 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 both YouTube and Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments come through social media such as Mastodon, Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first question I want to respond to is, HeyDT are you finally going to do a true video hands-on review about Chrome OS or Chrome OS Flex since it may be a great introduction to some Windows users to Linux giving that well-balanced area between proprietary and open source goodness. Cheers for great content as always. First let me thank you for your kind words and I'm also going to say welcome to the channel because I'm assuming you haven't been around that long because anyone that's watched a few of my videos knows that I'm I'm all about free and open source software right? I don't cover proprietary software. I don't like proprietary software right? I'm never going to cover a piece of proprietary software and say anything good about it. So that's why you've never seen anything about Chrome OS on my channel. I'm never going to go buy a Chrome book. I'm never going to have a machine that runs a proprietary operating system on it that's fundamentally against everything that I believe in right? So I'm never going to tell people I spend so much time trying to get people to leave proprietary operating systems like Windows for example since you mentioned Windows. I'm trying to get people to leave Windows for free alternatives mainly Linux because that's the best free and open source operating system out there. There's others and we've got various BSD operating systems and Haiku and React OS and various other units like operating systems out there but they're not ready for prime time right? The driver problems and things like that where Linux is a very mature desktop operating system that people can switch from Windows to Linux so that's why I focus on Linux but mainly I'm focused on free and open source software right? So I'm not going to give Chrome OS any coverage. I'm not going to tell people to leave the aids that is Windows and come over to the cancer that is Chrome OS right? That makes no sense right? I'm not going to you know cure their one disease and tell them to go infect themselves with another disease that's not the way we do it. Let's cut out the tumor that is Windows but we're not going to replace it with another tumor. Let's actually heal ourselves and get people to go to a truly free as in freedom operating system that is GNU slash Linux and I hear from people like this a lot especially you know Chrome OS is built on Linux right? Android is built on Linux. They're both proprietary operating systems though. The Linux kernel is free. It's licensed under the GPL. It's free and open source software. The kernel is but those operating systems that Google builds around the Linux kernel they are proprietary. Chrome OS is proprietary. Android is proprietary. They're not free operating systems. That's why I never talk about them. I don't care about them right? I'm never going to tell people to go use them. That's not what I do. It's the same argument with proprietary browsers like Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge. Well they're built on the open source Chromium engine. Yeah that doesn't make them open source. There's still the stuff they put on top of that open source engine in Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi. They license it under a proprietary license. It's proprietary software. You can't be free and open source software and proprietary at the same time. You're either one or the other and people try to find this weird middle ground like Chrome OS is a perfect balancing area between proprietary and open source goodness was part of the comment. There's no area between proprietary and open source. It's either one or the other. You can't have it both ways right? I went to the gym today and I worked out and I actually asked this guy a question and this is a perfect analogy here. He was a big guy. Swole up and he was doing some of our squads and I asked him did he take anything? And obviously I'm talking about performance enhancing drugs right steroids. I asked him hey do you take anything? He says half and half. He says I'm not really a user but sometimes I'll take some stuff for a while and then for a little while I won't take some stuff. So he's not really on steroids. He's just he's half and half on steroids right then you can't have it both ways. You're either taking something or you're not and you're either open source or you're proprietary. You can't try to find a weird middle ground. There is no middle ground to be had. The next question is hey DT question. How do you look so good for your age for smiley faces? Appreciate the smiley faces and I appreciate the kind words. I don't know if I look that great for my age. I will say I typically people think I'm a lot younger than I am. I'll be 45 later this year. I'll turn 45 and I probably do look younger than that. But that's been the case my whole life throughout my entire life. I've always looked younger than I actually was. I don't know. I would say it's good living as far as obviously work out. I spent a lot of time at the gym. I try to eat right. I try to do good things but I'm going to be honest. A lot of it is just genetics because I have sisters. I've got sisters that honestly they look the same. I've got a sister that's two years younger than me and one that's five years younger than me. I would say both of them pass for being younger than they are. I just think some people have the right genetics. They get a pass on some things where some people unfortunately they get a bad roll of the dice and because I've got friends that I went to high school