Toxicity runs rampant on the internet! The Linux nerds are bullying me! But there’s something way worse guys!

Reddit. Specifically, r/linuxmasterrace.

Now before I show anything, I don’t want this to specifically be about r/linuxmasterrace nor do I think everyone on this Reddit is toxic. Frankly, I don’t endorse bullying in any form or fashion. Don’t insult someone because of their appearance or something they can’t control. Don’t go after anyone you see in this video going forward or give them grief. Be constructive, don’t be a jerk.

Being an influencer™ means you have to develop thick skin against blatant hate speech online, but also you need to have the humility to admit where your wrong. Is it weird that I’m bragging about having humility?

I first stumbled across this post because of Google Alerts. I use Google Alerts to monitor various Google searches about me and this Reddit post was the first that popped up. I read the comment from /u/andzlatin that recommended my channel, because I used Ctrl + F to search the page and not read the rest of it. It was interesting to say the least, I don’t consider myself better or “mightier than thou,” but thank you u/andzlatin!

But then I scrolled back up to the top to read it and I became more disturbed the more I read the thread.

This is the post in question by u/nihil_live entitled “Distrotube”:

Keanu Reaves in Knock Knock (2015), buried in sand, and forced to watch a DistroTube hottake on a phone sticking out of the sand.

Now before I go any further, I want to take this as an analysis of a small subset of people who watch Linux on YouTube (let’s be honest that’s what Reddit it). I want to admit even if you consider me a paragon of all things good, I am/or will be equally guilty here. I want to take this as a time to an understanding between people.

I’m going to paraphrase these comments, because I believe there’s some truth to them. But I also want to say, by the middle of the thread, comments were starting to get really aggressive. I understand if you disagree about how someone conducts themselves online, but some of the comments seemed a bit much.

I want this to be a safe space to voice an opinion in a public manner and I want to pay respect to DistroTube. If you like his content, great, I enjoy some of his videos too. But I am afraid of the impact his channel has on Linux YouTube as a whole and judging from the Reddit thread, I might not be the only one.

I genuinely want to thank him and his channel for this because I think it taught me an important lessons and helped many other channels grow. He’s made some great videos about some command line utilities I think about of you would really appreciate.

5 years ago, I watched DistroTube when he had less than 1K subscribers. I remember watching his videos and they were fine for what they were I guess. I also watched him grow over the years, like upgrading his webcam, losing his job to do YouTube full time, and renting out his office space.

A lot can happen in 5 years, but I think I can provide some friendly critique and discussion. In fact, after I made my video about Bismuth’s development halt, DistroTube makes a video repeating my points, but comes to a totally different conclusion. It’s time to take these things into account (see what I did there?)

Off the Cuff

Some of DistroTube’s videos strike me as him doing things off the cuff. He fumbles around menus and there are videos which he clearly goes in blind to look at things rather than trying to learn it off camera. The irony is, he promotes and most of the time, does a good job at teaching people things. Why not reshoot the video if you were wrong about something? Why not learn something before you start recording?

The cited video from a Reddit commenter was him testing Manjaro’s Sway spin and claiming Sway and Wayland wasn’t ready and were “beta quality” software.

The issue he experienced was a peak Manjaro developer moment where THEY are responsible for these errors, not Sway and Wayland. An tiger can’t change its stripes, right Manjaro?

Back in the day, just talking with a cheap webcam was understandable, but now with your job essentially at stake and you’re making enough to live off of it, I have to really question whether his videos could be something more if just a little more preparation and writing went into it, and I consider myself able to criticize this because I used to be the same way.

Earlier in the channel’s history, even until a few months ago, I did everything without any major preparation. I didn’t write a script to follow, but I did know what I wanted to talk about and I did test the program independently.

But when you make crazy mistakes like what DistroTube did with InstantOS with 100K subscribers, it’s absolutely demoralizing to these developers. Couldn’t you learn it off camera?

I started writing last year and I feel like it’s done nothing like wonders for the channel. My engagement is up and I feel like videos are at a much higher bar than they were before. It also got me making subtitles for videos and thanks to the power of AI, I can now feed my voice to an algorithm and use a Vim macro to generate an article for me (after some manual review)!

