 It's time for 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 typically come from the comments on YouTube, on library, through Mastodon messages, through messages from Reddit, sometimes through email. And the very first question I want to get to is, HeyDT, I was wondering what you said about Brave being free and open source software. Where is the source code actually located? Because I did a quick scrape through Brave's homepage searching for the words open and source and I found zero results. Okay, well, there's a lot to this question and this is a great question, by the way. So Brave is actually free and open source software. I've mentioned this before that any time you're interested in quickly finding out whether something is licensed under a free and open source license or a proprietary license. The easiest way to do this is if you use the Google search engine, just type the name of that program and then type license. So if you do something like Brave license, you know, usually like the very first search result is actually not a search result. It will just give you the answer to what is essentially your question and it will say Brave is licensed under whatever free license that happens to be licensed under. If you do a search for Brave source code in your favorite search engine, you will actually get the Brave source code, which is hosted over at github.com. So anytime you're interested in whether something is licensed as free or as proprietary, search for name a program plus the word license in Google, at least, and it will the very first thing it spits out will actually be the license of that program. So you never have to go through life wondering whether something is actually free and open source or proprietary. It's very easy to get this stuff immediately. Also, if you just look up a project, if it's a popular project, look it up on Wikipedia, Wikipedia will tell you exactly what that project is licensed under. Now what makes this question also interesting is the fact that he couldn't find the words open and source anywhere on Brave's homepage or looking through their website. Brave may or may not, you know, really tout itself as being an open source browser. You know, they're more touting the fact that it is a more secure browser, more privacy respecting browser. Even though open source is a part of that, that may not be the real focus of their marketing because Brave, you know, there's a company behind that. And there's a lot of open source projects out there that if you go to their website and read a little bit about them, they really don't mention anything about free software or open source or anything like that. They really don't mention the movement. You know, they're much more talking to potential customers. You know, they're giving marketing speak typically on their websites. The other thing I want to mention is not everything on GitHub is free and open source software. So even though Brave is free and open source software, and they have a repository on GitHub, you know, a lot of proprietary software is also hosted on GitHub. So just because something's on GitHub does not make it free and open source software. And this is where people have come at me in the comments because Microsoft Edge is a proprietary web browser. Vivaldi is a proprietary web browser. Both of those web browsers are licensed under proprietary licenses. Both of those web browsers, though they do have repositories hosted over on GitHub. That's not the entire source code to those browsers, though. You can't go and grab the source code for Vivaldi and compile it from their GitHub page that, you know, they don't have the whole thing there. There's open source bits to it. So that's why they, the Microsoft and Vivaldi and some of these other proprietary software companies have GitHub repositories because they do some open source stuff. But that doesn't mean that everything they do is open source. And that doesn't mean, you know, if Vivaldi has a Vivaldi repository on GitHub, that doesn't immediately make Vivaldi an open source browser because in fact, it's proprietary. The next question I want to get to is, hey, DT, would you recommend a good replacement for Thunderbird as well as Firefox? So recently, Mozilla, the company behind Firefox and Thunderbird, made some comments there for more censorship on the internet. And from a company that puts out free and open source software, that's kind of bothersome to those of us that are champions of the free software movement, especially because it really goes against everything that free software stands for. So there's a ton of different web browsers out there for people to move from Firefox to. But there's not a lot of good desktop email clients for you Thunderbird users out there. And I'm one of those. I use Thunderbird. I've been a Thunderbird user since the very beginning, you know, for nearly 20 years, I've been a Thunderbird user. And there's just a few really good replacements for Thunderbird. Well, I wouldn't even say they're good, but there's some acceptable replacements for Thunderbird. So if you're only a Linux user, which is my case, I only use Linux, I don't use Windows or Mac at all. And this is where things get a little tricky, because most of you guys probably have to use Windows occasionally. So you guys need a cross platform email client, all I need is a Linux only email client. I've found that Geary is a really fantastic desktop email client. It's very easy to set up. It's easy to use very intuitive and it has a really clean modern look to it. It looks much more attractive than Thunderbird. So if you're a Linux user, I strongly recommend the Geary email client. Now for those of you that need a cross platform solution for solutions that work both on Linux and Windows, I know Clausmill works on both Linux and Windows. I don't particularly like Clausmill, but you guys try it out. You may like it. Sylphied is another one that is cross platform. I've never really played with Sylphied, so I can't comment on it. I mean, if you wanted something way off the beaten path, I mean, Emax has an email client, Mew4e, and Emax works on both Linux and Windows. Now that's definitely not for most people. So I'm not even really suggesting that. That's more of a joke. Mail Spring is a very popular email client. It's free