 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos I do where I try to answer viewer questions and comments that I get on the comments of my YouTube videos and my library videos. Typically when I upload to YouTube and library I do read all the comments at least for the first two or three days after I upload. You can also send me messages on Mastodon. I am distrotube over at mastodon.technology. You can also message me on Patreon. Those of you that support my work through Patreon, you can message me anytime on Patreon. You can also message me on some other social media platforms. If you wanted to you could message me on Reddit. I do have a Reddit account. I actually don't hang out on Reddit or ever post on Reddit, but I do have a username distrotube on Reddit. I have a subreddit r slash distrotube and if you message me there I do actually get email notifications about it and I will read your comments on Reddit and that really leads us to the very first question for this edition of Haiti. Haiti, you talk so badly about Facebook and Twitter yet you have a Twitter account. What's up with that? So those of you that have not been following the channel for a little while, I hate Facebook and Twitter. Really I don't like social media, social network sites in general, but some are worse than others. Some of course are proprietary garbage and they don't respect your privacy or your security and just do evil things to the users of that platform and Facebook and Twitter certainly fall into those categories. They are data mining you, they're selling your data to other corporations and you really should not be on those sites. If you value your privacy and your security you should never use Facebook or Twitter, not to mention that there are some really nasty and toxic people that hang out on those platforms especially Twitter. Twitter is just a complete hate fist. So I actually deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts about three years ago I think when Zuckerberg appeared in front of Congress to have to explain you know all the scandals that were surrounding Facebook at that time. I actually deleted my Facebook account. I went through the trouble of requesting them delete my account. It's kind of a hassle to delete your Facebook account. There's no guarantee that they're going to do it. Same thing with Twitter. I asked Twitter to close my Twitter account. You won't find DistroTube on Facebook or on Twitter but I do know that there are fake accounts out there. On Twitter you can go to DistroTube over on Twitter and there's a guy it's got my logo the DT logo and you would think it's officially DT's Twitter page. That's not me. I don't know who it is. I don't know why they have the page. I've asked them to take it down. I have contacted Twitter at least 20 or 30 times in the last couple of years asking them would they do something about it. They won't. Their response to me every time I contact them is if I want that page they'll give it back to me. I have to prove that I'm me and then they will give me back that page. But I don't want to be on Twitter and also I don't want to have to give them personal information like they want to prove that I'm me. I've just got to send them a copy of my driver's license and passport and you know whatever. But that's weird. Why do I have to prove that I'm me when I'm telling them that the other person isn't me? Why don't they ask that person that's already on their platform. Hey can you prove you're actually the person you're pretending to be? Wouldn't that make more sense? But as long as Twitter is basically going to force me to send them personal information to verify that I'm me, I'm never going to be able to get that account back. So just know that there is some weirdo out there pretending to be me on Twitter. There may be weirdos out there pretending to be me on things like Facebook and Instagram and all that other garbage as well. It's not really much I can do about it. That's one of the negatives. Once you become kind of a public figure is you're always going to have people that are trolls and pretending to be you. Some of them for nefarious reasons. I try to point out every couple of months I try to let you guys know hey that Twitter account is not me. I don't know why that guy is there. I know sometimes you guys actually retweet the tweets from the fake distro tube account and you're messaging that guy and things like that. I'm telling you right now that's not me. The next question is also social network related. It goes something along the lines of this. Hey DT, I saw you mention PeerTube on one of your recent videos. Why don't you have your own PeerTube instance? Why don't you host your own PeerTube instance and put all of your videos on PeerTube? And I've gotten this question thousands of times since starting my YouTube channel and I have answered this question thousands of times. It got to the point where I just quit answering the question because it's the same question over and over again and I don't know why I need to answer this question. Okay so PeerTube it's great the technology behind it it's this peer-to-peer decentralized YouTube alternative. But you know it's free and open source software and being a free software advocate. If this thing was worth using I would be out there championing that cause. I would have been the first person out there years ago when PeerTube first arrived on the scene. I'd been the first person to be on PeerTube promoting PeerTube telling all of you guys to start PeerTube instances. But there is one big problem with PeerTube and why you don't see any large YouTube creators using PeerTube it's because you have to host your own video with PeerTube. That's right in my PeerTube instance I got to you know pay for some web hosting rent a server and the server costs are going to be outrageously expensive because I have to store all of my video on that server. They have to be stored on that server locally and I have terabytes of video in my my catalog. I have made nearly 800 videos now on YouTube and on library and I can't put that much data on a web server and pay for that hosting. It would be hundreds of dollars a month probably just on the storage costs alone and I would go broke hosting a PeerTube instance when what's the point. There are other free as in freedom platforms that you can go watch my videos on. I am not going to go take a loan out from a bank. So I can start a PeerTube instance when I can just sync all of my content to library which is a much better platform. I don't