Now I work full time, go out with friends for drinks, and am able to do this kooky YouTube/Odysee thing at the level I can, if I can make the time to write a script (even if I lose sleep doing so), learn the software I cover properly, then I think other content creators can afford to do so too, including DistroTube.

Things Have Changed

In fact, this all ties into my next criticism. If you analyze DistroTube’s content, no you don’t need to ask ChatGPT, you don’t need to have fancy software, just watch some of his latest videos and compare them to some of his oldest videos. It’s his content and structure hasn’t changed at their core.

DistroTube’s prerecorded videos can be divided into the following:

  • Distro reviews where he does blind reviews of various Linux distros
  • Sit down videos where he gives commentary/answers questions
  • Software reviews, where he highlights a particular program

There’s nothing inherently wrong with DistroTube’s content format, because I don’t think they need to change; his userbase seems happy. The issue is his views on specific topics in Linux need to change. The most significant is Wayland is beta software goes beyond that video in a livestream where he claimed “if Wayland was ready, people wouldn’t have to be convinced.”

So I’m going to keep working, working with Xorg until Wayland actually works. Or until Xorg becomes horribly broken… it’s still working. It’s still being maintained. Xorg’s been with us for 40 years. If Wayland worked, people would be using it. The fact that so few people are using Wayland should tell you it’s not quite ready. And when it’s ready, you’ll know when Debian stable ships Wayland by default. That’s when it’s ready.

DistroTube, My GitLab Has Issues, So Let’s Clear Them! - DT LIVE | 8:58

Except Wayland is the default of Debian. If you click through the installer, GNOME with Wayland is the default. In fact, it has since 2019.

Some of this knowledge used to be true. Less than 3 years ago, Wayland was barely usable (especially if you use NVIDIA). I remember when Flatpaks were broken and took up gigabytes of space. But there’s signs that DistroTube may not understand or keep up with the underlying technology. I’m not going to pretend I do either, but I can firmly say DistroTube is objectively wrong with Wayland.

Let’s put it this way. I have gone cold turkey on Xorg since October 2022. I have never needed to open Xorg on my main machine, the same machine I edit my videos, do light development work, and watch my anime and everything works fine WITH NVIDIA. If it works on my system, it’s probably even better for non-NVIDIA users! DistroTube has no right call Wayland “beta software,” especially with new wlroots alternatives cropping up (still won’t support NVIDIA, big sadge).

Instead at 4:55, he says no one is putting in the work to use Xorg because it’s easier to develop on Wayland. Not only that, you’re going up against the GNOME and KDE Foundations because they unabashedly back Wayland as being the future.

DistroTube seems to in general not want to accept ANYTHING new.

  • I’m convinced he’s still using Xorg, given his opinion of Wayland.
  • He still uses PulseAudio even though many distros have already made the move to Pipewire, another key piece to the future of Linux and XDG portals.
  • If DTOS is anything to go off of, I know he doesn’t use full disk encryption as distros like Fedora and PopOS! are pushing their users to enable full disk encryption.
  • He made a video complaining about the dependency hell of Arch Linux and AppImages, but it also revealed he fails to apply updates frequently. Refusing updates in a sign of grumpy old man computing if I’ve ever seen it (and I should know!).

Personal Hot Takes

Unlike Luke Smith or Brodie Robertson, DistroTube’s channel isn’t his real name and his channel name implies distributions of Linux and BSD. And this caused lots of people to dredge up videos out of my memory and recently where he doesn’t talk about technology, but rather, inserts his own life beliefs into an explicitly tech focused channel.

But even stuff that is related to the channel is a personal hot take. I get that things I say are my own opinion, but when you make a video declaring word processors the worst thing ever, which is frankly ridiculous because I had to edit a PDF document in LibreOffice Draw to fill out my taxes with my accountant friend. It’s not even an argument if WYSIWYG editors are bad, it’s not pointless and evil if I need to fill out a document sent me by my state! It’s not my fault Microsoft is a despot monopoly on governments and the business world; it’s not pointless when everyone views it as the standard.

There’s also the issue that not just DistroTube, but many Linux channels, are just not sustainable. Staring at a virtual machine and flipping through programs in an application menu isn’t enough and even distros which do make the cut on larger channels, just aren’t ready for prime time and are cluttering the internet with more exposure to Linux, but make people worse off than using a conventional proprietary operating system.

