 Hey everybody, welcome back to the Linuxcast. I'm your host, Matthew Weber. I'm joined by Tyler. I don't know what your last name is, Tyler. It's Kelly. I did know that. So this is your first episode. So Tyler, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Well, I'm someone who's been using Linux for a few years. Linux wasn't always my main system. I hopped between Linux and Windows for a little bit, for work and playing games. But here over the past couple of years, I've pretty much just stuck to using Linux unless I had to use Windows for work. And so I'm making videos on Linux and just enjoying it, to be honest. Compared to Windows, I'm tired of it. Yeah, I haven't used. I had a dual boot of Windows for a little while after I built my new computer. And I use it like twice. It's horrible. It is. All right, so what we've decided to do is just keep the podcast layout the same for now, even though we've done a host shuffle. But we'll probably or somewhat change it up in the future as we kind of get used to what we want to do. And remembering to look at the camera. I'm not actually going to do that. Because my camera is over here. I have a camera over here. I could probably use it, but that would be stupid. Why would I want to do it? Anyway, so this week, what have you been doing on Linux and open store stuff? Oh, quite a bit. I have a few things, but I'll try and keep them quick. Because the main one that I've been pretty interested in is I have this Acer Aspire one. It's a 10-inch netbook. It was really popular. I think it came out like seven years ago or something like that. But it was actually my first laptop that I ever got. It was my first computer that I ever bought with my own money. And I've been trying to use it, but it's a 32-bit system. So you have to pick and choose your operating system. So I've been trying different things on it. And I found OpenBSD to be really good on it, surprisingly good. Because OpenBSD is, as far as I can tell, when it comes to the BSDs, it's not the fastest one. It's not really designed for performance. It's more designed for security. But it's actually brought that little, like it's got an Intel add-on in it. So it doesn't have decent processing power whatsoever. What's the app selection? Like, I've never used BSD like at all. It's pretty good. I mean, being fair, you'll find quite a bit of software that isn't ported over to it, mainly OBS. Like OBS is the big one that's just, it's not on there. But I mean, SpectreWM, DWM, like Tiling Window Managers, Qt browsers over there, like most of the software that I'm used to using is on there. It's just some you might find not. Like Qtiles is one, I really like the Qtile Window Manager, but it just hasn't been ported over to OpenBSD. But the app selection is pretty decently good. And that's not something you could, I mean, like I have no clue what BSD really is. Like you couldn't like build a package or something like that. Like you could like Ungent2 or something. I don't believe so. Even though I'm starting to use OpenBSD, it's very much the beginning of my journey. So I'm not sure exactly all that you can do with it. Well, you're already waiting the way more than I do, so. Like I know with this, I've never really had the interest in trying it mostly because the software things care. Because like I use Spotify and I'm sure you probably can't get Spotify on there, right? Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be a horrible thing, but because I could just use my phone, but there are other things that are like that. Like I use Notion. I'm sure that can't be over there to do this. I use all these proprietary software nonsense foreshadowing. That would probably prevent me from even using it. But maybe someday I'll try to figure it out and put it on like a laptop or something after. Yeah. I mean, for me, what I've found with OpenBSD is it's a fantastic operating system. It's just at least, I'm sure there's people out there that would disagree with this, but at least for me personally, it's not a workstation ready operating system. It's more, it's definitely really fun to tinker around with. It's just, there's quite a few things about it that just aren't ready for it to be prime time when it comes to using it for video creation, stuff like that, so. So is it meant for servers or something? Is that what it's primarily used for? Yeah, it's primarily used for servers and like the security when it comes to OpenBSD, when you start using it, like you'll find quite a few details, like small details about it that are completely like an obviously meant for security. Like when you install OpenBSD, one of the main things that you'll notice is if you try and listen or record any audio from a microphone, it will not work out of the box. You have to actually, and like your microphones and everything are set up out of the box and should work, but they've set it up so out of the box, your computer will not allow anyone or you to record from any microphone unless you specifically set the option to be able to record from audio, which I think is kind of a neat thing, like if you're gonna set up a computer and it's got microphones in it, but you're not ever gonna use them and you would rather know for sure that there's not gonna be any case where someone is recording you through it without your knowledge. I think that's a pretty cool feature. And it's just a small touch where you notice they take security really seriously. It reminds me of Tails. Yeah. That's cool. So anything else you've been doing on the Nexus this week or is that what you've been tinkering with? Well, there's that. And then I've also, I have switched to elementary OS from Arch. Yeah. Trader. I don't know if I can talk to you anymore. I know, I was just gonna do a video on it. And then I was like, dang man, I really, like, I really like it. The aesthetic is pretty freaking nice. And hey, I mean, I could give it a chance as my main operating system or distro of choice, you know, whatever. And I loaded it up and surprisingly, and now I made a video not too long ago about distro hopping and how bad of an experience I had with that, but I decided to give it a chance. And I've really liked it so far. And so I've been using that. And then also I'm messing around with Godot quite a bit. I'm messing around with a 3D project. So might, might be making a video on that before too long, but my skills aren't great. I have issues with elementary OS. I've talked about it before, but I just don't care for, it feels to me like they're prompting developers to develop just for elementary OS instead of having them develop for Linux in general. So it's really, so like there's this