 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your bi-weekly GNU-slash-Linux-News video podcast. And by bi-weekly, I mean every other week, not twice a week, guys. Begging so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. If I packed any more freedom into this episode, the RIAA would file an immediate DMCA. On this edition of Unfettered Freedom, we're going to talk about the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their takedown of YouTube DL. We're also going to talk about Linux and open-source jobs. It's never been a hotter time to find a Linux-related or open-source-related job. I also want to discuss library. I love library LBRY. It's one of the platforms that I post to, but does it have a marketing problem? And we're also going to talk about the best text editors on Linux. I came across an article the other day. A guy wrote, six of the best text editors available on Linux. Do I agree with his choices? I might have some additional choices. We're going to discuss that also, the huge distro releases in the last few days. We have seen some gigantic releases from the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora, and more. And when I talk about the more distro releases, I actually installed one of these other distributions. One I had never actually installed before on physical hardware and gave a try, so stick around for that. All this and more on this episode of Unfettered Freedom. This is the community support that I receive. There are no corporate sponsors. There's no product shilling of any kind in these episodes. And if you'd like to support my work, I'd greatly appreciate it. Please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. So the first story is the news that YouTube DL has been taken down by the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America. They filed a DMCA against YouTube-DL and they have been taken off of GitHub. Now, for those of you that are not familiar with what exactly YouTube DL is, it is a way to download audio and or video from YouTube and hundreds of other video platforms out there on the web. It's just a way to quickly grab audio, video, thumbnails. You can get a bunch of stuff directly from this command line utility and it's really a fantastic program. It's one I've used many times in the past for sometimes just getting my own videos off of YouTube if I didn't have a local copy or I didn't have a backup or something. I could use YouTube DL to actually go and grab that video and that way I would have a local copy of my own videos for archiving. Well, YouTube DL has been taken down by the RIAA. They filed this complaint. I won't read this entire complaint, but one of the things that was a problem with YouTube DL is somewhere on their GitHub. They had some example videos, I guess for testing purposes so people could actually test out the software and they were using songs like Icona Pop. I don't even know who that is. Justin Timberlake. I've heard of the name. Taylor Swift. Yeah, she's kind of cute, but I don't know why. I don't know why they were using these songs other than it was just testing. I don't think they were actually hosting the videos of these people anywhere on their GitHub or in a repository anywhere. But anyway, the RIAA cited that as one of the violations. The other violation that YouTube DL is, I guess, guilty of according to the RIAA is the fact that the software that they create, YouTube DL, the only reason it exists or the primary reason it exists according to the RIAA is to circumvent things like DRM, you know, to get around protections that these people have put in place on platforms like YouTube. So the recording industry, you guys have seen all these huge music channels on YouTube. Many of them are run by Vivo, V-E-V-O, you know, there's all of those are licensed under a standard YouTube license. They're not creative commons. You know, you can't just go grab this stuff and use it any way you want. But it is freely available for anybody to view on YouTube. And that's the part I don't understand. It's not like anybody circumvented buying this music. Because if you could already listen to it on YouTube, then what is the harm of these people listening to it with the help of some of these tools like YouTube DL? So according to the complaint here, the thing I have a problem with is they state that because this piece of software can be used to circumvent copyrighted stuff, copyright protections, that somehow the software is illegal. It's illegal for this thing to even exist. And they requested GitHub, who is owned by Microsoft to take down YouTube DL from GitHub. And of course, that's exactly what GitHub does. When people file a DMCA request, that's a digital Millennium Copyright Act request. It's going to get taken very seriously because, you know, you can get into some legal trouble if you don't act in a timely fashion, especially with an organization that has a ton of money and a ton of lawyers. The RIAA, they go after people very aggressively. And it was probably just easier for GitHub to just shut down YouTube DL, just get rid of that and be done with it. Now, when they removed the YouTube DL repository, it's not just the official YouTube DL. GitHub also removed several other clones of YouTube DL that were also on GitHub. So anything that had YouTube DL code, they tried to pull all of that down any forks. And there are, because it's open source software, right? YouTube DL has always been free and open source software. Everybody has a copy of it somewhere. Most good news slash Linux users, especially if you do a lot of stuff at the command line, you probably have a copy of YouTube DL somewhere on your system because it's free software. You're free to take the code and do whatever it is you want with it. You can continue developing it yourself or you can fork it and keep on keeping on. So YouTube DL will not die. It's nowhere near dead. You can't kill free and