 Tom here from Lawrence Systems. Are you one broken Windows update away from switching to Linux? Well, let me show you the application that I use to run Linux as my full-time desktop to run my business And let's dive into some of the details But first you like to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems comm if you'd like to hire short project There's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel including a link to our patreon if you like become a patreon supporter We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time What's available and what's not so go ahead and check that out frequently and finally our forums If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out say hi and talk tech Our forums are a great place for that. All right now back to the content Now the first question everyone asked when you talk about Linux on the desktop is what distribution now you're running And I'm running pop OS and it has been wonderful. I switched to it a few years ago I actually switched to full-time Linux desktop almost 10 years ago now the early versions of Ubuntu were rough And I would not have brought all of you along for the journey on that It took a lot of dedication to figure out workarounds to run things on the Linux desktop back then Fast-forward here to 2020 and things that are way easier most applications Well, maybe the ones I use are web-based at run my business But even the ones that aren't there's plenty of applications that I use and that's the ones I want to cover all that run Locally here in Linux that are open source that I manage my business with so pop OS Why did I choose this? Well a bunch of did a nice job on a desktop pop OS took and polished that up a little bit I think they just did a great job, and I'm not here to have an entire Debate many Linux users want to debate the validity of their choice and desktops, and I don't debate people on it I'm happy with ever desktop you'd like to choose That being said I do find for new users pop OS or Ubuntu either one of those work very well Because you can find most of the problems that you run into especially as a new user a quick Google search of the error message will reveal how to get that thing you need configured inside of Ubuntu or By extension pop OS being built on Ubuntu. You'll find an answer pretty quick or support for it, and there are a couple applications I don't have on the list here that I probably could One of them will be like zoom if you download zoom it'll say are you running a bunch to or another operating system? You can pretty much just answer a bunch to for any of those one-off proprietary Applications that I'm gonna say I guess our part of my daily usage I mean zoom has more become that because so many more people are using it Zoom has always been good for interviews and things like that I've used on the channel a couple times because it's a pretty solid product for that. I know someone's Raven Raven about privacy concerned with it But seeing as what I do is record with it and publish it on to YouTube I'm much less concerned about privacy, but I see your point Back on now. I can't say I'm not concerned with privacy I'm not concerned with privacy is zoom because I'm putting it public privacy matters a lot to me But we're not gonna get too far off topic on this back to the things. I'm running on here So I mean a long list well not too long of a list, but I have a list I should say of the applications on the first couple things I'm gonna cover here because I want to narrow this down to business use case not everything I've ever done on Linux, but g-suite is something I use for my business and running your own mail service is a headache That's not really up for debate right now on people say why don't you it's actually because I used to I was a mail administrator for Some of the first Linux jobs I did back in my red hat days in the night late 90s I was a mail server administrator. I'm extremely and intimately familiar with setting up both Sunmail postfix and many other Mail utilities and applications. They're just kind of a headache to run self-hosted mail G-suite works really good for the overall features it gets But like I said, I'm not here to really debate that office 365 We don't use but we do use it for a lot of our clients So as much as I'm gonna really go on that topic the other thing related to business because this question comes up But it's not as much relevant to Linux solar winds and screen connect now Solar winds and screen connector the tools we use to manage the MSP or IT side of our business and screen connect is web Based and solar winds is web-based except screen connect launches a tool So I can connect remotely to people's computers and that works perfectly fine in Linux So that is something we use quite a bit of and that's how I manage other windows computers So I have it on here as a list. I have reviews of each of these products They're probably Unless you're working in IT not something you'll ever use but worth mentioning same thing with invoice ninja web base But that's how we do all of our invoicing. I've got you know a review of that local applications Now here's where I want to talk more about running Linux on the daily to run my business and when it comes to money K my money, I've got a review on this particular product. It is I think that M is capitalized Yeah, like that and I've got a review on this This is handles all the ledger and I'm not gonna open right now because I'd have to you know Redact information or blur off the screen, but I've got a review on that if you want to dive into it And came my money is great for doing all the ledger I don't use QuickBooks or any of those now QuickBooks online does work in Linux It's a browser base, but some people that may not work and I'm not absolutely guaranteeing This is the application to run your business with but take a look at it. It's pretty slick and it's open source and free It's also cross-platform now drawings We definitely do drawings because well we do a lot of networking and we're doing IT work So the best way to figure out what someone needs is first map out what they have and then figure out How do you want to fit the new puzzles in place? So a lot of my job does require me to do some drawing and diagrams net I've got a review of this particular product on my channel. It's just great for doing that It's open source and free and of course cross cross platform So we can easily have it interrupt with our clients no matter what they use I Think shutter