 Welcome to another edition of Haiti. Haiti is a series of videos I do where I respond to viewer questions and comments. These questions and comments typically come from the comments on my videos on YouTube and on Library, but sometimes I also get questions and comments through Mastodon, Reddit, email. And the first question that I wanted to read and respond to is this, Haiti. I'm a Windows user. I have tried Ubuntu, but their software center is just too slow and it never opens. All right. Well, if you're new to Linux, I know this can be frustrating because Linux distributions typically think all new Linux users expect there to be this graphical app store, you know, like the Apple app store or something on the system. So they all ship with these app stores, if you will. And all of them are buggy. All of them are just horribly slow. And this really can't be helped because these app centers really, when you think about it, they're all just front ends to a website. You know, you have these screenshots and user reviews and rating systems and all of that. It's really just a website. It's a website that's been wrapped into this application is like a web app, essentially. And the Ubuntu software center is kind of like that. Mainly it's just a front end to a website. And that's why it's kind of slow. It's not a good user experience, but they ship with that thing because they think most new Linux users expect there to be some kind of app store or software center on the system. Now, as you get more advanced and more used to using Linux, what I strongly suggest you do is just get used to using a terminal using the command line, installing and removing software. It's much faster and quite frankly, it's just easier. So on Debian or Ubuntu based systems, you can sudo apt install name of program to install software or sudo apt remove name of program to remove a piece of software. If you're not sure what software is available, you could do a apt search and then whatever it is you're searching for. And that's good for discoverability. But I know many people want a graphical application for discoverability purposes because they're not sure what they're looking for. They want to browse by category. They want to browse by keyword. And if you want to do that, there is a really good alternative to your standard app store software centers on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions. What you can do is on an Ubuntu based distribution, do this, hit control alt T on the keyboard that will bring up a terminal, then type this one terminal command sudo apt install synaptic. This will install the synaptic package manager. It's an alternative package manager that you can use a software center you can use. It doesn't have all the bling and the flash and fancy screenshots and rating systems and all of that. It's mainly just plain text for the most part. It's very clean though. It's very well done. It is categorized. You know, you can search for apps by category. You can search by keyword. And it's very intuitive, very easy to use quite frankly. I think Ubuntu and Debian and every distribution that's based on Debian or Ubuntu probably should just use the synaptic package manager by default out of the box instead of trying to force those big heavy bloated app stores on people. The next question is hey DT, you recently plugged the websites for the FSF, the EFF and the software freedom conservancy. The FSF is the free software foundation. The EFF is the electronic frontier foundation. And of course, the software freedom conservancy is the software freedom conservancy. Anyway, the rest of the question is all of their domains end in .org. Is the software free as in freedom when the page has .org? Or is it just a coincidence with all of the ones that you shared on that video? So yeah, when I told you guys to go join FSF and I told you go to FSF.org and the EFF at EFF.org and software freedom conservancy is sfconservancy.org. Yes, it is kind of a coincidence that they all have .org as the domain extension. Back in the day, in the very early days of the web, the domain extension actually had a purpose. Back in the day, in the early days, you had three domain extensions mainly. You had .com, .net and .org. And you were supposed to register those domains depending on what type of site it was. So .com was for commercial sites. Most everything on the web, right? It's trying to sell you something. It should be a .com. .net was regarding networking. So like your ISP providers back in the day, typically their domain names were domain name .net. .org was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, right? .org. And that's kind of still the case. Many non-profits still do follow that model as, you know, FSF is going to register .org, FSF.org, EFF.org. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. I could register a .org name and put anything on that. It doesn't have to be a non-profit organization. It could be a for-profit company, you know, registering that particular name. And a matter of fact, most companies, what they do is they actually register several domain extensions, mainly just for protecting their trademark. So if I have distrotube.com, I probably want to go and register distrotube.net, distrotube.org, distrotube.info or whatever the other extensions are out there, you know, as many of them as I can financially afford, you know, to pay the yearly domain fees just to prevent somebody from registering those alternative domain extensions and pretending to be me. This typically, you know, what people do is most people want to be on .com because that's what most people expect you to have when they are not sure about a URL. They typically go to name.com, but many people also go ahead and try to register the .net.org.info extensions as well. And the next question comes in the