LINUX Unplugged - 304: Losing My Religion

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Adopting a distro like it’s a religion is stupid. That’s one of many hard lessons we take away from Texas Linux Fest this week; we’ll share some of the best. Plus some old friends visit the show, reading eBooks on Linux, and a new Ryzen handheld. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.

Hey, before we start the show, I think we should give everybody a deepfake update, right? Because everybody's probably been wondering about deepfakes. I have a YouTube channel that I'm not going to, I'm just going to link it. I'm not going to play anything. I'm just going to link it in the show notes. It is getting there, guys. It's getting there. The stuff that really convinced me is they take the Dark Knight Joker and they put him in other movies.

Did you see these videos? Well, I haven't watched that particular one, but I have watched a couple of them. The Terminator ones. Yeah. Yeah. Super creepy. Wes, did you find this?

You know, I don't know where that popped up, but I've seen a lot of coverage and you can tell people are getting a little scared. We already do a terrible job of knowing, you know, what's real information and what's not. So when you can have perfect looking videos, I don't think it's going to get any better. It's gotten there. It's there now.

Like Hollywood's done. I don't know that it's perfect, but it's freaking close. It's so good. For the average person, I think they would just accept it. I leave it to the audience. Go check the link out in the show notes and then tell me if you think it's there. I kind of think most people, unless you know to look for it, it's there. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 304

for June 4th, 2019. Oh, hey there. Welcome in to your weekly Linux talk show, Linux Unplugged. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Mr. Payne. It is a warm and packed episode, just hot out of grandma's oven. This week, we went down to Texas Linux Fest and had our minds blown. Mr. Cheesy's here in studio with me. Hey, what's up, guy?

Hey, Bacon. How's it going? Oh, I'm doing good. You finishing up your post over there? Oh, my post is finished. Yeah? It's rocking and rolling, yeah. Right on. The Texas Litics post. Post? Post?

Post post. It's a post post. You should check it out because, oh man, there's some pictures in there that will make you salivate. That's true. That's true. We're going to talk about that today, but also some community news, as well as a big congratulations to someone in the community about a housekeeping, some pics. But before we can do any of that stuff, it is our duty to say a big holler to our virtual log. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Hello, everyone. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I like that. It was such an orderly Mumble Room today. It was very, very orderly. I agree. Hello.

I like that. It was such an orderly room today. It was very, very orderly. I agree. Hello, Brent, Bruce, Byte, Lynn, and TechMav. Good to have you all in there as well as Rotten and MiniMac up there in the staging helping get people in and see. And Sylvia up there. And Sivya up there in the old.

How would you say that one, Wes? Sivya? I'm going to say Sivya. Sivamashima. Makina. Oh, look at you. You had to get all fancy with it. Making me look bad now. That's what

happens when you ask. Okay. Learn the lesson. Okay. All right. You just got served. I did. And he's right too. That's the worst part. You know, that's what happens when Wes works late in the studio. You know, he gets, he was there late last night and he was in earlier today. Fixing things up for us. So that's what happens. Very good on you, Wes. All right. Well, what do you say we get into some community news, guys? Stay a while and listen. There's quite a few things to talk about, but I don't know.

This week, I didn't really want to talk about most of them, to be honest with you. I just, I don't know. I mean, the really good stuff we put in land this week, and the other stuff sort of just didn't really register with me as much did you feel the same way yeah it's kind of slow yeah so i so i just kind of like i think this week i was more proud of what we didn't put in the show there's some clickbait and stupid media hype stuff and this week it's just other cool stuff so i wanted to start with speaking of cool stuff the smosh z i'm gonna say it like, the Smosh Z. It's supposed to make its

formal debut at E3 next week as we record this, but it is a handheld in its current form that is fully AMD Ryzen powered with the V165B system on a chip with Vega graphics, and it's running Linux. Say what? Yeah, you can have it all to yourself starting around $629. That gets you 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of onboard storage. There's a nicer model too all the way up around a grand

that's 16 gigs and 256 gigs of storage. Yep, yep, yep. So it's supposed to get announced next week at E3 but Pharonix and others don't expect it to begin shipping until later this year. But if you look at it, it's essentially got a phone LCD-like screen in the middle with a split-up Steam controller on the sides. That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw the little Joy-Con. Yeah, it's got the touchpad thingies, just like the Steam controller has,

and it's a full Ryzen stack. There's been rumors of this thing before, so this isn't like the Steam controller has. And it's a full Ryzen stack. There's been rumors of this thing before, so this isn't like the first time. In fact, they even teased it back in 2015 when AMD was looking for a partner. But they've got actual promo videos now, and they've got people they're sending to E3, and they've got press kits they're sending out. So we may have ourselves a handheld Linux device here. I noticed so far no mention of battery life. That makes me a little bit worried.

Yeah, good catch. Yeah, you know, and I'm hoping it's one of those ones where maybe you can just swap the battery out. That would be great to give us that sort of device. I'm going to go into sales mode here because that's exactly what I was thinking. So Brent, you're my potential customer in this scenario, and here I'm going to try to sell to you.

So, Brent, what I have here is a nice portable Linux gaming device. It can play some popular games such as, and it also has a removable battery, and you can put a battery in there that's easy to do such as, as well as expandable storage with an SD card, and it'll support up to X. And, well, Brent, we just think this would be a great gaming device for somebody like yourself who's on the go. You don't have a lot of extra room in your bag. You

just slip this right into your bag. You could put a couple extra batteries in there and this thing will be a playable device for an entire flight. Did I sell you? Where do I get one? Really? I think the battery. Yeah, totally. The battery switching out, like if you're a heavy gamer, especially if you're flying, of course. why would you not want to change the battery? So what I would want to know is how quickly can I change the battery? It would be a big standout feature because it's baked into the Switch, which I think is

the biggest competitor. If this is, well, it's not really a competitor to the Switch, obviously, but that's what it's trying to compete with, I should say. Yeah, I mean, I think that's where it's trying to compete. Obviously, it's going to be a smaller display. It is going to have that Ryzen 1605B system on a chip.

What do you think of that? Four gigs of RAM. What do you think of that? I think that's the right avenue for them to go for something like this, absolutely. I mean, it runs SteamOS, so technically any Steam game that will run on Linux will operate with it. I mean, there's enough juice there to play a game at Counter-Strike at 1080, 60 frames a second. So, I mean, you definitely have a lot of power in your hand with a little device like that.

