When I started out on YouTube, the Egee channel was just called "Ethereal Gaming" and I intended for it to be a Linux Gaming channel. The name "Egee" comes from "E and G" from the old channel name.
In 2017 - 2018, I noticed that many (most?) popular Linux channels were usually based around a guy, talking to t...
2020-04-13 14:15:33 +0000 UTC View Post
When I do look at unfamiliar distros in Distro Delves, I purposefully avoid other reviews or "spoilers" in general, so that my review is literally the first time I'm looking at it.
After producing this video, I went ahead and peeked and two other reviews of Q4OS. And I have one word for them:
Horseshit.
I started the Distro Delves series as an "anti-review" series because so many Linux distro reviewers out there simply rave about h...
2020-04-11 02:34:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I wrote this post as a draft a week or two ago and forgot to post it until now!
YouTube analytics have come a long way since I started uploading videos back in 2014.
The tools on offer are super good but some of them provide really mixed messages, such as the widget in the picture of this post.
Compared to Distro Delves episodes, yes, the install .sh video was a total bomb. But if you remember from the r2020-04-08 23:53:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I couldn't come up with an adjective to describe MakuluLinux so I left it blank after the colon.
It's really odd, strange, interesting, curious... I still don't really know what to make of it.
I'm glad I gave it a test drive, though. I know there are lots of people out there who like this kind of stuff! 🗜️
2020-04-07 00:57:49 +0000 UTC View PostSo I've been posting a lot likely but this one is going to be short -
I just got laid off.
Yes, from that job I just talked about in this post.
Shoobx is backed by a principal investor that owns tons of small businesses. And with the COVID thing happening, small businesses are getting hit really hard.
They are hoping the furlough only lasts until July so I'll ping them each month to...
2020-04-03 19:27:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Believe it or not, I've had a few different ideas in mind for Distro Delves episodes and mini-series'.
I'd really like to do a series on the Raspberry Pi (I talked about this during the Live Stream last night).
I bought this little mini-pc because it has a Ryzen SoC and I want to try using it as a server thingie.
But wouldn't it be super cool to do a mini-series on something like this? I wonder if this litt...
2020-04-03 00:00:52 +0000 UTC View Post
When I think of desktop Linux distros, I really only think of 3 "main" distributions:
* Ubuntu
* Arch
* Fedora
Where does openSUSE fit in this short list?
Nowhere.
I was hoping it would eventually fit right above Fedora but after reviewing it, that's gonna be a big ole Nope from me.
OpenSUSE has made almost no progress in the past 6 years. It's honestly quite stunning...
2020-04-02 13:41:08 +0000 UTC View PostSo today is April 1st - April Fools. And I feel a little bad for not having anything planned.
I really wanted to start doing "themed" videos or whatever but I've got too much on my plate right now to plan for anything extra.
The support you all have been providing has been incredible and I want to thank you all so so much.
February was a disaster I talked about why in a 2020-04-01 15:52:47 +0000 UTC View Post
So earlier this month I decided to take a chance and do a quick gaming live stream on the Egee channel just to see what the reaction would be.
I got like 20 to 30 concurrent viewers for most of the stream and I was stunned!
I've been live streaming more frequently since then and the feedback has been really positive. And a bonus - it's really fun for me to stream, too!
The last time I live-streamed on the channel was back in 2017 - 2018 and they were real...
2020-03-31 02:05:16 +0000 UTC View Post
When I created the Distro Delves series in late 2019, I created a couple of other series' as well. One of them was called:
It's a modest series focusing on installing applications (usually Windows games) on Linux.
And that's it!
I initially wanted to cover as many games as I could get my hands on but, the thing about the install.sh series is, the videos aren't very popular.
And I don't want to sink a bunch of time producing videos tha...
2020-03-30 01:45:20 +0000 UTC View Post
This video was hell to record.
Something I didn't mention at all during the video was that Endless OS crashed on me SO MANY TIMES.
