egeexyz

Twitch is a thing now I guess

So, Twitch ended up being more popular than I was expecting.

I picked up a few new followers from the Saturday Stream and more have been slowly filtering in regularly since. Pretty cool!

I'm considering setting up a regular stream schedule early in the morning after I wake up. I usually play games or work on projects this early because it's a good two+ hours of uninterrupted time.

I also somehow meet all of the requirements for affiliate except for hours, which is interestin...

Persistent Marketers

I've had annoying marketers before, but this takes the cake.

I'm not even clear as to what the deal is - for me to link to their product in the description or something?

Many of these affiliate/backlinking deals want you to dedicate the whole description box and or a pinned comment to whatever they are pushing. For single videos this is fine but this A3logics outfit wants it in like all future videos.

It sounds like this would net $10 per-video but c'mon �...

Artix Linux - No systemd required!

If you've followed me for a while, you know my opinion of systemd.

Systemd is (one of) the best damn things that has happened to Linux in a long time. Udev is probably the best, followed by the standardization of libs and file systems, but I digress.

Criticism of anything good is important, but the anti-systemd movement borders on conspiracy theories and has lost a great deal of steam over the past few years.

Enter: Artix Linux, the acclaimed anti-systemd Linux distribution!...

Twitch Ho!

I've decided to start simulcasting on Twitch for the Saturday Stream, starting this Saturday!

My friend Teal1500 has been streaming on Twitch and just met the requirements for affiliate, and several other people in the Egee.io community stream there as well.

I know people tend to prefer YouTube but I think there's a large community separate from YouTube that is missing out on my awesome content! 😸

The ...

Long Term Stability Maybe?

It seems like a lot of people hate change. I tend to embrace it sometimes too much change is, well, too much.

2020 (and late 2019) was way too much for me! Luckily, it looks like that constant churn is coming to an end!

Yesterday, my colleague at work asked me:

you wanna stick around whenever that year mark comes around?

Hell yes, I do!

There's very little cognitive load in the work I do. It's literal DevOps - Dev, as in development (mo...

The Questionable 22k Video

I'm pretty sure I've never done a celebratory video for something like subscribers or views.

This one is a bit different because it's meant to gauge what kind of content people are interested in because sometimes it's better to make a video of a question instead of just asking it in a poll or something.

I also wanted to use this video to point out that the "algorithm" has basically killed the channel and, on its current path, it's going nowhere fast:

This month, the...

SolydXK 10.4 - A Business-Focused Distro?

I've been on a streak of Debian-based distros lately and most of them have been underwhelming.

Deepin was a standout but it's more like Ubuntu in that it is "based on Debian" but is really its own thing.

SolydXK is more like BunsenLabs - based on Debian with relatively few custom things done to the base OS. But unlike BunsenLabs, SolydXK is woefully underwhelming.

If it weren't for the terrible SolydXK apps, it might not be so bad. But the SolydXK is basically the "special s...

2200k Video Teaser?

I was saving this screenshot for the upcoming "ZOMG 22k subscribers!" video, but it's taking forever to get there, and I already need to make a new one so... Here it is.

tl;dr - the YT algorithm isn't indexing my videos, and less than half of all my views come from YouTube Search anymore (in 2018, over 80% came from YT search).

Recent videos, such as the Deepin 20 episode, are more normalized, probably because the channel data is aggrega...

Deepin 20 - Great Work All Around 👏

At last - a Distro Delves episode that I'm really proud of!

Not that I'm unhappy with other episodes, just that this one is exemplary! I feel I really nailed the voice over, and the footage flowed together really well.

Deepin was very well mannered, and it honestly surprised me at how capable it is. It did have growing pains but genuinely not bad for a beta. BunsenLabs Lithium had more issues, and it was a stable release!

I want to avoid doing betas in the future be...

Egee & Felicity

I had the idea of using the Sims 4 as a canvas for brainstorming scenes for artwork for Egee & other OC's but a part of me thought it sounded lame so I wanted to first try the idea with someone I've worked with before.

I've done a couple of commissions with Rainiing and he's super nice. He actually drew the original Felicity Fossa OC!