have to host my own video on that platform and you guys for some reason if you can't use library I get libraries kind of a new platform. It's not perfect. But if you wanted another place you could go watch my videos. I actually do self store all of my videos on Amazon S3 because it's cheap storage. It's really designed to be long term storage. But if you go to distroutube.com I do actually link to all of my past videos to that you know that Amazon storage. So you can actually go watch my videos at distroutube.com because you guys are watching that though it does cost me a little bit because again that Amazon storage it's cheap storage as long as nobody's ever accessing those files but if a lot of you start watching those videos it will cost me a little money from Amazon too. Right now I'm paying about 30 bucks a month storing all of my videos on S3 and that 30 bucks a month it's not just the storage costs that's you know some of the bandwidth costs too because some of you guys I do know go to distroutube.com and watch my videos and that's okay if if I ever get large amounts of traffic to that site watching those videos it may be a problem to to fund some of that but Peartube for sure it's just not a viable option if Peartube was a viable option you would see people on it you would see creators actually migrating to Peartube you've never seen that and you never will see that as long as you have to host your own videos it's just not an option and the next question is along the same lines it's about library and it goes something like this hey DT how long does it take you to upload a video to library hey DT how long does it take library to sync your videos from YouTube to library how long do I have to wait after you post on YouTube to see that video on library so I don't actually upload my videos to library myself and the reason I don't do this is because they have a sync feature where when I post a YouTube library is supposed to detect it and it's supposed to go and sync that video that I posted on YouTube over to library automatically for me oh it'll grab the thumbnail and the title and the tags and the description and I do that just to save on work I don't want to have to go through the trouble of uploading all of that stuff myself because it's not like it's a ton of time but it would take me 10 or 15 minutes to do all that myself and I post you know a lot of videos I'm posting frequently right now there is a downside to this and I know there is it's that libraries syncing is not reliable there are many days where I will post on YouTube and within an hour that video is already synced to library but there are sometimes where I post a video to YouTube and it is not available on library until 2, 3, 4 days later that has happened a few times and I can't really control that that's out of my control the only way I could really control this if I uploaded to library myself I may eventually start doing that I haven't committed to it yet mainly just for being lazy and just trying to save some time you know if I can save myself 15 minutes of work a day you know that that's valuable because again I got so much going on and I'm just trying not to have to do that myself there is other options with library they do have a syncing option going the other way where I upload first to library and then they should sync my content to YouTube they'll post my content to YouTube I haven't tried that out and I'm kind of scared to try that out because if the syncing doesn't really work consistently the way it's way I'm doing it now YouTube first and then library I definitely don't want to do the other one you know post the library first and then hope they eventually sync my content to YouTube because what if it takes you know 2, 3, 4 days for them to get around to syncing that content over to YouTube because at the end of the day YouTube is the biggest platform people watch my content on it just is I get you know 10 times the views on YouTube as I do library so I definitely want to make sure that my stuff gets posted to YouTube so maybe as library the platform matures and their syncing gets better all of these problems will be solved if they don't eventually probably what I will end up having to do is just upload all my videos myself to both platforms I'll you know when I upload to YouTube as soon as I'm done uploading to YouTube I'll go to library and just upload all the videos myself the next question is distro related because I've done some distro hopping recently but I ended up back on Arco Linux on the main production machine I've been running Arco Linux for about a year and a half now on this main production machine and the question goes something along the lines of this hey DT why do you run Arco Linux instead of just running mainline Arch that's a good question what are the differences between Arco and mainline Arch well Arch is a command line installer but you know what the command line installer for Arch Linux doesn't take that long it's a pretty simple process I've done videos of Arch installs and I've run mainline Arch on physical machines even on main production machines not this current computer I have but the one I had previously for the YouTube channel I ran mainline Arch on it for a little while just fine pretty much all Arch based Linux distributions are the same most of them pretty much all of them I can think of are pretty much 100 compatible with Arch Linux meaning they're essentially Arch Linux and certainly Arco falls into that category it's 100 compatible with mainline Arch so what's the point of installing Arco rather than mainline Arch well for me it's because it does some of the stuff I'm going to install automatically for example I'm a window manager only user and Arco has window manager only editions they have editions for awesome Xmonad Qtile and i3 and BSPWM and every other window manager you can think of tiling window managers floating window managers they even have editions for full desktop environments I don't use full desktop environments personally but I do use a lot of the tiling window managers most Linux distributions do not ship tiling window manager editions very few do and as far as I know of Arco Linux is the only distribution that ships a Xmonad edition which is one of my favorite window managers as far as I know of Arco Linux is the only Linux distribution that ships a Qtile edition which again is one of my favorite tiling window managers and I suspect part of the reason they doing some of this is the popularity of these particular window managers