all of his videos, right? So I, uh, you know, I watched it on my phone. I was like, you know, because he does one of those YouTubers you should watch every year. Like, like, yeah, this is cool. Like, there's no, no way. I didn't even think I was like, well, I didn't think about, you know, well, maybe he'll mention my channel. And then what's great though is he, I was first on the list and that kind of helped because the ones that were further on the list didn't get nearly as many subs. So that was really good. To be fair, I've got, yeah, I do watch a DT, Mindy for the Fact. He talks sense and there's no drama. That's what I like. It gets to the point, even though he's heavily arch related, I do like the guy. He talks a lot of sense. Yeah, great stuff. With that in mind, let's go ahead and jump into the contact info. You can contact, you can contact us on Twitter at the Linuxcast. I'm at MTWB, Martin's Martin to you. You can subscribe to us on all of our feeds and stuff at thelinuxcast.org. That is going to get a website soon. I promise. Eventually. I'll do it eventually. I want to do a video on Hugo or Jekyll or whatever the static website generators, but I just have not gone around to it. You can also contact us via email at thelinuxcast.gmail.com. And you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com.linuxcast. I'd like to thank Devon, Zach, Marcus, and Kamp for being our patrons. You can follow us on Facebook at facebook.com.linuxcast. This stuff is all out of order. I need to redo that. And you can subscribe to us on YouTube at youtube.com.linuxcast, where you'll find Linux related content every day of the week. I've taken a couple days off now. I had a streak going. I started December 24th or 6th or something like that and did a video every single day until like March something. And then I took a day off because I was sick. So now that the streak is over, I feel a little bit less guilty about taking a day off every now and then. So every once in a while, you'll see a video. It's not a day that doesn't have a video on it. But most of the time, there's a video every single day. And we do obviously a weekly podcast when we can. So every week, we pick a link of news-ish, news-ish, that we can talk about. So Martin, what was your link for this week? I'm 40. So I mean, if you want to, I think it's Fedora 34. If you sign up to beta, get that running. You've got now I'm 40, now I'm 40, whichever way that you want to say it. I don't know whether you've had the chance to have a look at this, but I'm quite impressed actually. Really? Yeah. I'm really, I'm quite impressed with it. To say that the baggage in the history of it all, no, blah, blah, blah. But it looks modern, looks up to date. Reminds me, well, obviously, they've nicked a couple of bits and pieces from KDE, but it just looks really smooth, fluid. I mean, it's going to be on the website, things like that. But I think a couple of used tubers of the work of a way through, but I think it's a generic thumbs up for it. What do you reckon on that? So I did use it. I installed it. I installed GNOME OS on boxes and made a video on GNOME 40. And I came to the conclusion that it's GNOME. So here's what I think about it. But if you like GNOME and if you've been using GNOME for ages, you'll probably come across with your opinion about it, because it will feel different to you because you've been using GNOME for so long. To me, it was just very similar to what GNOME has always been. They just moved the dock to the bottom. That's the way it felt to me. But like I said, I've always been a KDE guy. So KDE has gone through many changes in the last, I don't know, 10 years. I mean, KDE 3 was released in 2009 or something like that. And that was 2004. Or excuse me, it was KDE 4 was released then. And then 5 came out in 2015. And while they share some similarities, they've made visual refreshes. GNOME's looked the same forever. I mean, since GNOME 3 was released, this is what GNOME's looked like. And I think if you've been using GNOME for a long time, like I said, you'll find that it does feel fresh because it does feel different. Now, I will say this, if you're one of those people who uses extensions a lot and you always use dash to get your dock to the bottom anyways, you're going to probably feel like this is just the same old, same old. Now, my impression was that it was slower than it has been. Because I've been going through GNOME for the last two or three years and trying to make it faster again. It felt slower to me. You use a decent machine, haven't you? Well, yeah, but it was in a VM. And it's beta software. So I don't really want to judge it. So I'll wait until it comes out on Fedora 34. I couldn't get Fedora 34 to install in a VM. I didn't try in boxes. I tried in Ritualbox. So I'll wait until it's final software before I make a final verdict. But it just felt slower, whether or not that was because of the VM or because of whatever. I don't know. We'll see. It's food for thought, Roy. I mean, obviously, I'll have a double. Troy it out. Well, it'll be new to me, so to speak. So I mean, if it fits in, but if it's going to be a memory monster, then no. Yeah, we'll see. But I mean, from what I've saw of it, it looks, well, a lot slicker. The rounded corners and everything. Yeah, see, that's what I thought. When I just first saw the announcement before I used