can get its own review and let me pull shutter up real quick shutter is a screenshot tool and It just is really easy And I know when you talk about being able to very quickly go let me point at what we're talking about here We're talking about shutter But I need to redact the things we haven't talked about and we'll just drag a little blur over there Maybe we'll blur this part here and hit save It very quickly allows me to screenshot and put arrows on things and if you follow me on Twitter or If you interact with me much at all on any of the chat platforms I'm throwing screenshots all the times of things I see things I like if I like something important I more importantly I have to highlight or point at something to show someone when they have a question and answer and I send this to My staff all the time I use shutter to grab a screenshot. Hey guys look right here. Look at what well No, let's get more specific look at this where I drew the arrow to and of course if you've done any text apart You've wanted really to point the arrow at something shutter is just one of those really simple tools for it It does desktop workspace capture window capture application capture delayed capture Where you can include the cursor not include the cursor So if you have certain drop-down menus that kind of fade away when the mouse moves You can say already do the capture but wait three seconds and capture that and then it can organize all those captures Export them to different options It's it's a pretty extensive tool, but for the most part pretty easy to use You can do things like also tie it to Dropbox tie it to imager It's got different places where you can just keep uploading as you do it So if you're creating different tutorials, also, this is how I screenshot and grab things to create all the thumbnails I create for any of my video editing So actually really great tool signal and key base I'm not going to show but I've covered both of those in reviews because well I have a lot of personal messages in there But those are my two favorite communication platforms and mumble if you're not familiar with mumble. Yes, that's the gaming system Well, it was popular. I don't know how popular it is anymore But we use it internally here for push-to-talk voice-to-talk So even though we're working remote or remote people we can just load up mumble cross-platform again windows and Linux and Easily just have chat conversations ongoing. So Push-to-talk is great. So you're not hearing someone while they're munching down on some chips But you can hear when they hold a button that they of their choosing I may do a review separately of mumble. It's a pretty great program For you know keeping communications open wire shark. I mean if you're not familiar with wire shark, you're not into network engineering We do have to use wire shark to help troubleshoot things I got a few videos on diving into wire shark and one of them is how to tie wire shark with pf Sense along with SSH and actually there's more than just pf sense that supports this But what I mean by that is if you take an SSH remotely to a pf sense box Then pull the data back over the remote SSH connection and pipe it back into wire shark That's not as easy to do in windows as it is in Linux wire shark and Linux work together Wonderfully now a lot of your security focus distributions will have wire shark and those features built in but outside of a quick app To get installed of things like proxy chains and of course, this is the standard SSH You can tie together things really really well for doing engineering with wire shark and just standard pop OS So apt get install or use the pop shop to install wire shark SSH into something I got a video on this of how to grab a packet capture right from pf sense And not have to like go inside download pull the pcap file and open it But actually get real-time filtered packet captures Streamed right into wire shark with no more than just a quick one-liner SSH command So that's one of the reasons I really like that That's a great way to do it and it's definitely one of the tools I use a lot whenever I got to do some troubleshooting for networking Back to the list here Genie and Vim they kind of go back and forth. So both of these are good tools This is genie and it's fast and lightweight IDE. It is just like they said fast lightweight simple Really has a lot of different options when it opens up different types of code. So if we go here and we say New we can do HTML PHP tax HTML 5 Java Python there's a handful of different languages. It has no problem understanding and this is just a shell script right here So it's nice being able to do it. It also has the ability to Open up multiple files and tab between them So there's a lot of nice of these that you get with this and it's kind of funny I pulled up this file. It was some notes I had from the command needed to pull a wire shark and Do a TCP dump and pull that data right in here This is that one line command that would pipe data right in so pretty slick that this that How that works in here now? I mentioned Vim and of course once you go to the terminal I have them open down here and I have the window split with Tmux. We'll actually unsplit them right now Vim and Tmux kind of go hand-in-hand together to me from my daily usage because I'm you know SSH again fixing a lot of things setting up a server for a client Monitoring or modifying something on some of our server stack and being able to quickly split the window and SSH into another Server again and then Vim over there So it's kind of a back-and-forth between them, but I gotta admit genie's really nice Being able to handle everything right in the UI here, but Vim is one of those ones I do consider really important now It's not exactly something like necessary. You can't switch to linux desktop without learning the command line It's handy and will help you in the future Especially if you do some network engineering or some of the DevOps stuff that I do but it's not necessary But I'll mention it is something I use all the time along with Tmux now I finally will also mention when it comes to running the command line and terminal I'll leave a link to these two videos my customized shell my customized bash terminal set up These are things I have videos and how I how you set them up how to learn them and how I handle doing all of that It works quite well Back over to the list and a couple last ones on there are going to be open VPN and sync thing So these are more just utilities Not really