great to do applications called Planner. And it's developed for elementary OS and it will work on other things, other Linux distributions and other, you know, window managers and desktop environments and stuff. But you can tell it was developed for elementary OS and it just feels like, you know, there's always been a problem with Linux, the full fragmentation thing. It just feels like that makes it worse, you know? Like I understand stuff on elementary OS can work elsewhere, but it just feels like it's making. So I have my issues with it. And I won't disagree with you there. Yeah, even though if it's one of those things, like I feel like if you're a user of elementary OS, you'll really enjoy the fact that they have their own sort of like design guide and like preferences for how developers go about like, you know, making their apps look and feel. But yeah, it definitely does contribute to fragmentation like across Linux, which I mean, to be honest, that is a problem that it needs to be addressed, but I don't know how as a community, like we can go about like really attacking it. Yeah, I don't think that it can be fixed at this point. Mostly because I think you have people like me and you probably you is that you feel that fragmentation is a problem, but we're a very small minority in the group of Linux users. Everybody else thinks that having choice is a fantastic thing. And there are times where I think having choice is a fantastic thing too, but in fact, probably the more majority of time, but when I try to think big picture about trying to get Linux to be more popular, fragmentation always is a negative, right? So, all right, so me, I don't know if you, any of the listeners know this, but I have a crappy camera and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. Like this is like a $40 camera from Amazon. It doesn't even have a brand name. It's one of those ones that says 1080p webcam on Amazon. And I was like, well, that has to be good. It has five stars. Of course it has to be good. It's not good. It's horrible. And like I said, it keeps getting worse. I feel, I'm getting whiter. And some of that is the lighting. So like I have a video light here, but there's no like diffusion on it or whatever. So it's like really bright. And if I don't have it set exactly right, the camera will actually go really dark, really dark, really like over and over and over again, especially in OBS. Like right now, we're not really recording the video and OBS is coming through Discord. So it doesn't seem to be as a problem, but in OBS where there's like actual video settings, it seems to be doing weird stuff. So I actually have to have that light on all the time. And when that lights on, I look like I just stepped out of like a dark room that I lived the last 20 years and without ever seeing the sun. It's horrible. My last video, I looked like a ghost. It's horrible. The lack of a neck beard also contributes to that because I'm even whiter without facial hair. So it was not. You can really tell it. Yeah. And then they accused me of going DT. Like I did not go full DT. I have hair. Like there's hair up here. It's not a lot of hair, but there's hair. I saw that comment and made me laugh. So I'm like, what are you talking about? He's bald. Like I'm not even close to being bald. Like there, I would not look. I mean, I'm not sure. If you're bald, I'm bald, man. Like there's hair up here, man. It's like shit. Oh man. All right. So I've been struggling. Doing this entire week is trying to get this camera to look at least half reduced because getting another camera is, it's going to happen. But I mean, you got to do with shipping and stuff. So that's going to take like a couple of weeks. And so I've been trying to get this to work. I've not been successful because there's not any really good camera software. So like every web camera, whatever comes with its own software. Like, but it's all Windows based. And I'm not even sure if this camera came with its own software. I have no clue. I mean, like I said, it didn't even have a brand name. So I doubt they've spent a lot of money on software development, but I've, you know, I thought maybe I could look it up and try to see if I could get whatever software there is to run through like wine or something. I'm not very able to find any of the software. So I've just been dealing with the settings and OBS and those are not great. Yeah. Well, and also I have noticed, I have an Aki webcam. Like it's, it's one of those cheap ones but it actually does have a brand name. But for it, I've noticed that I think the settings in OBS, some of them, like they don't actually work. Like they'll, they do, they, like for, for one thing that I've noticed on it is the saturation. When I mess with a saturation, like even though the bar is this long, like the changes only take place like within this like section of it. If I go too far, it does nothing. Like so. I mean, there are two settings that I really need. So OBS has saturation like levels, right? It has a saturation slider or whatever. And it also does them supposedly automatically. So I've, you know, I tried the automatic stuff, that didn't work. That for whatever keeps auto focusing even though auto focus is off. So I turned that off and tried to do the whole thing manually and you know, I was trying with the, with the sharpness and trying with the saturation and stuff trying to get right. But there's no like exposure slider. Like, so it's a mess. And honestly, I'm just going to end up having to deal with it until I end up with the ever meter one, ever media one that I was talking to you about. I'm just going to end up ordering that. But I mean, it's 200 bucks, but if it's good and it lasts for a long time, it'll be a good investment, but I don't know. It's just, it's just been a pain in my ass for the whole week. It's just weird cause when I first got this and I was like, you know, it's cheap. Like, that's not bad. It's better than, cause I have a, like a 10 year old Logitech on my other monitor. It's like, it's like, it was like the precursor to the 940 or whatever. It'll only record in 720p 30 and only in 43. So yeah, if you try to get it to go 16 by nine, the frame rate goes down to five frames per second and it looks like you're in stop motion. Awesome. Yeah. So, cause that's the camera I started out with, but it was, you know, it was fine, whatever. It's just cameras on Linux just don't seem to want to be okay. But maybe that's just with my crappy cameras. I'm hoping with a more recognized brand names that it'll be a little bit better. Cause I know that some of the, at least if it has software I might be able to get to run through wine. Yeah. So