with. Of course I would be the exact same age with these people that I graduated with. And some of these guys I look at them and they look like they're 70 years old and they're broke down and they're just barely getting by. And unfortunately life's a crap shoot and sometimes you get dealt a good hand. Sometimes you don't. Moving on. Hey DT will you be taking pull requests on your projects? He's talking about my get lab projects and specifically that comment came from the video I did the other day creating that GTK app using Haskell and Python. Will I take pull requests? Yes but know that that was an example application right. I don't mind you guys doing pull requests on it go ahead but don't be surprised if I don't take them because like if somebody gives me a pull request and rewrites the whole thing I probably won't take it because I made a video right and I covered every line of code that I wrote in that video and then these people are going to go click on the link to that particular get lab project and want to see the same code that I had in the video try to understand it and all of that code has been changed by pull requests. So understand really with any get lab project understand what the purpose of it is. I'll give you another great example my dot files. I get pull requests on my dot files a lot and sometimes I'll take them for example people will find errors in various config files of mine or some hey there's this one small little error here let me correct that for you and they'll do a pull request I'll take it no problem but then I'll get people that do weird things in my dot files repo which are my personal config files like they'll change all my key bindings and then do a pull request as like do you really think I'm going to accept that why are you changing my key bindings for my personal config for my machine that I work on every day why would you do that but I get people that do that and they again understand you know some of those get lab repos are you know for collaborative community things like you want to contribute code that's fine but then when it's really personal stuff or in the other day that the code examples for these gtk apps feel free to do those pull requests but understand don't do like any kind of major rewrite or anything like that if you do that I probably won't accept your pull request but what I'll probably do is I will just put that as a completely separate example and maybe I'll just keep that particular get lab repository which I called code examples yeah if you guys want to submit stuff yeah I'll probably accept it but I've got to keep the original file the same because again that's a reference from a video I can't butcher that up because again people are gonna go to it and wonder what the hell happened to the original file and the next question is one I've gotten before and I think I've probably answered it on a previous edition of hate et but it's hate et have you looked at peer tube what are your thoughts on it and I'm getting this question because I did the video the other day about odyssey I'm about alternative video platforms you know alternatives to youtube and peer tube is great because it's free to open source software it's peer to peer and it sounds like a great idea but the problem with peer tube is it's self-hosted meaning I have to run my own peer tube server right it's not it's not like a service like a odyssey or even youtube you know where any creator can just upload their videos because it's on somebody else's servers they don't have to pay you know because it's expensive running your own server especially storage costs you know I've got many many terabytes of videos I'm talking about the rendered videos I'm not even talking about trying to store all the clips and things that I eventually made the videos out of if I had to store all of that stuff I mean we'd be talking about dozens of terabytes or just what I do also I only record in 1080p if I did 4k we would be talking maybe hundreds of terabytes of storage that's massive amounts of cost I mean you're talking about many hundreds of dollars a month to run a peer tube server that's not going to have any income coming in right because if there's no ad network on on my own peer tube thing you're like I can't really I would have to beg people for money just to try to break even on the cost on something like that and there's no way I'd probably break even on it so it makes it tough peer tube is not appropriate and I'm a bigger channel right like I've got a lot of viewers a lot of subscribers and I do make enough money on my youtube stuff that I could sacrifice a few hundred bucks a month and make that peer tube server if I really wanted to I wouldn't want to but I could probably do it think about smaller creators they can't do that of course smaller creators are not going to have as much storage need you know they're not going to have as big a catalog but what you'd have to do with smaller creators is a bunch of them probably have to get together and share the cost of a server and then you're dependent on other people to maintain that server if you're doing a shared server with somebody you better hope one day they don't forget to pay the hosting bill and yo you lose everything and that's another real problem with something like peer tube you know peer tube again it sounds like a great idea and I would love to support it and I would love to have my own peer tube instance but right now I'm not sure it makes sense maybe one day I'll do it though I'm not completely ruling it out but right now yeah I'm gonna have to pass on it and the next question is referring to a video I made a couple of weeks back about auto starting programs on Linux he writes hey dt how do you handle