10 New Years Resolutions for Linux Users

[@michaelsheehey]

As someone switching to Linux this year from being a lifetime windows user, this video was absolutely perfect, cheers.

[@hoff._world]

It seems daunting but take it step by step and slowly immerse yourself. You'll be comfortable before you know it. Thanks for the comment!

[@Myname-l3h]

What distro???

[@itsanantsingh]

Something about your videos feels pretty calm and good. Watched each one of em. Great work brother.

[@hoff._world]

Thanks mate, appreciate the comment

[@SeanSMST]

Just found your channel and I wanna comment on the first 5 points, cause discussions are fun. Bear with me, it's gonna get long. Cheers from Ireland. 1. The server idea is great, me and some mates do it for our uni course, as well as setting up a web server and database for a club. It's fun to mess around with. A simple server is fun to get your hands dirty with. Where you mentioned nas and media servers is where money for storage and some more processing is required, it's why I haven't delved into hosting my own media either. 2. With degoogling and "debotnetting", the reasoning is sound, albeit it's tangential to linux itself and involves a philosophy of the community. I understand detaching yourself from amazon, google, microsoft, etc. but thats a lot easier said than done. If you're in school or college, bet you'll need ms or aws services. If you've got mates not as online as us, you're bound to need google play or some other services to engage with them properly. If you're working in web dev, you'll need firebase, aws or azure. It's impossible to rid yourself of proprietary stuff that you don't agree with, and that's how the world has and will be. Even enterprise level networking, my course, cisco is a big player and they've got proprietary rubbish to deal with. 3. I'd call it rather running a daemon, running a program, just a nitpick. With people ricing their system, making scripts and stuff, they are silly to not go further with programming. My laptop looks fine, I can't exactly rice it much, but it works for college and work. Still, I use it to do little coding challenges to learn as a hobby. I think if someone is that deep into linux community and haven't tried programming, they're truly silly. 4. With installing arch, I didn't agree at first, but I see your point with customising and understanding the architecture. I think knowing how each component fits together is worth understanding, but I would suggest to someone to try learn from an existing distro. To try replace a component with another, for instance replacing bash with zsh, or pulseaudio with pipewire (no idea how simple the latter is). If they're confident, then build arch. 5. I agree with old systems perfectly usable for a lot today. I bet you could circumvent windows and other requirements not met on old hardware by using linux, for games using dxvk, vulkan, proton etc. instead of relying on dx11, dx12, ray tracing and other stuff. I think Windows 11 and Microsoft's further ruining of their operating system has really shown just how poor it's made computers appear. Even windows 10 is fine by comparison (with plenty of tweaking and debloat anyway), it's disappointing. Thankfully Linux does support so much hardware, and old desktops from a decade ago could run games and applications fairly well.

[@hoff._world]

Thanks for the thoughts mate! If I didn't want long comments I wouldn't have made a long video :) 1. Yep 100% storage is a big upfront cost. Especially if you mirror your disks, which I'd always suggest you do, though this cuts your "I paid for this amount of storage" in half. There are many pros and cons on both sides with self-hosting storage vs. traditional cloud, and it is up to the individual to weigh them up and decide what is best. For me I want to be able to see my personal data sitting in my living room whenever I want, and that is worth it to me :) 2. You're absolutely right. Perhaps I should have added "detach as much as possible" into there since that's what I really meant. At my work for instance, we use MS Teams. I can't detach from that. My friends chat on discord and instagram, so what do I do with that? And the very nature of having a YT channel is linking with Google. My answer is compartmentalization. For example, my daily driver is a Pixel 6 running GrapheneOS, where I can sandbox google play services from the rest of my stuff. All my proprietary apps are on Flatpak where their file access permissions are restricted. It is more about managing than detaching, I suppose. Thanks for your comments on this! 3. Daemon, job, background task, long-running program, there are many things seemingly used interchangeably for them, it seems people cannot agree lmao. Agree completely with your points here. 4. I actually have a video up on my channel where I show people how to dissect an existing distro, and I use Ubuntu as an example. It's called "My #1 Tip for New Linux Users" (badly named, I know, was trying the whole clickbait thing but as you can see it didn't really work out). So this is to say, we have very similar thoughts on this idea. 5. Completely agree, love the comment about DXVK. It is wild how some games perform better with it than natively in the first place. Cheers for the reply and have a good year bro

[@Blue-bb9ro]

found my new favourite channel, love it!