And if they were to say, hey, maybe this supports your Dreamcast emulation. Well, and don't forget about Steam Play. Steam Play streaming. Steam Play streaming, or these additional services. So I think this is a good market. I think the prices might be a little bit steep. I'd like to see it more around the $400 to $500 range

for the base. Because what is the switch now? Around there. So you've got to kind of be in that same, if you're going to sell a similar device, but with smaller display but with additional features you still kind of need to be in that price range so we'll see where it goes so i'm i'd be interested to get one if if you know it turned out that the reviews were great bite have you been following this device yeah since the beginning and there was even some rumor that it even was a scam

because they were using a tablet and a deconstructed Steam controller. At that time, I purchased the GPD Win, and that one was a blast for that time. But yeah, it finally came out or coming out like how it's supposed to be. Yeah, it may be, it's not out yet, it may be still the rest of the year before we see it. Yeah. And by then we'll be, will we be as impressed by the Ryzen chipset?

I suppose it depends on what games they really push for it, what they try to sell it as. Well, I mean, with the large one at 16 gigs of RAM and 250 gigs of storage, 16 gigs of RAM on a device like that? Yeah, I mean, it's the size of a Switch. You're going to get a 60 frame rate out of something like that. That's a pretty reasonable

price difference, too, right? Like, where else do you get, like, four times as much RAM for a couple hundred extra dollars? That certainly doesn't happen in the Mac ecosystem. Absolutely not. I don't know, though. What do you think, Wes, about the heat something like that's going to produce? It's got to get hot.

Yeah, that's a good question. Hot. I'm worried about the battery life. And is it going to ship? There's might actually ship in this title here for the story linked in our show notes, of course. And that's just never a good omen. year for this story linked in our show notes, of course. And that's just never a good omen. When you have to be hopeful as the journalist reporting on it, it doesn't leave me in a very hopeful spot. One of the stories that got me grumpy this week, and I don't really feel like

talking about it much because it's wait and see, but this stuff that Chrome is doing with the ad blocking, they're making changes to their manifest list. We've talked about it in LAN. And it's still up in the air. No final decisions have been made on this thing that right now is people very upset about potentially really limiting the usefulness of ad blockers. And it kind of just got me in a funk because I really don't like where we're going with so much control in Google's hands for the web and how they are now just as... It's like if you could have made a worst-case scenario how they would leverage Chrome, they're doing it now.

And you watch what they're doing with AMP, and I just don't like the direction it's going in. It's the portal to Google's world, man. I know, but it makes me suspicious of everything that they're doing, and I don't like that feeling. So the one way that I kind of push back is I'm like, well, all right, let's start looking at alternatives. And I remembered about our friends over at PeerTube.

We haven't talked about them in a while. And this is kind of, you know, replacing YouTube for me would be a major accomplishment by the open source community. If we could get it replaced with something that was open source and it took off and people started having their own self-hosted YouTubes just – and it's not crazy. I mean, look at all these different industries that are now doing their own streaming services. I mean, maybe these same companies would want to have their own YouTubes, and let's hope they could base it off something that's standard. I will say Peertube is kind of a technological accomplishment. I don't use it all the time, but I've played with it, and I've watched a significant number of videos on some of the various hosted instances out there. By and large, it just works. I'm really impressed with that. Yeah, we've had members of the community set one up for us in the

past and moved it around a bit. And they've just released a brand new version, which adds, I'm very, very, very happy to say, playlist support, including watch laters, private playlists, public playlists. They've also added experimental HLS support, which has better bandwidth

management for both the client and the server. Just a whole bunch of other stuff, including user management, optimizations, SEO

improvements, adding a not safe for work policy and filter, and being able to block and blacklist that stuff if you don't want it. Like, just a lot of really nice, easier to use, full feature kind of fleshing out stuff

that it's just really nice to see landing in this project. Yeah, and they also add support for Japanese, Netherlands, and Portuguese. So, I mean, if you're looking for adoption rate, you know, you really, that's, I think, something a lot of people don't focus on. If you want to make this something that everyone is going to jump on board with and use as a standard, you need all that documentation there for everyone. You got it, girl. You got it. Well, look at that.

Coming now into the virtual log, Mr. Popey and Wimpy, gentlemen, great to see you. How are you both? Dudes. Good evening. Very well, thanks. Hello from Texas. Hello. We're still down here. We just did Texas Linux Fest down here. Gonna go get ourselves some babe's chicken tonight.

Oh yeah. The world's finest fried chicken. It's just not fair. Been enjoying myself the Ubuntu podcast as always. Been a very fine season so far. We just finished recording two more episodes. I suspected that might be the case. Nicely done, gentlemen.

Nicely done. I look forward to hearing them. This week is a week of three episodes. Whoa. What? Yeah. So a very special live recording. Oh, right.

Right. That's very... When is that? We should plug that. So that's this Saturday coming. It's Foss Talk Live. Mm-hmm. Joe will be there as well.

And it's just a great mashup of different podcasters in the area. They're going to be recording their shows. They'll do a mashup show. They'll do their own shows. It'll be great. And some drinking, I bet, will happen as well. Well, it's in a pub, so I think that's inevitable. No.

It just helps to grease the shows that's right yeah by the last whoever's on last they're going to be struggling it's a little bit dangerous this year

because in the past the pub hasn't opened until like five o'clock in the evening but I hear it's opening at midday this year so there's danger of you know

yeah I'm going to have to control ourselves I think otherwise Popey will walk out of there sounding like this There's danger of, you know, yeah, I'm going to have to control ourselves. Otherwise, Popey will walk out of there sounding like this. Again? That's so good. And tell me if you can guess who this is.

That's Joe. That's Joe. So good. My soundboard gets better and better every week. I love it. Drew's been editing the Ubuntu podcast now, and he's also been grabbing me those clips, so. It's a double-edged sword, I will say. He's a great editor, but he knows how to get the clips.

It's good for me. Well, I want to say a big happy birthday. Happy birthday! It's good for me. Well, I want to say a big happy birthday. Happy birthday! Pharonix turns 15 years old tomorrow as we record this. Awesome. Yeah, Michael Erbel has been churning away at that now for 15 years,

and 11 years since the Pharonix test suite launched, which is a hell of a benchmark suite. And to celebrate the 15th birthday, he's working on a whole bunch of different articles. It'll be pushing over the week and the month of June. And it's also not a bad time to go sign up if you want to support his work over there because he's got a sale going for the birthday. Yep. Good for him.