open source software. And already the source code is being hosted on other platforms, not GitHub. So everything is fine in that respect. The downside to this is because you've had this upheaval, you've been moving everything to different repositories. You no longer have the main YouTube DL repository on GitHub actually contributing code and updating the software. It may be challenging at least for a few weeks for the YouTube DL team until they get things properly squared away here. Now, what's interesting about this is the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America. So it's based here in the U.S. And of course, DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is U.S. law. And GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which is a U.S. company. But what if this was overseas somewhere? You know, this wasn't hosted on GitHub. Maybe it was on some foreign servers. Well, that really doesn't matter to the RIAA because they have filed claims in the past in non-U.S. countries. They have filed claims in, for example, I know they did something in Germany a while back saying that the DMCA U.S. law still applied to whatever was going on with a German individual or a German company that they were upset with. Now, Microsoft and GitHub, you know, their hands were kind of tied on this, right? They kind of had to act, but I kind of wish they hadn't. And I'm not the only one. The Software Freedom Conservancy had this blog post a couple of days ago asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over YouTube DL takedown demand. So I guess Microsoft is in some way associated with the RIAA. They're, I guess, a member or something of the association. And the Software Freedom Conservancy is asking Microsoft to resign from that organization in protest. I doubt Microsoft cares enough about something like YouTube DL to do something like this. But it's a good idea, especially Microsoft. You're trying to be a champion of open source and GitHub. You want that to be this gigantic repository of all this open source software. And if you want to create a little goodwill with the community, it would be great if you defended open source software more than you currently are right now, Microsoft. And when they talk about open source software, it's mainly about them making money by developing open source software. But it would also be great while they're making bucket loads of money with that open source software if they defended open source software. And whether Microsoft or GitHub actually does do anything here, I doubt they will, but it doesn't matter because, again, YouTube DL free and open source software it will live on. And a lot of ways this is nothing more than a bump in the road. The next topic is Linux and open source jobs. They are really hot right now. Maybe as hot as they've ever been. So those of you looking to get into any kind of field relating to Linux, open source, programming, development, IT, system administration, now's a good time. And I'm going to pull up an article here. Those of you watching the video portion of the podcast. This article is titled, Linux and open source jobs are hotter than ever. It's written by Stephen J. Von Nichols over at ZDNet. And what it is, is he's reporting on the publication of a survey recently. This survey was done by the Linux Foundation and some online course company. I guess somebody that certifies people in Linux or networking or something. Anyway, they surveyed people about their hiring practices and what they were looking for when they're hiring IT professionals. And some of the more interesting statistics that jumped out at me were that 37% of hiring managers say they will hire more IT professionals in the next six months. So more than one in three are planning to hire IT professionals in the next six months. So their hiring guys, specifically 81% of hiring managers say hiring open source talent is a priority. 56% of these hiring managers plan to increase their hiring of open source professionals in the next six months. And oddly enough, they say they can't find enough people or they can't find people that have the knowledge of open source programs that they need. And one of the craziest statistics out of this survey is that 93% of hiring managers, 93% report that they're having trouble finding employees who know open source programs. So they're looking for people who have knowledge of certain open source programs and 93% of them say they have trouble finding these people. And so it's a good time to get in, guys. Those of you that want to work in a computer related technology related field, I've never been in any kind of work like that. You guys know I'm not a CIS admin. I'm not an IT professional of any kind. So I've never worked in any of these fields. But right now might be the time to get in because everybody wants open source. It's a completely different world because even though I've never worked in the industry, of course, I pay attention to what's going on with Linux and open source. And it wasn't like this 10 years ago, right? 10 years ago, there weren't, there were companies looking for people with open source knowledge, but it's not like now it open source is mainstream. Now everybody is on the open source train. 