auto start with programs or software not made for tiling window managers like mega sink steam flame shot etc okay so I use a tiling window manager but everything I did on that video about auto starting programs it doesn't matter your programs don't care what window manager you run these programs these programs aren't written with a window manager in mind they're just programs right when I open up my file manager pc man fm it wasn't written or a floating window manager or a tiling window manager or any specific it was just a program that was written the same thing with your terminal emulators and your web browsers they don't care same thing with auto starting programs right it doesn't matter that's a desktop environment floating window manager tiling window manager whatever throw it in dot config slash auto start and that program should auto start when you log in again to whatever window manager or desktop environment you happen to be using and the next question is hey dt wish you would have kept your gopher alive gemini is okay but it needs special browsers while gopher works fine in w3m good luck and please make more videos like this and he's referring to the gopher protocol and the gemini protocol those are two alternative protocols to http to the standard web and I had a gopher hole set up at one time I eventually abandoned it I don't maintain a gopher server anymore and then I had a gemini capsule I don't maintain that anymore I gave up the gemini server because it was too much work I can't I have to have a website right so I have a presence on the web but I don't want to maintain basically three different sites right because I gotta maintain a website then I gotta maintain a gemini site then I gotta maintain a gopher and that was too much work for me for I I'm limited on time because mainly I spend so much time making videos right I'm really limited on time everything outside of the video stuff such as maintaining websites so that's the reason I gave up gopher and gemini but that's just for me I still am happy I made those videos about setting up a gemini server and a gopher server and you guys that are happy with those protocols keep using it I hope more people use them and I'm not saying that I'll never use gopher or gemini in the future I actually would love to still maintain a gemini capsule but I'm gonna have to work out some way where what I'm gonna have to eventually do is set up something to where I can create my website and it automatically generates a gemini capsule for me I'm gonna have to automate the process in some way and until I work out something like that right now it doesn't make sense because it's just too time consuming for me to maintain all that stuff right now and again because you kind of have to be on the web right now I'm just going to maintain a website the next question hey dt can you do a review of a ganu slash herd distro I think dibby and has one and I've got a train blowing a horn near the office I'm not redoing this clip though we're gonna go with it I hope you guys don't get annoyed by the train blowing but can I review a ganu slash herd distribution no there's no way I could never run a fully free ganu operating system complete with the ganu herd kernel because it's no driver support is just I can't even run a fully free as in freedom linux libre distribution because I need proprietary blobs proprietary drivers for various things I could never install ganu herd on any of my machines and actually do what I do there's no way I could I'd have to quit making video content right I have to quit doing anything like because most of the stuff I do on my computer would not be possible on ganu herd so no I'm not going to review it I'd have to review it in a virtual machine for one thing because I couldn't put it on my real equipment because it wouldn't work on my real equipment and what am I going to do in a virtual machine a virtual machine is not going to tell you whether that thing works or not and as far as hardware support I know it's not going to work and it would be irresponsible for me to do a video about it and then try to convince you guys to go try it out and use it when I know it's not going to work for me it's not going to work for you either I already know that so no I'm not going to do that that is cool that debian has a herd flavor debian's always had some weird stuff going on with it as far as they maintain some some strange additions of debian one thing debian calls itself good news slash linux because they are fans of the free software movement and so the in difference to the contributions of ganu and the free software foundation debian has always called itself from the very beginning debian ganu slash linux and they like the ideals of the free software movement so that's great that they maintain an ISO with the herd kernel it's not going to be usable but debian I for a while I remember debian I think also maintained a free bsd uh distribution as well debian it was a debian slash free bsd it was like the debian stuff on top of the free bsd kernel I'm pretty sure they had that years ago I remember seeing that around but again at the end of the day the linux kernel the big generic linux kernel with all the driver support that's what people need for proper desktop laptop support when you get into some of the alternative kernels you're going to run into problems right that's great that those things exist and maybe one day these things like the herd kernel will get to the point where they're actually usable but right now they're not usable it's just not a viable alternative right now and moving on is a comment hey dt I feel that astro vim beats doom emacs astro vim beats doom emacs at at what I get these kinds of questions and