$15 for a year, dude. That's a pretty good deal. I signed up already. That's a solid deal.. I signed up already. That's a solid deal. It is a solid deal. 15 years, though. It just doesn't. 11 years for the test suite?

I know. God, I'm so old. I know. And he just hustles, right? Do you see the amount of stuff he publishes? Oh, every day. Basically every single day, yeah. It's exhausting to think about it, to be honest.

And it's so much more work than we can even understand because that's the thing about content creation. It's always way more work than you could know. And so I know that's true for him too, even though I'm not a writer. This whole Texas Linux Fest, I got to be honest with you, has made me start to feel like maybe I'm becoming an old timer. Absolutely. You too?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So I'll talk about that a little bit more as we get there because, yeah, it's been a thing. But before we get there, I was tweeted by at Jim Copps on Twitter. He said, I would be interested in Chris Lass and the group's take on this particular issue. For the record, this has been my opinion since the first year we ever heard the meme that it was the year of Linux desktop. And this is the piece that he's having me read to you guys.

It's an interview on ZDNet with Linus. And in this interview, Linus says, I still wish we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across all distributions. It's, it's a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think,

held the desktop back a bit. And then VMware's chief open source officer, Dirk Hondel, jumps in and says he agrees and that it is a frustrating situation for app developers. This week, there's also been discussion about the desktop is not a platform. Elementary OS is a platform. GNOME is a platform. Linux itself is not a platform. Elementary OS is a platform. GNOME is a platform. Linux itself is not a platform. Let's start with our friends that are back from a bit. Wimpy, as somebody who has a very great desktop in Ubuntu Mate,

what do you think? Is the distributions the problem when it comes to the desktop? Let's say for a moment that if any, just for a moment, let me imagine every distribution shipped Mate. Would that truly be a better scenario for the developers, do you think? and they were common across the major distros, then that makes Linux, in air quotes, an easier platform to target. And we kind of have that because Ubuntu does command the lion's share of users on the Linux desktop. And I know that that might be unpopular to hear with some people, but it's simply a statement of fact. And this is why, even to this day, you will find that application developers, even outside of the Linux bubble, make use of technologies that came from Unity 7. So app indicators and what have you are almost certainly supported by the application that you install from a third

party vendor. So yes, it's true that if we all had a single platform to get behind, then this would cut through some of that. But then again, we have a dominant platform. And if everyone gets behind that, you get the same thing. So I want to take that part of your question. And I want to bounce that to Popey here in a moment. But I want to follow up with you and say, so if that is true, then do you believe that the cost of having Ubuntu Mate and have it do its own thing is less expensive than the cost of one less group having all of their effort behind a common desktop? Do you follow my question? Yeah, I do. And it's something I was reflecting on quite recently, actually. I was asking myself, am I actually helping or detracting from the greater good here? By me having my own little

project that services the needs of me and my friends and my family, am i doing a disservice to the wider community because i'm being selfish and the answer is well yes i'm i am doing a disservice and yes i am being a bit selfish but then again i'm doing the thing in my spare time that interests me motivates me and i get enjoyment from and my creative pursuit happens to be a desktop operating system and for somebody else it may be painting or sculpting or playing an instrument or singing in a choir or whatever and i'm not in a position to tell those people how they should spend their free time in order to get enjoyment and creative endeavor from, you know, their efforts. So selfishly, I'm sorry, I don't care. I enjoy making the thing that I make. I make it for myself, my friends and my family, and I will continue to do so. And I realize that there is

some damage there to the wider Linux ecosystem. But then again, I'm slightly privileged in that I can see the statistics that the Ubuntu report gathers. You know, every time you install Ubuntu, you can say, you know, send my hardware specs back. And Ubuntu Mate is actually very popular when you compare it to other major distributions but when compared to ubuntu proper it's a fraction of a rounding error but ubuntu mate is still way more popular than a load of other distributions so i would say the the answer is there for us is get behind uh the big player which is ubuntu and that solves your fragmentation problem target ubuntu all right so let's go from there and i would also add just to your answer um more free software doesn't really hurt anybody and uh but

poppy is that almost the only solution is in a world where everybody is scratching their own itch and freestyling and can it's an organic process of creating software where the strongest survive is the only way to really kind of dominate this market and set a standard just to be the huge obvious winner because you can make a free desktop standard but it doesn't mean anybody's going to follow it somebody just has to set the standard by being, don't they? It's okay for there to be lots of different distros and it's okay for people to learn, you know, how to build a distro. I do worry that people don't realize that the amount of effort that's required to create that. And then when they walk away, they leave people in limbo. I think that is a very real problem.

And those people then have to go and find a distro to be something really great and really amazing. If you just walk away from it, it can really waste the time of, you know, maybe 10 other people or more. Yeah, yeah. Well put. Well put, I think. I'm wondering, though, like, how does this idea affect innovation in the desktop world for Linux? So if we just stick to one base framework, whatever that is, one style, how do we get to that minority report UI desktop that we all want to see? Or how do we, you know, we have to leave this open so that people can take it and run with these tools and make this. You know, I agree. I do see, you know, yeah, building a distro, running it for a year and then dropping it and then leaving 500 people in limbo is definitely not the way to handle it.

I think you touched on it, though. I think that that point you make about the minority report desktop is a subtle point, but really important. I don't know if you've watched the interview that Mark did with Swapnil recently, where he talked a bit about the Ubuntu desktop and desktop has failed to succeed because we have broadly followed what Windows has been doing and been trying to reach feature parity with Windows and what we haven't been doing is being bold and trying to create something distinctive and compelling that brings people to Linux because it is different and compelling and a step change in functionality but we made Unity and I know this is unpopular opinion but Unity was more successful that I know people class Unity as a failure because we shut down the project but it was more successful than any other desktop. There are still people, a million or more people

using unity every day. And that is incredibly successful. And the only reason it isn't more than a million or more is because we switched to know we drove everyone to switch to know in, in Ubuntu. So I think So I think we did do some innovation there. And before Unity came along, I don't think Dell sold a tremendous number of Linux laptops. And I realized that they had a certain bit of innovation inside Dell. But once they got a really usable, user-friendly desktop for users, they sold a truckload more of them.