[@AnalyticMinded]

Late to comment, but I just found your amazing video. All those are awesome New Year's resolutions. I myself am currently trying to teach myself to program, as I feel that I've reached a plateau when it comes to using Linux, and I want to get on to the next level. I wish Linux content creators delved more into programming. Hopefully you can fill in that gap. ;)

[@hoff._world]

Will do my best my friend. It's good that you want to improve your skills in that way, I definitely feel it is the "next level" so to speak.

[@kweefs]

We're in fucking january and my boi has his fan turned on

[@hoff._world]

Mate I live in Australia it's middle of summer for us hahaha

[@vafreozorn6036]

I switched to fedora after using windows for 12 years. I first intended to install RHEL but it won't give me permission because of some subscription manager issue so i had to go with fedora but I'm going to do a pi project with ARCH now. And will definitely try out the daemon project. Thanks for giving such great ideas.

[@hoff._world]

RedHat has been a bit scummy lately with their use terms. There was the big debacle about CentOS, and more recently last year they tried to cut off Rocky and Alma from using RHEL sources. It might be a hassle to get Arch running on a Raspberry Pi purely because the Pi has more niche and custom hardware than what you'd see in an x86 desktop machine; I don't think the main Arch project has official builds for ARM CPUs. However, it would certainly be a fun challenge to get going! Thanks for the comment.

[@joolz999]

Just got a older computer 8th gen i5 and originally wanted to get promox bc thats what people said to do but literally just having a linux distro and building on that seems so much harder but more fun. Your content is actually inspiring and educational. I want to know as much as you do some day! If you don't mind, where do you get your information from? any particular sub reddits or websites you read from to learn.

[@hoff._world]

many have asked, gonna do a vid on it sometime boss

[@johanngambolputty5351]

I think for the most part you can do anything in any distro, but funnily enough manjaro has broken a lot less for me than ubuntu or popos, and arch has not broken at all. Maybe my standards for what I remember to be a break has changed, because I can fix things more trivially, but still, I think the packages contradict each other less often, and I seem to prefer pacman. I love the constant updates too (and if you don't, you can just not run that command when you don't want to...). I love bspwm, I was also a KDE user before, in some ways I was already partly there with monitor/window/virtual desktop switching shortcuts and using krunner as my launcher, not much has changed in a way, except I don't have to fiddle around with my mouse to put windows where I want them, and since I usually want them either full screen or side by side, I usually don't have to do anything, they just go where they're supposed to be, and I can log in and out much faster. Something appeals to me aesthetically from using more of my screen with a smaller bar and no window bars. There's a little bit of overhead in setting up all the axillary stuff you need; launcher, bar, shortcuts and notifications daemons... but once its done its done, and if you ever think "oh I wish my notifications were a little more like ..." or whatever, you now know where to start. I recommend having a little cheat sheet program to remind you of your shortcuts, heres mine: ``` grep -Pzo "\ # \S.*\ .*\ " $HOME/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc | tr ' ' ':' | sed 's/:#/ /g' | column --separator : -t | rofi -dmenu -p "Cheat sheet (input map)" -theme-str 'window {width: 80%;}' -theme-str 'listview {columns:1;}' -matching fuzzy ``` Plenty of people have their dots on github if you prefer to go top down rather than bottom up, and archcraft is also worth looking at in a vm.

[@hoff._world]

It's true you can do most things on any distro, though the effort and accumulated bloat that goes into swapping large components out like desktop environments is usually not worth the time in my opinion. It is interesting to me how close yet how far KDE can be from a TWM. As you say, we have those desktop switchers, activities, krunner, etc. and I use the tiling function from time to time as well as my own shortcuts, but it still seems like such a big mental leap to go to a real TWM. This is why I want to try it this year :)