Hey, DT! You're Dumb...Your Non-Linux Opinions Suck!

Welcome to today's 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 the comments posted on the videos on YouTube and on Odyssey. Sometimes these questions and comments come through social media. Sometimes they come through email. And the very first question or comment I want to respond to is, HeyDT, why do so many Linux users use the terminal for everything, even if it is easier to use the GUI Is it because it disrupts their workflow? Example. Typing pathways to the downloads folder instead of right-clicking on a program you download, clicking on properties, and then checking a box to make the program executable. At least now we can type without using the terminal in AI to uncover all the GUIs Linux nerds buried under a ton of terminal commands. Yada, yada, yada. So he's asking, why use the terminal rather than the GUI? Because the GUI's easier. And I think this is a fair question, but I also, I think he underestimates how fast somebody can be doing all of this stuff in the terminal. For example, the situation he's describing, can I navigate to my downloads folder in a terminal faster than I can in In a GUI file manager, well, yes, if I'm already in a terminal, then, yeah, it takes me less than one second to get to the downloads folder. Right. If I want to go open my GUI file manager, I have to go to some kind of menu system and go search for the file manager and click on the file manager icon to open the file manager and then click on the downloads folder. That's going to take a few seconds. Right. It's not quicker. Depending on how fast you type, most commands in the terminal are going to be quicker. If you're a fast typer and you know the commands, and for most simple kind of file management things, I know the commands. He mentions changing properties. He can go into the GUI and just right click on the file and change the permissions right there in a little pop up, just click, hey, I want to make this executable. That takes. A few seconds, right? It seems like that's really fast. I can do that in under a second in the terminal because, again, if I'm already in the folder with the file, I know the CHMOD command to turn on the executable flag, right? CHMOD plus X, name a file, right? That literally takes seconds because especially modern shells like Bash and Fish. They help you basically complete the command anyway. I just start typing the command in the fish shell, especially the fish shell is basically it's almost like it's prescient and knows exactly what I'm trying to do. And it'll just complete the command for me. So the idea that you are faster in the GUI rather than the terminal. Yes, you are probably faster in the GUI rather than the terminal because you haven't been playing with the terminal. You don't know the commands. You don't type fast. You don't live in the terminal all the time the way a lot of us do. If you live in the terminal all the time, it is far faster to do things in the terminal than the GUI, like 99% of the time. And I know it kind of, some people have this. This weird mental situation where they imagine that people doing things in the terminal, doing things with, you know, some of the shell utilities that those people are elitist. They're showing off. They're just trying to make you feel inferior because you don't know the command. So you're a bad person and I'm an awesome person. That's not what we're doing. We're just getting work done. Right. And if you don't like the fact that we get work done Better way, more efficient way than you, then that's a you problem. That's not a me problem. Moving on to the next question. Hey, DT, have you looked at the new open source Photoshop and Microsoft Office clones from Artcraft? So, no, I haven't looked at any of that stuff. I have seen the stories about especially the Adobe clones where somebody used AI to basically make clones of all the proprietary Adobe Creative Cloud stuff. Cool. I'm sure those programs probably work half-ass because they're clones. They were generated by AI. I'm sure they're going to be missing functionality. They're going to be buggy and certainly they're probably going to be slow. They're not going to be optimized in any way. I wouldn't recommend anybody that needed to use Photoshop to use some random AI-generated clone. Just go buy Photoshop if you need Photoshop. Same thing with Microsoft Office. If you need I need to run Microsoft Office. And you need to run Microsoft Office. Don't go find some half-ass clone again that was generated by AI. Now, there are really good. Open source alternatives to a lot of this stuff. For example, if you haven't checked out LibreOffice, you know, I love LibreOffice. I use it all the time. The word processor, the spreadsheet, the presentation program. They're all amazing. They're not exactly 100 percent compatible with Microsoft Office. If you're in a corporate environment where you have to use Microsoft Office, then you have to use Microsoft Office. But if you're like me. I don't have a regular job. I can use whatever office suite I want to use. LibreOffice is damn good. And of course, I'm not tied to any of the Adobe stuff at all, right? I use GIMP to make all my artwork. I use Kdenlive as a video editor, right, so I don't really need the Adobe Creative stuff. Yeah, it's