we'll see. That's what I've been doing all weekend like that. And messing around with X-Moin ad, I seem to say this every single week cause I'm gotten for punishment. I can't, I'm not good at Haskell like at all, but I keep going back into X-Moin ad hoping that, you know, I can switch to it for, you know, at least a little while to make a video about it. I keep messing around with the configuration files and keep making mistakes because cameras aren't in the right place. It's not, it's not. I mean, I will give you some, some much deserved credit. I cannot even mess with Haskell. I start, I start looking around at Haskell and I'm like, this language, what's going on here? I mean, it's, it's super com, like complicated to understand for a new user trying to understand Haskell. Like it's not easy. It's really not. Well, it's, I've been trying for months now. I made my first videos about X-Moin ad probably in December-ish, back when I was like a truly, truly new YouTuber and trying to get stuff done. And those videos are absolutely hilarious. Utter entertainment if you want to look at them cause it's just me completely failing for like 30 minutes to try to get X-Moin ad to actually work to, you know, like I had it installed and I was trying to change colors and change key bindings and stuff for like a half an hour. It was just fail after fail. And funnily enough, I've been trying ever since then I'm still just as bad at it. All right. Let's go ahead and jump into the contact information. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so. We're on Twitter, I'm at the Linux, I'm at MTWB. The Linux cast is at the Linux cast. Sandy, you're not actually on Twitter, are you? No, I'm not. You're one of those people who are anti Twitter. I have a feeling about you. Actually, I used to be on Twitter. So I'm not anti Twitter. It's just I've gotten off of it and- You and Twitter are broken up, I get it. Yeah. You can follow Tyler at the official Zanny on my library in Odyssey and you can subscribe to him on YouTube. The link for that will be down in the description below. Definitely check him out. He needs some more subscribers. You can subscribe to all of our stuff, audio-wise and video-wise at thelinuxcast.org or on YouTube at youtube.com slash linuxcast. And I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons, which you can find all of our patron stuff at patreon.com slash linuxcast. I don't actually have a list of all my patrons here, so I'm going to go look at it. Let's see if I can remember Devon, Marcus, Merrick, Donnie, Maglin, Camp. I'm forgetting one. I can't remember. Yeah. You did good, though. There's a seventh one. I don't remember your name. I think you're the new, oh, Mitchell. Yes, I remembered. Solid, man, good memory. That's only going to happen once I get past seven. My memory is going to, you know, I mean, I think we better just stay at seven. So I can't remember any more. All right, anyways, so each every week, each of us will be selecting a news topic to talk about. And I'm going to go first this time. I don't even remember what I chose. Oh, yes. So system 76 has unveiled a brand new desktop environment based on GNOME because there aren't enough desktop environments out there based on GTK. We needed one more. So true. So true. I think that they've done this in response to GNOME 40 because GNOME 40 has significantly changed the, you know, the look and feel of GNOME. So they're probably doing this in order to have more control over their own user interface. So I'm assuming that that's the reason why they're doing this. But if you've taken a look at it, and you can find the link in the description below, it is, well, I mean, obviously it's early days, but it doesn't look, I mean, it looks like GNOME. I mean, so I'm wondering why they bothered. The same, but at the same time, I will say the one thing that I do give them a little bit of credit for is the separating of like applications and the like Rofi like, you know, like launch launcher, I guess, I don't know what they're calling it, but it's a run launcher. Come on. Yeah, well, I mean, it looks kind of like what they're doing is they're taking their, they're just taking standard GNOME and then automatically, you know, enabling tiling by default. And have you used the material shell thing for tiling? It's not great. I, if I'm gonna be completely honest, I hate it. I don't, the thing that gets me about their tiling that like really upsets me is like, if you're going to implement, like the tiling in GNOME makes no sense because the title bars, like they don't get smaller or anything, they're just the same size. And I'm like, I mean, if you're gonna be tiling and making it more keyboard driven. Yeah. Turning on the tiling should turn the title bars off. We can agree on that. That's point number one. The second thing is, is when you're in a tiling window manager the number one thing you always do with every key binding is hit the super key. And that means your super key has to have just one use. It's the modifier for every other key on the keyboard. But in GNOME, the super keys, also the activities button, right, you hit it and you get to your activities view. It has dual use and it doesn't work. So you, the tiling thing, I mean, it's a good effort. And it's not as if it's completely unusable. I mean, it's not, I mean, you can use it. But if you're gonna use a tiling window manager just use a tiling window manager or they need to go through and say, when you turn the tiling on, we disable the functionality for the super key during this time and we get rid of the title bars. I mean, I understand from a development standpoint, that's hard because, excuse me, the super key is hard coded into GNOME. You're not gonna get rid of that very easily. Maybe that's the reason why they've forked GNOME. I mean, because that's basically what they've done here is fork GNOME. And maybe that's the reason why they've done that so that they can go through and make it easier to actually go through. Because they seem to like the tiling idea. And as, I mean, you and I are both tiling window manager, you know, aficionados, I guess. Just to use a big word. They seem to be kind of like that. So I mean, they, you know, maybe that's the reason why they've gone through and done this so that they can have more control and focus more on the tiling aspect. But I don't feel like the, I mean, PopOS has become very popular over the last few years because it's kind of like Ubuntu, but without all the Ubuntu-ness, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's a great way of putting it. Right, it doesn't have the focus on snaps. It's meant for like gaming and it's