Yeah. Here's my thoughts on it. Everybody that writes about it in the sense of it's failed or it's never going to work, I want to have a little beer and I want to have a little snack and I want to be sitting at a table and I just want to say, slow down, child. Just slow down. Give it some time. See, we're really bad at this because to us, you know, we don't have a lot of time on this planet for one thing and a lot of things are happening. It's over. It's come. It's gone. This stuff's going to be around longer than us. And it'll just over time, it will grow. It will change. It will adapt. It'll become what the people need. So right now, the way we get it is through scale. That's the state we get today. We get standards by scale. That's why Google is bending the way the web operates now, because they have scale with Chrome. Canonical has scale with Ubuntu desktop. So that's why a lot of vendors have to support Ubuntu if they want to ship for the desktop. That's why Steam works so well on Ubuntu. They have the scale to set the standard.

Red Hat has scale on the server. Canonical also has scale on the server. There's certain things that just the market adopts. That's the best we're going to get right now. And it works. So I guess there is a standard. It's just what the majority of people use. And then we sit here and we fight about it works. So I guess there is a standard. It's just what the majority of people use. And then we sit here and we fight about it all.

I guess we should probably move on. I'll give Minimac the last word on it before we go. Minimac, what do you want to chime in with? Yeah, it is interesting to see, like, the development in Unity gave us global menu. And even though Ubuntu digged the global menu and the Unity desktop, you see that you have the Vala panel, for example, that gives the global menu possibility now

for the X-Face desktop, and I think also for Mate. So things live on. That's a cool thing, I think. Yeah, and in fact, that particular project, it was after Unity was discontinued in 2017. And I'd been working on the Ubuntu desktop team at that point. Unity 7 that I hadn't seen before that I then approached the Vala panel project and helped mold it into what it is today to reimplement a lot of those, you know, Ubuntu technologies so that they are broadly available today because they are pretty great and lots of people want global menus and app indicators and the HUD and various other things.

Right. And just searching for apps and launching it from the search. Some of that stuff had been done in other places, but that desktop brought it all together. And I remember when it was announced that it was over, I took a vacation in Unity for a while and appreciated certain things about it. But we have pulled a lot of the best elements forward, I think. All righty, sir. We have pulled a lot of the best elements forward, I think. All righty, sir. Well, before we get into the Texas Linux Fest stuff,

we do just have a few items in housekeeping, some really good stuff this week. Number one, probably the most important. Do you remember how many seconds I said it was? Was it seven? 17? 17, is that what it was? Yeah, it was 17.

It was 17 seconds. I'm positive it was 17 seconds. The best 17 seconds. Look it up. From Texas Linux Fest. It's going to be 17. It was 17 seconds. I'm positive it was 17 seconds. The best 17 seconds from Texas Linux Fest The best 17 seconds from Texas Linux Fest will be in the Friday stream. Hilarious moment happened. I happened to have my

microphone going and we happened to catch it. Let's see, were you right? Yes, you were right. It is 17 seconds. You were right. I told you it was right. It was also one of the most expensive clips that I've ever gotten. And also, I think I'm going to owe Al an apology.

But all that will be in the Friday stream, so check that out at FridayStream.com. Should be pretty good. Get a chance to hang out with those of us here on the show that, you know, turns out we're human beings. We've got other things going on, too. The Laidback Show. It's going to be live at 1 p.m. this week. I'll be back in Seattle, 1 p.m. Pacific, jblive.tv.

Get it converted in your time. Also, got a whole bunch of Meetup stuff coming up very soon. This Friday in San Antonio, an unofficial Hacker Family Dinner, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting for details on that.

Elle's going to be at B-Sides! Elle, you got anything you want to say about B-Sides? Maybe people can find you? Yeah, just look for the hair, as you always say, and it's going to be myself and Allie, so no matter who you find, you're going to find someone who knows me. There you go.

Yeah, and the dinner details are at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Also coming up very soon is our next study group. Back to the basics. Linux Permissions 101. Join Alex and Elle for an introduction to Linux Permissions. Not Alex, Ironic Badger Alex, but Alex from Rackspace. As we go over the basics of Linux permissions and other things. meetup.com slash jupyter broadcasting.

For that, it will be Tuesday, June 11th. That's where you just chmod 777 everything, right? Yeah, dash R, sure. Yeah. And put a sudo in front of that so that way it works. What I would do is just open up your terminal, right? Sudo dash S, hit, and just leave it up. Okay, I'll try that. Is this before

or after I push putty in there? You know, I might have that wrong. I better attend that study group myself. meetup.com slash jubyterodcasting. And last but not least, Cheesy, did you know the Linux Academy is cranking away some new code for their video player in the apps

for both Android and iOS, but as well as Fire TV. And Android TV support's coming, too. That's super awesome. I know. I know. And they're adding. And it looks great, too.

They're going to add transcripts to the video player, so you can follow along with transcripts in the video player. Zoom and pan on the video. Also, to pull up related training videos that you can watch. And subtitles will be in there, too. With a whole new UI for the video playback, zoom and pan on the video, also to pull up related training videos that you can watch, and subtitles will be in there too, with a whole new UI for the video playback too. All that's coming soon to the new app, so I wanted to let you guys know, if you don't have the Linux Academy app, you can use it now for free as a community member, if you're

just signed up to the community edition. So that's really great. Check that out. I'll have a link in the show notes for that. We've got a lot going on. And that last study group we did, Don't Be Famous, learning all about the Kubernetes. Securing your Kubernetes.

Your Kubernetes. That's up on the YouTube, youtube.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. That's up and available for anybody now. And it's good, too, because honestly, that is a packed study group. So you're probably going to want to watch it a couple times. I know I did. No kidding, right? The Kubernetes is thick. but that was great.

Hart really does a great job of just breaking it down. Yeah, absolutely. You know somebody really understands it when they can explain it simply, right? And don't forget the notes are available on the GitHub. Boom. It's magic right there. That is some magic. Yeah, that's something Elle's doing that's really cool.