probably technically better software than the open source alternatives I use, but then again, I'm not paying hundreds of dollars a year in subscription fees to an evil corporation like Adobe, and I sleep better at night knowing that. Next up, hey DT, I find your comments on this subject comical and hypocritical considering your past efforts of ricing Arch and tiling window managers with your newest aversion to the current excitement with the recent release of the beautiful, fun, malleable, and agentic OS OMARCHE. Quattro has caused a huge tremor in the personal computing space and more specifically, a palpable derangement in the legacy Linux community. Man, I don't even know what to make of this. So this was a video I did called Linux distros should stop worrying about their desktop, meaning stop worrying about customizing a desktop. Just ship your vanilla desktop environment, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, whatever it is, right? Just ship it vanilla. Don't waste time customizing it because users are going to customize it anyway. I just think that's wasted effort. Spend your effort on the things under the hood, optimizations, drivers, kernel optimizations, things like that. I think that's what most of us would rather our distros spend time on. And I don't know why he thinks I'm hypocritical because I rice my desktop. Like, you know, I customize my desktop. That video had nothing to do with me and you customizing our desktops. Obviously, computer users are going to customize desktops to their liking. I said the Linux distro shouldn't do it for you, make decisions like that for you. So, again, I don't know why he's complaining about that. But this is clearly one of these probably negative people in real life because he just wanted to make up something to argue with me because there's no real argument. Right. He's just making up stuff. He's assuming that I made comments I didn't make. And then he's talking about my aversion to the excitement around beautiful, fun, OMARCHE, my aversion. Like I'm avoiding OMARCHE, I don't use, I don't use, you know, probably 400 other Linux distributions out there because I'm on CachyOS on this machine and Arch Linux at my house. What does the one distribution that I'm not using, you know, he picked one, like why that one? Again, this is a person that very clearly just wanted to argue with me. He didn't have a real argument, so he has to make up an argument. He has to make up statements and opinions and things that I may or may not even have just so he can argue with the fake DT, the DT he made up. I'm not going to do that. Next up, hey DT, it wouldn't be too far off to say my Linux file management is literally hell on earth. I have so many configs, personal files, game data scattered everywhere that it's impossible to keep track of and backup reliably. Given your experience with Linux, if you were starting fresh, how would you organize your files? Should everything funnel into unified buckets like the... .configs folder or gamedata folder and get symlinked out or let things scatter where programs expect them and force a scavenger hunt during backups. Maybe there's another way entirely. So yeah, this is... There's no easy solutions here. I would suggest you not overcomplicate things. I absolutely would not suggest going around and trying to sim link everything to one backup folder because you're going to have hundreds, maybe thousands of sim links all over your file system and those kinds of backup plans. And those cause more pain in the end than save you any kind of pain. And I think Linux is actually pretty good putting things in a spot where you expect them. For example, he mentioned .config. You know, the .config folder on Linux, that's pretty much where all your config files live for practically everything. There's a few things that won't go in there. You know, in your home folder, if you're using Bash, you might have a .bashrc file or a .zshrc file if you use the Z shell. But for the most part, you know, like 99% of your config files that you want to back up and save, they're going to be in that .config folder. So, you know, outside of, again, a few special cases, they're all there, right? So that's already taken care of. And then you mentioned things like game data. Now, data is a little bit different than like config files, right? And settings files, things like that. Actual data, you know, documents, things like that. There's no standard place. to put a lot of this stuff. But one thing I would suggest, if you've got multiple drives in your system, have a dedicated drive just for your user's home folder. Just have that on its own partition. That way, if you're worried about backing up because of distro hopping or reinstalling the operating system at some point, if you have your home folder on its own partition, that really solves a lot of problems. Yeah, there's gonna be Some stuff that's not in your user's home folder that maybe you want to back up, like some system-wide things that are going to be in the root file system. For example, I often back up user share fonts because a lot of my fonts that I install get installed system-wide rather than just for the DT user on my system. So there'll be a few oddball folders in the root file system that maybe you want to go back up. But I don't