aftermath of me making my recent Arch Linux installation video. Hey, can you explain some of the basic must have software that you have to install when you're installing your window managers on Arch Linux? So you go through the Arch Linux base install and, you know, at the end, it's still just a command prompt. You haven't really installed XOR or a window manager or desktop environment or anything, but he's saying, Hey, he's going to install a window manager on top of this base Arch Linux installation. But other than the window manager, what do you need? Okay, well, I always, when I do my window manager tutorials on my YouTube channel, I always tell you guys, when you install a window manager in your mind, you should automatically install three other things with it. Just automatically doesn't matter what the window manager is. Make sure you have a text editor, a terminal emulator and a web browser installed along with that thing. Why is because when you log into these very minimal window managers, they don't really have anything going on. Sometimes it's just a black screen. And, you know, it's really nice to be able to edit text files. So you need a text editor. If you don't have a text editor on the system, it's going to be a bad day. You need a terminal emulator because chances are that text editor is probably going to run in the terminal, especially it's things like VI, VM, nano. You also need a web browser because you may have to get on the web and search through support documentation to figure out how to configure that window manager. So text editor, terminal emulator, web browser, some other things you're going to want. You're going to want a compositor. That's for transparency, drop shadowing, helps prevent screen tearing. So you're always going to want a compositor that's typically PyCom on Arch. You're going to want something that sets the wallpaper. For me, I like using nitrogen. Some people like using FEH. Either one of those programs is perfectly fine to set a wallpaper. You're going to want something that can change your GTK themes. Most people go with a program called LX appearance for changing their GTK themes, icon themes, things like that. You're going to want a panel or a doc if your window manager doesn't come with one out of the box. Many window managers will have a panel or a doc built into them. Many will not though. So you'll have to go grab a third party panel or doc. You may also want to install a cistrate if that third party panel or doc doesn't have a cistrate built into it. So typically what I install is a program called Trayer. There's another one out there called Stallone Tray that's okay too. Either one of those programs is fine. Assuming that you have the panel or doc and the cistrate, you're going to want some programs sitting in that cistrate. Some of the most important ones are going to be network manager for your Wi-Fi networking and stuff like that. Volume icon is another one that's nice to have in that cistrate and has to adjust the desktop volume. And on an arch based system, you may want to have PAMAC installed for those of you that like the PAMAC updating utility. Another thing you're going to want to install is Paul Kit. Paul Kit is a policy kit. That's a application level toolkit for defining and handling the policy that allows unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes. So processes that don't have root privileges. How do they speak to processes that do? It's kind of what policy kit does. So install Paul Kit is very important. You have that installed, but it does nothing by itself. You also need an authentication agent and there's several of these Paul Kit authentication agents available to you. Typically the one I install is LX Session, which was the default session kit for the old LXD desktop environment. So I still use Paul Kit and LX Session. And you will run into this problem if you don't install those where some things just won't work for you. Like you go to start your firewall and it asks for Paul Kit and some kind of session to be enabled on the system, you know, because it wants you to type in the root password before any of this gets activated. Same thing with my favorite USB writer etcher. I want to burn an ISO to a USB using etcher. If Paul Kit is not running, it's going to complain about it because Paul Kit needs to be running and then I need to be able to authenticate myself as a root user. Same thing with G-Parted. You just you just can't launch G-Parted and start editing your partitions and things like that. No, you have to have Paul Kit running and then you have to enter a root password before G-Parted even launches for you. The next thing I want to address is this particular comment. But before I read the comment, I need to preface it by saying exactly what he's commenting about. So I did those two arch installation videos recently. And I think in one of those videos, I had you guys open something in VI or VIM, there was a config file we needed to edit and all we needed to do was delete the last four or five lines of this config file. I forget which one it was. Anyway, I went down to the end of the document and got to five lines from the end and I hit DD to delete the line. And then I told you guys, hey, delete the next four lines. So just do DD about five times, you know, delete those last five lines. And his comment is, hey, DD handy hint, when using VIM, and you use DD to delete multiple lines of text, if you DD the first time for the first line from then on, all you have to do is simply use the period key to repeat the same action. I was so happy to use this after repeating the same key actions great video DD. So what he's talking about here is in VIM, anytime you run a command, any command, but say DD in this case, and I want to repeat it, all I have to do is hit period the next time. So