and open source. I believe it's licensed into the GPL. Check out Mail Spring. It's available, I believe, on all three platforms, Linux, Mac, and Windows. The next question is, hey, DT, once you reach 100k subscribers, will you do a silver plaque unboxing? I doubt it. So I know that's kind of what people traditionally do on YouTube. I really don't watch those kinds of videos because that sounds like an incredibly boring video watching somebody unbox their, what is it called, the silver play button, which is really just a silver plaque. It's got like a mirror that's got like the YouTube logo on it. I personally, I would not watch a video like that. So personally, I wouldn't want to make a video like that because I don't think you guys would really be interested in me just showing you a plaque unless I added a little something to it, right? We have to spice it up, jazz it up a little bit. And from what others tell me, too, is that sometimes once you get to that 100k mark, it takes YouTube several weeks, sometimes several months to ship you out that plaque. So by the time they ship me that plaque, we may have been way past 100k for months, right? So it's no, it kind of loses some of the, the luster, some of the excitement goes away since it takes so long to get the plaque many times. And I've heard from others that told me that they crossed the 100k mark and they never received their plaque. And, you know, this has been years since they crossed 100k. And for whatever reason, YouTube just didn't didn't even bother sending them one. So it's not even guaranteed that I'll get one. But honestly, I hadn't even really thought about passing 100k, although I guess I should because we're really close. I mean, I could pass it here in the next couple of weeks. But it's not something that's really been on my mind as far as doing something special to commemorate the event. Yeah, I suppose I should. I'll come up with something. The next question is hey, DT grow your hair once you reach 100k subs paint your hair pink. Well, we're almost at 100k like now. So no, I'm not going to paint my hair pink. Well, I'd have to grow hair and then I'd have to dye it pink. Yeah, this is too soon to hit me with something like that. I tell you what, if we hit 200k, maybe the next question. Hey, DT, have you ever used a terminal emulator for Android? I've used Turmux on my device and it's very useful. You should definitely check it out. Okay, so I actually have played with Turmux on Android myself. Turmux is just a terminal emulator that's available on Android and it's really neat. It's a terminal emulator that fits on your mobile device, right? There's one problem for me, though, why I haven't played with it that much is because it's a terminal emulator on a mobile device. I don't really like mobile operating systems. I don't like playing on phones at all. I like real keyboards. If I'm going to start typing stuff in a terminal, if I'm doing real work in a terminal, I'm going to need a keyboard. I don't want to do that thing on a phone's, you know, keypad on the phone. I need a real keyboard. The other problem for me when you're playing with a terminal on something like a phone is I don't really play with phones. I've told you guys before, I don't like phone operating systems and I have a phone. The only reason I have a mobile phone is for work. It's because, you know, jobs I've had that require me to be on call and I have to have a phone. People have to have a way to get in touch with me. If that was not the case, I personally would not own a mobile phone because quite frankly, just morally, I'm kind of against the whole idea of having a device on you all the time that's tracking you, that people can get in touch with you anytime they want. I just, the whole idea behind it repulses me. So I do have a Samsung S10 Galaxy phone. It's a really nice phone. All I really do on it is make phone calls and occasionally send text messages on it. I don't really use it for any kind of computer work. And to go along with that, hey, DT, why do you have an expensive Samsung S10 phone if all you do is make phone calls? That's a good question too. I like having a phone that works. That's why I buy the high end phones, even though I don't do a lot on the phones. I do make phone calls and I do send text messages and I want my phone to last, you know, when I spent $1,000 on a phone, I expected to last several years. I have purchased cheaper mobile phones before and within three or four months broken them and then had to go buy another because I spent, you know, two, three hundred dollars on a phone where I just should have spent the eight, 900, whatever it is on the high end Samsung's. You guys that like the Apple devices, I'm sure the iPhones hold up well. Yes, they're expensive and it may seem expensive for somebody that doesn't really use their phone as it like a computer, you know, like it plays around on their phone all day. But, you know, when I buy a device, I want it to last me. And I'm kind of hard on these things, especially when I'm working, you know, they're typically in a pocket and I'm moving around, they get banged around, you know, in my pants pockets or sometimes you drop them, you know, some people drop them all the time. I'm not that clumsy, but they do get dropped occasionally. I just like something that holds up. And I've always found that the Samsung devices tend to hold up really well. And of course, it wouldn't be a hey DT without a question about DT being bald, even though he's not bald. Hey DT, you keep saying you're not bald, but shaved bald is still bald. That's a fair point. Next question. Hey DT, what are your thoughts on a patchy open office? I've known it as a free alternative for Microsoft Office, but now I see distros like Mint using LibreOffice by default. So this is confusing for those of you that have been Linux users, especially if you're been a Linux user kind of on and off over the years, and you don't really follow what's going on in the community. Let's get into a bit of history here. So open office started around the year 2000 or so open office was a open source office suite that was built really to rival Microsoft's office suite, right? It was the free and open source alternative to Microsoft Office. And the company that owned open office was Sun Microsystems. They