She's publishing the notes for the study groups, so that way you guys can follow those along as well. That's all good. And that GitHub is meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. That right there is a packed housekeeping. We are cranking stuff out these days, and so we just try to let you know about it in the most efficient way possible without tying things down too much. So we are down here in the very, very warm Texas. It's 83 degrees in the studio right now as we record. How are you feeling, buddy?

I'm feeling good. I think if you keep, I'm literally, I have no shoes. You stopped it? I have one sock on. Cheese is taking one article of clothing off every time I complain about the heat. We're going to need special music for that. I know. It's brutal in here.

I mean, there's no lie. It is brutal in here once the door's closed. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, so let's talk about Texas Linux Fest. It's the little conference that could, and Elle is a volunteer there, so just full disclosure there. We do have an insider on the team, so we may be biased. But we've gone before. I think it's pretty great,

and I want to start with the most important part, and that's the meetup, the dinner. It's meetup time. We're at the Hard 8, standing next to the smoker right now. I'd say it's about 120 degrees or so here, and the room is filled with smoke. You walk in, and it's nothing but smoke. It's going to be a good meetup. I think this whole aisle of people now is us, too. I think we've basically taken over the restaurant. Yeah. Yeah, we had about three or four tables at least. People were slamming down some good food.

And some new friends, some old friends. And thank you to Elle, because she made sure that we actually tried to socialize with everybody. Like, you tuned in on that right away, that that needed to happen. So tip of the hat to you on that. You know, it was actually closer to five and seven tables at some time. That's awesome. That's awesome.

It was great. It's just, it's so cool to like go to a place like that and fill it up. And that location, I believe, was also Elle's idea because she had the brilliant idea of it's a line where you just go in, you get the food, you pay it yourself, and then you go sit down. Yeah, it was this all a cart line. What I thought was super cool about it too is all of the sides were free. So like if you wanted the mac, did pay it yourself, and then you go sit down. Yeah, it was this a la carte line. What I thought was super cool about it, too, is all of the sides were free.

So, like, if you wanted the mac, did they tell you that? No. No, they did not tell me that. Maybe they're just free for cheese. He's got that smile, you know. Maybe they were. Maybe they just like you. Maybe they were. I was a sweetie. Yeah, I don't think they were free cheese. I think you may have stolen sides.

Oops. Well, I mean, I went to the counter. She didn't charge me. I paid like 36 bucks. That's not just for the meat. For meat, I mean, it was like 50 bucks. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, it was solid. I had to try the mac and cheese.

I had to try the... The brisket was solid. The ribs were okay. The ribs were all right, yeah. The sausage was okay. I didn't get any sausage, but I did get bacon-wrapped jalapenos. I have a six-word review of Dallas barbecue. It's good.

It's not Austin. It's good. It's okay. Maybe that's an eight-word review. That's how I would do it. Yeah, I was about to say, I think you're going over six words, bro. Okay, so anyways, let's talk about the actual event. And we had a good time.

We just probably partied a little too hardy that night. And we woke up the next day, which was Saturday. The first day was Friday, which is kind of slow, usually is on these conferences. Go to the meetup. Then the morning rolls around a little too soon. Oh, good morning. It's day two of Texas Linux Fest 2019. It's Saturday.

Mr. Cheese Bacon's arriving with the swag for our booth. I think today's going to be the real day, I think. So today, I got here a little early. While they're setting up, I'm going to sneak into the ballroom, and I'm going to try to plug my recorder into their audio system so I can record the keynote for them. This is something they asked me to do, and we're going to give it a go. We're going to MacGyver this thing. Hey, Good morning, Cheesy. How are you? I'm alive on the outside and I'm dead on the inside. That's not new, right? That's nothing new.

I got no sleep last night. I got no sleep. And none. So I might try to sneak out of here later today and take a nap. Did you get the get-together for the audio for the keynote? No, I got to go do that. I got to go do that. So I did go do that.

I took the nap after the keynote, and boy, am I glad. I was able to hook my recorder directly into the board, the house audio. Big thank you to Texas Linux Fest for making this happen. And Thomas got up on stage. Remember, what was Thomas' last name? Cameron. Thomas Cameron. He's a little bit older than me. He's probably about 5'7". this happen. And Thomas got up on stage. Remember, what was Thomas's last name? Remember? Cameron. Thomas Cameron. He's a little bit older than me. He's probably about five,

five, 10 years, maybe not, maybe probably not that far, but he's about five years older than me. Got a little more gray in the beard than I do, but mine's coming right along. And so he is quite literally a gray beard. And he starts to share a few stories that make us nostalgic for the bad old days of Linux. In the early days, does anyone remember XF86 config? Right? You would have to run XF86 config before you could start X. And you had to tell X, or you had to generate a config file. You had to define the mode lines.

You had to define X and Y, start and stop. You had to define the refresh rate. You had to define the X and Y, start and stop, you had to define the refresh rate, you had to define all this kind of stuff. You could literally go in and tell the electron gun to shoot to the left or to the right or up or down, and even to keystone, and to, you know, do the in and out and all that stuff. And if you didn't pay attention to the warnings, you could get a 14-inch monitor that said it was good for 800x600 and go, I wonder if it'll do 1024x768. And XF86 config would go, yeah, sure, let's try it.

Click. Start X. Oh, crap. Yeah, it was rough. He also talked about WinModems and all the other things we had to battle Oh, crap. Yeah, it was rough. He also talked about WinModems and all the other things we had to battle and how hard it was to find other community members to connect with. How many folks remember using Claws? Yeah?

Silphid? For those of you who are younger than my IT career, these are old open source tools that we used to access Usenet. Usenet was sort of like a precursor to bulletin boards, I guess, or mailing lists. But so you would use Usenet and you could post questions and people would reply. And the thing that was amazing was I would see people replying whose names I saw scrolling by as the kernel booted. That was pretty amazing that the people who were helping were literally the folks who were

writing the code and they were willing to help. And Usenet is where I started to understand what open source was really about. And he had a couple of messages that were pretty on the nose for an old timer to make about today. People would ask, what's the best distro? Which distro should I use? What's going on? Well, thank you very much for asking. Let me just tell you. What's the best distro?