it, I was like, oh, this is great. This is a whole new look for it. But it just, I guess it's the way it felt. It felt the same. The real question I have is what Ubuntu is going to do. So Ubuntu is not going to do Genome 40 in the next release that comes out next month. But we should see it in the fall. So now if we want to talk about a distro that's looked the same forever, that Ubuntu has looked the same forever. Now they've changed themes recently. They went from the whatever it was before to Yaru or Yaru, whatever. I don't know what that was called. But in terms of layout of stuff, it's looked the same since, I don't know, 2004. It's basically the same. It has the icons along the side and the bar along the top. That's the way Ubuntu looks. So it'd be interesting to see how they go through and implement some of the Genome 40 things into Ubuntu. If they make a similar UI change, I mean that'd be really cool if Ubuntu decided to do something a little bit fresh. But I'm the guy who likes change, so it'd probably piss everybody off. So that'd be interesting. All right. So my link is... I debated putting this in there because really I don't want to get into the whole Richard Stallman thing. I don't give a shit about... Excuse me. I don't care about Richard Stallman at all. I have no horse in this race. I don't care if he stays or goes, but he's back at the FSF. And you got two factions within the Linux community. Some of them want to get rid of them again. Some of them are trying to keep them from getting canceled because of the cancel culture, the whole thing. So I just thought I'd put it out there and ask Martin, do you have any opinion on the Richard Stallman fiasco? None at all because I've literally had my cake day the other day. I was using Linux. I looked at the date. I think it's about the 24th or something of March. So now I don't know any of the history. Just having a quick check. Is he a more type of person? You either like him or you don't. So Richard Stallman founded the GNU project. He founded the GPL license and he founded the FSF. So he's kind of like the Linus Torvalds type guy. And he's very, very smart, but he has no social filter. So he's come out and said things about pedophilia and stuff like that that he really shouldn't have said. But those things were said like, I don't know, 15 years ago. So people know this about it. It's not a secret that he's a weirdo. I mean, and he is. He's a weirdo. What he got canned for a year and a half ago was saying stuff about that Epstein guy who had a harem and was pimping out little girls or something. I don't know. Stallman came out and said something about him, something about, he didn't really defend him. He just said something about semantics or something. And that got everybody up in arms. And he was forced to leave MIT, which is where he was a professor and he was forced to leave the FSF, but now he's back. And like I said, there's a whole brouhaha going on. I've tried, like every, like, Linux YouTuber, like the Linux gamer guy made a video on this. DT did a video. Brodie Robertson did a video. I decided not to do a video, because honestly, Richard Stallman's like 70 years old or something. I don't really know how old he is, but the man's ancient. If he gets canceled or whatever, that's not going to affect Linux at all. I mean, have your opinions on whether he should stay or go, whatever. I don't care. For me personally, I think that he probably should retire just to bring in some fresh blood, you know? At this point, he's a legacy. What is he doing? At least with Linus Tarval, he's still in charge of the actual product. He's still pushing out the Linux kernel, like he's been popping it out for the last 30 years. He's still doing stuff. If anybody asked, I mean, you're fairly new to Linux. I've been using Linux for three years. I think if you ask the majority of people who use Linux what Richard Stallman does every day in order to support the Linux ecosystem, they have no clue. Maybe they know that he's part of the FSF or maybe they know that he was the founder of the GPL license or the GNU project, something I don't know, but they're not going to know what he does now. I don't know that he knows what he does now, other than causes a lot of brouhaha. I don't know. That's where I fall on it. I don't care. That's why I was... I thought about not even putting this link in there because it doesn't really matter, but I figured I should cover it somewhere. I don't know. Yeah. I was just flicking through having a read. Yeah, definitely. If you really care... If you care all that much about reading some of his stuff and he said it's all on Wikipedia and he said it publicly and stuff, he said some weird, weird crap. Yeah. He's not necessarily... He's a weirdo. He's one of those guys who definitely should not be in front of a camera or in front of a microphone. He shouldn't... Yeah, just be behind the keyboard. He should be coding or something. Social media. Yeah, definitely. That's the way it is. