egeexyz

Early Access: Rocks n Diamonds - Another Remake!

The original Rocks n Diamonds review was the third video I made for the channel and the first Open Source game I had ever reviewed. It's what gave me the idea of doing reviews for OSS games in general.

At the time, all of the Linux Gaming channels were covering new releases and I thought people would enjoy seeing a review on an older & OSS game.

I wanted to make my reviews a bit different and m...

Game Devlog 01: Finally taking that first step

I've talked about making a game for a loooong time. That PhaserJS video I did years ago was actually driven by my desire to make a game. And now here we are!

I'm calling this series of Patreon posts "Game Devlog" to help myself commit to the idea of finally making a game.

This short little clip obviously isn't much but it's my own personal announcement that I've decided on a game engine: Godot...

Early Access: OpenClonk - the review remake

This video started out as an idea to remake the original review using the subtitles as a script.

Unfortunately, the voice over for that video was aimless and too rambley for me to work with, so I ended up writing a script for it.

My old scriptless videos are just not good. I can't believe some of you have stuck around for so long 😂

Somehow the new review is half the length of the original review but mana...

A brand new thing

I've wanted to do something like this for a long time. As a fun little treat for finally passing 1000 followers on Twitter, I thought now might be a good time to do something like this.

It's a bit more like a music video because I'm obviously not actually playing the guitar with my paws. I recorded the guitar track after like 50 takes of trying different things. I had an elaborate idea of how I wanted to layer the tracks, but it all sucked, and I settled for one track w...

Surprise! A new video!

This video has a funny story.

I originally wrote it to be a huge punch at Kdenlive, specifically, why I use 18.12 instead of the mess that it 20.08.

When I was preparing the voice over, I decided that rather than attacking it, why not promote it and briefly explain why I use 18.12 instead of the latest version. 

As I rewrote the script, it became a "Why Kdenlive is the best free editor" sort of video; a far cry from what the original script was. 😂

I've been bel...

Which OS for this weekend?

Gah I meant to ask this yesterday!

I've been too darn busy with life & work stuff to research interesting distros to test so I've been picking from DistroWatch.

I pulled these OS's from the Distro Delves Github. Lemme know which one you'd like to see 👀

Garuda Linux - Not what I expected

Garuda Linux was a weird one! Probably the most fun I've had testing a distro...

In many ways, it feels like a more daring Manjaro. I don't know if I would recommend Arch or Manjaro users to it, though, because it's still pretty rough around the edges.

I didn't talk about potential security issues like trusting them to maintain their own AUR. The official AUR is sketchy enough, but there are enough eyes to watch packages that should be "safe enough." The Chaos AUR feels a little i...

Wintertime Egee!

I have a simple rule on Twitter - if an artist shows up in my feed and I like their artwork, I will follow them.

I'm not even sure where I found Jupi (@starwhiskers).. probably a retweet? But I'm so glad I did because her artwork is beautiful and she's the fastest artist I've ever worked with.

The turnaround time for this piece was less than 24 hours - that's crazy! And I didn't even give her much information about the scene. In fact, all I said was:

In my head I...

2020-11-23 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Endless OS 3.9 - Underwhelming

I remember Endless OS being super cool but this release was really underwhelming.

Looking at the release notes, they actually removed a lot of features that were in the previous version such as their custom "Exploration Center" browser home page. It feels like Endless is now aiming for a more neutral market rather than an education-focused one.

I actually had trouble coming up with things to talk about. It's a unique distro but I feel like a lot of the charm was missing.<...

Linux Lite - Featherweight in a bad way

Linux Lite takes the cake for the most underwhelming Linux distro release I've ever used. Maybe not the most underwhelming distro every, but definitely for a new release.

I had pretty low expectations because Linux Lite 4.x was kind of lame despite being drummed up by certain Linux personalities (such as Quidsup) who get paid for reviews.

I think Linux Lite is a good example of why people shouldn't buy into some Linux distros' hype. Projects like Ubuntu, Fedora, ...

I finally did it!

I've had the Subaru for almost a month and I've been telling myself to make a video about it already. But I haven't made a video like this in quite a while so I didn't know exactly where to start.

The parking lot was mostly dead (at first), Sun was great, the fall weather made the trees look awesome; it embodies what I have in mind for this project.

I did a few different takes but I'm really happy with the video. The audio could have been better but I wasn't expecting my phone to ...

Mental Health

On Tuesday, our VCS provider sort of imploded and we stayed up late to recover it. It was quite an event but we pulled it off without any downtime.

Last night I successfully deployed a massive but risky network infrastructure change. It caused issues with other services but I was able to fix everything and wake up to a still-running system this morning.

I didn't realize how much my self-confidence tumbled since leaving Shiftwise. Working at Aula took a big toll and the Snap projec...

Ubuntu Kylin - Bittersweet

tl;dr Ubuntu Kylin is a weird GTK/Qt hybrid with few redeeming qualities when compared to contemporaries such as Deepin.

Between the networking issues and poor styling, I don't really even see a point in Ubuntu Kylin at all besides maintaining Ubuntu compatibility. Deepin 20 is superior in almost every way.

I'm being significantly more critical here on Patreon than I was in the episode but I am glad I reviewed it. I will say that the Kylin Assistant app is pretty ...

Should I stay "in character"?

I've wanted to get back into non-tech content (cars, guitars, maybe vlogs, etc) for a long time. 2019 & 2020 have been rough and I haven't done much outside of Linux tech stuff.

I've had my other personal-ish channel for a pretty long time but I've never liked using myself or "Brian" as branding.

