 Welcome to another edition of HeyDT. HeyDT is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. These viewer questions and comments they typically come from comments on the videos posted on YouTube and on Odyssey. Sometimes these questions come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first comment I want to read is, HeyDT, I know you like Mastodon as a decentralized social network, but there is a huge downside to this model. The instance that I'm on is shutting down. At least with sites like Twitter, I never have to worry about all of my posts in the last three years just disappearing. And then he links to a blog post from the maintainer of the mastodon.technology instance. That maintainer is named Ash Furrow, and he has decided to shut down his instance. It is a very large mastodon instance with thousands of people that are members of that instance. And now these people have to migrate their accounts to a new mastodon instance. And he's right that this is a huge downside to this model, but it's one of these things that being a decentralized network, anybody can start their own mastodon instance. And sometimes people are going to start instances and not be able to maintain them or their interest change and they want to move to something else. This is both a pro and a con to this model. And as someone that has maintained my own mastodon instance for a brief period of time, I can actually relate to a lot of the problems that people are going to run into trying to maintain their own mastodon instances. And I can relate to some of the problems that Ash Furrow is having with mastodon.technology because according to his blog post, he has grown to resent the work involved in maintaining that instance. He just hates maintaining mastodon.technology. That's why it's time to shut it down. You can imagine it's a very large instance, thousands of users, so many technical problems, occasional downtime, of course, keeping up with updates, moderation, right? Because you got to moderate a lot of posts of people constantly reporting posts. And then somebody's got to check that stuff out, right? And it's just become too large for him to administer. And he no longer finds being an admin fun, being an admin of this mastodon instance or probably just being a server admin period. That may not be what he wanted to be in life. I know it's certainly not something I personally enjoy when I started my mastodon instance. I really started mine out of necessity because I was told to get off of mastodon.technology oddly enough by this guy, Ash Furrow. So I created distrotoot.com. I had the domain and I made my own mastodon instance mainly just for me. I didn't want to be responsible for other people's accounts, right? Other people's data. I didn't want the headaches. So when I started it, it was a single user instance. But people wanted me to open it up. And when I opened it up, my instance became very popular. I had many thousands of users on distrotoot.com before I also decided to shut my instance down because I couldn't administer it. I didn't have the time to do what I do with video content creation. This is a full-time job. And being an admin of a large mastodon instance, honestly, it needs to be a full-time job. You need to be getting paid for it and you need to be all in on it. And there's no way I could do that. I have another full-time job. I don't know if Ash has another full-time job. Probably does. And that's probably also a reason why he needs to walk away from mastodon.technology. Also mentioned some family issues and spending more time with family. I certainly can understand that. Sometimes these tech-related fields, they demand so much of your time that you kind of lose touch with friends and family. And I can certainly respect anybody that wants to walk away from anything because of that. So I've actually migrated my account twice. So I started on mastodon.technology and then I migrated my account from mastodon.technology over to distrotoot.com. And all of the, I don't know, 5,000 followers or whatever I had on mastodon, they were still following me when I moved my account. You keep all of your followers and you can keep your pose. It's not like everything gets lost when you migrate your account. The migration path is pretty easy. And then when I shut down distrotoot.com, I moved over to mastodon, migrated my account to mastodon. And again, everybody that's following me is still following me. Everybody I was following, I'm still following. The migration path is really easy. So I would not fear this as much as what I think some people are. Again, it's easy for me to say that because I've done it, but I promise you it's really not a hassle. Moving on. Hey, DT, your DTOS installation script is now password protected. When will it be ready for public again? So this post was from a couple of weeks ago and I don't know why it was password protected at the time. It's not now though because I actually ran through installation of DTOS this morning. It's working as expected. I do know a couple of weeks ago I had some issues with DTOS because I accepted a merge request that badly broke the script because this person did a pretty big rewrite using some different programs. For example, the DTOS installation script had been using the dialogue program and he wanted to swap out the dialogue boxes for another dialogue style program, but it uses different styles, different syntax. And the way he wrote it, it was just full of errors. The script wouldn't execute at all. I spent over an hour trying to figure out the errors that he had put in the script and trying to correct them myself. I spent more time with it than I wanted to, so I eventually reverted back to my old script. And it's one of these things with DTOS. It's kind of like why Ash Furrow does not want to admin mastodon.technology, right? That's not what he signed up for. He doesn't want it to be a job that requires actual work. DTOS, I don't want to maintain DTOS. I didn't write the DTOS installation script or maintain the DTOS repo software. You know, I know I spent so much time building that stuff, mainly for educational purposes. I don't want to maintain a distribution. I