Then after friend of the channel the Linux Cast criticized distro reviews, DistroTube uploaded a video getting the most defensive I have ever seen him get in 5 years after getting his Linux content creator flippers on it.

But wouldn’t you be defensive if only source income was these sorts of videos?

Calling Others Out

This all changed with a trend I’ve observed in DistroTube. The thing that scares me the most is what happened to eBuzz Central. DistroTube made a video describing how eBuzz Central was responsible for plagiarism of news articles and other YouTubers, including copying DistroTube’s thumbnail layout. First, I will freely admit my thumbnails were stolen from the ever-infamous channel Dhar Mann. My thumbnails do have some differences and I will freely admit they are counterfeits if but in idea:

  • rounded corners rather than boxes
  • font is Quicksand not Impact
  • I don’t have a person making a dumb face in most of my thumbnails, not often anyway.
  • Orange is used instead of blue
  • My titles are often more terse than Dhar Mann’s
  • I don’t have any workers and Dhar Mann refuses to pay his…

But you see what I mean? I ’m afraid that DistroTube doing this is setting a trend. Sure, it might be okay when someone does something legitimately wrong like with eBuzz Central or Roel Van de Paar or some douchebag on Reddit bullying a viewer, but who’s next on the chopping block?

Whether you believe eBuzz Central is guilty or not, he brings up an interesting point:

We always talk about how big of a community is, but at the end of the day, it is small if something like this comes up, why wouldn’t people reach out? Why wouldn’t they say, “Hey man, what’s going on here?”

eBuzz Central: Ebuzz Central A Fraud? | Response To DistroTube, The Linux Tube & Everyone Else | 5:57

That’s the problem with doing videos like this. I don’t want any of what I’m saying to be an attack on DistroTube. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but this behavior doesn’t exactly foster a welcoming community when people are being called out left and right.

I Have Problems

But I’m confident someone is going to make the argument my criticism is just epidemic of everyone I brought up: it’s a hot take that calls DistroTube out. I say this as everyone’s content has legitimate problems. With my content, it relies heavily on me ripping stock footage from random Linux conferences and Big Tech events; if I edit a video wrong or there’s a major change with Fair Use in the US, I’m screwed. I don’t have a fancy DSLR or mirrorless camera to film or take pictures and I’m locked up in the house or my cubicle most of the day. I also have the problem of my content is very inconsistent and people can’t really predict what I’m going to do next in a reasonable way. Especially since changing my channel name last year and streamlining my process, I can say I’ve learnt a lot, but I still have a long way to go. I’m still haunted by one of the few mistakes I ever made in a video by saying you needed an account to boot an alternative OS on the Steam Deck (I learned my lesson okay guys??) or flubbing my livestream weeks ago.

And truthfully, sharing political or personal beliefs on YouTube has always made me very uncomfortable, not just because I’m sharing it with the public is a part of it, but the fact that Google is a data hungry monster and is going to send you and me targeted ads attached to my Google account about such things.

It’s actually one of the reasons I never go “fleshtubing” (I recently learned this was a word by the way, it’s basically a zoomer way of saying recording in-person). We know social media networks like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube all employ tracking algorithms to identify people’s faces, their age, or their race. I don’t want to be caught up in that dragnet and that’s why you will never see my face online.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t have a modelled avatar for a gimmick, I do it out of the compromise of necessity for my own privacy. If you don’t like it, go watch a fleshtuber like DistroTube. When I say I value my privacy, I mean it and I value your autonomy as users because if it impacts you, 100% it impacts me or someone in my life. I hate technology so much I made entire channel to help all of you combat its ills.

A Ending Promise

I want to take an oath, if you will, to say my channel will solely be dedicated to technology. I value my privacy so much I will never divulge anything about my personal life that isn’t a technological stance. I also deeply research everything, because as my base grows larger, my opinion is going to carry more weight and I need to be careful with it and my own public presence.

And to DistroTube, times have changed. It’s time to grow up and embrace what Linux is becoming. Sure, you may not like it, but it’s coming whether we want it to or not. That means we use things like Wayland, Flatpak, and Pipewire. You aren’t a small channel anymore, you’re now one of the largest internet personalities representing the open-source community. Let’s be better together and let’s be for each other.