Hi folks- so apparently TH-cam is now doing a thing where they auto-dub my video into other languages. I have questions. But before I turn it off, I want to know what non-English-speaking viewers are experiencing. If you like or dislike this feature, can you let me know here via reply? If it gets to be a real nuisance I'll happily disable that feature. For all I know I'm being mistranslated! EDIT: after hearing from several of you, I turned this off from future videos (had to figure out how to do it) and attempted to disable it here. Please let me know if it's still present, to my understanding it isn't.
So someone I know listened to the Spanish translation just now and was concerned that the context wasn't right. Ugh. I'm sorry if folks are getting a bad experience, please let me know what you all think and I'll see what I can do about disabling whatever this new dubbing feature is.
@Andreradio1 Irmão, vi teu comentário sobre a legenda automática e o quanto foi importante para ti. Neste comentário da Veronica a que estou respondendo agora, ela diz o seguinte: "Olá, turma! Então... aparentemente o TH-cam agora está numa de legendar automaticamente meus vídeos para outras línguas. Tenho algumas perguntas a respeito. Mas antes de desligar tal função, eu gostaria de saber como está sendo a experiência daqueles que falam outras línguas. Se você gosta ou não da funcionalidade, poderia, por gentileza, informar-me via resposta? Caso se revele um incômodo, desativá-la-ei com prazer. Até onde tenho sido informada, estou sendo muito mal traduzida!
@@VeronicaExplains I'm from Brazil. The comment from @Andreradio1 about this called my attention. It was written in Portuguese and here's my translation of it: "Today I watched for the first time a video with TH-cam's autodub feature. I was suprised and happy! I felt closer. I'm from Recife, northeast Brazil. Congratulations for your work, I've been following you for years! Merry Christmas! God bless you!!"
Hi Veronica, thanks for this question! I'm German and get the auto-generated German translation (here and on other TH-cam channels). It is pretty annoying for me because it ruins the entertaining and authentic style of your videos. The auto-generated voice is super boring and I cannot really imagine anyone would like to listen to that. My English is certainly not the best and I don't get everything you tell, but IMHO the original soundtrack is a must for your channel. I guess there are probably not so many people who are interested in Linux but don't speak English at all.
I'd say leave it. I'm from West Africa and speak excellent English. But I believe in Linux and it's changed my life as someone from a third world it gives me hope. I can't imagine someone from a third world and what will change his life is in a language he doesn't understand. TH-cam should give option of listening in original language and subtitles.
I'm a Linux user, not a pro at all. I've been this way for over 20 years. Mint is my distro of choice. Very stable, everything works on my laptop, I can play all my games, emulators, and retro PC games. (Thanks Lutris). I recommend anyone that is OS curious to try Linux.
Mint is by far my favorite distro for desktop. I find Cinnamon to be incredibly intuitive and conducive to my work flow without needing to customize. There's other options that are more shiny and modern looking but I've never found anything that just works the way Mint + Cinnamon does.
Same here. I started with Mint a year ago. Curious about Arch so I installed it on my laptop. Tried out KDE and a couple WMs. But I'm back to Cinnamon. It just works great. It's simple. Feels like my cozy little home.
I have been using Linux since 1994 (Yikes!) That was a Slackware distribution that came on 4,283 floppies! (For those suffering from numerical OCD…that's an exaggeration.) I consider myself a semi-expert as I have not contributed to the kernel. I recently switched to Mint because it's the easiest way to DO things.
You're a top-tier educator reaching new-to-linux users. The fact that you got the question "what is a desktop environment" goes to show that you're teaching people who are actually learning. And I think that's magnificent. Great job!
I'm not even a beginner yet, but I am very fond of how patiently you balance an understanding of newcomers with anticipatory snark towards splainers who have validation issues! You've helped me make some choices about what I'll be exploring on my old MacBook's Linux partition, and I thank you.
Yeah almost all Linux youtube channels give their personal opinion on Linux which always results in all Linux users fighting in the comments. Just because nobody can agree and all want their opinion to be the only valid one. So much for what you can call it a community. But this channel is different, Veronica just does what she promises: explaining!
I've been an XFCE user for over a decade, ever since I felt Gnome getting slower and taking away configurations. At this point, it's what I'm used to, it always works for me, and is lightweight for even my older hardware.
@@moocapiean XFCE is pretty nice. All they need to do is add proper Wayland support along with per ponitor fractional scaling and it's a perfect no fuss environment.
@@pedroalbuquerquebs yes to everything, except please stop calling it "fractional scaling" - it's HiDPI, except if you mean GNOME's (past) horrible implementation.
Out of curiosity, have you tried Mate? It's supposedly a lot like classic Gnome 2. I never cared for Gnome 2, and used XFCE and occasionally KDE 3 back in the day. Personally (and I know this will sound weird), I didn't care for Gnome until 3 came around; I use it about 75% of the time now.
I love btop-it's gorgeous, and I find it conveys important information way better than htop or glances. Unfortunately, it requires a minimum width and height that are below what I get on my phone's ssh client, so it can never be my _sole_ top.
About fractional scaling: Support for this has gotten better, and on most DEs and Compositors it's basically free performance-wise now. I'm using a 13 inch laptop with a 2256x1504 display, and fractional scaling is very necessary there. To get equivalent ui size feel to what a 1080p monitor provides, I need a scale of 1.175x. As for performance: If implemented properly, Wayland fractional scaling actually costs no performance at all: The UI isn't scaled as an extra step after rendering, rather each supporting application calculates how big in actual device pixels it should render its content, and renders it accordingly. There are some applications that don't support it yet, and in that case it does cost performance: In those cases, the application renders at 2x and is manually scaled down by the compositor, but the performance hit is still relatively low as long as the app doesn't do software rendering. Apps that render this way will also sometimes look slightly blurry due to the manual scaling.