Well, you want enterprise support and a really long life cycle? Well, clearly Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the best distro. You want enterprise support and maybe not as long but really good community and really docs? Well, obviously LTS Ubuntu is the best distro. Do you want the latest and greatest packages, bleeding edge technology that's really, really close to upstream? Well, obviously Fedora is the best distro. Do you want a stable long-term release but you don't want to pay for it? Well, clearly, CentOS is the best distro. Do you want an amazing desktop experience that just works, has all the multimedia, everything's fine and flashy and and you just click next, next, next, and it's fine?

Well, obviously, Linux Mint is the best distro. Do you want a distro that's optimized for cloud computing and virtualization workloads? Well, clearly, Amazon Linux is the best distro. Do you want a highly technical distribution for power users that is insanely configurable? Well, Gentoo is clearly the best distro. Except, wait a minute. Maybe Linux from scratch may make more sense. And you remember I was

talking about the easy to use. Maybe MX Linux or Mongero. Maybe that might, hmm. You know what? Folks, adopting a distro like a religion is stupid. I've been guilty. I'm not saying I'm not stupid. I'm saying I've gotten enough scars that I don't do that anymore. Try a bunch of them. Force yourself to learn them. Put whatever, put Ubuntu on your machine exclusively. Don't dual boot, put it on and force yourself to live with it for a month or two. Then change over to Slackware. Then change over to CentOS. Then change over to Arch.

Then change, learn, get good at it so that you can have informed decisions. At the end of the day, folks, it's a kernel, glibc or similar, the GNU utilities, and a bunch of applications. The best distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost, you know? So I'm kind of done with that,

that whole mine's better than yours thing. I agreed with a point in that clip so much, I pulled it for the soundboard. Adopting a distro like a religion is stupid. Can I get an amen to that? Because that is so true. So this is where the talk starts to get really good. You can see he's starting to get fired up. And it feels like he's right. I mean, the man knows his stuff. Cameron worked for 16 years at Red Hat. He now works at AWS on Amazon Linux. He's followed this stuff for a really long time.

And when he started, it was a very specific group of people that were in the room trying to solve a specific set of problems. And he puts up a picture of an old 90s Linux user group up on the screen. Who were we back in the 90s? What do you see on this page? They're all gray beards. Like me. I have become. But more importantly, what do we not see?

People of color. Women. young people. That's a big problem, folks. And he makes a point that really stuck with me, that diversity and inclusion goes beyond the things that you can see with your eyes. And it's not just about LGBT or women or it's also about disabilities, right? And disabilities don't just mean the ones that you can see, okay? Neurodiversity is a really important topic. There are a lot of folks who are terrified to talk about things like mental health issues in tech, right? I have bipolar, folks. It's scary to say that, but it's important to break down the barriers.

Mine's controlled by medication, thank God. But people need to feel safe in tech. And we as a community have done a phenomenal job in the past of bringing people in and including them. Let's extend that. Man, that point hit me hard. Oh, yeah. And I liked the way that he presented, you know, where he almost felt like he tricked us a little bit, right? Like he brought us into this kind of nostalgic zone and through his experience.

Talking about the old times, man. I think he was working at Microsoft at one point during the 95 release he had mentioned to. Yep. But he kind of walked us through this path of his own path. Which was very similar to mine. He even had comment about what some would consider hipsters, right? And how they're actually super smart kids that are getting into this industry. They're actually super smart kids that are getting into this industry so that we really need to embrace and we really need to diversify our community.

And that's just going to make for a better community at the end of the day was one of the real things that I took away from that. And I like the way he kind of frames it in a way that's easy for us all to understand. He kind of frames it in a way that's easy for us all to understand. Even if you don't have an empathetic connection with people in these situations, I think there's a way to phrase this all that helps us all better understand it. There's a really, really cool thing that I see here. There are people of color. There are women. There are folks with disabilities. We are getting more inclusive. We're not there yet, but we're getting more inclusive, and that is phenomenal. There's still a lot of room for

improvement in diversity and inclusion, and I think that we need to pay attention to that. And I want to make something really clear. Diversity is inviting someone to the dance. And I talk to folks and they're like, oh, no, no, we work for diversity. We have hiring requirements that, you know, X percentage of people who come in are people of color or women or disabled or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's fine. Inclusion is asking them to dance. I know that's true because I have met so many audience members when we go out that are too shy to come out. They've traveled in some cases from parts all around the world and they finally get there and there's a big group of us and they shut down and they turn around.

What's amazing about this, even well-known established people in the community have this happen to them. And so I, and Elle's even better at this than I am, try to go out of my way to when I see that happen, I try to invite them to the conversation. I try to invite them to the group that has formed around us, that is chatting with us. And you've seen this, right, Elle, at events all the time. I think the hardest one is when you want to approach them, but you kind of feel like you're going to scare them off. So it's kind of just changing your body language to make them feel included more than even, you know, approaching them vocally. And I think that's an important note to make for people. Right. They're anxious. They're anxious about it,

you know, and when you can put yourself in that, when you understand that to them, it's a, it's a very anxiety inducing situation to try to be included in a group you're currently not in. And for some people, it's nearly impossible. Absolutely. And I think Thomas Cameron really touched on that in saying that all disabilities aren't disabilities that you can see. Right? right and and so we you don't really know um and you shouldn't guess but you should at least make you know a real opportunity to try and connect with those people because those people are likely to have a lot of knowledge that you would appreciate as well and there's ways to do that

online too it's not just about at events it's a good reminder we should all um you know just take a second and consider that everyone has different paths to wherever you are. And it's pretty easy to just extend a hand here or there, or, you know, just even think like this person has a different perspective than I do. And how can I interface that? Because as you said, Chris, you know, anytime we go to these events, eventually, you know, things improve where you meet new people. And regardless of how that happens, I don't think any of that has ever been bad, right? It's only a good experience when you can reach out and meet new people. I really liked his message when it came to diversity because

he talked about actually inviting people, you know, to dance instead of just to the dance. And I know this is something I experience. I have a loud personality when I'm on, when I'm doing my talks, but I tend to try to fade into the background. And I've been very appreciative of the people that are like, you know what? Actually talk to Elle. They don't speak for me and they bring me into a conversation. It just makes me feel included in the community. Yeah. Listener Steve had a good talk about different personality types and how that can make a big difference. I think it's something he'll be giving more talks on in the future.

I would love to see him do like a YouTube video on that or something like that. Yes. And link that out so that people can actually consume that. I think that would be a great avenue for that. Should have said that to him. All right. Then this was really a State of the Union talk that was being given. And I really thought Thomas had a good kind of way to look towards the future too.