applications that I use but when I need a VPN is something PopOS makes it easy. It have all these set up and open VPNs if I need to jump back over to my house like this I'm at the office now and boom I'm SS VPN open VPN Dan, and now I can get to any of the servers or any of the resources at my house pretty quickly Kind of related but sync thing is running in a background. So anytime I edit any local files I have a series of and we'll just go over here to terminal and CD LTS slash Bascripts and These are just some random things that if I can't remember how to do something. I'll throw a little shell script on there too For some settings on things or whatever they are any types of files. I modify sync things always in the background. I got a whole diet deep dive into sync thing of how I use it for synchronizing everything on my systems, but it's kind of like just a really handy go-to for Not exposing anything is I know a lot of people like next cloud and all these different web-based applications And they're kind of heavy you see things very lightweight runs in the background And all they really need is a handful of my business documents and things like that if I edit any of them The ones that aren't shared to G suite. I need them synced on multiple computers or in the case like I showed you I have a handful of little shell scripts. I write and if I need those synced well same thing I just need them be able to quickly sync between all the computers I have open so That's really quick way to do it now final mentions on here and I will Briefly go over them because I have an entire video on this for video creation is Gimp Kaden live in audacity Those are the last ones I can think of that. I have an entire flow video and how we do everything So how we record how we put it together how we assemble it and how we publish it That's all using Kaden live in terms of the editing OBS in terms of the capture which I either capture it Well this particular case right now you're watching it being captured an OBS through a camera. That's tied to yes Sorry a windows box that is one piece on there OBS with windows works best with this little stream deck, but when you see him right videos recorded a lot of my tutorials are recorded Actually in my office that does run Linux as well. I'm just using OBS and Linux the stream deck I know there's some Python libraries my friends been working with and he's been modifying them to get them to work better With a stream deck and I'm myself one windows crazy update away from Formatting the computer that records this and figuring out how to get those Python Things to work properly with this The stream deck makes the editing allow Well, it allows me to do this very quickly and it doesn't work as well in Linux That's why this particular machine is running windows But all the other stuff I do as far as my daily usage my laptop and my desktop not the studio computer that records This are all running Linux. So for the most part, it's not been that painful There's plenty of other applications if you're into drawing if any of those that I didn't cover That work really well with Linux many of the applications now more and more if you're into like really heavy coding and development There's actually a lot of them like visual studio That is completely running on Linux now. So It's become easier and easier over time to switch things over to Linux for me running my business on Linux It's just an absolute convenience It works really well. So my staff from Linux some of them do run windows as well We kind of a mix kind of depending on what applications they use and kind of it goes back to if you're doing a lot of support And we have to use that one tool from solar winds. They do have an application for remote control that launches That just doesn't work well in Linux. I never use it. It's not part of my daily use case So for the most part it it's just not a problem for me But I know that particular system now I do have it set up and I do run virtual box with windows inside of it But it's just not that often that the use case comes up or okay I got to run windows for this mostly a time when windows is running a virtual box It's usually because I have something special with a client that we need to do We've had some special projects with clients and I'll spin up a special VM just for them Where they give us whatever VPN software they're using so sometimes we're at the mercy of the clients But then again, I don't want mucking up my main computer with whatever special VPN software So even if I was running windows as a primary I'd still rather have a virtual system that I use just for Maintaining that particular client if there is some special VPN Or any you know problematic software as I call it like that not just they can't use standard connections Most of the time we're just going to use our screen connect tool to remote into a client and get things done But with more and more things becoming web-based and most of time people's general daily habits Just have them in the browser and my parents are no exception to that My dad runs Linux on his desktop because he's not tech savvy in any way He just wants a computer he can turn on and work and he just opens up the browser that works for him That's actually the only app he uses is the browser He uses a Chromebook laptop and that so for some of these cases where people are more web-based works really well But from ideally you should standpoint those are the apps I use. Let me know what apps you use I'm always interested in learning what some of the other people you know Sometimes there's some suggestions and things like that. It's always interesting to have a discussion on But hey, thanks, and if you're like me though Like I said one more windows update and I may have to get rid of the one studio computer that runs Linux here or windows because Those windows updates can be really pesky and some of the other quirkiness in windows Once you kind of get used to the flow and all the different shortcuts offered inside of Linux and how you do Window management you just feel so much more efficient and less constricted like I do on windows But hopefully this helps you on your journey if you're thinking about it Go ahead and take the dive grab a computer load it don't do a boot I'm not really a big fan of that just you got to go full in because if you do a boot you you just keep switching back over to The operating system you prefer you don't learn the other one. 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