owned it and then they released version 1.0, I think around 2002. They open sourced it and of course you had this gigantic open source community that got behind the project and started developing it and open office just became one of the most popular free and open source programs on the planet. Hundreds of millions of people around the world started using open office and it was the default office suite on almost all of your Linux distros. If they shipped with a office suite, it was open office. But that was again, not like 20 years ago. Around 2010, Sun Microsystems, the company that was supporting open office, their interest in the office suite kind of started declining. They really didn't seem like they were interested in supporting open office anymore. It was starting to rub the community the wrong way. A lot of contributions that the community were trying to make to open office were rejected or you know, Sun just seemed very reluctant to accept community contributions to open office after a while and eventually Sun was purchased by another company, Oracle. And Oracle does not have a great track record as far as their behavior toward the open source software movement and just open source in general. So when Oracle purchased Sun, I think that was in the year 2010, most of the open office community forked open office. They created this new project called LibreOffice and that's where they continued the development of that free and open source office suite. So open office essentially became LibreOffice, you know, the community part aspects of it anyway. And that's when all your Linux distributions quit shipping open office and started shipping LibreOffice as their default office suite. So that's why you used to hear all all about open office and it just kind of died all of a sudden. It's because it did kind of die. You know, once once a Oracle bought Sun and things changed and eventually changed hands, I think Apache now has the rights to the open office suite. But really, for the last 10 years, open office hasn't really been much as far as development. All the action is behind LibreOffice these days. And our final question is, Hey DT, how do you manage system backups and make your distro more stable? Okay, well, there's a lot to that question too, even though it's a very short question. Let's start with system backups. So I'm not one of these people that take system snapshots with something like Timeshift or Desha Dupre any of that stuff. I don't bother with that because most of the important stuff that I want backed up, I take care of in other ways. So some of the most important things I backup or all of my config files, my dot files. So those are my config files for all of my window managers and terminal app applications, my Vim config, my Emacs config, you know, all of the configuration files for my programs, I store them in a Git repository, I store them over on GitLab. So I have all of my user config files for all the programs I use on a daily basis stored on my GitLab. So I can easily distro hop, I can wipe out my main production machine right now, I can reformat the hard drive and reinstall whatever Linux distribution I want to install. And I could go to my GitLab and pull down all of my user configuration files and all of those programs will look and feel and function exactly the way I left them, you know, once I get those programs reinstalled on my system. Of course, GitLab is really just for config files. Now, what about important user data? Well, I have an external SSD drive that I use for that. I have a two terabyte external SSD drive that I can store, you know, all of my documents and pictures and everything to if that's what I want to do. And that's typically what I do every now and then I will make a hard copy back up on external SSD. So if anything ever happens to the computer, like the drives and the computer ever die or somebody steals my computer, you know, hopefully I have the really important stuff I needed backed up on that external SSD. Another thing I use for external storage is my video content. My video storage needs are extreme and I really don't have enough storage here on my machines at the moment or, you know, extra disks just laying around. So what I'm doing right now is I'm using Amazon S3 to store all of my video backups. I also have a NextCloud server that I use mainly just for cloud syncing so I can move files from one device to another. I don't really use NextCloud as a backup solution necessarily. It's mainly just for moving files around among my multiple devices. So that's really my backup solutions. As far as how do I make my distro more stable? I use Arco Linux, which is a Arch Linux based distribution. And I've never really had any major breakages using Arco or Arch or any of the Arch based distros like Manjaro. In the last three plus years of making the YouTube channel, most of that I have had an Arch based distribution installed on my main production machine and I've never had a major breakage. And when I say major breakage, that's for me. Some of the minor breakages that I've had that, you know, took me a minute to fix. Other people would call them major breakages because if you're brand new to Linux, you don't know what broke. You don't know how to fix it. You know, it's one of those things that once you've been in Linux for a while and you recognize problems that arise and you immediately know the fix for it and can go fix it. Then Arch really is actually a very stable Linux distribution for the brand new user who just doesn't have the experience. It's not that you can't do it. It's just you haven't had some of the things break on you that you have to fix. You know, every little breakage is a major breakage for you. But for me, I have never had a breakage on Arch at least in the last three or four years that caused me to need to reinstall. That's never happened. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the patrons. I need to think the producers of this episode, Abseed, Devin Fran, Gabe Corbinian, Mitchell, Akami, Arch 5530, Chris Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, DM, Scott, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of the show without those guys. This episode of Haiti would not have been possible. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.