Dude. What’s up Johnny here, Welcome to Embrace your Storm. We’ve got another exciting, awesome episode for you today, and it’s going to be a little bit geeky nerdy. I know I’ve said it a couple times before, but stick with me. I mentioned this in the past open source and I talked a little bit about how I built a Linux operating system. But today I wanted to, like I don’t know bring awareness to the Linux operating system. I guess I was an advocate, a very huge advocate, of open source software for a very long time. I don’t know if I would use the word advocate now. I guess I could be kind of pushed back into that. But uh, anyways, linux and open source is very cool, it’s very awesome, uh, but it also could be frustrating. Uh, we may or may not get into that, but so so check this out.
If you’ve never heard of Linux, you don’t know what open source is. Linux is a whole other type of operating system. It’s not windows, it’s not the operating system on Mac. It’s totally different, and there’s a few things that are different about it. One it’s totally free, as in, it doesn’t cost you any money at all for the operating system. So you right now could go to like literally probably 300 not kidding, 300 different linux operating systems that you can download and use. Now there are lots of differences and maybe not differences between all of those, but you have that opportunity and choice. Choice, that’s the double-edged sword, I feel, like in the open source world, but anyways. So if you’re interested in using a Linux operating system, there’s a few kind of cool things that you can do with this.
So first we’ll talk about, before you pick out your operating system, what’s going to happen is when you download you know the operating system you’re either gonna you’re probably gonna put on a usb stick, so you’re gonna find software to copy it over onto a usb stick. Then you’re gonna boot off of the usb stick and what happens is is you’re gonna boot into what’s called a live system. You’re gonna literally boot into what’s called a live system. You’re going to literally boot into the operating system and you could actually use it on your computer just as it is right then, and there, like, you could launch the web browser and go online, you could create a document and save it. Now, with that being said, it’s all temporary, meaning like the second you shut off your computer, anything that you like saved is going to be gone. Okay.
But that’s the point of it, though, is like you could use the operating system on your computer and like, actually, like, try it out, see if you like it. You can even install software, and like there’s nothing you can’t do, okay. So you decide, hey, this is pretty cool, I’m going to install it. Now you have two choices. You could either completely erase windows, which that’s what I do I mean, I use windows currently, but if I’m going to put a linux operating system on a computer, I just wipe the whole thing out or you can do what’s called the dual boot, meaning you could leave windows on your hard drive and then you can install linux on kind of like another part on your hard drive, and then you can install Linux on kind of like another part of your hard drive. So then, when you turn on your computer, it’s going to ask you hey, you want to boot into Windows or you want to boot into this Linux thing. So you could do that also. It’s called the dual boot. That lists people that do like triple and quadruple boots and all kinds of silly stuff, anyways. So all right now. Now you kind of could do the live thing. You can install it on your hardware, you can install a dual boot, okay, cool.
Now you’re probably going to use you know, as a new user. What’s going to happen is you’re going to, you’re going to use a distro and then you’re going to do the all-famous distro hop, meaning you’re going to be like, oh, this is cool, but what if I try this out? What if I try that out? And so, before we get ahead of ourselves, you’re probably going to use Ubuntu, which is U-B-U-N-T-U. Honestly, that’s what I started off with. I used Gutsy Given 7.04, baby, that’s how long ago I was using Ubuntu, or I used it anyways. And so you could use Ubuntu. Maybe Linux mint Um, I mean I’m sure there’s some other, you know, user friendly, um distro. I mean you’re not going to use Debian, you’re not going to use Slackware. I mean you could, but you won’t. And you’d see why if you tried to install it.
Let’s see, I’m kind of out of the loop a little bit. I’m getting back into the loop. That’s why I’m kind of doing this episode, because I’m like, hey, maybe other people out there aren’t aware of Linux and open source. So here we are. So you’re going to want to check out Ubuntu or check out Linux Mint.
Now the reason why I say that is they’re user-friendly in the way of like. They’re easy to install, they’re easy to use. There’s a lot of documentation online on like. You know, if you have problems or whatever, you know that’s kind of the cool thing too about Linux is like a big community of people of like users around. You know that’s kind of the cool thing too about Linux is like a big community of people of like users around. You know these Linux operating systems. So if you do run into troubles or problems, you know there’s other people online that are like oh yeah, dude, try this out or go to this file and edit this, and so sometimes Linux, you might need to get your hands a little dirty. You know kind of doing some stuff. So if you don’t like messing around with like computers or you know software and stuff I’m not saying well, you know I should, I shouldn’t even say that because you don’t with your if you’re using ubuntu or linux mint, everything kind of just works honestly, um, or in quite a few other operating systems also.
But now there’s within these Linux distros there is also various, let’s see ways of thinking. Now this is where I get into the double-edged sword of open source, because the cool thing about it is anyone can do whatever they want. The bad thing is anybody can do whatever they want Because, like here’s an example, there’s like a video editing software. Right, I’m not going to use any like actual uh names here, but we’re just gonna. I’m just gonna illustrate something for you. There could be like a video editing software that’s like popular and people are using it. Well, let’s say, someone comes along and is like hey, dude, I’d like to add this feature, or maybe like I think it would be better if we did it this way, and you know people don’t agree on stuff like that. So then now this other dude goes off and starts making another video editing software. Now we have two of them running, two different ones, you know running, and so on and so forth, and so before you know it, there’s like five different kinds of half done. You know, video editing software, like that’s like the double edged sword of open source. Ok, but it’s also a good thing.
Well, so, anyways, there’s different ideologies when it comes behind building an operating system, and so you’re going to run into a few different ones of those when it comes into running, like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. There’s another one, opensuse, it’s O-P-E-N-S-U-S-E. There’s Fedora f-e-d-o-r-a. It’s uh, that’s run by red hat linux. Uh, man, I can’t believe I’m forgetting that.