@CubicleNate yes, it's a Framework 13. 125% seems slightly too large for me. Also, 125% is not a scale factor that results in an integer number of logical pixels, which some apps and compositors don't handle well (you get gaps on the bottom right in fullscreen apps with KDE for example). The closest pixel perfect scaling ratio to 125% is 125.333333% btw
@@CubicleNate I love how we recognize the laptop by its eccentric resolution. Gotta say-took me a while to get used to the aspect ratio, but now that I'm acclimated, I'm kind of a fan.
Hoje foi a primeira vez que assisti o video com dublagem nativa do TH-cam. Fiquei surpreso e feliz. Me senti mais próximo. Sou do Recife, Nordeste do Brasil. Parabéns pelo trabalho, há anos te acompanho. Feliz natal! Deus te abençoe!!
Thank you Amiga voice for making things clear. Oh how I miss you. We really are spoiled for choice in Linux. Love you Veronica. Merry whatever holiday you celebrate.
I installed Mint on this laptop because I heard someone call it "Kubuntu done right." While my experience has taught me that it's a reasonable description, it did get me confused into thinking it was running some heavily modified KDE for a while. Because who's going to look at this Windows 7 style layout and assume it's forked from Gnome of all things? Once I learned the truth, I had so much more respect for what they've done. Building your own DE, complete with making a full suite of default apps, is no small task, but anyone serious enough to go through with it probably knows what they're doing. While I wouldn't describe my experience with Kubuntu as frustrating, it's been fun discovering that all the issues I had with it instantly disappeared when I switched.
I also think the Cinnamon folks have done wonders and I applaud their standing up to the GNOME tyranny - but whoever described mint to you as "Kubuntu done right" had made you a disservice. It's maybe "Ubuntu done right".
Not only is Mint great for beginners, but you can add whatever window manager on top of it that you want. Following a DT video about "becoming a Mint power user", I installed awesome wm (a tiling window manager for those not aware) over top Cinnamon and used that as my default. It took me out of my comfort zone and required me to acquaint myself with the terminal, which has been very handy to learn for Linux.
The one thing I dislike with Wayland is that sometimes the applications default to the Wayland icon rather than the icons I want. But that's on an app level, not a desktop environment level, and I hope it will eventually get fixed.
This is actually a limitation of Wayland. Currently, applications are not allowed to set their own window icons - your desktop environment has to look up the corresponding icon from a .desktop file. If the application is not installed globally, the icon won't be found.
There's a Wayland protocol in the works to fix that (XDG top-level icon) in the mean time, on Plasma, you can set a window rule to fix your favorite applications.
I gave my wife a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint Mate and as a non technical Windows user she had no problem adapting to the OS. I wrote a couple of scripts to dim the screen and shut down, but apart from that it’s exactly as it comes out of the box. Fast, crash free and perfect for non technical end users.
Finally someone explaining it without simplifying too much and at the same time understandable for beginners. I needed this video when I was introducing my friends into Linux.
XFCE was my favorite for a long time. Loved LXDE for a bit too when memory management was an issue. Now that they're all mostly performant and I'm not bound to a wimpy system, I've been running GNOME mostly. I used Debian and Debian derivatives for 11 years and am on Arch now, really enjoying the newer kernel and package situation.
"or to ditch them all as bloatware" damn, you got me 🤣 to be honest on my arch+hyprland i just ditch the session sleep feature (suspension/hibernation), and the bar, and my background is a beautiful plain black, and i dont have space between tiles, to maximize screen usage
I'm a longtime Linux user who's ended up settling on Pop OS as my daily driver. I've actually installed the alpha of version 24.04 which includes the alpha of Cosmic as its DE by default, and I'm loving it already. Really excited to see where it goes once it's feature complete.
Even though I learned all this 15 years ago, I still loved hearing your explanations. Great to refresh my knowledge of things I haven't really played with since landing on KDE Plasma back in 4.6. (Although I *do* use Qtile on my old netbook for the same reason you have Sway on your smaller laptop)
I use KDE on my desktop PC, I use XFCE on my laptop. Both of these run Debian. However i use Windowmaker on NetBSD on an SBC (not Raspi, olimex a20 micro, allwinner a20 SoC).
13:14 As someone who still needs to use windows sometimes, I’m happy the disk format utility still looks the same. Windows has given me such headaches with their changes, making me waste time looking for how to do something because they’ve hidden the buttons somewhere else. It’s like going to the grocery store and finding out they’ve rearranged the layout and now you have to hunt each item down.
Long time watcher, first time commenter! I've been using Mint with XFCE since 2018 when Valve released their Proton compatibility layer for games. Video games were the last things that kept me tethered to Windows, and I've been happily daily driving XFCE ever since! I love how speedy it is on everything from my low end laptop that I use for my writing projects all the way up to my main rig......
Thanks I know I’m awesome, thanks again for your honesty and explanations, they do make a whole lot of sense, learning a few things here and there hearing you speak. Cool question and answer video, great timing as well, not to short and not to long, catch you on the next one…😺⭐️
Yeah, I use KDE because I like it's customization. I've got the global menu from Mac OS, a task bar like Windows, a theme that looks a lot like Irix, and a warm and light color scheme. It looks good, and works pretty well too. It's nice having a color picker on the global menu.
13:01 I use Windows extensively, and I need to point out that complaints about appearances are far greater than one might imagine. Whenever a new update comes out and they uses a new style of windows that calls to an older style of windows, oh boy, the people will complain. I also use mac a lot too, and they have similar complains, albeit in less volume. I will even say that Windows users will accept a lot of sh*t from the OS yet hate that some things still look "old"
First off, been watching you for years and there aren't many channels you finish watching a video and just feel happier. So thank you for being awesome yourself! Second, what is habit you have on linux that you picked up early in your linux life, that you know there is a better way but you are so passionately connected to it? :) Take care
Please explain how to do system snapshots including whether/how to save them to a USB drive (how big should it be?), and the relative pros and cons of rsync vx btrfs. Also, what is a rational schedule? Timeshift vs. BTRFS Assistant, etc. would be nice too. I'm a 74 year old Linux noob since 2005 (not to imply that I wasn't 55 in 2005) and I love your channel.