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the main topic, which this week we're going to be talking about the things we do when we install a new distro. So, Martin, when you install a new distro after hopping, what do you do? Well, prior to that, I mean, I could say go to Distro Watch and check out, but I do go to Distro Watch, obviously, and I just check, mainly, the new releases, see what's coming through. Usually, your favorite YouTubers will be doing something. First look and all that. I check through about two or three YouTubers just to get some sort of opinion. Let them do the hard work to save me doing the install, so to speak. Then I'll try out the distro, bang it on a USB but I would stick it on a USB just to just get a feeling of it. I know there's going to be a bit of a lag on using the USB and what not. And then what I'll do is I'll obviously install it. Ideally, it's best to have a spare drive, so what I'll usually do, I'll back up all my pictures to the cloud or a USB and I'll just literally drag my home directory onto the spare drive. Make sure everything's copied over. Unplug the spare drive just in case. Obviously, go through the install. I mean, the hardest thing to do is to get your new distro set up to exactly your workflow. I mean, if you use do cinnamon and you're going to KDE, you'll just be there scratching your head for some time. What are your thoughts on where I've got to so far? Are you much the same? I guess when I've changed over the years, so when I first started using Linux, I'd do the same thing. I'd go do the research and stuff, but now I pretty much know what distros are out there and they're all things that I've tried before. Yeah, I know what you mean. The main ones. When I hopped last month and I was just leaving Arco behind because I was having a problem with Python or whatever, I pretty much knew that I wanted to go to an ArchBase distro, so I just randomly pulled up one of the ArchBase distros and just tried it, so I think for an old timer, it's a little bit different than I should say that it did try now that I've started the YouTube channel, I've tried more like not necessarily ones that I haven't tried before, ones that are new to me, and then yes, I'd go to DistroTube all the time and see, that's how I got to use MX Linux for the first time because it's at the top of DistroWatch all the time, so yeah, I've do the DistroWatch thing, yeah. Right, so once I've installed, I mean I am on Rint at the moment using this Cinnamon, I mean previously I was on KGE, but I was doing a lot more Linux stuff, so I mean I will install Redshift just to reduce eye strain, so that just goes with the phases of your light levels and just reduces the glare and the blue light, I think it is late at night, just because there's nothing worse of frying your eyeballs late at night than watching YouTube or chatting about. Otherwise, download a clean copy of Firefox. I do use a sync, so I'll log in to get all my bookmarks back up and extensions running. I do install Timeshift as well to take regular snapshots, I mean I'll do I think it's something like two quickly and I'll do two daily and just keep them running so I've got anything to fall back on. I'll install Web Apps as well, so I can stick my YouTube on there without Google spying on everything and shopping. I don't ever really log into Google from my browser of choice. I mean I've usually got two running. I've got Browse, Brave and Firefox. So they installed Web Apps and Rambox I spoke about in the previous podcasts. It's just basically containerized systems. I've got WhatsApp Outlook, Gmail Skype, Skype played up the ones, so I've got rid of that. Banking if I wanted to stick that on separately and then just as I go along I will install programs as and when I need them. I mean when I do shift to distros, I must admit like everyone, I do like a light distro. I mean I know they've got to include this or you're used to this program and you've got that and you've got to go through all the pain of that free software that you've got reinstalled in a different version, but yeah that's mainly how I do it and how I like to start my new distros. I mean what are your thoughts? Do you just install as and when you need or do you just do one massive install of all your main programs? Well, so I'm always quite surprised about how few programs I actually need to download when I hop. There's only like five or six. I need Firefox, I need LibreOffice and I need Cayden Live and Audacity. Those are really the main graphical ones that I use and then there's a whole bunch of terminal ones obviously that I have to install. But the big thing that I always download is my .file. So I always go to my github page and download the backup of my .file so I have all my window manager endings and stuff all right there. And then I'll always go through and just install the few programs I need. Like I said, I need Firefox and LibreOffice and Cayden Live and Audacity. And then I always download like Todoist and Zim and I do MuttWizard for mail and I have a Notion app and I have Discord and then the messaging apps that I try to avoid like to play. So I have WhatsApp and Telegram on my system now but I do not install those until I absolutely need them. I don't like them especially WhatsApp. WhatsApp has a horrible app on Linux. It's just not good. I know there are third party ones but they're all just kind of terrible. So other than that, that's like maybe like 7 or 8 apps that I install. Other than that, I can get to remember most of the time I install Arco. So Arco comes with a ton of apps installed. So most of the time I don't have to do Firefox. I don't have to do LibreOffice. Those are things we usually install right from the beginning