2020-08-18 12:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Fatigue and other assorted excuses

IRL work has me so tired. 😩

I have big & fun videos planned but I've had to put some of them off two weeks in a row now. 

I've had a Gnome vs MATE video planned for almost a month but those comparison videos are a lot of effort and I really don't want to half-ass it.

I've committed to doing just 1 video a week but I almost couldn't even do that last week because of my workload.

I'm not even juggling that many balls at work - it's that all the tools...

GeckoLinux KDE Next - Not like KDE Neon

Despite getting a late start producing this video, it ended up being one of the quickest videos to make.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about GeckoLinux; everything about it feels underwhelming. Especially the styling.

I feel a little bad for being negative during the outro but there's really nothing special about the distro. The codecs and stuff are pre-installed but that's like... it. Maybe in 2010 that would be a big deal but not anymore.

As an aside, ...

BunsenLabs Lithium

I wasn't planning to churn out two videos this week but BunsenLabs surprised me with their Lithium release right after I finished producing the Helium video.

Lithium was rough around the edges, to say the least. I know there's going to be people with "works on my machineitus" in the comments of this video, but I've not seen a Distro fail this badly (besides OpenMandriva, but that was mostly due to my ignorance).

I watched the footage of when the Tint2 panel changed and I couldn't ...

BunsenLabs Helium

Guess what Linux distro just had a new release the other day? BunsenLabs.

Helium was based on Debian Stretch. The new release, Lithium, is based on Debian Buster. Big difference.

I discovered the new release when my friend Teal told me he was using BunsenLabs with the Buster repos. I had already rendered the video at the point so I skipped to the part when I'm running an update and... Yep - it's using the Stretch repos. UGH. 😩

On the flip-side, I'm rea...

Distro Delves slowing down

As a semi-follow-up to this post, I've decided to keep Distro Delves to just weekly episodes.

I think my previous cadence of two videos per week was a little over-ambitious and focused more on quantity (& making people happy by reviewing their picks) over quality.

I'd really like to do more with episodes, whether it be skits, goofs, different gpu's/hardware, etc and its difficult to do that...

Sims Egee

Getting commissions for OC's is ridiculously fun but I've had trouble coming up with ideas for how they should look. But a couple of weeks ago, I had this thought...

What if there was a furry mod for the Sims?

As it turns out there is! And it's really good. Tim Weeks, the creator of SaveState made it and did a fantastic job.

I intended for it to be a way to design outfits but the Sims 4...

Mageia 7.1 - Distros Distro Delves was made for

I've wanted to look at Mageia for a long time and I'm so pleased to have for this episode. It's as weird and quirky as I expected it to be!

I recorded probably 6 or 7 different ending pieces for this episode, and the one in the script was really negative so I just winged it. And I still think I was a bit too negative.

What I write as a script and what I record for the voice-over are similar but can be quite a bit different because I often go off-script and speak my mind. When I'm ...

Windows vs Ubuntu - An Evolutionary Process

I originally planned for this video to be a Monday video meaning it would follow up on a Distro Delves episode from Sunday, but neither happened. Instead, this video took forever and rolled over into Tuesday.

The cause for delay was mostly due to IRL things and my underestimation of how long these videos take to produce.

I also completely screwed up on the original Linux game benchmark clips. I didn't have Mangohud set up right, and I didn't realize it until I began editing. An en...

A Brian Life Update

Back in March, the CTO of a little startup found me on Angelist and asked if I would be interested in a DevOps position at the company.

I flew out to Boston, interview with the team, and happily accepted the job. And then, in April, I got laid off due to COVID cutbacks.

In June, we had a quick meeting and now back on board! �...

July 25th Stream Plans!

I've decided to return to vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 as my main/daily distro. Two main reasons that I will elaborate on during the stream are:

1) I need to be closer to upstream Ubuntu for my work.

2) Latest Kwin/Nvidia updates are causing havoc in games & frame rates.

I've got two identical Samsung 860 EVO's (I used both of them in a Raid 0 for a while with elementaryOS!) and I'm going to keep KDE neon as a backup to try to run Ubuntu Vanilla for as long as I can. 2020-07-22 17:23:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Windows 10 Home - Redefining the Series

This episode was my worst enemy.