Rsync vs. BTRFS is a comparison I didn't think about until now. I guess both can be used for backups? From my perspective (and most IT people) a "backup" isn't "keeping another copy of your files and syncing them from time to time". If you can't restore to a point in time n backups ago, you aren't backing up and you are just one failure away from losing your data - which is why I recommend restic.
@@guss77 You bring up another good point for Veronica to cover if she discusses snapshots: the (big) difference between a system snapshot and a data backup, and why it would be foolish to use, for example, Timeshift or BTRS Assistant to back up your files. I would never suggest that rsync or BTRFS be used for backups, so thanks for bringing up that point of potential confusion. I'm no expert, but I have set up both Timeshift (on Endeavour OS and Pop!_OS) and BTRFS Assistant (on Fedora 41) it having a system snapshot allowed me to roll back effortlessly to a working system when a bad firmware update pooched my wi-fi. I use deja-dup for backing up my files.
I'd say that one thing that may help cement KDE as being the most used is the fact that it is the default for Steam Deck. To be fair, KDE Plasma 6 finally reached a point that it does basically everything I missed from GNOME on Plasma 5, like the desktop overview. But GNOME is still usually more polished, but MUCH MORE (often too much) opinionated. I also feel that, more often than not, I have had more issues with "third party" apps on KDE than on GNOME since things tend to be more focused on GTK+ and GNOME. For instance, until recently Zoom had issues with screen sharing on KDE on Wayland, whereas on GNOME it worked just fine on Wayland. That said, I'm actually an heretic that has been mostly using Windows in more recent times :P
Until recently Zoom literally blocked screensharing unless the environment variable "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" was set to "gnome". That's why it wasn't working on KDE.
Oh ! So happy to get a video :) I learned so much, thank you! Currently, I'm playing around with desktop's theme and stuff like that. I'd like to find "something new" (basicallly, I don't know what to do or where to place the taskbar... I think there much better to do with mutlti-destkop combined to plasma activities...) Anyway, I think talking about architecture (x86, x64, amd64, arm, etc...) could be fun interresting next time :) Merry Christmas and happy new year Veronica !
I know XFCE allows you as many task bars as you like, and you can place them anywhere you like. And any size you like. For instance you could make a "panel" just big enough for a clock, make the clock the size you want, and put it in the upper right hand corner. And nothing else. This works surprisingly well because right clicking anywhere on the desktop will bring up a menu of basic commands and a sub-menu of all your applications. So you don't really have to have a taskbar at all, especially if you use Conky. I do use a panel myself, at the top, almost exclusively for information. Time, processor temperature, fan speed, notifications, and a few widgets for controlling things like volume that I don't need very much but like to keep handy.
What a pleasant video! I love the Vibe! Gnome and XFCE are my personal favorites. I run Arch with Gnome on my PC and Linux Mint with XFCE on my oldish Thinkpad. Both work great and look amazing (with the right customizations)
My favorite DE is Budgie with the Vimix theme (color depends on my current wallpaper). Putting the panel at the top and making it thin with the clock in the middle and notifications/raven to the left and right of that looks really good and modern.
I installed Bunsen Labs on an old Dell laptop and I love it. I can’t remember what Desktop Environment it uses but if you like Right-clicking for your menu, give it a try.
Good Fun! Great job differentiating the Desktop Environment, Window Manager and Compositor elements! And having the Amiga's 1985 text to speech utility ask the questions made me smile bigly! 100% agree on the Mint recommendation for Linux newbies -- I've probably done a couple dozen Mint installs for friends and family with great appreciations FUTURE SUBJECT suggestion: Do a similar breakdown of the Linux Audio stack and subsystems now that you've covered the graphics side. (You can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears!) 😉
A Desktop Environment is a software suite that contains a Window Manager. The Window Manager is the part responsible for drawing windows and the menu. At least I've never seen a Window Manager that didn't have a menu. I've seen most of them too.
For the next episode: I'd like to get an overview of about your experiences with GNU powertools. There is a loot of CLI tools available, and I would love to extend my toolbox. A ranking could be fun, followed by a select few deep dives, or a workflow demonstration with these. Really loved the fuser video.
Thanks for the video! I ... didn't know it was surprising that Xfce was so popular in that poll - it seemed to be pretty highly recommended when we were looking for DEs for our laptop. Lots of folks seem to like it for low-end machines. On the subject of Ask Veronica subjects: our first thought is backups, actually - that was one of the first things we wanted to get going when we started using Linux. (Losing data stinks!) I don't know if that's good for a Q&A, though.
Hi Veronica! You do an awesome job on your videos and I love how clearly you speak and explain things. One thing I would like to know is if there are any *good* parental control packages or settings for desktop Linux. I've been a Linux user for quite a while and this is one area that I feel is kind of overlooked. I'm sure I'm going to get called out for suggesting parental controls because that goes against the ethos of Linux. But when I build a computer for my children to use, I'd really like it to have some kind of controls on it - especially for web browsing and time management.
I see that PDP-11 COBOL book on the desk. I started my career at DEC, but was just past when the PDPs were being sold. One team that I worked on did still support DSM-11 (MUMPS directly on hardware) I miss those days, and love the current smoothness.
Ran into some hiccups but I’m working on converting my first laptop over to Mint. Thanks for the video! It’s good motivation to keep trying to get it to work.
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you. My Desktop of choice is also KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed as it's served me well for many years. I wanted to point out that I use fractional scaling with my Framework 13 using a 6 logical display setup. The main Framework display is at 125% along with the FlipGo of the exact same size, resolution and pixel density. I have some smaller 1080p displays that are scaled at 105%. You mentioned a performance penalty for fractional scaling which has me concerned but yet I haven't noticed any performance hit. I am using Wayland so maybe that mitigates that issue but I can't say for sure. Perhaps it is something I should look into testing? Regardless it's something to think about and also I wanted to give you two thumbs up 👍👍 for having Btop on a display behind you. Thanks again and Merry Christmas!