Most people on the internet know me as Egee so I'm trying to decide ...

Which Distro for the next episode?

It's going to be slow at work next week so I'm going to work on a new feature-length Distro Delves episode!

How about you guys pick the distro?

Regarding Distro Delves episodes

I got the feeling from this community post that people think feature episodes have been replaced by Live Streams and that isn't necessarily the case.

I thought I had explained what I was up to but in retrospect, I don't think I've explained or really announced anything at all... Whoops!

To be honest, I am a little burned out. I ...

Hey Egee - What distro are you using?

I get asked this question in Twitter DMs, Discord, and YouTube comments all the time. Not sure why people are so interested in the Linux distribution I use but here's the answer:

Solus 4.1 with Gnome

I used KDE neon for most of 2020 but an update in September broke my desktop arrangement and made my workspaces non-functional.

I installed Solus on my laptop (the new StreamTop) and the performance was outstanding so I decided to try it out o...

Distro Delves PC & Seasons Future

The trusty Distro Delves PC had another hardware failure and I spent about an hour trying to track it down. This time, it is either the motherboard, cpu, or possibly the psu.

Debugging hardware issues like these just isn't a good use of my time so I've decided to let the Distro Delves PC retire.

I have two totes with of random computer parts, not including a half dozen chassis parts, and at this point most of the components are far past their expected lifespan. It winds u...

End of the Snap saga

I've had a draft of this post written for a while and I've received payment for my last invoice so now I can talk a little bit about the project.

 tl;dr it was an interesting & enlightening experience. And while I'm glad I did it, I will definitely not do it again.

The project itself was a trainwreck. I'm not going to divulge private details about it but let's just say lots of promises were made before vetting.. like, anything.

There was a ...

Ubuntu Unity 20.04

Unity will always have a place in my heart, especially after producing this episode.

It is such a slick Desktop Environment and it is a crime that Canonical just unceremoniously axed it.

The current evolution of Unity is quite buggy but I have faith that the community will step in and fix it up. It shares lots of code & components with Gnome anyway so maybe it's just a big refresh away from being stable?

I never realized how much polish they put into Unity. In t...

Work & Life Balance

I've been failing on the whole "Work Life Balance" thing. I haven't even picked up my guitar since the last IRL live stream on YouTube 😭.

I have a backlog of ideas and things planned, not to mention post drafts that I need to finish, but my everyday is basically consumed by work.

Having a stable schedule would help but I find myself putting in waaaay too many hours at work just trying to figure things out. We have a meeting tomorrow where I'm going to talk about it. 2020-09-30 21:10:47 +0000 UTC View Post

Announcement

Egee will be coming to life by the end of the year.

That is all.

EDIT: this was 2020 RIP

Annoying Marketers Pt2

Yep, its the same person/company as last time.

I'm very happy to hear that this is their final offer!

Pandas! In 3D

This video was super weird to make!

I've been producing Distro Delves videos for nearly a year and my delivery style is very tailored to riffing about Operating Systems. And coding videos are not that.

I also produced this video in reverse from Distro Delves episode. I wrote the script & recorded the whole voice over before recording any footage. As I wrote the code for the recording, I had to be mindful that I'm following the voice over.

The biggest pr...

Peppermint OS 10 - Nice!

Episode 50 features possibly the "best" Linux distro on Distro Delves so far. Peppermint OS passed every test on the checklist!

I'm honestly quite blown away. English Bob used to rave about this stupid Linux distro. I used to think it was a knockoff of Linux Mint.

Not sure why they chose the name Peppermint.

Despite the positives, I think the branding and community is kind of lame. The logo is meh, the website is ...

End of the Saturday Stream

It seemed like a cool idea at first...

What am I saying? It is a cool idea and I'm ending it to replace it with something better:

Distro Delves LIVE

It's really just a more formal title to the Saturday Stream everyone is already familiar with.

The Twitch thing is going really well and most people watch the Saturday Stream for Linux stuff anyway so why not just call it another flavor of the Distro Delves show?

2020-09-19 01:38:48 +0000 UTC View Post

[WIP] Distro Delves Logos!

Still playing with the typeface and placement but here are the almost-finished logos!

There are two main logos - a primary and an alternate. I originally just wanted one but the old-style logo with the CRT and the Tux plushie was just too good not to get also!

I'm starting to use Medium more (again) and I will post a more detailed write up on how the logo came to be over there.

Out of th...

Drauger OS - Lots of potential, but oh man

I admit - I feel a little bad for the Drauger OS developer here. But c'mon, he clearly didn't do enough testing with his Linux distro.

The only other distro with lots of bugs out of the gate like this was OpenMandriva but Drauger is orders of magnitude more rough.

Performance wise, Drauger was fantastic though. I was particularly blown away at the Metro Redux performance. I really wish I could have tried other games but the memory was limited to about 3gb which wasn't eno...

Discussing Commissions

I originally inteded to write a post here on Patreon for each commission I get done but unfortunately, I've fallen pretty far behind.

As I figure out what to write about for each commission I've wondered if it would be valuable to people if I wrote public posts about them.

I looked up my first email to Blitzy regarding the first modern Egee icon and it was so bad. I can't believe she even responded 😂. But I would love to share my experiences getting co...

It's live!!

Ahh!! I just wanted to tell somebody!

I've been working on the site(s) for a loooong time and egee.xyz just sort of fell into place last weekend.

There's still a tiny bit more work to do (specifically on the OC's page) but I'm super excited and I wanted to make it live right now!

There's some missing context to the website redesign and I have a big backlog of #egee posts I need to publish for you all..

But let me know what you think about my new personal hom...