Now, obviously, working at Amazon, he comes at it from a certain perspective. So take that into consideration. But there was a harsh reality that has been setting in for me personally this entire year. As I've gone to all of these events this year, I felt something that I felt before, but it's been so long that I couldn't name it until after this talk. And what Thomas essentially is about to say is that the Linux admin is going the way of the Unix admin. There will always be some, but in the next five to 10 years, there's going to be a lot less. Then I backed off and I said, well, just give me all Linux in Austin. And I was like, man, that's pretty cool. 1,500 results for Linux.

That's developers, admins, you know, sales, whatever. He's doing job searches. This is a screen that he has up and he's showing the results as he does different searches for Linux jobs in Austin. And then I did the same thing for cloud. 4,000 jobs in Austin. And then I did the same thing for cloud. 4,000 just in Austin. 4,000 jobs in Austin. In Dallas, in the DFW Metroplex, it's more by a bunch. Employers expect cloud competency.

But Linux is a huge underlying component of that. So I'm not at all saying, oh, screw Linux, go cloud. No, what I'm saying is you have an advantage right now. But you need to understand all the things that Linux does, sort of architecturally, right? You need to actually understand networking because cloud is very much about networking, setting up virtual private clouds and subnets and things like that. You need to understand storage.

And I mean block storage. I mean file storage, like NFS and Gluster and things like that. And also object storage. You need to understand those technologies. Those are all built on Linux, folks, but understand them. You need to understand those technologies. Those are all built on Linux, folks, but understand them. You need to understand application services because the days of somebody who just does Linux are gone.

You need to, at the very least, understand the concepts of programming and software development. His point is so great. It's cloud, you can demystify it by realizing it's just a series of different components, storage, networking, Linux is a huge part of that security. And as a Linux admin or user today, you've already mastered or are near competent in the most critical aspect of that stack. You're in a great spot to leverage that and just be ready for the way things are going. But a cloud admin, cloud architect, cloud engineer, these are the terms that employers are

hiring for now. And it's mind blowing to me because I realized I'm witnessing another industry transition like I saw from Unix to NT and Linux and from Windows servers to Linux servers, I'm now seeing, well, essentially services, hosted services. Either people roll their own or they use a commercial cloud provider. Something else he talked about in that slide is he showed how many data centers companies are building has just significantly dropped over the years. Yeah, and I think that that's one of those topics that might be hard and might be unbelievable to some people. So I encourage you to go out there and do your own search. Yeah. Now we did capture that audio of this talk and Mike, Linux Academy training architect captured some video of it. He mashed those up. So we have the audio from the house

system and the video from his camera. And we're going to get that over to Carl at Texas Linux Fest. When they have that posted online, we will retroactively update our show notes with a link to that so you can watch the entire talk. So that should be out soon. And you absolutely should watch that talk. Elle, I think you and I thought it was one of the better talks we'd seen in years. I think right when it was done, I looked over at you and went, that is the talk I've always wanted to be able to give. I actually remember you saying that exact thing, Al. Mm-hmm.

I went up to him and I said, how many times have you given this talk? It was just incredible. It's the first time I've ever given it. Solid. I finished it this morning. He was just so passionate about that stuff. Well, and it should be said, too, that Carl George there in the IRC, in the Jupiter Broadcasting World, he actually helped throw that together, I think, five days before or something like Oh, that's the thing about it. Carl George there in the IRC in the Jupyter Broadcasting world.

He actually helped throw that together, I think, five days before or something like that. Oh, that's the thing about it. You wouldn't have known. That's the thing about Texas Linux Fest. No, I had like a full month. Guys like Carl and folks like, well, everybody that volunteers, like Elle, everybody that participates makes it possible. I mean, they're all volunteers. Yeah.

And that's, I want to, this is my last clip. volunteers like Elle, everybody that participates makes it possible. I mean, they're all volunteers. And that's, this is my last clip, this was our final thoughts as all of the booths were being teared down, as we watched Chaz from Linux Academy do all the hard work, I fired up the microphone and captured my final thoughts of the event. Here we are at the end of Texas Linux Fest.

The plucky little Linux conference that could, I think it's kind of like your favorite distro that's not doing super good, but you still love it, and you want other people to try it out because they've done something that's kind of nice and different than the other distributions. That's Texas Linux Fest.

And as a Linux user, something about that draws me in. Day two, you know, now that we're at the end, like literally everything's all packed up and we're just clearing out, I would just say day two, I think, was really kind of hopping compared to day one. All the talks you really wanted to see were on Saturday. Sometimes we're a little jammed together.

But I think that sort of motivated us to have conversations in the future about how to make this stuff more generally available for people. So that's nice. And it was always good to see people make friends. Yeah. Alex, this was your second Texas Linux Fest. You and I both went to the one in austin last year did you have some time to reflect on this any any thoughts about this year's uh

fest it was great i i really enjoyed the new venue uh although the barbecue was you know a couple of notches down the actual conference itself was great um i gave a talk for only the second time ever in public so that was scary and it cool to, you know, talk with lots of other people about home automation stuff. Kind of agree with your assessment is the plucky little Linux conference that can though. It was only felt like three or 400 people turned up and Friday was really quiet compared to the Saturday, like you've said as well. But I had a great time. And I just see Ella, Elle in the chat has just said, why are Alex and I always scheduled to speak at the same time?

I know. I'd love to go and hear Elle speak. And by the way, if you ever get a chance, she is a fantastic speaker. Yeah, Elle, you packed the room. You crushed it with the Confessions of a SysAdmin talk this year. How did you feel like the conference went from your perspective? You know, this is my third year to be involved. And it's always the hardest conference for me because it is smaller than all the other ones

that I attend. But, you know, you go to a conference and you look at the schedule and you're like, oh, there's one talk here, another talk here. I'll do the hallway track. This is three or four talks that I want to be at at every single time. So I never feel like there's enough of me to go around. And sometimes I really wish people wouldn't show up to my talk because I could sneak away and go to somebody else's. If nobody makes it, I'm going to sneak out. The quality of speakers. I don't know. I'm not involved in that process, but they do an amazing job of getting a diverse variety of topics when it comes to not just Linux,

but just the open source community as a whole. Mm-hmm. Yeah, something they did that's a little different, seen in a couple of other places, but I like their take on it, is they had a few workshop talks that were specific longer talks that had follow-along components. And the one that I went to was from Ansible Basics to Brilliance. And there was a spot where the speaker just sort of stopped and said,

all right, here's where you get the VM, here's the instructions, I'll take 10 minutes and go get going. Carl, what was the overall takeaway from the team? Did you guys break even at least? And do you have a total number on attendees? Yes, sir. We had 274 total attendees. We finished just in the black as far as the financial side of it.