》What most of the newbies or even conventional (`M$`) users don't understand well, Veronika, is this possibility of adjusting and tuning so many system resources in order to make it behave the best possible way, anyone is free to install, remove lots of components, from just visual ones to the most advanced `deamon` modules.
I've always loved the text to speech system . Gonna break out my A1200 today. What more can you ask for on Xmas 🎁 day. Happy Christmas 🎁🎄 to you and your family Veronica 💖.
Fractional scaling is a matter of sight and cost specially for 1080p and 1440p. Is a matter of accessibility of price and disabilities. It's not a must, but it is really good to have.
I've heard the argument that most people who want fractional scaling are best served upping the system font size. And I've definitely had that work well for me on single-display systems. It does fall apart when you have screens that have considerably different DPIs, though.
My monitor is a TV and I sit in a reclining chair about 9 feet away. I use 125% scaling, and even then, some text is just barely readable. I've tried font-only scaling. I can't remember the exact problems with it, but there were problems. I think the font-scaling didn't work with some programs, maybe LibreOffice.
Since Mint was my first distribution and made a lasting impression on my Linux experience, my favorite desktop environment is GNOME with extensions that make it look and act similar to Cinnamon. This way, I can have the benefits of Cinnamon’s familiar interface without software inconsistencies.
Linux user since 1995 (Slackware at the time of speaking, Debian now). Veronica can explain the back of a cereal packet and I would still tune in, just for the positive attitude and elegant simplicity of the explanations. p.s. I run Debian Unstable because when things break, I can spend a happy afternoon learning why! p.p.s no i don't have a celebrity crush on Veronica, you do.
I used tiling window managers for 2 years ( i3 and dwm ) and i really liked them. But i want easier solutions now so i moved to xfce. My fav de. Simple, very configurable and resource efficient.
Ah yes KDE is amazing! A little bit too good since I haven't really felt like anything else in years, although I do am starting to experiment with Hyprland on a side laptop. Also now that I've seen that Pop OS has a tiling manager I think that I'll try it a bit, thanks for showing that :)
The Text to speech: Nicely done. Also, in the comment space, challenges with new computers and video drivers, vs older Thinkpads that mostly just work on most distros. Or distros that are best suited on Arm based machines.
Hi folks- so apparently TH-cam is now doing a thing where they auto-dub my video into other languages. I have questions. But before I turn it off, I want to know what non-English-speaking viewers are experiencing. If you like or dislike this feature, can you let me know here via reply? If it gets to be a real nuisance I'll happily disable that feature. For all I know I'm being mistranslated!
EDIT: after hearing from several of you, I turned this off from future videos (had to figure out how to do it) and attempted to disable it here. Please let me know if it's still present, to my understanding it isn't.
So someone I know listened to the Spanish translation just now and was concerned that the context wasn't right. Ugh. I'm sorry if folks are getting a bad experience, please let me know what you all think and I'll see what I can do about disabling whatever this new dubbing feature is.
@Andreradio1 Irmão, vi teu comentário sobre a legenda automática e o quanto foi importante para ti. Neste comentário da Veronica a que estou respondendo agora, ela diz o seguinte: "Olá, turma! Então... aparentemente o TH-cam agora está numa de legendar automaticamente meus vídeos para outras línguas. Tenho algumas perguntas a respeito. Mas antes de desligar tal função, eu gostaria de saber como está sendo a experiência daqueles que falam outras línguas. Se você gosta ou não da funcionalidade, poderia, por gentileza, informar-me via resposta? Caso se revele um incômodo, desativá-la-ei com prazer. Até onde tenho sido informada, estou sendo muito mal traduzida!
@@VeronicaExplains I'm from Brazil. The comment from @Andreradio1 about this called my attention. It was written in Portuguese and here's my translation of it: "Today I watched for the first time a video with TH-cam's autodub feature. I was suprised and happy! I felt closer. I'm from Recife, northeast Brazil. Congratulations for your work, I've been following you for years! Merry Christmas! God bless you!!"
Hi Veronica, thanks for this question! I'm German and get the auto-generated German translation (here and on other TH-cam channels). It is pretty annoying for me because it ruins the entertaining and authentic style of your videos. The auto-generated voice is super boring and I cannot really imagine anyone would like to listen to that. My English is certainly not the best and I don't get everything you tell, but IMHO the original soundtrack is a must for your channel. I guess there are probably not so many people who are interested in Linux but don't speak English at all.
I'd say leave it. I'm from West Africa and speak excellent English. But I believe in Linux and it's changed my life as someone from a third world it gives me hope. I can't imagine someone from a third world and what will change his life is in a language he doesn't understand. TH-cam should give option of listening in original language and subtitles.
I'm a Linux user, not a pro at all. I've been this way for over 20 years. Mint is my distro of choice. Very stable, everything works on my laptop, I can play all my games, emulators, and retro PC games. (Thanks Lutris). I recommend anyone that is OS curious to try Linux.
Mint is by far my favorite distro for desktop. I find Cinnamon to be incredibly intuitive and conducive to my work flow without needing to customize. There's other options that are more shiny and modern looking but I've never found anything that just works the way Mint + Cinnamon does.
Same here. I started with Mint a year ago. Curious about Arch so I installed it on my laptop. Tried out KDE and a couple WMs. But I'm back to Cinnamon. It just works great. It's simple. Feels like my cozy little home.
based
I have been using Linux since 1994 (Yikes!) That was a Slackware distribution that came on 4,283 floppies! (For those suffering from numerical OCD…that's an exaggeration.) I consider myself a semi-expert as I have not contributed to the kernel. I recently switched to Mint because it's the easiest way to DO things.
@@Arfonfree I haven't been using Linux quite that long but I'm in a similar boat and have consistently found Mint to be a pleasure to use.