out of the box. And Firefox is usually the default browser on every Linux system. So that's something that I don't have to do. Now if I ever get around to actually switching away from Firefox to something more privacy focused than it's possible that I'd have to go through and install that but I haven't actually done that despite threatening to do so over and over and over again. Yeah and I'll look into my P close account with what I was doing when I was hopping a lot and I've got a text file with all my terminal commands just to install my various software but I just do it the lazy way and use the GUI and click install and do that but previously I used to have a list of my commands and I used to run the file to install it but yeah I'm a bit lazy like that. I'm not like you with your terminal guru and that's about it really and nothing amazing I mean I would say I mean I know we did a podcast about security and firewalls if I remember to click on the firewall I do I mean I usually do bottom click just see what firewall is installed but as I said on Mint it's already installed so just another click and it's up and running and that's about it really yeah a small bit done on that. Yeah so what I've been thinking about doing is creating a bash script to just install the programs that I need for me but the thing is I'm not sure if I hop distro is often enough to care right so maybe when I first started out and I was hopping every two or three weeks it would have made sense but now I have no intention of leaving what I'm on right now I have all of my stuff here it's working fine I'm going to stick to it and that's a completely different you know outlook on Linux than what I had even a year ago like well maybe not a year maybe like a year and a half ago because about a year ago I switched to Arco for the first time and then I used it for a whole year like without hopping and then I hopped crazy and end up back on Arco so like maybe like a year and a half ago this a bash script to install my programs would have made sense now I'm just not sure that I actually need it maybe it's just something I'd you know create just for fun and then put up on GitHub that way if I ever do hop I have it I can just you know run it after I you know install I don't know what to think about yeah it's what I did as well I did my little bash script that used to throw up errors because some of the stuff was out of date after a while and I had to go in and edit it and I just thought back in the times when I was confused with all your various software stalled names and this and that and trying to find it I just did that but yeah just very lazy just use the software stalled of choice yeah that's it and I haven't hopped recently I'm still on Mint which is probably longer than I was on Mint last time to be fair but then again I haven't done a vast lot on it currently so if it ain't broke don't fix it is the way I'm looking at it currently yeah well I mean I think I said I think I'm going to stand this for as long as it possible I think that's what I think that's as you use Linux you know the longer you use Linux the more apps you are to just find what you like you know you get everything dialed in and you don't want to leave unless it breaks and even if it breaks you spend you know at least a day trying to fix it before you say because hopping becomes a chore I mean even if you own an only install if you're like us you only install five or six apps and you have a script or whatever yeah you still don't want to do it whereas hopping used to when you first use Linux hopping seems like it's so much fun because it's all new and it's going to be exciting and you're going to learn a whole bunch of stuff and yeah it's going to get some work done yeah but eventually it's going to I mean even if you just nuke and pave it and reinstall it you know the same old same old as well yeah it's kind of a pain alright let's go ahead and jump into apps of the week Martin what was your app I've installed this have you installed this sorry yeah just now I'm looking at now oh excellent right so it's a bit of a cheat it's not an app extension of the week it's called dark reader now this is a dark theme for every website you visit now you might go into random sites I mean I think distro watch it's like an acid trip whatever one of them is like it goes a bit funky so I mean you can turn it on or off and things like that but there's it's just spot on Amazon things like that just to give you the the dark dark web page instead of your bright one so I know are you more of a dark mode do you switch everything to dark mode or do you just leave you as is as much as possible yeah I use dark mode mostly because it helps with my phone yeah oh yeah everything on the phone as much as possible yeah white just sears your eyes and makes you want to die yeah but I mean there's some more and more websites have got it you've got to click on it but then it's still storing it in your cookies once you clear them you log back in and you've got this bright white screen but yeah it's really good I've been using it for the last three weeks and you just forget about the funky the odd couple of sites you just carry on it's just not to actually just see and read without blinding things on the other side especially if you've got your ad blocker so all the the ads are gone I'm not sure if it's got a slight