don't want to maintain my own repository of software. I don't want to spend time doing this. I did this because you guys asked. Now for those of you that find DTOS interesting and you want to actually do work on it, you want to make major changes to something, I would ask you before you make any kind of major changes to the DTOS installation process or anything, maybe make a post on my GitLab before you try to merge those changes. Or if you want to, because honestly, again, I don't want to maintain DTOS myself, just fork the project, fork DTOS, rename it to something else, and you start doing your own thing, you know, basing off of what I started for you. And the next question, hey DT, what do you think makes Rust stand out from other programming languages? I have never said that Rust stands out from other programming languages. If I had to say the one thing that Rust does stand out for, it's you guys that are Rust fanboys. You guys are like Arch Linux fanboys because, you know, how do you know somebody loves Rust? They're going to tell you, by the way, I use Rust. Moving on, hey DT, I like your videos. They're very informative. Now this is an older video and maybe you fixed it, but when you have the terminal on the screen, the YouTube navigation bar is covering the field and it is hard when pausing to see the commands. So, many of my videos, I'm full screen, either in a web browser or in a terminal emulator or full screen in Emacs, and I, obviously, you get full screen of text. And I really, I have no control over the fact that YouTube does have the little navigation panel that comes up. I don't know if he was watching on a computer screen or on mobile or, you know, depending on the resolution, that could be the issue. I do, I can say for me it's never been an issue because I have multi monitors. And as long as the monitor that is full screen watching YouTube doesn't have focus, that navigation bar never appears. I don't know if it's a single monitor issue where that bar maybe is there all the time. I wouldn't think so. I think that would be annoying to watch videos if that bar was there all the time. So, there's got to be a way to get rid of that bar. I would say post this question in some kind of YouTube related support channel because, honestly, I think that's more of a YouTube issue than an issue with the way I recorded the video. And the next question, hey, D.T., I would love to get the wallpaper from your main desktop. Great video, by the way. Appreciate the kind words on the great video. This was a video about Xmonad. He wants the wallpaper from that particular video that I did. So, for those of you wanting wallpapers, because I get this question asked all the time, and I haven't mentioned it lately, but those of you that have been following the channel for a while know that on my GitLab I actually have a wallpapers repository, and it's got like 300 something wallpapers in that repo. It's got pretty much every wallpaper I've ever used. Many of the ones you guys have seen on camera are going to be in that repository. And the next question is, hey, D.T., I watch all of your videos, and I can't recall the one you showed your browser homepage on, but it was all those cool Linux links and subreddits for Linux, etc. Could you please share that? Would love to copy and adapt it. Also, a proud Arco Linux user. It's really well constructed. I agree, Arco Linux is great. What he's talking about with the browser homepage is I had my own custom browser homepage that I've showed off several times. It's actually part of my surf browser config. It's also part of my cute browser config. And for those of you that want that particular homepage, that start page for your browser, and it can work in any browser. It's just some HTML. It's an HTML page that you load in the browser. You can find that in my .files repository on my GitLab. So in my .files repository, go to the folder .surf slash html slash home page .html is actually the location of that file. I'll try to link to it in the show description. Moving on is a question I get all the time. Hey, D.T., have you thought about doing cybersecurity videos or doing some ethical hacking related topics? No, I have not thought about that because it does not interest me at all. I have mentioned this many times. I'm not an IT professional. I don't work as a server admin. I don't work with Linux as a job. I don't work with computers as a job. I've never worked in any kind of tech related field. I'm simply not interested in this kind of server administration stuff. I'm strictly a Linux desktop user. When I make videos, I'm coming at it for the most part as a Linux desktop user, and I'm trying to communicate to you guys the Linux desktop users out there. I'm not trying to do videos that are necessarily educational content for people in IT or in network administration. There are plenty of people that work professionally in those fields that can do that kind of thing. And for cybersecurity videos or ethical hacking videos, penetration testing videos, things like that, that doesn't interest me at all as a Linux desktop user. What would I ever use that stuff for? I would be learning it just to make a video on it. That's typically not the way I do things. One of the things to keep me sane as a video content creator is I like making videos about the stuff that interests me, the stuff that I find fun, right? And I'm not going to make a video just to make a video about something. And that's all I would be making these videos about if I did these kinds of topics. And the next question is, hey, DT, I've been using Audacium and Tenacity ever since you made this video. However, it appears these projects have died. Is there another audio editing program that you recommend? So he's talking about two very popular forks or were very popular forks of Audacity. They were named Audacium and Tenacity. They're no longer being maintained. They're really seeing no development. And Audacity, we have the problem of the newer versions of Audacity have telemetry in them. And many people are concerned about that, especially those of us that are free and open source software zealots, right? We don't like telemetry. So a