supposed to be really, really fast. And for some reason, people seem to trust System 76 a little bit more than they trust Canonical. And they have all these things, but I don't feel that there's, I don't think going through and making this shift to something totally new and radically different is going to necessarily work out for them. Now, maybe they'll be smart about it because they went through, when they switched to PopOS on their like hardware or whatever, they maintained. Actually, I think you can still go through when you order like one of their computers, you can have regular Ubuntu install or you can have PopOS install. So maybe this will just become like a third option, at least until it's more mature. So those are my thoughts on it. I don't know, because I've used that tiling thing before and it's just, no bueno, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's not great. Maybe, I was thinking, maybe if you hadn't used an actual tiling window manager before, it'd be okay. Good point. Like if you don't have the experience of what the real stuff is like, then maybe it's just, this is cool. This is automatically putting things. I mean, they've always had that like snap mode or whatever where you're dragging things around and it snaps to the quadrant or whatever. This is basically what that is only it's. I've had people tell me that's essentially the same thing as tiling, which that one gets me. Like, no, it's not, no, it's not. But like, yeah, I think you're right. I think it's a great in-between for, moving from a desktop environment to a tiling window manager can be a very stark difference. So maybe the tiling is just to, you know, get yourself comfortable with the idea of a tiling window manager so that you move into it. But yeah, I don't see this like new desktop environment really doing super like or changing too much about the, you know, view on GNOME and stuff. But maybe, maybe it'll work out for him. Maybe it'll be really good. But to be honest, as long as they don't do the thing that Ubuntu did where they, you know, come out with unity and then force it on, you know, everybody when it's half-baked, I think they'll be fine. But there's nothing stopping them from doing it. So hopefully they'll just do it. Like I said, they'll do it smart and just making it an option. If they go through and make people, I mean, because I mean, most people, I don't think want, I mean, if most people wanted a tiling window manager, they'd just use a tiling window manager. So most people probably want to be able to drag it to the front. I'm assuming that whatever they end up with will probably have the option to turn that off. Because I mean, from that video they had, it looked like there was like that little tiling button up there at the top. So maybe they'll be able to just turn it off. So maybe they'll just turn it off. Maybe they'll be able to just turn it off. Or maybe they won't even be defaulted by the end. It will just look like a gnome. In which case, I'll wonder even more why they bothered. Yeah. So I mean, at that point, all they did was separate out the applications from like making it a separate two windows, which, I mean, cool, but that's not really like super innovative. Yeah, that's why it's one of the reasons why I admire what like Budgie did. With the Solis guys, they went through and yes, they went through and used, at first it was GTK. Now they use QD, I believe. But when they went through and created a new desktop environment, they actually created a new desktop environment. They did the work where they didn't do something like, I mean, Mate is just gnome two, but modernized. XFC has basically been the same for the last 20 years. Ubuntu has been using the same look and feel since 2010 or something when Unity came out 2009-ish, 2011, I don't know. Somewhere around there's looked exactly the same. And even when they went through and changed to gnome, it stayed the same. GNOME has, when they went to GNOME three, that's looked the same up till GNOME 40. And even, I don't know if you've looked at GNOME 40, but that looks, I mean, yes, it looks different and behaves a little bit different, but you can still, it still feels like GNOME, right? So when we get a new desktop environment, it just feels like, usually it's just the fork. You know, it's just somebody taking GNOME and it's almost always GNOME. I mean, there's very few, if any, like true forks of KDE. You notice that? Yep. I mean, there are implementations of KDE Plasma that look different, like on Garuda or something, but there's still Plasma or whatever. There just doesn't seem, it doesn't seem to be the willingness of distributions to fork KDE and make their own as there is with GNOME. Maybe it's because GTK is easier to code for. I don't know, maybe it's you didn't find it. Like, I don't know, it's a thing. All right, so what's your link for this week? For this week, it is the dark mod and it is, so this is like a really interesting game. So I've been checking out some free and open source, you know, games and just in general, different types of games. And I found this and I had never heard of it, even though it seems to be a pretty popular game, but as the title might suggest that it's a mod, it's not. It started off as a mod for, I believe it was, it was, I believe it was DOOM 3 or it was at least like based off of the DOOM 3 engine, but they've switched over, it's now standalone. And I just, I had to talk about this because for one, when it comes to free and open source, like games, you'll have, there's like two classes of free and open source games. There's the ones that are, you know, like zero AD or I'm trying to think like open arena or something like that where you could just, you know, if you have a distribution that has a software center, you can just install it in, you know, button press or if you have something like RH, you can get it from your package manager, maybe the AUR or something like that. So it's simple to install. And then there are the other ones like Freedom where it's, I mean, it's a game, but you only get the project files and you've got to go out and get an engine and do all of this stuff to get your game up and running and working. And this one, I found it to be extremely easy to install, extremely, like it's, what is it? Four steps, four steps. Oh no, excuse me, excuse me, I missed one. There's five steps. And they're extremely easy to do. And then it's a game that's very heavily thief inspired and as somebody who I never really got big into the thief games. So I don't really have a frame of reference when it comes to how like true to the series it is, but I have been playing the absolute heck out of