20 years ago, you definitely didn't see this because that was back when Microsoft was still saying open source was evil and that Linux was a cancer. The world has completely changed. The other thing that does help you guys looking for jobs right now is the COVID pandemic because hiring was way down, you know, a lot of companies were shut for a little while. And now once the world starts getting more back to normal, there's a lot of vacancies to fill. And that's part of the reason why some of these companies are having problems finding enough people for these jobs. I think some of you guys should definitely update the resume, right? Get it ready and start doing some interviews and see what's out there for you. One of the things I think is a misconception a lot of people have is the notion that there's a lot of upfront costs getting into these industries because you have to have some certifications and some of these certifications are very expensive. Well, according to this survey, 47% of the hiring managers surveyed said they would pay for your certifications. So basically half of the hiring managers out there say they will pay for your certifications if it's needed for you taking a job. And the third story is not really a story, but it was something I've seen discussed on the internet a lot lately. It is does library have a marketing problem? And I'm not really going to talk that much about library marketing, but library markets itself as this champion of free and open source software. And on their site, they make some pretty bold claims about library, the app, library, the site, library, the protocol. And sometimes it comes off as a little disingenuous when you see them doing the opposite of what their marketing says they're doing. And what got me thinking about this was on Reddit. I've seen this discussed a couple of times. It keeps coming up, but I have the screenshot here. It says it's time to take back control from YouTube and Amazon. That is some of the marketing speak directly from libraries website. It's time to take back control from YouTube and Amazon. Well, when you do a check on library dot com, you know, a registry check, domain check, they actually register that site that domain rather with Google. And that is their registrar. So Google LLC. But they're trying to take back control from YouTube, which is owned by Google. So that's kind of interesting. The other thing they mentioned about Amazon, the site is actually hosted on Amazon. They are using AWS to host the site. Now, is this a big deal? Is this hypocritical of them to have this marketing on their website about Google and Amazon, yet they use Google and Amazon to serve up this site? Me personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I think it is a marketing problem. I think it's a bad look, but I understand why they do it. You have to host your stuff somewhere. You have to have your stuff on somebody's servers and Amazon. I mean, that's that's a major player. So why not now should they have chosen something else other than Amazon since they did their little blurb here and trashing Amazon a little bit? Yeah, they probably should have. But it's not a problem for me because library, the app, the program, the protocol, it's free software, free and open source software. You can do whatever you want to do with it. If you have a problem with library.tv, maybe they're using servers from Google or Amazon or wherever, you know what you can do? You can go create your own instance. You can do that. Heck, you could fork the whole thing and rename it and go create something new. You have that kind of freedom. So this is not that big a deal to me because of the fact that it's free software. If they want to host it on Amazon servers, great. You can start your own library instance and host it on whatever servers you want to host it on. And maybe you hate Amazon. Hey, go for it, you know, host with somebody else. But I don't see what the issue is. I've seen this posted a few times on library, like the subreddit for library. I'm sure people have probably brought it up to the library team on their official support channels, like on Discord and things like that, whatever they happen to use. And I think this is a little unfair. The fourth story I want to talk about is an article I came across titled six of the best text editors available for Linux. And I have tried out a bunch of text editors on Linux. I love playing with text editors. So I thought, well, let me see what this guy's six best text editors are. And maybe I'll agree with them. Maybe I won't. Now this article comes from Make Tech Easier. And this was written by John Perkins. And I will clarify that he doesn't say these are his six best text editors. He just says they're six of the best Linux text editors. But still, if you picked out these six, I would assume that Mr. Perkins probably feels very strongly about these. And number one, like he chose to come out of the gates with this one. And this one was very strange. I would not have Adam on my list, but he likes the Adam text editor. Now it is free and open source software, which is great. But it is also an electron application and it's very slow. Like I've installed Adam before and the thing takes like 10 seconds to launch. You know, when you launch it, it is slow. Now once it launches, you start doing whatever inside it. Yeah, it's nice and it looks good. I mean, it's a complete IDE and it's got a lot of really cool features and everything, but I don't know. I don't think there's that many people really use Adam too. Like you guys that actually make a living programming, you write a lot of code. Do you see a lot of people out there using Adam? Because I would be surprised if you did. Now the next one is Visual Studio Code VS Code. And of course that's owned by Microsoft. Of course, Adam is owned by Microsoft because Adam was created by GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft, but their official IDE, VS Code. Now VS Code is not free and open source software. So that's why I've never used it. I've never installed it and never looked at it. And I know people are going to say, well, the source code for VS Code is over on GitHub and it's licensed under an MIT license. Yes, if you could somehow compile it yourself and get it working, then technically that would be free software. The problem is nobody does that. Everybody installs VS Code via pre-built binaries. And the pre-built binaries for VS Code are licensed under a proprietary license from Microsoft. So if you go get VS Code from one of your standard Linux repositories, it is licensed under a