are increasing thanks in no small part to some of the content that I do on my YouTube channel especially something like Qtile most people would have never heard of Qtile had I not focused so much coverage on my YouTube channel because it just was not something most people had ever heard of until me doing what I do on this channel and because of that I really want to give Arco Linux some credit and that's why I want to run it I want to talk to you guys about it because it is one of those distributions so many distributions out there really don't serve a point they have no reason to exist they don't do anything unique they don't do anything different Arco serves a purpose and it's just a fantastic distribution not only because it has these tiling window manager additions but the installation process is really fantastic and I'm not talking about it's just the Calamari installer and you click okay three times and you're done in 10 minutes it's not that kind of installer it actually lets you choose what you install before you actually install it you can actually tell it what packages you want what packages you don't want if you guys want to see this in action if you want to fire up a VM just to test any edition of Arco go grab one of the tiling window manager additions of Arco Linux B they have a set of ISOs called Arco Linux B and pick your favorite tiling window manager edition run through the installation in a VM and you'll see what I'm talking about the Calamari installer has about 10 software sections that you got to go through categories like development software gaming software office software web browsing and things like that and you choose there's tick boxes and you choose what programs you actually want to be installed during the installation process and it's fantastic it actually saves you so much time because you don't have to go through and do all that yourself in a mainline arch command line installer but at the same time you're not wasting time because you install this Linux distribution it installs a ton of packages you don't even need you're going to have to remove them later and then install the stuff you want because of the way Arco Linux does it you get to pick pretty much all the stuff you want during the Calamari installation and it's just fantastic I can't talk to you guys enough about how great a distribution Arco Linux is and the next question is along those same lines hey dt why don't you run Artex hey dt what are your thoughts on Artex I've actually looked at Artex on the channel at least once maybe a couple of times a couple of years back I haven't looked at Artex lately but Artex is another it's just arch it's just the arch based distro like one of the hundreds of other arch based distros they're all the same they're all pretty much 100 compatible with arch it's just different desktop environments or window managers and theming Arco is a little different because it does some special stuff or like Arco really stands out among the arch based distributions Manjaro does some interesting stuff too and why Manjaro's become such a popular distribution in recent years but most of the other arch based distributions they're pretty much all the same I don't see themselves really differentiating themselves in any significant way Artex has never been a popular arch based distribution I don't know how much development it sees because you know I do pay attention to distro watch and release announcements I can't remember the last time I heard of Artex seeing a release and essentially again it's just arch Linux so if you've run one arch based distribution you've run them all the only thing with Artex that really separates it is it doesn't use systemd by default you have your choice of either using run it or open rc as you're a knit system with Artex and if you are one of those kinds of users those systemd haters and you're looking for a protest distro you know you hate systemd so much I want to go use a protest distro the two protest distros systemd haters love to run are dev1 if you prefer devian based distros and Artex if you prefer arch based distros but I'm not a protest distro kind of guy I don't care about the init system I used Linux way before systemd ever existed so I've used other init systems other than systemd they're all fine cist via knit upstart was great systemd once it came along I have no problems with it I've used distributions that used run it and open rc and various other things that laptop behind me is running a new shepherd as it's a knit system I it's okay I guess but I don't know I'm not a protest distro kind of guy and if I don't care about systemd being installed or not Artex I mean what's the difference the next question is hey dt recently on video you commented that you wished we had a website or some repository where we could all go and put our dot files and share our dot files well I've recently stumbled across a website called dot share dot it that does exactly this all right so I did mention that on a video a while back is that we should have a website I should create a website or maybe a get repository where we could all upload our dot files and see what each other is doing in their dot files so we could you know share our bash rc our vmrc and various config files for our tiling window managers and he's right there's already this website that exists and when he mentioned dot share dot it this particular website I remember it I remember that URL and when I went to the website and and saw the website it has a very unique look to it really cool theme a dark theme anyway I remember this site and it functions great you upload your dot files and a screenshot and it shows you the source code for the dot files you uploaded and it's it's a really slick website there's no way I would want to recreate a site like that when this site already exists so I don't need to do this he's right dot share dot it I wanted to share this with you guys on camera go to dot share dot it and I'm here's what I would like to do is this site doesn't look like it's seeing that much activity it sees some activity but not much guys let's all go and start putting our dot files on that site I think that's what we need to start pushing and maybe we can make this site the go-to site for an archive of dot files config files and the final question for this edition of Haiti is Haiti your channel is the reason I switched to Linux were there any YouTube influencers that influenced you to switch to Linux that's a great question and I get thousands of comments like this