this game. It is super fun. Just sneaking up behind people and conking them on the back of the head and trying to stay in the shadows. Like I found it to be really fun. Have you checked it out at all? I haven't yet. I'm not much of a gamer, like at all. My gaming is pretty much limited to Hearthstone and even that I don't play as often as I used to. Now I was really into City of Skylines for a while, but it crashes like Dickens on Linux. Like you can't run it for more in a few minutes and it just crashes on you. Maybe that's just me, I don't know. But I guess- I've never gotten into the City of Skylines. I have a buddy who keeps telling me, he's like, dude, you just got to try it, you'll get addicted, you'll love it. Let's see, I got really, really into like SimCity back, you know, back in the day, like when I was really young and played SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4 was just like the most amazing thing ever. And then they ruined it with the whole online thing with the SimCity, whatever the most recent one is. And then like City of Skylines is just kind of like SimCity, but with like Uber control. I mean, it's really cool. And it's great because the whole mods scene is like huge mungus, right? And they have a ton of mods. So I think one of the reasons why it crashes for me is because I have all the mods installed. Not all of them, but I mean, it's like way too many. So that's probably the reason why it crashes on me. But yeah, I'm not, I want to game. Like I have an Xbox 360 that I've had for ages, but it has not been turned on in four years. Same, I have one I haven't turned it on in a year. Like I doubt, I mean, it's sitting on the floor. It probably has three or four inches of dust on it. It's, I have, I don't have like a lot of games. I have like, I don't know, probably six games. And one of them is Batman Arkham City, Arkham Asylum or something, never been opened. Still has. Really? Yeah, still has, still has the cellophane rep on the outside. That's how much of a gamer I am is that it's still sitting up there. I mean, it's like a collectible at this moment. It's like, it's never been opened. It's probably worth like 25 cents or whatever, I don't know. I've been told it's a really good game. I wouldn't know. I haven't played it. Now like I have Skyrim out there too. I played that a little bit, but because I like, I really like Elders. I liked Elder Scrolls. So I thought I'd get into Skyrim, but I could, by the time, you know, I, by the time Skyrim came out, I was just not a gamer anymore. Like we used, I mean, I used to do a ton of game. Like we, you know, we didn't really have time for this, but we went through and played that Gran Turismo and a whole bunch of other games. Definitely to see our podcast from last week with Martin's last episode, because we talked about retro gaming, so it was good. Anyways, let's go ahead and move into our, we're 35 minutes in. We're just now getting to the main topic, but that's just the way it's gonna go. So this was your topic. So I rewarded your topic to quote DT. So it's proprietary software garbage. And well, I don't remember what's your original topic. Software proprietary software on Linux, really a bad thing. So it was much more PC of putting it. So what are your thoughts on proprietary software? We don't need PC titles here. To be honest, when it comes to proprietary software on Linux, even though people talk about like, you know, it being okay and it being something that like, there's too many people out there that are not willing or not okay with the fact that proprietary software is available on Linux and it's just a thing. Like I think we need proprietary software on Linux not because it's good to be proprietary software, but it makes the transition for newcomers to Linux much, much more digestible. I mean, we all like, I don't know about you, but I remember that my first experience with Linux was me installing it and then noticing how much wasn't available on Linux. And now that's no longer the case. And I think it's a good thing. I think having the option to use Discord, having the option to use Spotify is a good thing. Not necessarily that you should be using them, but you and I tried to use an open source solution to record this show and it was horrible. It was not a good experience. So if we didn't have Discord, we would be using Skype. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, don't talk to me about open source VoIP projects. They're not good. At least the ones that we've tried so far have not been a good experience. Sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to put that out. Oh no, no, no, you're right. I don't think we can afford to be... The whole free software foundation mindset of where... If you even allow proprietary software to be installed out of the box on your distribution, that's nobody know we can't have it. I don't think that helps Linux adoption at all. I mean, you're just making it more easy for a person who doesn't know anything about Linux to say, well, why should I even try it? The stuff that I'm used to isn't even there. So I guarantee you, even those people who are out there saying that proprietary software is the root of all evil are still using proprietary software in some form. They have to be because unless they're not using a computer at all, every single thing that makes an Intel processor run is proprietary. That is in the kernel. There are ways of getting around it, but you're not going to have a... There's a Libre kernel out there that will run on some hardware, but try getting a Wi-Fi card to work with a Libre kernel. You can't do it. I should say that you can do it, but it's a significant hurdle in order to get it to actually work, right? And if you just want Linux to run out of the box, you have to use the regular blog standard kernel that has all these proprietary blobs in it, and you have to use that. I mean, because that's what enables the vast majority of hardware to run. And yeah, that stuff's in the background. That's not in your face. You're not getting... It's not like in order to use your computer, you have to blog into Microsoft Word or something, but I think really the... Really weird feedback in my headphones right now. I think that the reason why proprietary software has such a bad name is mostly because of Microsoft's propensity in the past to be horrible to Linux. I mean, they sued Linux, tried to sued Linux out of existence, and that gave a lot of old-timers, people who've been in the Linux community for a long time, a really bad, like a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to proprietary software. Because Microsoft is one of the huge