think it's like a million. files or a million directories you need to go back up. I can think of just offhand five or six directories in the root file system that I know I need. Outside of that, everything else is in my home directory. So if you've got your home directory already taken care of because it's on its own partition, on its own separate drive, you're pretty much most of the way there. Moving on to the next comment. Hey DT, your Arch installation video introduced me to ButterFS and helped me make an educated choice about my file system and partitioning scheme. So thanks. ButterFS works great on my machine and it has genuinely exciting features that I never knew existed. Awesome. I'm glad ButterFS is working for you. It's working for me too. I'm using ButterFS. On this Kashi OS machine right now, I've got Arch on my home computer, and that installation has been up and running for at least two or three years now, and I want to say I'm using ext4 on that system. As a matter of fact, I know I'm using ext4 on that system, because if I was using ButterFS, I would see snapshots being created, and that doesn't happen when I update that machine, but it does happen on this machine, and that snapshotting feature is really nice. Needed to roll back. Thankfully, I've never had any kind of serious breakage where I needed those snapshots and to roll back to a previous generation of this machine. But it is comforting to know that's there should anything crazy happen. And then I've got about three questions here that kind of are a mixture of Linux and... Politics slash opinion. So these will get into some weird spaces here. But the next question is, hey, DT, is Linux and open source left wing or right wing? How do they correlate to politics? When I used to be on Mastodon, people leaning toward communism claimed open source was political. Can right wing people contribute to open source? Open source seems to be less about philosophy and more about practicality. So is Linux and open source left wing or right wing? Well Linux is more of It's a software project. I don't know if they necessarily have a specific philosophy they go by. I mean, they obviously are an open source project, but let's stick to the actual movements themselves, which are the free software movement, the open source software movement. Are they left wing or right wing? And my answer to that is that they are both. They are also neither, right? Free software and open source software. Are they left wing, right wing? Yeah, sure. Whatever you, if you want to call them left wing, you can call them that. And you can probably find areas where they support your particular political bent. If you're a right wing, you certainly can find areas where they agree with your political ideologies as well. That's why, you know, they're neither left wing or right wing or both left wing or right wing and you've got People that are on the left and the right that contribute to free software and open source software, again, it's not really about politics. Free and open source software is not a political movement in terms of trying to make social justice kind of changes. It is political in terms of, hey, we want everybody to know about. Of digital freedom and freedom of privacy, things like that, and security and software, taking control of your software and your digital lives. That's a political movement, but that's not a political movement in the same way as we're going to create some kind of political action committee and try to steer the public on the path of, you know, changing, making sweeping social changes. It's not a political movement like that. That's why I typically wouldn't label it as either left-wing or right-wing. And then you ask, can right-wing people contribute to open source? Anybody can contribute to open source. There's nothing that can stop anyone from contributing, right? Anybody can make a piece of software and then license it under a free license, and it's open source. You, me, anybody, it doesn't matter what your politics are, your race is, your gender, what your religion is, your economic status, anybody can contribute to open source software. I mean, we literally have millions, if not hundreds of millions of people probably around the world that at some point have contributed to the free software and open source software ecosystem. Are they all left wing? Probably not. And then a couple of more kind of political charged questions, although I do think these are fun. So bear with me, guys. I think you'll find these interesting. Hey, DT, if you ran for president, what are the big ideas that you would run on? Now, I could sit here and talk about, you know, the hot button political issues that mainstream news media typically focus on to try to divide people. But that's not how I would run. If I ran for president, I would talk about about issues that actually mattered. in real life, not the imaginary issues that the news media wants to focus on because the news media is just propaganda and they're trying to manipulate you. I'm actually going to tell you exactly what we need to actually make this world a better place. I think by far the biggest problem with society is a lack of discipline. I think these days, especially younger people, they are are not instilled with the kind of discipline and