proprietary license. Unfortunately, I believe there is something called VS Codium out there. Kind of like the Chromium browser where you have like the Chromium browser or what is it, un-Google Chromium where they strip out all of the telemetry stuff. I believe there is also a VS Codium out there. Same kind of deal, free and open source software in any kind of telemetry that Microsoft had in that thing. They've stripped it all out. So I would definitely recommend you guys go get the builds of VS Codium rather than Microsoft's official VS Studio code. And the next editor on his list, I would have never thought to put this one on the list either. Nano. If you're talking about six of the best text editors available on Linux, why Nano? Nano doesn't have any real features. I mean, it is just a plain text editor. It really does nothing special. I mean, it's nice for what it is. It's just a simple text editor that you can use in the terminal. But that's it. It really has no other features. If you wanted to do kind of a new user text editor, terminal based text editor, Micro. I did a video about Micro a while back. You guys should check out the Micro text editor. Once you start using that thing, I don't think you would ever use Nano again. His fourth text editor he mentions is Zed. That's X-E-D. Zed is a fork of G-Edit for, I believe, the Cinnamon desktop environment. It looks and feels very much like G-Edit. They could be practically the same text editor. So when I talk about Zed, everything applies to G-Edit as well. It's a nice plain text editor. It doesn't have a lot of features either. It does have some extensions, but it's not like a full IDE or anything. It's a very simple, GUI text editor. Now, if you were going to mention a simple graphical text editor, I don't mind him plugging Zed or G-Edit. Either one of those are fine, but there are better ones out there. Genie is one that I plug a lot on the channel. And Genie spell G-E-A-N-Y. Fantastic text editor. And really, once you start using something like that, I don't think you would ever use G-Edit or Zed again. His fifth text editor that he wants to talk about is Sublime Text. Sublime Text may be fantastic. Sublime Text is not free software. So I have nothing to say about Sublime Text. I've never used it other than I know it's a big IDE and it has a lot of features and a lot of people that do professional programming do use Sublime Text, but it's not licensed under a free and open source license, so I can't use it. And his number six is actually Genie. So props to him on including Genie. He does get a little screenshot of Genie. It's definitely better than G-Edit, Zed, Kate, you know, all those standard text editors that so many people use mouse pad, leaf pad. If you want a graphical text editor, but nothing too complicated, nothing too crazy, Genie is the perfect one. If you want something easy in the terminal, Micro is the one you want to take a look at. But there were two glaring omissions of the six of the best text editors on Linux. He did not mention VIM. And I honestly would have thought on any serious article about text editors on Linux, VIM would be one. That's the first one you're going to talk about. And he didn't even mention it. That's strange to me. That blows my mind. He also didn't mention Emacs. It's a little more niche than VIM. But you got to at least include VIM on an article about the best Linux text editors. So if I was writing this article, I would have gotten rid of the two pieces of non-free software. So VS Code and Sublime Text, proprietary software, get those off the list, put VIM and Emacs in their place. And you know what, for a GUI text editor that's kind of simple, it's called Notepad QQ. It's kind of Linux's version of Notepad++. I would have added that because so many people like Notepad++ and complain about it when they come to Linux. Oh, I can't get Notepad++ to work. Yeah, but we've got this thing called NotepadQQ. And it's just like it, maybe even better. And the final story I want to talk about is just some of the big releases that are happening right now, distro releases. So we've seen Ubuntu and all of its major flavors have a big release this past Thursday. They had the 2010 series come out. 2010 code named Groovy Gorilla. You had Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Zubuntu, Lubuntu, and a bunch of other Ubuntu's, right? And then just yesterday, I believe, Fedora 33 came out and there was one more distribution I wanted to discuss and that was the release of NixOS. They just had a release a few hours ago, you know, prior to me making this recording and oddly enough, I happened to go to the NixOS website and download the latest ISO without even noticing that it had just been released. I actually went and downloaded their latest ISO before I even went to distro watch and realized, hey, this thing is like five minutes old like they just released this thing. And I actually installed NixOS on that laptop that's running behind me. That is NixOS running the Qtile window manager. But before I get into NixOS, I just briefly want to talk about the Ubuntu releases. I did a video on the Ubuntu 2010 releases. I did a video covering just very briefly six of the major flavors of Ubuntu and I thought they all looked good. They all released a little bit of time I spent with them in VMs. I didn't install any of them on physical hardware, although I guess I could have put it on one of my test laptops. I had some other stuff going on on my laptops though. But yeah, I thought it was a solid release by the Ubuntu team. Now, what makes 2010 special? Well, it wasn't a lot of special stuff with it. Nothing earth-shattering, right? But this is the first release of Ubuntu to offer desktop support for the Raspberry Pi 4. And that's kind of a big deal. So I would say that was one of the things that stand out when you talk about key changes and key features in these latest releases. Overall, Linux