companies that have a lot of software that people want to use, Office, and all that kind of stuff. And Adobe is the same way. Adobe has been very... I want to say they've been uninterested, I guess is a nice way of putting it, of bringing any of their software to Linux. I mean, I think the only software that Adobe has ever brought to Linux was Adobe Reader or something. I mean, I think you could get Adobe Reader back in the... I mean, seriously, to say, but you still use Adobe Reader, but... I hope not. I mean, it's just a thing. I mean, Flash obviously would work on Linux, but that wasn't Adobe bringing it to Linux. That was Google and Firefox or whatever bringing it to Linux. So I think that the position against proprietary software has really been... It's been pushed back and given a bad name because of the way those companies have treated open source software a lot in the past. But I think that there's this whole idea that all proprietary software is bad. But really, I think that there's... The real way to say it is that there is some proprietary software that is bad, like not necessarily bad, but it's not privacy-respecting or whatever. But there's good proprietary software we're using Discord right now. I don't think that... I think the vast majority of people would say Discord's actually a really good thing. And I think that they've... Because they've brought their client natively to Linux, I think that's a great thing. Because without it, I mean, it would feel like there was something missing, right? Especially with gaming, because Discord's a huge thing with the gaming community. We've tried so hard over the last 25, 30, 40 years or whatever it is. I mean, it's a long, long time to try to get gaming on Linux. And we seem to finally be succeeding. We've finally with the help of Steam and Proton and Lutris and gaming on Linux, all this stuff and wine, we're finally making some headway in that area if we didn't have Discord because we were so against proprietary software, which I mean, which would be completely hypocritical because all gaming is proprietary software for the most part. It'd feel like something was missing, right? It'd be another reason why you'd wanna go through and game on Windows because you could then talk to your friends. I mean, it feels like Discord's completely changed the way a lot of people do gaming, right? Yeah. I don't know. It boggles the mind a little bit that people are so against... I mean, I can understand wanting to use as much FOS software as possible, FOS, whatever. I'm using FOS software, FOS software, software, whatever. But I understand that and I do too. There's a reason why I've been stuck on Firefox even though Mozilla continues to piss me off. It's because I wanna use an open source browser and I don't trust Brave and I don't get the whole cryptocurrency nonsense. And the browsers that I wanna use is Vivaldi. Like it's based on Chromium, you know, and they seem to at least have some cool about innervating and stuff and make it look a little bit different and stuff. It's an open source. I've been dragging my feet on it, right? So that's, I mean, I understand the whole idea of wanting to go through and use, you know, FOS stuff. But on the same thing is, if I were only going to use FOS stuff, my experience using my computer wouldn't be as good because there's certain things that we just don't cover. We don't do a good job with messaging standards like Discord and stuff. I mean, there's Matrix or whatever out there and stuff, but it's, a messaging platform's only as good as the number of people who use it. So you can have, you can, it's the reason why Mastodon is horrible because there's nobody there, right? It's the same thing with any open source federated kind of thing is that there's just a small number of people there and it's not, it's fun. It's somewhere like a Twitter or Discord or whatever. So there's just a blank spots that Linux doesn't seem to be able to do as well in. Yeah. So. And I mean, I think it's one of those things where like it could get better. It could, like when it comes to FOS software, but the idea that we can't, we can't tell people that it's like, it's not okay to be like you shouldn't use proprietary software. It's just not like, it's okay to use whatever works for you. Just, you know, over time, don't ever get to the point where you're not okay with trying a FOS software. Like even though Discord works and it works great for what we need it, if a free, if a FOS piece of software comes out and lands in front of us and it, you know, it does everything that Discord does just as well. Yeah, I'll use it, but that's the thing. There are some proprietary software that just does things either better or just does things that FOS software can't right now. It just, it has FOS, some pieces of FOS software haven't matured as much as the proprietary software has. So, you know, just use what works. Don't be so negative towards people who use it. Yeah. There's the whole, there's the whole, I mean, we talk a little bit about the elitist stuff in a prior podcast with me, Martin, but I mean, it's the whole, I think there's a perception out there that if you limit yourself to just FOS software, you're somehow better than those people who interspersed, you know, proprietary software in their workflow. And really that's just complete and utter nonsense. I mean, just because one person just sticks to all FOS stuff doesn't make them any different or better than me because I use proprietary software. There are items of proprietary software that I couldn't live without. There'd be no reason for me to use my computer if I can, you know, have gaming on here or have, you know, my to-do program, which is a proprietary piece of software or notion or any number of things on here that I just couldn't, I mean, I use all the time. I think, I mean, you're probably the same, right? You have proprietary pieces of software that just are in your workflow that you just have to use. And yes, I could go to completely FOS. I could find a to-do app that isn't to-do as that's completely open source. I could do that. I could probably even figure out a way to sync it between that and my phone. I could, you know, it'd be extra work. There's an open source version of Notion out there that you can host yourself. I could use that. It's a pain in the ass to set up. I've tried, but I could use it. There are open source options for Discord and all these other things. But it's, I mean, it feels weird to say that those things are too hard to do. Because, I mean, I'm a self-proclaimed lazy person, but, and so it's kind of true that it is too hard to do, but it's also, it's more than just the