It is a gloomy rainy day today but thanks for making it better. 😀
Thank you SO MUCH for the support!
You're a top-tier educator reaching new-to-linux users. The fact that you got the question "what is a desktop environment" goes to show that you're teaching people who are actually learning. And I think that's magnificent. Great job!
Amiga voice!!! That takes me back. Thank you for an excellent video.
"Because" AmigaOS "was awesome".
The most ahead of its time OS of the last century.
Blast from the past.
What's an Amiga??
@@Thiesi A computer.
I'm not even a beginner yet, but I am very fond of how patiently you balance an understanding of newcomers with anticipatory snark towards splainers who have validation issues! You've helped me make some choices about what I'll be exploring on my old MacBook's Linux partition, and I thank you.
Yeah almost all Linux youtube channels give their personal opinion on Linux which always results in all Linux users fighting in the comments. Just because nobody can agree and all want their opinion to be the only valid one. So much for what you can call it a community. But this channel is different, Veronica just does what she promises: explaining!
@@chinesepopsongs00 Because she is awesome!
I've been an XFCE user for over a decade, ever since I felt Gnome getting slower and taking away configurations. At this point, it's what I'm used to, it always works for me, and is lightweight for even my older hardware.
@@moocapiean XFCE is pretty nice. All they need to do is add proper Wayland support along with per ponitor fractional scaling and it's a perfect no fuss environment.
@@pedroalbuquerquebs yes to everything, except please stop calling it "fractional scaling" - it's HiDPI, except if you mean GNOME's (past) horrible implementation.
@@moocapiean gnome is weird. I am on xfce too but i want to try kde
Out of curiosity, have you tried Mate? It's supposedly a lot like classic Gnome 2. I never cared for Gnome 2, and used XFCE and occasionally KDE 3 back in the day.
Personally (and I know this will sound weird), I didn't care for Gnome until 3 came around; I use it about 75% of the time now.
@@pedroalbuquerquebsxfce also still missing proper fractional dpi scaling.
10 points for btop
The "B" stands for "best".
How about bloated? Yet I think of it as of bloated and best at the same time
btop is pretty, htop is useful.
I love btop-it's gorgeous, and I find it conveys important information way better than htop or glances. Unfortunately, it requires a minimum width and height that are below what I get on my phone's ssh client, so it can never be my _sole_ top.
@shateqI only open btop when I want to convince others I'm busy working 😅
About fractional scaling:
Support for this has gotten better, and on most DEs and Compositors it's basically free performance-wise now.
I'm using a 13 inch laptop with a 2256x1504 display, and fractional scaling is very necessary there. To get equivalent ui size feel to what a 1080p monitor provides, I need a scale of 1.175x.
As for performance: If implemented properly, Wayland fractional scaling actually costs no performance at all: The UI isn't scaled as an extra step after rendering, rather each supporting application calculates how big in actual device pixels it should render its content, and renders it accordingly.
There are some applications that don't support it yet, and in that case it does cost performance: In those cases, the application renders at 2x and is manually scaled down by the compositor, but the performance hit is still relatively low as long as the app doesn't do software rendering. Apps that render this way will also sometimes look slightly blurry due to the manual scaling.
By chance is that a Framework 13? I scale mine at 125% which seems to work well for me.
@CubicleNate yes, it's a Framework 13. 125% seems slightly too large for me. Also, 125% is not a scale factor that results in an integer number of logical pixels, which some apps and compositors don't handle well (you get gaps on the bottom right in fullscreen apps with KDE for example). The closest pixel perfect scaling ratio to 125% is 125.333333% btw
@@CubicleNate I love how we recognize the laptop by its eccentric resolution. Gotta say-took me a while to get used to the aspect ratio, but now that I'm acclimated, I'm kind of a fan.
Always great to see a new Veronica video. Happy Holiday's to you and yours!
Hoje foi a primeira vez que assisti o video com dublagem nativa do TH-cam. Fiquei surpreso e feliz. Me senti mais próximo. Sou do Recife, Nordeste do Brasil. Parabéns pelo trabalho, há anos te acompanho. Feliz natal! Deus te abençoe!!
Pleeeeeeeease, make the ancient text to speech syntethizers a regular thing!
I did just pick one up for my TI-990...
"ancient"? No way man. Amiga was way ahead of its time. Still kicks many OS'a ass in many areas.
I used to play with a Votrax Type and Talk (for pay) about a gazillion years ago. (around 1983-84) Fun times.
@@RockTo11Man how I wish I had grown up in that era of innovation.
The voices of the old school speech synthesizers give me the creeps… Probably cause I watched too much low-res horror games!
5:40
Everytime I look at a Budgie screenshot I think for a second, "yeah that's Windows 10.”
Thank you Amiga voice for making things clear. Oh how I miss you.
We really are spoiled for choice in Linux.
Love you Veronica. Merry whatever holiday you celebrate.
I installed Mint on this laptop because I heard someone call it "Kubuntu done right." While my experience has taught me that it's a reasonable description, it did get me confused into thinking it was running some heavily modified KDE for a while. Because who's going to look at this Windows 7 style layout and assume it's forked from Gnome of all things? Once I learned the truth, I had so much more respect for what they've done. Building your own DE, complete with making a full suite of default apps, is no small task, but anyone serious enough to go through with it probably knows what they're doing. While I wouldn't describe my experience with Kubuntu as frustrating, it's been fun discovering that all the issues I had with it instantly disappeared when I switched.
I also think the Cinnamon folks have done wonders and I applaud their standing up to the GNOME tyranny - but whoever described mint to you as "Kubuntu done right" had made you a disservice. It's maybe "Ubuntu done right".
Love the terminal shout out, especially in a Q&A about desktop environments.
"Its bridged to matrix" got a bigger laugh out of me than it should've, always love to see it though.