anytime you want to repeat an action in VIM, just hit the period key. And that's a great tip. And I knew when I did that on camera, actually, there's about 15 different ways I could have done the same thing. Like I could have done five DD for delete five lines, I could have gotten into visual line mode and selected those five lines and then hit D. There's so many different ways to accomplish the same thing in VIM. Every action has multiple different ways of getting the job done. So the reason I just stuck with a DD five different times is because on that particular video, I'm addressing new users new to Linux users, maybe that's the very first time they ever launched VI or VIM, because it was people maybe that have never installed Arch Linux the first time it's a arch installation tutorial, right? And the kinds of people that need that tutorial are not advanced users, right? These are people that have never installed Arch Linux, they probably have never used VIM either. So DD, which is one of the very first commands you should learn in VIM, that's the reason I address that I could have done five DD and explain that to them or, you know, gotten into visual block mode or visual line mode, or I could have done a lot of different things. But those are more advanced things, even the period command repeating the same action in VIM. That's nice to know. If you plan on using VIM in the future, many of these people, though, they're probably only going to use VIM once or twice ever, you know, just to get Arch installed in this case, and then probably from there on out, they're going to install some other editor that they're familiar with nano or graphical when like sublime or VS code or something like that. So I didn't want to, I didn't want to turn that video into a VIM tutorial. Many times I purposely do things the long way. But the long way sometimes is simpler to explain to new users because I do have to take into account the users that I'm talking to through the camera, their user experience, their level of experience. The next question is one I've gotten many, many times in recent months. And it typically I get this question asked two different ways. First, hey, DT, have you switched back to virtual box from vert manager? The other one I get is, hey DT, have you switched back to vert manager from virtual box? I don't know why so many people are concerned about what hypervisor, what virtual machines basically that I use when I do my Linux distro installation and first looks or installation tutorial videos such as the arch installation guide that I did the other day. Many people notice what hypervisor I'm using and ask, hey, why are you using virtual box instead of vert manager for this one? But the other day you were using vert manager for this other one instead of virtual box. Why do you switch between the two? Is one better than the other? No, not necessarily. I've used virtual box. Since the dawn of time, I've used vert manager for many, many, many, many years as well. Since switching to Linux, I've used vert virtual box maybe before I switched to Linux. I've used these hypervisors for a long time. One is not better than the other necessarily, but sometimes I find certain operating systems work better in virtual box rather than vert manager or vice versa. Sometimes I find that they work better invert manager rather than virtual box. Typically, here's how I go about it. At least this is what I'm doing right now. Typically, I use vert manager if it works. If I install something in vert manager and it just isn't working right, it won't install properly or it doesn't solve, but it's, you know, really wonky and slow. Then I'll go back and install it in virtual box and try virtual box. So typically I install it in vert manager. If it'll work invert manager, if not, then I go to virtual box. The one exception to that is if I'm talking to potential new to Linux users, because potential new to Linux users typically are going to be on windows. For example, the arch installation guide I did the other day that is for new Linux users, right? People that have never gone through, especially arch Linux installations, but maybe never installed any Linux ever in their life. Those people are still running windows and I want to talk them through a arch installation in a VM. I want them to follow along with me in a VM and lets me and that person, that potential new Linux user, install arch Linux in this VM. Which VM are we going to use? Vert manager is not an option on windows because it's KVM. You know, that's the kernel virtual machine that's built into the Linux kernel. They can't use that on windows. Virtual box, though, is available on windows, on Mac, on Linux. That's the one that makes sense for that video. Me doing an arch installation in vert manager and telling windows users to follow along with me makes no sense. I have to use virtual box for that video. So I do have to take into account sometimes the audience that I'm speaking to when I do things in these VMs. The next comment I want to read is one I've gotten thousands of times, literally thousands of times since starting my YouTube channel. ADT, proprietary doesn't necessarily mean garbage. And they're right. You know, I've kind of overdone it with the term proprietary garbage. It's tired. It's played out. I'm going to try to switch it up a little bit. It doesn't always have to be proprietary garbage. I could try proprietary trash. It doesn't have the same ring, proprietary junk, proprietary rubbish, proprietary flotsam and jetsam. That's way too long. Proprietary detritus. Hey, I like that proprietary litter. Proprietary filth. Refuse. Waste. How about proprietary feces? Proprietary excrement. Proprietary poo. That's the one we're going with. From now on, it's proprietary poo. And the last comment I want to read is, hey DT, I