convenience of it. It's more the things that I'm used to, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not opposed to doing those things. It's just more, I want to be able to be comfortable with the things that I want to use. And going through and changing to something new and working to get it set up, maybe I get some kind of, you know, sense of accomplishment for doing that, but if it's not as good when I get there, you know, it could be. Wow, yeah. And I mean, to further that point, like a piece of software being proprietary isn't necessarily, like, in of itself, a reason to not use it. Like, if the proprietary soft, like Discord right here, if, if it becomes a thing where I don't feel like my privacy is, for one, when I use Discord, I use Discord with the knowledge that anything I say on here could be traced back to me. So there's, and also like, I have my own server with a picture of me. So, you know, it kind of be pretty arrogant to think that no one would be able to figure out that, you know, this is what I'm saying. Well, it's not meant to be private, right? It's not as if, it's not like signal, like where you're, it's meant to be, you know, encrypted or whatever. It's meant to be something, it's, it's, I mean, people didn't go through and complain about AOL chat rooms back in the early 2000s or whatever, because, you know, they were sharing all your messages. That was the point. You know, that's, that'd be silly. Yeah, and it's just that type of thing. Like, I feel like so many people have that, the mindset of, you know, you just can't use anything proprietary. No, like, if you don't have a reason to leave it and find something else that works better for you, that's FOS, I mean, there's, you don't, no one should be telling you, like you can't use something proprietary just because it's proprietary. There have to be other reasons not to use something other than just because of the license it's under. I mean, that's the way I look at it. Like, I don't want to really use anything that's Google, right, because I know Google's actively taking, you know, all the data and selling it. Like, that's a good reason not to want to use anything by Google. I still use Google stuff because it's really good, right? I mean, I've tried to switch to DuckDuckGo. It's atrocious. It's not, it's utter garbage. It's so bad. I mean, for the vast majority of stuff, I end up having to search on Google or on DuckDuckGo. I just have to research again with the G-Bang, right? And that's the way it is with a lot of stuff. I mean, like Google's really good, but I can understand when somebody says, well, I don't use Google for these reasons. But if somebody just said, I don't use Google because it's proprietary, that would make me think, well, you know, that's dumb reason. Yeah. You know, it's taking those reasons a little bit farther. And like, I don't use Google because they're data-sucking monsters. You know, that's good reason. It's a good reason. Sorry to cut you off. Same thing with Microsoft. I mean, I don't use Microsoft because they hated Linux back in the 90s, I'm not holding a grudge. It's a, it may not be a fantastic reason. It may not be a rational reason, but it's a good reason. It's better than because they have proprietary stuff. And it's the same thing with any other thing. I don't use Discord because, I don't know, because the moderation stuff on there is not very good. That's a good reason. You know, and it's the same, like I said, it's the same for any piece of software you want to use. Like you said, it's not a good reason to not use them just because it's proprietary. You have to have other reasons. Have other reasons. And then it's, I mean, okay. So I never want to be one of those people who say you want to, I don't want to become those people who say, you know, don't use proprietary software or I'm going to judge you, you know, into oblivion. If you want to be that kind of person, I don't want to be like you, you use, what the hell you want to use, you know? I mean, if you want to go through and install GNU Geeks or whatever, one of those, the next distribution is that you use the Libre kernel or whatever, you want to be one of those people and you want to go through and jump through all these soups and get your stuff up and running. I'm not going to judge you because I sat through and installed all the Secless software. And there are a lot of people out there who just don't understand why I'd sit down in there and take all the time to get DWM up and running. I mean, I was one of those people before I used Secless software. I was like, I couldn't, I could not understand why anybody would go through and waste their time on DWM. It was like, it looks hard. There's no documentation. The people who development are arrogant and go completely against the idea of having a community. I mean, they don't want to help anybody. I mean, I couldn't understand it. Then I was like, I'm going to try this. And I still come back to DWM every single day because it's my favorite window manager. It's the one that I want to use. IQ tile, I like BSPWM, I started in I3. It's my pride and joy, my I3 config because I'm so proud of getting it under a hundred lines and everything, but I actually keep the DWM. Use what you like to use and even have the reasons you want, whatever reasons you want to have to use it, even if those are dumb reasons. If your only reason is because it's proprietary, I'm going to judge you for that, but still just use whatever you want to use. Yeah, yeah. So, that's it. I mean, seriously. It's just so, one of those things, it's one of those things in Linux that it's always going to be an issue that is debated upon, like GNOME versus KDE, or what's the best package manager? More recently, Snaps versus FlatPack or something like that. It's always going to be, it's going to be one of those topics that's going to be on podcasts like this one for all of eternity because for the most part, we're never, ever, ever going to agree on it as a community because it's, I mean, there's going to be people all through absolutely hate proprietary software. There are going to be people all there who say, you want to know what? I use proprietary software because just in some cases, it's just fucking better. Yeah. The way it is. So anything interesting. All right. We literally talked that to death. So let's go ahead and move into our apps of the week. So Tyler, why don't you go ahead and give us your app of the week for the first time? Mine is Flameshot. If you don't know what Flameshot is, it's a GUI like screenshot utility. I found it to be really useful and it's got a lot of features built into it that make it very, I