kernel 5.8 for Ubuntu 2010. LibreOffice is on 7.0.2. And you get some fresh wallpapers, fresh theming, the latest of the desktop environments. So GNOME was on GNOME 3.38. And Plasma was not on the latest, latest Plasma. I think they were one point behind. But I'm sure with backports you could get to the latest version of KDE Plasma if you really wanted it. One thing I did want to briefly mention too about the Ubuntu 2010 video I did the other day, I covered those six main flavors of Ubuntu. And some people had asked me why I covered the release of the mainline Ubuntu release because it has the GNOME desktop environment. And I said I was never going to talk about GNOME on the channel. Well, when I said that, I mean, I'm never going to promote GNOME as a desktop environment. I'm not going to go out of my way to take a look at GNOME, the desktop environment. I'm not going to take a look at the release of Ubuntu 2010 because they use the GNOME desktop environment. I'm not going to do that. Those folks at Canonical and Ubuntu put in a ton of work for the 2010 series. And I want to give them a little shine here. I want to cover their work on video and let people know about it. It wasn't a video promoting GNOME. It was a video of me promoting Ubuntu 2010. So that was the reason I did that. But I get it. People don't want me to take a look at GNOME. I don't want to take a look at GNOME because of that crazy, racist, bigoted code of conduct they have. Fedora is going to be the same problem. If I take a look at Fedora 33, am I going to take a look at the GNOME version? Probably not. I doubt I'm going to actually review Fedora 33. It's not something that interests me that much. If I did, though, I'd probably take a look at one of the other flavors. I'd probably take a look at their Plasma version because it doesn't get really much love. Nobody ever takes a look at Fedora, Katie. I don't know why. Now, some of the highlights with the release of Fedora 33, they have switched from Extend 4 to ButterFS by default. So the default file system, if you don't change it, is ButterFS now. That's interesting. GNOME is also on 3.38 and Fedora 33, same as Ubuntu 2010. Nano is the default terminal text editor. They actually put that as a highlight, as a key change. I'm assuming that before it was VI or VIM, they made it Nano. So that's probably a wise choice because I don't mind people making Nano the default text editor. Just make sure VIM is also on the system as well. I don't want to have to use VI. As long as I don't have to use VI, I'm good. They also have Swap on ZRAM by default now and also Fedora IoT, Internet of Things, I guess that is an official edition of Fedora now. And lastly, NixOS 20.09 was just released. Like just a few hours ago. I already played with it a little bit. I installed it on that laptop behind me and NixOS is an interesting distribution. Now, I did a review. It's not even a review. It's a horrible video. I did a video about NixOS very, very, very early in the history of my YouTube channel. And I had no idea what NixOS was when I downloaded the ISO and started recording. My viewers trolled me a little bit. They said, hey, you need to install NixOS. You're going to love it. They didn't tell me anything about it. And I struggled getting that thing installed because I didn't read anything, didn't read any documentation. I just launched a VM and a way I went and NixOS is not one of those distributions you go into blind because you're not going to be able to get it installed. I've actually managed to work out the installation on camera after a few hours. But that video is horrible. It's not a good representation about anything regarding NixOS. If you want to go watch that old video, you can, but it's really just for you guys to laugh at me. It's not a good video about NixOS. And because of that, I've known for the last three years that I need to make another NixOS video at some point a proper one to give these guys the proper review that they deserve. Downloaded the latest ISO. I've got it up and running on the laptop. I may go ahead and play with it and some VMs as well. And I'm probably going to do something with NixOS on camera in the coming days. This second time around with NixOS, it's going to be completely different because I actually know what the distribution is about this time. And the other thing that has prepared me for this is that I spent some time using Geeks. GNU Geeks. And Geeks and NixOS are very, very similar as far as their design and philosophy and everything. So the fact that I've already went through Geeks, which was probably, well, not probably it was much tougher to use than NixOS. NixOS is going to be a breeze this time around. So I can't wait to get some of NixOS on camera for you guys. I'll probably get to that sometime in the next few days. And that is it for this edition of Unfettered Freedom. This was Unfettered Freedom Episode 10. I try to release Unfettered Freedom bi-weekly, and by bi-weekly I mean every two weeks. I know that term confuses some people because I assume it means I'm going to do the podcast twice a week. Who in the heck has that kind of time, right? I can only do it every other week. So look for Episode 11 of Unfettered Freedom in two weeks. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Archie, 530, Akami, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, George, Gregory, Caleb, Devils, Louis, Paul, Scott, and Willy. These guys, they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, Episode 10 of Unfettered Freedom would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. Those of you watching the video portion of the podcast, you're seeing a long list of names on the screen right now and these are all my supporters over on Patreon because Unfettered Freedom and the Distro Tube channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. Look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.