self-control and, you know, things from Older generations, the younger generation these days, there's a reason why they're all screwed up. They're angry and they're hateful and they're violent and they have no real direction in life. It's just a mess. The young people today are a mess. I think if I ran for president, my number one platform idea would be everyone should be required to serve in the military. Everyone should be forced to serve in the military safer. Two years, I think two years is fine. You know, as soon as you're out of high school, two years in the military, you serve those two years, you get some free college. We'll pay for your college, but you got to serve in the military. That takes care of a lot of problems, actually, because now you really don't have to worry about trying to recruit for the Army and Navy and everything, right? Because now. We got that taken care of. We know every year there's going to be new recruits coming in. So you've already got kind of a standing military. Plus, now you are actually instilling real discipline into people at a young age, which will serve them better in life. And you would see a drastic change in the American society. I think on a similar note, I would also require that every single child has to play a sport Or be in a musical program in school. Why? Again, it's to instill discipline. Sports instills discipline. Music instills discipline. Now, this is, again, something that. Today's generation is just really lacking. I think a big part of why society is just in shambles today is just the lack of a nuclear family, where there's two parents in part of the household. So instead of giving out, for example, assistance checks, welfare checks to people that are not necessarily doing the right things, single parent households, people not holding a job, just in many cases, people just in real bad shape. Why don't we give assistance checks to people that are doing the right thing? So nuclear families. I love that idea because now that encourages people to actually stay together, work out their differences. You know, the father and mother stay in the home together and raise their children. Right. And actually the children will be better off because they see. Two parents actually trying to work things out rather than just, again, not being disciplined and just as soon as there is any kind of trouble in the relationship, hey, we split, we're gone, father disappears forever, you may never see him again, right? Let's get rid of all that and actually pay people to stay together. And two other... Ideas I think really deserve some consideration is I would outlaw all sports gambling because it has absolutely ruined professional sports because professional sports now is completely and totally rigged. And again, because of instilling discipline in people, I think sports is an important part of society. But the online gambling has killed sports. We got to outlaw sports gambling again. And I would also require an intelligence exam. For voter registration, you have to meet a minimum threshold of intelligence to be able to vote in this country going forward. And I think that eliminates a lot of manipulation, because right now, why is there so much fake media and propaganda when it comes to political content? Well, a lot of it is because they know a large percentage of the American public is stupid as hell. I mean, we have a really dumb population. population right now. This is the first generation of Americans that's actually dumber than the previous generation. That's a bad sign. A dumb population is easy to manipulate. If we actually require people to gain some intelligence, right, those people are less likely to buy into the bullshit. They will just have a better society in general because now the propaganda machines They really don't have a large population to feed on anymore, right? It's a much smaller population of those dumb people that they're trying to manipulate. And then the final question or comment here is, Hey DT, no one wants to hear your opinions. Almost everything you say is factually wrong and makes you look dumb. Stick to Linux. So yeah, I'm not exactly sure what video this comment was from, but I do get this. Occasionally, when I do any kind of off-topic video as far as something that's not about Linux or tech, I just give my opinions on life in general or whatever. And then people are like, hey, man, I don't want to hear your opinions. Your opinions suck. And what's really strange about these comments, they never exactly tell me what the opinion they're disagreeing with is. They don't tell me why my opinion's wrong. They never actually give me any kind of logical kind of No reason why I'm wrong. It's just, hey. DT, you're wrong and you suck, right? So I typically don't respond to these kinds of comments, but I will try to make this one fun and educational. So let's talk about, you know, maybe I am wrong. Let's give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I said something that was factually wrong and made me look dumb. Is that a bad thing? Is that something I should be concerned about? Should I, you know, just feel bad and miserable that I might have said something that was factually wrong? Well, no, not necessarily, because I don't mind stating something that's wrong if people pointed out that