don't know. It doesn't feel bloated, but at the same time, it has plenty of features that make it really, really easy to use because for me when I'm taking screenshots, there's plenty of screenshot utilities out there for just easily capturing your entire screen and calling it a day and editing or doing whatever you want to and GIMP afterwards. But Flameshot makes it really easy to just have a system tray icon running and just whenever you want to take a screenshot of a portion of your screen, you click on that and you can select it and it's got easy tools for if you wanted to draw an arrow to something or you wanted to apply a Gaussian blur over someone's face or whatever you want to do with stuff like that. It's got features you can add text to a screenshot like in seconds. It's just, I found it to be a extremely useful and very small utility and it's really amazed me because I didn't expect to come out liking it as much as I did. Have you ever used it? Maybe. When I first started using Flameshot a couple of times, I was probably looking for a screenshot utility and I probably tried it. Right now, I'm just using the XFCE screenshot thing and really because I don't need any of that other stuff, I just need to take a screenshot. My thought is if I'm taking a screenshot to show somebody something, if they can't use their eyeballs to actually find that on the screenshot, then I've lost a hope in them anyway. So yeah, I'm not going to do that. You got to remember, I really should change the channel to just lazy man Linux guy because anytime I can be lazy about something, I will be lazy about it. So that's just the way it is. So all right, so mine, my lap of the week is called Castero. I made a video about this, but basically what Castero is, is a terminal application to listen to your podcast and it's amazing. It's so good. It's the biggest downside to it is it's written Python so it's slow. And by slow, I mean like you notice that it's slow. Like you can tell that there's like a millisecond or five milliseconds or whatever delay between pressing the pause button and actually stopping. That's the only thing I've come across that it's not a good thing. The rest of it is it's easy to add podcasts to. It remembers your position in podcasts even when the application closes and comes back. You know, it's easy to download stuff for offline use. It has good quality. You can speed up the podcast. So if you've listened to your podcast, you know, two times the speed or whatever, you can do that or you can slow down obviously. But it has all the features you'd want and it's in the terminal. So it's right at my alley because I love everything that's in the terminal. So that's the one I've been playing around with enough for almost a week and I'm not one of those people who go through and you listen to podcasts on my computer. Like at all, I listen to them on my phone. That's the same way. I mean, you're supposed to do it, I think. But with this, it's actually got me listening to podcasts on my computer more than I ever had before. So yeah, Castero is the one that I've been trying out. It's really good. Now I got a question for you. When you post a video on Castero, because I didn't see any comments about this, but I just have to ask, did you get any comments of people talking about the fact that it's Python and slow, that millisecond of delay? The very first comment was like that. The second comment was like that. I'm pretty sure the third comment was like that too. And then it branched off into some of my more regular viewers. But definitely the first three comments were all about, well, this is what you get when you use Python. Well, you know what? Python is like proprietary software. It's good for what it does. It always cracks me up when people talk about how slow Python programs are, like Ranger. I had someone tell me that like, I need to stop using Ranger because I'll notice a night and day difference in speed. Ranger is perfectly fine. It's not slow. Ranger's not slow. I've never noticed it'd be slow. It's my favorite too. I have it on my little, like, on my, oh gosh, my Ryzen laptop. It's got, I mean, it's not an underpowered ship by any means, but it's not a, you know, eight core 16 thread processor I've got here in my main PC. And it runs like, Ranger is not slow. Like Python programs, when you're running something in the terminal, like unless you can't deal with something having like one or two milliseconds of delay, like how are you that anal about speed? Like, how can you even perceive that speed? I don't even know. So I have a laptop here. This is from 2011. It has a, I don't even know. I think the sticker might be still on it. I don't know. This has a, well it has an i7 in it, but I'm pretty sure it's like an i7, like 11 hundred or something. It's some crazy old processor. Ranger runs perfectly fine on it. Like it has no problems on it, like at all. I can run KD Plasma on that thing. And I'm gonna notice that there's like a thousand millisecond delay in Ranger. I mean, this does come on. People are so stupid. I just called commenters on my video stupid. I'm just, I didn't mean it. Leave a comment. It's okay. You can hate Python all you want. It doesn't matter. Yeah. It's not gonna judge you for it, because I hate Haskell. I can't stand Haskell. So I would be, if somebody said that this thing was written in Haskell, I would be the first person on the video commenting, why are you using Haskell? It's so dumb. All right. That was fun. All right. I think that's it. I think I've had enough. We can sit here and rant about proprietary software probably until our faces go blue. And well, I could probably use some blue tint to my facing as how I'm still the whitest person in the history of whiteness. But we're not gonna do that. I mean, we've been going for an hour and one minute. So I'm sure I'm gonna cut some of that stuff out because you will take out some of the soundness, but whatever. Anyways, thank you for watching. We record this video or the podcast every Thursday now and it will be released probably on Sunday issues, Sunday, it will probably be released on Sundays to the YouTube channel. If you'd like to get it early, like two days early, you can support us on Patreon level two, three and four. Get it two days early. If you wanna, like I said, if you wanna listen to this early, eventually if we ever get advertisers or whatever, you'll also get the audio feed completely ad-free. So patreon.com slash linuxcast, support us there. Thanks to everybody who does support us. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing, like and subscribe. I'll see you next time. See you Tyler. See ya, have a good one.