It took so long to produce that I missed my regular Monday release. I thought I could wake up early and finish it before work, but oh boy, was I wrong.

The episode is 17 minutes long. That is the longest episode in the season by far, and probably the longest Distro Delves episode ever, even for future episodes.

I dug way deeper into things that I would typically but, the vast majority of my audience...

Thanks, guys

For the past few episodes, I've written legit scripts that I more-or-less read for the voice over. It makes producing take a bit longer, but I think it results in way higher quality videos.

I've used Grammarly for Medium posts, and it recently injected itself into a Notion page it occurred to me that I could use it for these scripts.

The paid version of Grammarly has a bunch of additional tools to help dial-in your writing style, and it sounded perfect for creating writing like fo...

Linuxfx - Not Horrible

Not horrible but not great either. Barely even good, to be honest.

Blocking single-threaded applications is a tell-tale sign of a junior developer or, at least, one that has never coded in a particular framework before. But I digress..

Linuxfx is impressive for what it is. Yes, it's an Ubuntu flavor but it seems to be just one guy doing all of the work, and honestly, the important parts distro worked. We've all seen more ambitious Linux distros that manage to do way less.

I ...

What exactly is Egee.io?

The connection between Egee and Egee.io is a bit weird. Despite the name, Egee .io doesn't have much to do with Egee or the channel (anymore).

Egee .io started as a fan-run Discord server for the Egee channel back when I did occasional Minecraft videos (cringe).

I did a cross-over episode with The Linux Gamer and a lot of people wanted to play on a Minecraft server with us so I created one made it public. Fans created a Discord server to coordinate building &...

Bodhi Linux - Featherweight

Bodhi Linux is what the Distro Delves show was made for.

It's not a Linux Distro I would run any of my computers but I've always wanted to try it out. Virtual Machines are always an option but it's not the same feeling as installing it and using it on real hardware.

After using it for an hour or two, I actually liked it quite a bit more than I thought I would. The worst thing about it by far is the default theme. What were they thinking??

The standard Enlightenment theme rea...

Meet Felicity: The Focal Fossa!

A few weeks ago, I had this crazy idea - what if Ubuntu release codenames had fursonas?

The code-names themselves aren't trademarked or anything and, like most of what Canonical does for Ubuntu, it's all open source for everyone to enjoy.

So.. why the heck not make a semi-oc out of it?

Focal Fossa's name is Felicity, named by the community! There's a forum post wit...

Calculate Linux - Sufficiently Whelmed

I really didn't have a strong opinion on this one. I feel like I should have, considering its based on Gentoo and it had that weird Yast-like console thing, but nothing really did "it" for me.

Gentoo seems to be drummed-up as one of those "super fast" distros but nothing felt particularly "fast" about Calculate Linux. And the gaming performance was pretty underwhelming.

The Cinnamon desktop has never impressed me. It always feels like an alternate take on Xfce but with less charac...

[Map] World Building

While at work at my boring job, I'd sometimes draw maps and write stories.

I drew up this map from scratch based on some old maps a couple of years ago. Earlier this year, I went crazy and added terrain, climates, and a bunch of other stuff.

The outline is hand-drawn and scanned to a computer. There are several different versions of this map with added details using Gimp.

I haven't had much interest in it lately but I still occasionally think about it. I'd love to make it a ...

Distro Delves Finale In Progress!

I've been brainstorming about Egee with some friends and I've finally come up with a live-action skit for the Distro Delves finale!

I have talked about the finale episode before but I didn't really have anything concrete until now. The outline of the episode is "done" but the content of the episode is a little fuzzy since I've literally never filmed a live-action skit before.

Distro Delves will end on October 31 so of course, the finale will be spooky. I'm not a ...

openSUSE Leap 15.2 - New Nothing

I've got to be honest - for the amount they hyped up openSUSE Leap 15.2, hardly anything is different.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a community enterprise Linux distro. But still, there's nothing sexy about this release at all.

They even shipped it with some pretty nasty bugs. The Flatpak bug in particular is unacceptable. I read a post that said the build system doesn't currently have a test for Flatpak. So, did anybody try to install a Fla...