lot of us, what we're either doing, we're either using the older versions of Audacity pre telemetry. And that's what I'm doing these days. Or if Audacium and Tenacity, you still have them installed and they're still working for you, just because they're not being further developed. If what's working is still working, just keep using those. Could you explore some other audio editing programs free and open source audio editors? There's really not much out there other than Audacity. Our door is great, but our door is a very complicated program. It's really a digital audio workstation. It has a ton of features. It's really for like professional musicians. It's not something Audacity is different because it's very easy to use, very simple controls, even though it has a ton of features. It's very easy to get into. And you can tell it's it's mainly for people like me that I record a video and then I pipe it into something like Audacity. I take that video file, throw it in Audacity to clean up the audio, you know, clean up noise or maybe do some EQ adjustments or whatever. Or for people that do audio only podcasts, they typically will record in Audacity, which, you know, that works too. Where our door, you could do all of that in our door as well, but the problem is it's a much more complicated program. I think a lot of people would be very off put, even just opening up our door. When you first open it up, if you don't know what you're doing, it's just very, very confusing. So I would keep using the older versions of Audacity if it's working for you or keep using Audacity and Tenacity until they stop working for you. At some point in the future, hopefully we will have some better options out there. And the final question is, hey, DT, will you ever do a UNIX installation video? Yeah, that's not going to happen. So UNIX and by UNIX, I mean UNIX as in the trademark term UNIX is actually proprietary software. Every operating system that calls itself UNIX, they actually label it as UNIX, is a proprietary operating system. That's what the original UNIX was, you know, UNIX back in the 60s, the AT&T UNIX was proprietary software. This was way before the free software movement ever got started, way before GNU and the free software foundation and any of that we're talking about, you know, a good 15 years before any of that got started. So UNIX was proprietary, UNIX is still proprietary, anything that calls itself UNIX. And I promote free and open source software. I'm not interested in proprietary operating systems. Now, that being said, almost every operating system I've ever installed on video on this channel is a UNIX like operating system. So they're essentially, they do a lot of things that the old UNIX operating systems did. There's a lot of heritage there, you know, there's some lineage, but at the same time, they're not true UNIX, but that's fine. Why are you trying to run UNIX? A lot of people imagine that that we have to go back in time to this original operating system, to the original UNIX operating system, because somehow things like Linux and the various BSD operating systems, which are all UNIX like, but they're not true UNIX. And if it's not true UNIX, I'm not a hardcore hacker. So please give me something that's true UNIX DT. And that's, that's asinine. That's the wrong way to think, because if you're trying to go back to something that really wasn't that great to begin with, there's a reason why we have all of these Linux operating systems and all these BSD operating systems. And that's because people didn't want to use UNIX, at least not UNIX in its current state, current state back in the 60s and 70s, but also in its current state. Now nobody uses UNIX, right? What do they, what are all servers essentially running around the world? Typically Linux and some of them are running BSD. Nobody's using UNIX. Think about the mobile space. Think about the embedded devices marketplace. What dominates that market? UNIX like operating systems, but they're all Linux and BSD operating systems. You don't see UNIX. UNIX, again, it's proprietary garbage. I get that we evolved from UNIX, right? If you're talking about Linux, right? Linux really started with the GNU project, their work in the 1980s and GNU actually stands for GNU's not UNIX. It's an acronym. That's what it stands for. And that's tongue in cheek, meaning it's not UNIX because UNIX, the word UNIX is trademarked. I can't call my operating system UNIX, but GNU really is UNIX. And what's funny is a lot of the modern UNIX operating systems, if you could look at the code, most of them actually contain components that they borrowed from modern Linux, modern BSD. You will find GNU utilities and a lot of these UNIX operating systems. You will find BSD utilities and a lot of these UNIX operating systems. At the end of the day, UNIX is just not important for us, the Linux community. I mean, UNIX, it's not historically important to Linux or to BSD in terms of the technical details of those operating systems. It is important in terms of how we got here. And it is in terms of the UNIX philosophy. That's the one thing that if you want something to grab hold of from the decades gone by is what UNIX really gave us is the UNIX philosophy. That philosophy of everything being small, everything being modular. And we've carried that on into the Linux operating systems, into the BSD operating systems. So that's great. But we've, we've become much more than what UNIX ever was and better than what UNIX currently is. So no, I'm not going to give time to an inferior proprietary operating system not on my channel. Now before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Emmett Mitchell, Paul West, William Baltimore, Alex, Homer, Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Ingrid, Iokai, George Lee, Marsdrom, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Varsion, Fedora, Polytech, Realities for Less Red Profit, Roland, Stephen, Tools, Defler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. These guys are the producers of this episode. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, not proprietary garbage like UNIX, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.