comments sometimes and these things tell me nothing astro vim beats doom emacs at at what cards dominoes tiddly winks like what are we talking about here one thing let's forget about the distributions astro vim and doom emacs let's talk about under the hood vim and emacs they're not even the same program right they're not they're totally different things emacs is a graphical gooey program vim is a terminal program you have to run it inside a terminal yeah I know gvm exists but gvm is very bad that's not usable uh so one thing they're fundamentally very different things vim and emacs you can't compare them so I don't know one beats the other no because they're not even trying to do the same things it's like saying hey apples beat oranges at what I guess if you like apples maybe apples beat oranges but sometimes you need a recipe that calls for oranges right you can't use apple for that thing and the final question is hey dt what's your thoughts on the current situation with elementary os it's a great Linux distribution and it's very sad that it's facing some troubling times for those of you that are not up to date on the current situation with elementary elementary has two co-founders that are part of the company that is behind elementary one of the co-founders last week posted that they needed to go get a real job and were leaving the company and they sold their half of the company to the other co-founder the other co-founder is also complaining about not making enough money and may needing to go find a real job and who knows what the future of elementary os and what's in store for it right and you know right now all we can do is just wait and see it's one of those things Linux distributions unfortunately come and go I've seen a lot of Linux distributions die in my oh 15 years or so of using desktop Linux and many of them I love many I used and one day you just wake up and they're gone that's fine we've got we've got so many Linux distributions out there it's not like it's not the end of the world I know people think it's just crazy when they're the distribution they use dies no no it's not you'll be okay trust me on that you'll be okay if you can't handle this then Linux is not for you unfortunately because a lot of your community-based Linux distributions especially are not going to be here in five years 10 years 15 years right they come and go again now elementary os I'm a big fan I am a supporter of theirs on patreon I donate a few bucks a month to them on patreon even though I'm not an elementary user their desktop environment and all it is it looks great I think it's great especially converting new to Linux users from windows or Mac over to Linux I think it's a great beginner Linux distribution personally it's not for me but again that's just a personal thing I love the fact that elementary exists it's different you know most Linux distributions are all kind of doing the same thing where the elementary guys were really making something unique and exciting and they really differentiated themselves from the rest of the crowd and I want them to succeed and I'm going to continue to support them on patreon and I hope you guys continue to support them those of you that are if you're not supporting them go give them a few bucks because right now they're hurting financially I think that's the main thing this these guys it's one of those things you work on something you get burnout you put in a lot of hours especially when you're not getting rewarded for it the way you should and everybody feels like they're underpaid right it doesn't matter what job you do everybody is underpaid you are not making what you think you are worth and sometimes people are in fact not making any any amount of money what they should be making and this is something that many Linux distributions face and I think it's unfortunate and I hope that elementary os is able to survive and thrive in the future a lot of this though is not dependent on finances a lot of this ultimately sometimes people just change like you know sometimes people decide hey this thing I've been working on forever I no longer want to work on it and that's okay that's cool so and there's nothing again there's nothing anybody can really do about that unless you want to go take up the mantle and help the elementary team out and if that's the case hey get in touch with with the founder of elementary that's still around Danielle Fourier and let her know that you are interested in helping out the project if you can if you code I know they spend a lot of their time coding in vola you know for the GTK stuff and those of you that can contribute financially hey go help them out I mentioned they have a patreon they I'm sure take donations and other ways as well I'm not sure but I'm sure you can go to the elementary website and find a link where you can give them money probably through PayPal or something like that I'm not sure on that but yeah go help those guys out because honestly I think the Linux ecosystem would be a much dimmer and darker place if elementary os wasn't a part of it now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Devin Gabe James Maxim Matt Michael Mitchell Paul Scott West Allen Armor Dragon Chuck Commander Ingrid Diokai Dylan George Lee Linux Ninja Mike or Yon Alexander peace arch and fedora polytech real-profit Steven and Willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode of hey dt would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well 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 it's just me and you guys the community if you like my work and want to help me out look for distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace them beating emacs that guy must have been drinking