I'm wrong and tell me and actually show me where I'm wrong. I want to be right. I want to. believe in true things. So if I say something that's factually not right, yeah, let me know and give me the actual evidence that, hey, what I'm saying is not right. But I don't mind doing this on camera. I don't mind. I'm often wrong on camera. And a lot of people imagine that that must be embarrassing, DT, for you to be such a public figure and occasionally get things wrong. Well, no. Would you rather be right in the darkness or would you rather be wrong in the light? I'd rather be wrong in the light because when I'm wrong, for example, on camera, again, millions of people potentially could see these videos and then let me know. They can correct me, and I want to be corrected if, in fact, I am wrong. If I'm wrong, Right. But in the darkness, you know, then I don't really know if I'm right because nobody is correcting me or nobody is actually auditing my opinions if I'm not actually sharing my opinions with the world. Now, I'm also wired a little differently than most people in life. Most people in life, I think, have this. Kind of psychological damage in their brain where they imagine that being wrong somehow makes them a horrible person, makes them a terrible person, makes them an immoral person. Many people, when you point out that they're wrong. And it's obvious to them that they are, in fact, wrong. They then get very embarrassed. They get angry. Sometimes they get violent. Right. And this is kind of normal. That's not the way I operate. If somebody says, hey, DT, you're wrong. And it's obvious that I am wrong. I'll be like, oh, yeah, you're right. Thanks for. Letting me know. Right. And, you know, I don't mind admitting I'm wrong. I don't mind apologizing, which is, you know, again, another kind of psychological damage a lot of people have. Most people in life hate apologizing because apologizing is, in fact, admitting you were wrong about something. And a lot of people just can't do that. In fact, I would say apologizing really lets you know that somebody is actually a strong person, somebody that has some intestinal fortitude, somebody that has basically a pair of balls. We're talking about a man. You know, if I see a man that can apologize, I think That's a strong person. That's somebody that's probably got their ---- together. They probably do well in life. Anybody that's one of those people that can't ever admit they're wrong, can't ever apologize if they're wrong, that's somebody that is weak-minded. That is somebody that is weak in life. And the reason I say that is because when you apologize to somebody, obviously you're admitting you're wrong. Most people can't do that. But also, there is a second problem with apologizing to someone. If you're apologizing to someone else, you don't know how they're going to react. Maybe they're not going to be gracious with your apology, right? They may or may not be gracious. They may ridicule you as you're apologizing. And some people fear that. I don't fear that. Like if I apologize, somebody comes to me and says, DT, you were wrong. And I say, oh, you're right. I'm sorry. And then they go on to tell me, hey, DT, you're dumb. You're stupid, blah, blah, blah. Your mama smells funny, whatever it happens to be. Okay. Like I'm not, it doesn't bother me. And that would bother some people though. I think it takes a lot of courage from somebody to admit they're wrong and to apologize because when you admit you're wrong, you recognize that you're not the ultimate authority on whatever the hell it was you were talking about. And that's really tough for some people. Sometimes it's tough to admit that there's anything higher than you. A lot of times people imagine that they are the ultimate Authority on blah, blah, blah, right? And it physically pains some people to admit, hey, you know, there's people that know more than me out there. And what I really find amusing is some of these damaged people that really can't admit they're wrong or admit that there's something, a higher authority than themselves out there in life. What I love is they'll admit, well, there is a higher authority. I'm not that arrogant and vain. There's a higher authority, but it's, you know. God. It's some deity, right? It's the universe, right? It's not a human being. They would never admit that another human being is higher than themselves. And again, I think that is a clear sign of somebody that is mentally weak. And this negative comment here, this guy really was just trying to insult me. He thought it would get under my skin. It didn't. I think we've had a nice little conversation based around his kind of throwaway kind of comment. But ultimately, I think people have to understand that. Making mistakes is normal and I think it's healthy. You have to make mistakes to realize you're wrong. If you don't make mistakes, you'll never realize you're wrong. Because we often learn more from the things we do wrong. than the things we do right. We often learn more from the things that we do that are not beneficial to our life than the things that we do that are beneficial to our life because it's those mistakes and that pain that comes from those mistakes that really make us learn and grow as human beings. That's it for this edition of Hey DT. Peace, guys.