Not only is Mint great for beginners, but you can add whatever window manager on top of it that you want. Following a DT video about "becoming a Mint power user", I installed awesome wm (a tiling window manager for those not aware) over top Cinnamon and used that as my default. It took me out of my comfort zone and required me to acquaint myself with the terminal, which has been very handy to learn for Linux.
"Install fancy window managers to get better at your terminal skills!" That's a slogan I can get behind 👍👍
The one thing I dislike with Wayland is that sometimes the applications default to the Wayland icon rather than the icons I want. But that's on an app level, not a desktop environment level, and I hope it will eventually get fixed.
@@DissertatingMedieval on KDE you can sort of fix it, by adding a window/application rule that points it to the right desktop file.
This is actually a limitation of Wayland. Currently, applications are not allowed to set their own window icons - your desktop environment has to look up the corresponding icon from a .desktop file. If the application is not installed globally, the icon won't be found.
There's a Wayland protocol in the works to fix that (XDG top-level icon) in the mean time, on Plasma, you can set a window rule to fix your favorite applications.
XFCE just released version 4.20.
Blaze it up!
@@HisVirusness oh
Does it have fractional dpi scaling support?
Love the new segment! ASK-V is a super clever and funny name. It reminds me of RISC-V architecture, which is pretty cool. Keep up the great work!
YAY! ANOTHER VIDEO!!
I gave my wife a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint Mate and as a non technical Windows user she had no problem adapting to the OS. I wrote a couple of scripts to dim the screen and shut down, but apart from that it’s exactly as it comes out of the box. Fast, crash free and perfect for non technical end users.
I've been a Linux guy ever since wifey and I got married close to 20 years ago, and she STILL refuses to convert from Windows to Linux. LOL
Veronica Explains why it's OK to use LCDs with vintage PCs
"LCDs: because electricity can hurt"
Finally someone explaining it without simplifying too much and at the same time understandable for beginners. I needed this video when I was introducing my friends into Linux.
I have no idea what the next Ask Veronica could be about, but I just wanna say I'm here for it!
XFCE was my favorite for a long time. Loved LXDE for a bit too when memory management was an issue. Now that they're all mostly performant and I'm not bound to a wimpy system, I've been running GNOME mostly. I used Debian and Debian derivatives for 11 years and am on Arch now, really enjoying the newer kernel and package situation.
also fight me but Canonical's Unity was fantastic and I wish their Ubuntu Touch mobile OS succeeded.
@@devon-crain Unity desktop is actually back and pretty usable
To each their own...I can't stand GNOME.
I don't run any Linux distros as a main OS, but every time one of your vids show up, I get closer to converting. Thanks for the digestible knowledge.
But you have run Linux?
"or to ditch them all as bloatware"
damn, you got me 🤣
to be honest on my arch+hyprland i just ditch the session sleep feature (suspension/hibernation), and the bar, and my background is a beautiful plain black, and i dont have space between tiles, to maximize screen usage
I'm a longtime Linux user who's ended up settling on Pop OS as my daily driver. I've actually installed the alpha of version 24.04 which includes the alpha of Cosmic as its DE by default, and I'm loving it already. Really excited to see where it goes once it's feature complete.
Btop running in background! Love it ❤ thanks so much for the hard work.
Even though I learned all this 15 years ago, I still loved hearing your explanations. Great to refresh my knowledge of things I haven't really played with since landing on KDE Plasma back in 4.6. (Although I *do* use Qtile on my old netbook for the same reason you have Sway on your smaller laptop)
I use dwm tiling manager.
I use KDE on my desktop PC, I use XFCE on my laptop. Both of these run Debian. However i use Windowmaker on NetBSD on an SBC (not Raspi, olimex a20 micro, allwinner a20 SoC).
@nou712 That's cool! I love the BSDs. My two most favorites are freebsd and netbsd. I have freebsd in a VM. Linux mint on real hardware.
13:14 As someone who still needs to use windows sometimes, I’m happy the disk format utility still looks the same. Windows has given me such headaches with their changes, making me waste time looking for how to do something because they’ve hidden the buttons somewhere else. It’s like going to the grocery store and finding out they’ve rearranged the layout and now you have to hunt each item down.
Long time watcher, first time commenter! I've been using Mint with XFCE since 2018 when Valve released their Proton compatibility layer for games. Video games were the last things that kept me tethered to Windows, and I've been happily daily driving XFCE ever since! I love how speedy it is on everything from my low end laptop that I use for my writing projects all the way up to my main rig......
Linux tends to be pretty responsive. Windows can lose the plot from time to time and leave you hanging for a bit.
Awesome video, Veronica. Thank you for this. It truly was very helpful.
Good job, I really enjoyed the way you deliver your mind on the topic.
Loved the insights in this video! Thanks so much for sharing them! 📚
Thanks I know I’m awesome, thanks again for your honesty and explanations, they do make a whole lot of sense, learning a few things here and there hearing you speak. Cool question and answer video, great timing as well, not to short and not to long, catch you on the next one…😺⭐️
Yeah, I use KDE because I like it's customization. I've got the global menu from Mac OS, a task bar like Windows, a theme that looks a lot like Irix, and a warm and light color scheme. It looks good, and works pretty well too. It's nice having a color picker on the global menu.
13:01 I use Windows extensively, and I need to point out that complaints about appearances are far greater than one might imagine. Whenever a new update comes out and they uses a new style of windows that calls to an older style of windows, oh boy, the people will complain. I also use mac a lot too, and they have similar complains, albeit in less volume. I will even say that Windows users will accept a lot of sh*t from the OS yet hate that some things still look "old"
First off, been watching you for years and there aren't many channels you finish watching a video and just feel happier. So thank you for being awesome yourself! Second, what is habit you have on linux that you picked up early in your linux life, that you know there is a better way but you are so passionately connected to it? :) Take care
Amiga and "Say", absolutely awesome. Quite an interesting video, thanks for sharing.