loved your video on the Pinebook Pro, but I think you should definitely do more unboxing videos, but your setup is not practical. All I can see is black. And what he's talking about here is I recently did an unboxing video on that Pinebook Pro laptop. Now I don't do a lot of hardware reviews or unboxing videos. I would like to. It's something I've always wanted to do since starting the YouTube channel. The reason I don't is he's right. The setup I have for recording is horrible for that stuff. But the Pinebook Pro was such an interesting product. I made an exception and made that video on the Pinebook Pro anyway, knowing I just don't have the proper spot to do that kind of video. Because this room I record in is about the size of a large walk-in closet. It's like eight by eight. You know, it's a very, very tiny room. What you see right now in the camera frame is about a quarter to about a half of this room because of this L-shaped desk that I have. It's quite large. And then the audio server rack and the microphones. And then, of course, what you don't see, the camera on a tripod and some lighting and some shelves with some computer equipment. This room is very tight space. All I really can do is put the camera over there and record me sitting at this desk. And that's all I can do. This is very limiting. To do a proper hardware review, what you would want is a desk without all the computer monitors and everything. A desk just empty by itself where you could have an overhead cam or cam on some kind of tripod that could be pointed down at the product to get good photographs of and, you know, obviously better lighting. And it's hard to get good lighting, especially when you have computer monitors on right here by the product you're trying to review. He's right. It's kind of hard to see what was going on with that Pine Book Pro. And I've known this for a while. I need to find a better spot to record than this spot in this room in this house. And it's not just this room. Like there's bigger spots in the house I could go to. But you don't want to take up your entire living room or something as a recording studio. I wouldn't want to do that anyway. But also as this becomes more of my job, you know, my full-time job, I don't want to actually do this where I live. So about six weeks ago, I contacted a realtor and I've been looking for office space. This realtor has been looking for office space for me so I could set up a proper studio. Something large space that I can have multiple desks and multiple cameras. I can do multiple styles of video on my traditional videos where I'm sitting at a desk doing computer tutorials or podcasting or whatever like my typical kind of content but also where I could do product reviews. I really want to get into more of that or me standing up maybe standing up in front of a green screen or a chroma keyed wall or something. You know, doing more presentation kind of stuff. I'm good at that kind of video as well. I can't do that in my current setup because I'm so limited in space. But this realtor, again, I contacted him about six weeks ago and then you guys know the big hurricane. Hurricane Laura just devastated the entire state. And he was, he actually found a couple of spots that might have worked for me but those spots were destroyed by the hurricane. One of them had a tree fall like on the back wall of the building. It's not even protected in any way. Like there's no wall. There's holes in it and it's, anyway. So he had found some spots for me that were destroyed and then I was out of power for a week or there for a couple of weeks after the storm there was no point in even looking for anything. I was out of power. That particular realtor was out of power for nearly two weeks and we're just now getting back to starting to look again for some stuff. So eventually I am going to be somewhere else recording this stuff. I'm going to have a proper studio space and I don't know how much it's going to cost me, whether it'll be cost effective. But I do want to just get out of the house. I learned a long time ago working at home and I've done this many times where me working at home, you know, like now you know with the YouTube videos, working at home sucks because when you're working at home you're not really at work because people know you're at home even if you tell them you're working they don't respect that. They're going to bug the crap out of you all the time because you're not really working. You're sitting at home and even myself, even if nobody bugs me, in your head you're thinking well you know what even though I'm at work I could walk to the kitchen right now and make me a sandwich. And you know what on my way back to this room to record that video maybe I stop off at the love seat in the living room and just sit down for a minute. I'll turn on the TV. You know it's not the same so I really want to separate you know home from work so I'm really looking forward to finding a proper office space and setting up a proper YouTube studio to do this stuff in. So I hope you guys bear with me. I don't know exactly when I'll find the spot because again it's been a work in progress and because of the hurricane but I hope within the next month or so I'll find something appropriate and when I do of course I'll let you guys know. Now before I go I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of the show. I need to think Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Arts5530, Akami Channel, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Caleb, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott, and Willie. These guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode of Haiti wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work consider doing so. You'll find Distro Tube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.