There’s arch linux, which you’re not going to install by yourself the first time, but there are other ones like manjaro linux. Uh, that is my most favorite linux operating system, manjaro linux, and honestly, that’s probably kind of equivalent to Ubuntu now. So, in all seriousness, if you’re going to run a Linux operating system, you might as well run Manjaro, m-a-n-j-a-r-o. It’s like the mountain.
So Arch Linux is very hard to install, but the ideology behind that is they do I want to get into this. You guys probably don’t care If you do, email me and I’ll go into more of this. Hello, at embracestormcom, but we won’t go into it. But there are different ideologies. There’s Arch Linux, there’s another. You know what I’ll cover, kind of like the different Linux operating systems that kind of have different ideologies and you can kind of go down those rabbit trails if you want.
So there’s Gentoo. Gentoo Linux makes you build and compile everything from source, and that’s all I’ll get into. There are other sort of build packages, but we’re not getting into that. Then there’s Slackware, also extremely hard to install, also builds from source and doesn’t really have any packaging system. Again, there’s SBO, pkg. We won’t get into that, but we’ll just say Slackware, for all intents and purposes as a source build based operating system. So now we’ll move on to based operating system.
So now we’ll move on to let’s see debian. Okay, so debian is probably the first. It’s either debian or red hat, but they’re one of the first ones to package the software, meaning like you don’t actually have to compile it and build it from source. You could just say, hey, I want to install this mp3 player and then boom, it installs it like. So debian and red hat were the first ones to install packaging. Ubuntu came along and made debian easier to use without getting too much into it. Ubuntu builds everything off of debian, but they repackage and redo everything all their own way. But debian does do a lot of heavy lifting under the hood for Ubuntu and again, we don’t need to get into that.
Fedora is based off of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Linux was sold to IBM like five or 10 years ago for like $5 billion, $6 billion. This is a company that literally gives away their software for free, and they sold their company for that much money. So that’s what. There’s power behind this stuff. Red Hat Linux basically runs the entire Internet. I mean, without like exaggeration, like it’s not, it’s not called Red Hat Linux, but it’s basically Red Hat Linux and it runs probably 80 percent of the Internet and runs the New York Stock Exchange and runs anything that has anything to do with anything that’s important, basically. So with Fedora there’s also OpenSUSE. They’re from Germany. They have an enterprise version of Linux called SUSE and so they use the OpenSUSE as like their open source version of what they’re doing. I think that’s kind of it. So.
But so like, when you get into the operating system now, basically you’re going to be able to do everything you can do on a Windows computer, right? Except you’re going to use like different software, like if you’re on. Well, I take that back. I was going to say like, oh, if you’re on Windows, you don’t use iTunes, but you do so. So there isn’t iTunes on Linuxux, but there’s like an equivalent. You can install spotify that does install linux. There is like other like daw software. Reaper is actually installable on linux. I don’t think any of the other uh daws are. Uh, they have their.
Linux has a few more of their own daws. You know it has a open office which is microsoft office equivalent. You can open up any microsoft documents within OpenOffice. Actually, it’s called LibreOffice, I’ll take that back. So, yeah, I mean, there’s nothing you can’t do in Linux that you can do on Windows or whatever.
I mean I went back to college in 2008. And so when I went back to college, I strictly used Linux when I went all through five years of college and I got two degrees and I got to, you know, and I used open source Linux throughout the whole thing and my professors never knew like I was handing in my Word documents and all that, no problem. So, yeah, so you could check out a website. It’s called distrowatchcom. That’s a good place to check out a website. It’s called distrowatchcom. That’s a good place to check out. You can learn all about the different linux distros, learn about what makes them different. There’s new releases are always posted on there, you know.
And another thing if you got an old laptop or an old desktop lying around, linux is the best thing to put on. You could revive that thing and turn it into something else. You could turn into a streaming you know computer. You could turn a streaming radio station. You could do ice caster. There’s all kinds of stuff, man. You could turn to a media hub for your house. There’s all kinds of things you could do. Turn to it your own. You could run your own dns. Not now, now, I’m just talking crazy, but check it out. Check out linux, check out open source. You know it’s, it’s a, it’s a fun time, it’s a good time.
What’s cool, too, about all these like open source projects and, uh, you know, distros and stuff. Like I said, they have all these communities built around. You can literally get involved and you know, like, like here’s an example. I was using, uh, slackware and there’s this thing called slack builds and there’s a slack build specifically for the Gnome desktop, which I needed in order to run Slackware, and whether this is making any sense to you it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point of the story.
So I emailed the Slack build guy that does Gnome and I was like hey, dude, I’m totally blind and I need an easier way to like install this on Slackware. And he was like dude, wow, really, you’re blind. And he was like you know, whatever. So he was like absolutely, I’ll fix that for you. And it was like the coolest thing. It was so cool to be like hey, dude, it’d be cool if you could fix this for me. And he was like, absolutely, and he like fixed it. Like that’s what’s cool about open source. Like people, uh, you know, want to get together, make everything run as well as it can and make sure you know all the users are enjoying the software.
So check out anything open source. Vlc is an open source software. You know. Android, like that’s not open source. Like people would probably say it is, but it’s not, but it’s under the open source. Like guys, but I think that’s it right. Yeah, check out Linux and and if you don’t, that’s fine, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. But maybe you learned something new today. Maybe you didn’t, but I appreciate everyone for listening, for downloading, sending in your emails. Don’t forget to check out the website embrace your stormcom in your emails. Don’t forget to check out the website embraceyourstormcom. Sending your emails. Hello at embraceyourstormcom and everyone. Thank you for listening, thank you for downloading and don’t forget to embrace your storm, see ya.