Please explain how to do system snapshots including whether/how to save them to a USB drive (how big should it be?), and the relative pros and cons of rsync vx btrfs. Also, what is a rational schedule? Timeshift vs. BTRFS Assistant, etc. would be nice too. I'm a 74 year old Linux noob since 2005 (not to imply that I wasn't 55 in 2005) and I love your channel.
Rsync vs. BTRFS is a comparison I didn't think about until now. I guess both can be used for backups?
From my perspective (and most IT people) a "backup" isn't "keeping another copy of your files and syncing them from time to time". If you can't restore to a point in time n backups ago, you aren't backing up and you are just one failure away from losing your data - which is why I recommend restic.
@@guss77 You bring up another good point for Veronica to cover if she discusses snapshots: the (big) difference between a system snapshot and a data backup, and why it would be foolish to use, for example, Timeshift or BTRS Assistant to back up your files. I would never suggest that rsync or BTRFS be used for backups, so thanks for bringing up that point of potential confusion. I'm no expert, but I have set up both Timeshift (on Endeavour OS and Pop!_OS) and BTRFS Assistant (on Fedora 41) it having a system snapshot allowed me to roll back effortlessly to a working system when a bad firmware update pooched my wi-fi. I use deja-dup for backing up my files.
I'd say that one thing that may help cement KDE as being the most used is the fact that it is the default for Steam Deck.
To be fair, KDE Plasma 6 finally reached a point that it does basically everything I missed from GNOME on Plasma 5, like the desktop overview. But GNOME is still usually more polished, but MUCH MORE (often too much) opinionated.
I also feel that, more often than not, I have had more issues with "third party" apps on KDE than on GNOME since things tend to be more focused on GTK+ and GNOME. For instance, until recently Zoom had issues with screen sharing on KDE on Wayland, whereas on GNOME it worked just fine on Wayland.
That said, I'm actually an heretic that has been mostly using Windows in more recent times :P
Until recently Zoom literally blocked screensharing unless the environment variable "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" was set to "gnome". That's why it wasn't working on KDE.
ty aunt veronica for this amazing videos you make to help the new ppl on the linux world.
Show us your Sway setup. Also, that Amiga thing is so nostalgic, so show more Amiga stuff like how you implement based on your tastes.
Well I loved the electronic music video. I loved that someone uses something that most people don't know it can be used for. Bravo!
Oh ! So happy to get a video :)
I learned so much, thank you! Currently, I'm playing around with desktop's theme and stuff like that. I'd like to find "something new" (basicallly, I don't know what to do or where to place the taskbar... I think there much better to do with mutlti-destkop combined to plasma activities...)
Anyway, I think talking about architecture (x86, x64, amd64, arm, etc...) could be fun interresting next time :)
Merry Christmas and happy new year Veronica !
I know XFCE allows you as many task bars as you like, and you can place them anywhere you like. And any size you like. For instance you could make a "panel" just big enough for a clock, make the clock the size you want, and put it in the upper right hand corner. And nothing else. This works surprisingly well because right clicking anywhere on the desktop will bring up a menu of basic commands and a sub-menu of all your applications. So you don't really have to have a taskbar at all, especially if you use Conky. I do use a panel myself, at the top, almost exclusively for information. Time, processor temperature, fan speed, notifications, and a few widgets for controlling things like volume that I don't need very much but like to keep handy.
What a pleasant video! I love the Vibe! Gnome and XFCE are my personal favorites. I run Arch with Gnome on my PC and Linux Mint with XFCE on my oldish Thinkpad. Both work great and look amazing (with the right customizations)
I would love a BSD vs Linux (or even more generally Unix vs Linux)....
Manjaro XfCE here btw.
woo, Manjaro Xfce on my TH-cam laptop and any box I touch :)
i don't think that theres a linux out there old enough to do a reasonable comparison :D
@@AlexandraKnopf Both Manjaro users in the same comments? What are the chances?!
@@tylerboothman4496 hey! I'm sure there are two or three of us, ok? ;)
Bsd vs linux for desktop? Bsd has no video drivers. Try to install printers on bsd
Have a happy new year Veronica Explains
MATE, MY BAE!!!! I LOVE the MATE desktop environment! my absolute favorite now and forever!!
Brilliant q&a session V 🙏🤩😁😁. I'm on EndeavourOS. I love that distro.🙏😁
"fedorable" might be the best hostnames I have ever seen!!
It's so little!
My favorite DE is Budgie with the Vimix theme (color depends on my current wallpaper).
Putting the panel at the top and making it thin with the clock in the middle and notifications/raven to the left and right of that looks really good and modern.
Merry Christmas and have an awesome 12025, Veronica & entourage! :)
No YOU'RE awesome. This video made my Christmas much better. 42. Peace and prosperity for your new year. Keep being you!
I'm so glad the video was useful, best to you and yours this Christmas!
Firefox Translations
I love your humor. Thank you for this entertaining video! A nice overview of the topic of desktop/GUI
You're very pleasant, instant subscribe! TH-cam has recommended a few of your videos, I guess for once they knew what I'd like to see
Of course I’m still watching!
I installed Bunsen Labs on an old Dell laptop and I love it. I can’t remember what Desktop Environment it uses but if you like Right-clicking for your menu, give it a try.
Good Fun! Great job differentiating the Desktop Environment, Window Manager and Compositor elements! And having the Amiga's 1985 text to speech utility ask the questions made me smile bigly! 100% agree on the Mint recommendation for Linux newbies -- I've probably done a couple dozen Mint installs for friends and family with great appreciations
FUTURE SUBJECT suggestion: Do a similar breakdown of the Linux Audio stack and subsystems now that you've covered the graphics side.
(You can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears!) 😉
A Desktop Environment is a software suite that contains a Window Manager. The Window Manager is the part responsible for drawing windows and the menu. At least I've never seen a Window Manager that didn't have a menu. I've seen most of them too.
Love the channel, Veronica. I'm a new Linux baby, and am enjoying learning from you. Hope to see more content like this for people like myself.