on the channel too is Haiti I switched to Linux specifically because of you because of your videos or I switched to Linux because of your videos and a whole bunch of other Linux YouTuber videos too as well because really the YouTube Linux community is it's growing there's so much good content out there and I know that me and a lot of the other YouTube content creators really make a difference I know people are switching to Linux because of us and I think that's great that's one of the reasons why I work so hard at this and do what I do is the fact that I do know I make a difference you know in some small way in people's lives because this is a life-changing thing when you switch from Windows or Mac over to Linux very few people end up going back so who influenced me were there any YouTube influencers that influenced me making my decision to leave Windows and switch to Linux and it's a great question but if I had to answer this directly no there weren't any YouTube channels that influenced my decisions because I switched to Linux so many years ago when I switched YouTube was around but YouTube wasn't nearly the platform it is now there weren't it wasn't that big it wasn't that popular there weren't that many Linux YouTubers back then this was about 12 years ago and you did have some Linux content but not the kind of content you have now it was mostly introducing Linux to the world maybe some distro reviews very few tutorials you didn't have the kind of depth of content and the wide variety we have so many people doing Linux content now thousands of Linux YouTubers out there covering a wide range of topics nobody's doing the same thing and it's fantastic you didn't have all this back then so no there I wasn't influenced switching from Windows to Linux because of any YouTube content creator but along the same lines of when you switch to Linux it's a lifestyle change it's something that's going to change your life forever I there were some influencers that did influence me in a big way that I will say they changed my life for the better and I think one of those people was Brian Lenduk because I don't know if I've shared this story on camera before but Xmonad my window manager my favorite window manager I switched to it almost immediately after switching to Linux six months and I was probably already on Xmonad and then you know fell in love with Xmonad used it on and off forever tried out a million other tiling window managers and it's completely changed my workflow I could never go back to floating window managers I certainly would never run a full desktop infirmary and the reason I run Xmonad is because of Brian Lenduk and Chris Fisher and the Linux action show now specifically on the old Linux action show they had an episode where Brian Lenduk introduced Xmonad and he tried it out live on video of just a bare bones Xmonad just the default and figs all black screen and he was using the default key bindings which are a little weird you know alt shift enter opens up an x term and alt P opens up D menu you know just the standard Xmonad config but even just this bare bones Xmonad that didn't look good right it's just ugly no wallpaper he's just opening up some terminals and he's swapping the terminals as far as the placement on the screen and resizing the terminals and closing the terminals with the keyboard and opening more terminals with the keyboard I'm looking at all this and I thought cool I want that I want that I was watching that Linux action show while watching the program I installed Xmonad on my Ubuntu install at the time logged out of whatever desktop or window manager I happened to be using at the time I think I was using open box and logged into Xmonad to that black screen and thankfully Brian Lenduk told me all shift enter brings up an x term so I can get a terminal left and that's where the fun began you know from there you know I just started playing with this stuff and it was truly a life-changing experience I can't imagine you know where I would be now had I not discovered Xmonad and subsequently all the various other tiling window managers and related programs things like D menu had it not been for that single episode of the Linux action show now have there been other YouTube content creators podcasters that have gotten me to try out software or hardware of course but none of them introduced me to something that was a complete game changer for me the way Lenduk and Fisher did on that episode of the Linux action show with Xmonad one other YouTuber that I want to mention because he introduced me to something that is another life-changing thing like I can't imagine ever going back to the way I was working before XDSL those of you that don't know the XDSL YouTube channel check it out he does some Linux content Linux gaming content occasionally he does some stuff with tiling window managers and command line applications great channel great guy and hex DSL a couple of years ago did a video on the Ergo Docs easy keyboard and I had been thinking about buying that particular keyboard I've been looking at it and it was expensive it's like $400 US that's an expensive keyboard and I was looking for reviews for that keyboard and hex reviewed it on his channel and he gave it a positive review you know he really highlighted it he went into some detail about his experience with the Ergo Docs and once I heard his you know straightforward honest review and the fact that he just was blown away by this keyboard that was the selling point I bought my Ergo Docs I have been using the Ergo Docs easy now for a year and a half and again life-changing experience I would never go back to a standard 110 keyboard I couldn't do it I will forever buy Ergo Docs keyboards or things that are in a similar vein if Ergo Docs went out of business you know I would build my own programmable mechanical keyboards so I just wanted to highlight you know those particular creators so Brian Lundu, Chris Fischer, hex DSL whether you know it or not you actually influenced me in a big way and really have made some major impacts on my life now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of the show I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Arch5530, Chris Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tobias and Willie these guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon they are the producers of this episode of Haiti. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys the community we have no corporate sponsors here at DistroTube it's just me and you guys Peace