ad blocker in it I don't think so but yeah that's my app well not app I'm quite pleased with that how about yourself what terminal related app have you got for us it is terminal related I know you're taking it out of you but yeah make fun all you want this is actually a little bit of self promotion because I wrote this script I'm not a good bash I'm sure if someone who is actually a really good bash came along and looked at this script they'd be horrified by how amateurish it is and I'll freely admit that but it does work and I've tested it in Ubuntu and on Arch so this works there are instructions on the github that I've linked in the show notes basically what this will do is it will go through and it will download my setup on DWM with all the dependencies that you'll need run the script and you'll be able to use my version of DWM out of the box and it's really good the reason why I made this was because I've had a couple people ask on the youtube channel how they'd go about getting my DWM setup so I was like here's a script it's so easy I could do it so I don't really know why you need a script but it's been created I've made a video about it I'm going to upload that today by the time this goes up you can actually go back to the channel and actually watch me run the script on Ubuntu and on Arch so like I said it works on both and any related distros obviously and it's really good now obviously just because you get DWM installed from the script doesn't mean you're going to know how to use it so that's something that I'm not going to help with you're going to actually have to find a tutorial or something after you get installed but for the most part it seems to be something fairly easy that most people can pick up so yeah just one question what's nerd fonts is this something I'm missing sounds really good do you know what awesome fonts are um so basically nerd fonts are just awesome fonts are the fonts that have little icons they're not really old yeah kind of like that but these are a special brand they're usually meant for Linux in the terminal in order to show icons like file icons and stuff like that nerd fonts are basically like that it's a huge collection of fonts that um a lot of them are mono space fonts but some of them are not it's like 8 gigabytes worth of fonts it's huge that's the reason why in the script I only downloaded the ones I needed because I didn't want to go through and say I didn't want to go through and get clone the entire repository so it's just the four that you need and you have to install those on your own yeah that's what nerd fonts are it's just the little icons in the bar yeah it's with the amount of gig yeah that's cool best recommendation for nerd fonts is just browse through the ones that they have there and download them specifically instead of downloading the whole thing now I download the whole thing speaking of every time I hop I always just download nerd fonts every single time it usually takes longer than installing the distro I'm just going to put that out there it definitely does so that's the thing it happens alright anything else to say today Martin or are we done no not from our side I did not want to put a call out oh right so Martin's leaving us he has to go back to work I don't know why he needs to do this work thing I mean obviously the YouTube is where it's at anyways he's leaving us so we are looking for or I suppose I am looking for a new co-host so if you are interested in doing a weekly podcast I'm fairly flexible on times I mean Martin we've taken many many weeks off here and there right I mean you started in like I think you started in October October was it yeah so we made it a good portion of the year but anyways I'm very flexible in time it takes about an hour a week if you have a microphone and you're interested in Linux give me a contact at thelinuxcast.com or contact me on Twitter that's honestly when Martin started I hadn't really started the YouTube channel yet so he had to contact me on Twitter to check my damn email in order to see the email he sent me which is hilarious I still have that email and I still have the tweet so anyways yeah if you're interested give me a contact thelinuxcast.com and Martin you'll be sorely missed I know and anyone that's interested you can do better than me believe me but yeah drop my toline and talk Linux for the better they can do better than me too I mean no you don't want anyone better than you you want someone just below you but yeah it's just there's only so many Linux videos I can watch not that you can tell but just recently it's just slacked off and just crawling out my hole into the brave new world now so yeah gonna hit you on the head for a time being I will obviously keep in touch see how it all goes but yeah by all means jump on board and either learn Linux or teach Matto to use the GUI we definitely need to make sure we have a mint fan it's got to be a mint fan because otherwise we can't have two people here that don't like you can't have two archfront oh we could it would be so much better hey come on man definitely your biggest flaw is the mint thing I mean come on alright I think that's it so thanks for listening thanks for watching if you're watching on the youtube channel make sure you subscribe like all that kind of stuff thanks for listening and we'll see you next time guys cheers take care guys