By "crashed on me" I mean, hard lockups. Every time I tried to do anything remotely I/O intensive, the whole thing would lock up.
I swapped out RAM, installed to a different hard drive, tried a different GPU.. The only thing that had any impact was the GPU - I switched to a GTX 660 which I totally forgot I had. With the...
2020-03-28 03:38:30 +0000 UTC View PostI frequently get message requests on places like Twitter, Discord, etc, and rarely if ever respond to them.
The biggest reason is that I simply don't have time to talk & answer questions from everyone, especially if it is the same set of questions are asked over and over again.
The second reason is that private messages are not a good place to ask technical questions. Ask me on Twitter (a Tweet rather than a DM) and I can answer in a way everyone can benefit.
<... 2020-03-27 01:46:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Back in 2014, Canonical was still trying to find a place for Ubuntu and Mark Shuttlesworth was in the spotlight saying (then) radical things.
Canonical had made some bold decisions regarding Ubuntu and it freaked a lot of people out. Community members found reasons to hate Canonical, such as their decision to create Upstart, and then replace Upstart with 2020-03-23 04:08:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The feedback from the GhostBSD has been phenomenal! People really seemed to enjoy seeing a non-Linux distro review.
A couple folks have asked about HaikuOS and others like it and, like I said in the video, non-Linux stuff has always been my plan for the series and I'm really looking forward to checking out these weird OS's out!
Problem is - the current Distro Delves script is written from a very Linux-y perspective. As you can see from the image, GhostBSD "failed" many se...
2020-03-19 19:46:14 +0000 UTC View Post
I recorded the voice-over for this video in one take and it was mostly me just riffing over the video clips. I think it flows well but, damn, I made so many grammatical mistakes.
It's pretty normal not to use perfect grammar in everyday speech but when doing an adlib voice-over, good grammar is key.
Re-recording voice parts are painful and I rarely ever do it. Instead, I usually just add title text in the video so people who care enough to notice may also see the correction in the...
2020-03-19 02:13:13 +0000 UTC View Post
As a follow up to the Weird Sponsorships blog post, here's a sponsorship request that is a bit less weird.
I'm still not interested in sponsorship's at the moment but this one is interesting...
Designer Wallets?
The Linux crowd isn't exactly the best audience to market expensive products (such as designer wallets) to. I could see maybe something like a freecycle or "Free Culture" ...
2020-03-16 13:09:34 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a crazy week.
On the bad side, the project I had been working on as a consultant got canceled because the Coronavirus is hitting airlines hard. Which sucks since that was my main "job" with an expectable income.
But on the good side, I made a low-key trip out to Boston to interview with a company that reached out to me last month on AngelList. The interview went great and we both decided that my skills wou...
2020-03-15 03:18:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I haven't been quite this disappointed in a distro in a long time.
The work that Zorin put into the appearance and style of the desktop is nothing short of impressive. The desktop itself is beautiful; no doubt about that.
Everything else is just... Gnome. And the worst parts about Gnome, too.
I've talked about how Budgie is basically just Gnome with a different panel but Solus with Budgie makes a lot of changes to the desktop and the ap...
2020-03-08 01:27:52 +0000 UTC View PostI don't think I've ever formally talked about my Podcast here, so here we go!
https://soundcloud.com/egeeirl/sets/egasts-developer-stories
I got the idea to do a podcast in 2019 while working at a little startup called Aula. Startup culture is often 24/7 100% capacity so there's not much room to discuss software best practices & design patterns.
The original idea for the ...
2020-03-06 13:50:09 +0000 UTC View Post
I love data & analytics.
I started my career as a QA person doing software and worked my way into automation and more technical stuff but I still love analytics.
The "best" time of the day publish a video on my channel is around 3am (my local time) because the bulk of my "fresh views" happen between 6am and 12pm.
I published each of the videos in the picture above at around 5am except for the Manjaro video, which I published at 6pm.
I deci...
2020-03-03 16:24:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm not sure why I was so positive at the end of the video.