I like that V1 is the one asking questions for some reason
I just watched for the entertainment, and then I learned something new!
For the next episode: I'd like to get an overview of about your experiences with GNU powertools. There is a loot of CLI tools available, and I would love to extend my toolbox. A ranking could be fun, followed by a select few deep dives, or a workflow demonstration with these.
Really loved the fuser video.
I love this channel so much!
Thanks for the video! I ... didn't know it was surprising that Xfce was so popular in that poll - it seemed to be pretty highly recommended when we were looking for DEs for our laptop. Lots of folks seem to like it for low-end machines.
On the subject of Ask Veronica subjects: our first thought is backups, actually - that was one of the first things we wanted to get going when we started using Linux. (Losing data stinks!) I don't know if that's good for a Q&A, though.
Hi Veronica! You do an awesome job on your videos and I love how clearly you speak and explain things. One thing I would like to know is if there are any *good* parental control packages or settings for desktop Linux. I've been a Linux user for quite a while and this is one area that I feel is kind of overlooked. I'm sure I'm going to get called out for suggesting parental controls because that goes against the ethos of Linux. But when I build a computer for my children to use, I'd really like it to have some kind of controls on it - especially for web browsing and time management.
Love the use of the Amiga. I started with the original 1000, loved that time in computing.
omg, I love the punk cut. that was awesome.
Huge thanks for this valuable video
I see that PDP-11 COBOL book on the desk. I started my career at DEC, but was just past when the PDPs were being sold. One team that I worked on did still support DSM-11 (MUMPS directly on hardware) I miss those days, and love the current smoothness.
Ran into some hiccups but I’m working on converting my first laptop over to Mint. Thanks for the video! It’s good motivation to keep trying to get it to work.
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you. My Desktop of choice is also KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed as it's served me well for many years. I wanted to point out that I use fractional scaling with my Framework 13 using a 6 logical display setup. The main Framework display is at 125% along with the FlipGo of the exact same size, resolution and pixel density. I have some smaller 1080p displays that are scaled at 105%. You mentioned a performance penalty for fractional scaling which has me concerned but yet I haven't noticed any performance hit. I am using Wayland so maybe that mitigates that issue but I can't say for sure. Perhaps it is something I should look into testing? Regardless it's something to think about and also I wanted to give you two thumbs up 👍👍 for having Btop on a display behind you. Thanks again and Merry Christmas!
8:00 I remember a time, not long ago, when this painful voice was synonym of technological progress ...
This was great! I just rediscovered your channel. :) Linux is awesome, and so are you! :D
I returned to KDE years ago and keep using it. It just feels like home.
As always, a fantastic video. Would you be able to do one on various text editors in the future?
Love how Amiga GUI is being used for the questions, and narrator.device voicing them
The voice was "Say", the app on Workbench 1.3!
@VeronicaExplains if the app was say, it's soul was narrator.device was it's soul ;)
Its a Christmas miracle! Actually a good video as i am a disyro churner and run vm on devices.
》What most of the newbies or even conventional (`M$`) users don't understand well, Veronika, is this possibility of adjusting and tuning so many system resources in order to make it behave the best possible way, anyone is free to install, remove lots of components, from just visual ones to the most advanced `deamon` modules.
Guh-nome, Mah-tay. Thank you for correctly pronouncing these. Makes my day.
Don't forget Cute!
I use Linux Mint it does what I need, and is stable and doesn't change much, very consistent. Just the way I love it.
I've always loved the text to speech system . Gonna break out my A1200 today. What more can you ask for on Xmas 🎁 day. Happy Christmas 🎁🎄 to you and your family Veronica 💖.
Fractional scaling is a matter of sight and cost specially for 1080p and 1440p. Is a matter of accessibility of price and disabilities.
It's not a must, but it is really good to have.
I've heard the argument that most people who want fractional scaling are best served upping the system font size. And I've definitely had that work well for me on single-display systems.
It does fall apart when you have screens that have considerably different DPIs, though.
My monitor is a TV and I sit in a reclining chair about 9 feet away. I use 125% scaling, and even then, some text is just barely readable. I've tried font-only scaling. I can't remember the exact problems with it, but there were problems. I think the font-scaling didn't work with some programs, maybe LibreOffice.
Great video and live bith your channels! Thanks for sharing
We love Veronica!
Since Mint was my first distribution and made a lasting impression on my Linux experience, my favorite desktop environment is GNOME with extensions that make it look and act similar to Cinnamon. This way, I can have the benefits of Cinnamon’s familiar interface without software inconsistencies.
Linux user since 1995 (Slackware at the time of speaking, Debian now). Veronica can explain the back of a cereal packet and I would still tune in, just for the positive attitude and elegant simplicity of the explanations. p.s. I run Debian Unstable because when things break, I can spend a happy afternoon learning why! p.p.s no i don't have a celebrity crush on Veronica, you do.
Thank you.
I used tiling window managers for 2 years ( i3 and dwm ) and i really liked them. But i want easier solutions now so i moved to xfce. My fav de. Simple, very configurable and resource efficient.
》(GNU) Linux systems in general are very flexible!
You had me at the Amiga workbench text to speech program!
Great video, Veronica!
Ngl, after watching this, I looked into how to either find a DE, or theme my DE to mimic Workbench :-)
"At least two control panels"... YES!
Ah yes KDE is amazing! A little bit too good since I haven't really felt like anything else in years, although I do am starting to experiment with Hyprland on a side laptop.
Also now that I've seen that Pop OS has a tiling manager I think that I'll try it a bit, thanks for showing that :)
1:02 "Window Decorations" led me down a memory lane to "Wobbly Windows", and dragging and re-maximizing windows to watch them jiggle like jell-o.
The Text to speech: Nicely done. Also, in the comment space, challenges with new computers and video drivers, vs older Thinkpads that mostly just work on most distros. Or distros that are best suited on Arm based machines.