Manjaro 19 is the best Manjaro yet
I mean, it is the best Manjaro release yet but it's certainly not perfect. I didn't mean to gloss over the issues we encountered earlier in the video with that statement.
- Adding Bluetooth devices was a hassle and the app freaking locked up the first time I tried.
- Printer support appears to be an afterthought considering there's no ded...
2020-03-03 02:12:47 +0000 UTC View Post
In some ways, this video is a bit on the experimental side.
It's the first video with the short "Introduction to Distro Delves" which you guys recommended in an earlier post. I also included a low-effort PIP video at the beginning showing the Distro Delves checklist on GitHub.
And I also let a number of editing mistakes slip through because Kdenlive is such a pain to work with. It takes upwards of 40 mi...
2020-02-28 15:38:28 +0000 UTC View PostAlright Patrons, get ready for some IRL non-Egee stuff. The past few weeks have been crazy and I think today might be the last of it.
So a bit of history - I was working for this super cool company last year called Aula but I got laid off in October. I started low-key job searching & freelancing as a consultant by December or so (bad timing due the holidays).
Consulting is cool but because US benefits are expensive, full-time gigs are generally preferred because the e...
2020-02-28 00:12:57 +0000 UTC View PostAlright you wonderful Patrons, I have a question for you regarding the actual Voice-Over portion of Distro Delves episodes.
Should I include a short introduction explaining what Distro Delves is at the start of each episode?
I record the voice overs by opening Audacity, hitting the play button, and watching the footage I captured for a video with a microphone i...
2020-02-26 15:07:12 +0000 UTC View Post
But I loved it.
It reminded me of way back in the day when I first started using Linux. Back when you didn't know if an update was going to hose your system. Or if installing the Nvidia drivers would leave you at a blinking cursor.
I'm being serious here - those times were frustrating but I learned a lot by having to debug my systems. I was able to use my knowledge later in my career, specifically at Shiftwise, which I talked about extensively in my 2020-02-25 14:53:13 +0000 UTC View Post
I've always been terrible at making "art".
I've been teaching myself how to make stuff look good since I started on YouTube. It really helps to have a significant other that has an eye for what looks good & bad 😂.
A very small part of me enjoys making art. The first "thing" I ever made for my channel was this abomination:
It's dreadfully cringy 2000's era...
2020-02-23 21:18:42 +0000 UTC View Post
For the longest time, viewers have been asking me to look at MX Linux. And before the Distro Delves series, I had no plans to.
The recent MX Linux 19.1 release gave me the perfect opportunity to test the latest & greatest flavor of MX Linux and, well lemme just say it:
I'm not impressed
Not for the amount MX Linux is hyped, anyway. For a regular Linu...
2020-02-21 23:26:46 +0000 UTC View Post
After the somewhat unfortunate feedback from the maintainers of OpenMandriva in the most recent episode, I started thinking of ways to increase transparency and invite feedback.
I've used Notion to plan episodes but it occurred to me that I could put the checklists in a repo on GitHub and use Readme's as a sort of repo-hack to display them.
Having the checklis...
2020-02-19 01:47:26 +0000 UTC View PostSo I've talked about this idea of "Patron-Exclusive" Distro Delves episodes but I haven't really elaborated on it.
I've been working on an episode featuring OpenMandriva and, well let me just say, it ain't good.
In my rationale for making these exclusive episodes, I made a lot of assumptions about how my audience will react to a negative Distro Delves episode, but I've never actually tested it...
And in fact, when I was planning Season 2, I asked on YouTube if folks...
2020-02-16 01:53:36 +0000 UTC View PostSomething not often talked about in YouTube-land is sponsorships.
Even YouTubers rarely talk about sponsors and deals with other YouTubers. Not sure why - probably because discussing money is kind of taboo.
I sometimes get really odd sponsorship requests and I thought you guys might find it entertaining to see what's happening behind the scenes.
I briefly discussed sponsorships in the2020-02-10 21:16:24 +0000 UTC View Post