So we'll have just a little bit of spare change to get started with next year. So we'll have just a little bit of spare change to get started with next year. And hopefully we can get those attendance numbers up and we can bring in more speakers and more sponsors and have a little more options. Yeah, we'll see. There'll be something lost, though. It'll be good overall for the health of the conference. But around 274, while that sounds like a big number, it makes it so that you basically kind of bump into the same people a couple of times. If you go to both days, by day two, you've seen some of the same faces and everybody is notably a little bit more chill,

a little more comfortable with everybody because we've seen each other already. We've been around, we've been in the same room a few times. Well, I think that opens up time to where if you see someone standing in the hallway and you were in their track the day before, that you can go up and talk to them and maybe you didn't get that one little piece or or you're curious about the next step um it's a little more approachable you know people are a little more approachable there uh when it's just you know not buzzing as heavily for me that's the biggest comparison between something like linux fest northwest and texas is that like you say, you know, a smaller group, you end up seeing the same people two or three times, which sometimes, I mean, I struggle with

names at the best of times. Sometimes that's a good thing because you can end up saying, oh, did you see this, you know, one of these three or four talks that's going on and you can actually have a proper hallway track. And the community down in Texas, there was a JB Telegram group for JB Texas. And it was a jb telegram group for jb texas and uh that is a really great bunch of guys in there and uh lifelong friends made i think that is true i mean that is true 14 of us yeah to lunch together on 15 yeah 15 of us and um way more at the meetup but it's beyond that it's you know like every year i look forward to seeing carl now oh it's like it's like you really do create yeah it's true man. It's, you know, like every year I look forward to seeing Carl now. It's like you really do create.

Yeah. It's true, man. Well, he also brings solid jerky. He does always have really good. Carl has the best meat sausage. Yeah, he does bring really good sausage. What can I say, man? I'm food motivated.

I think the community is irreplaceable. The people that go to these events are great. They're sometimes a little awkward. You know, they have their individual challenges, but it sort of all gets normalized out because everybody's a unique flower at this kind of thing, including me. And everybody just sort of looks past all that stuff. Everybody's accepted.

And, you know, it's so easy. If you want to, if you want to be by yourself and not talk to anybody, you can do that. If you feel like just randomly going out with a group of people to a big old lunch and walking around town, you can do that too. And, um, I hope whatever, wherever the conference goes, I hope that always stays. Absolutely. That's my favorite part about it. Oh, it was a good one, Wes. I missed having you there. But you know how great the community is. You've gone to plenty of these events now.

You know how great everybody is. Yeah, absolutely. I liked what Alex said, because sometimes you meet people and you learn their names and become long friends. But you also just have, at those small conferences, people you run into as you go to the same couple of talks. And it's just sort of impromptu conference buddies, because everyone you're with is motivated by, if not the same thing, similar things. And there's just this sort of default friendliness that I think Thomas' whole talk is just saying we can take that to the next level. That's exactly it. We've all got common interests.

And that is a great way to start conversation, to start inviting people to the dance because we've got the same common interests. Yep. All right. There you go. That's our report from Texas Linux Fest. Now, with all this traveling, it seems like it's been a perfectly good time to do some reading. And Mr. Wes Payne comes in with a simple but modern e-book reader for the Linux desktop. This looks pretty nice, Wes. Yes, it does. Foliate, a simple and modern e-book viewer. And really, I don't need a lot of futz in my e-book reader. I just kind of want to open the book, be able to adjust the font, maybe have a dark theme, possibly. And don't worry, Foliate does. Best of all, it's pretty easy to install because, hey, it's on flatback. So I got it installed right here on the studio machine as we were doing the

show. Now, you may not like it because it does leverage some interesting open source, notably EPUB.js, which is a JavaScript library for handling EPUB readers, which means they didn't have to re-implement the whole thing. They're just using GTK WebKit to roll GNOME-style Electron App Lite. That's all right. It's all right. No, honestly, I think it's great, right? I mean, it means that they can throw this together and not have to reinvent the wheel,

but it still has native integrations with GTK, so it feels like a nice GNOME app. Yeah, it really does. It was a great pick, Wes. Thank you. And you picked it just at the right time, as I was kind of like, I wouldn't mind having, because I have a recent collection of EPUBs, so it was really perfect for that.

And sometimes your Kindle has to charge, so, you know, you got a Linux laptop. I've got a couple of things that I want to cover in the post show, so we should probably get out of here pretty soon because I've got a couple more clips. But I have a funny story that I thought, just as a perfect ending of the Texas Linux Fest adventure. So we're down here, and it was right near the Linux Academy office.

So Sunday after Texas Linux Fest, very conveniently, I was able to just jaunt over to the Keller office and record this week's Linux Action News. I had a couple of stragglers with me, however. So we made the best of it. Cheese and Amanda, Cheese's wife, brought us to Waffle House and had my first Waffle House experience, which was delightful. Alex was there as well.

What did you think, Alex? Dirty, delicious, greasy, and delicious. That's it. That's it. That's it. Nailed it. And then to make it even better, while I'm recording or getting ready to record the show, Cheese busts out his portable grill that he brought with him from home. Of course I did. And the brats that he brought with him from home. Of course I did. Talking about that full-size Washington grill? Yeah,hington grill yeah exactly carl it was a full-size it's like a little coleman grill and uh he uh cooked us up some brats while i recorded linux action news in the linux academy parking lot yeah i don't think i don't think anthony knows about that i hadn't mentioned it

yet no i mean i cleaned up after myself and stuff yeah you did the office might have smelt at least the common area might have smelt like smoked meats on Monday morning. Yeah. I wonder if we could have a meat counter on the Texas episode, how many we'd have. Oh, man. Oh, dude. I got to eat a salad. That's what I...

All right. Well, that'll be it for the official show. We got a couple of things in the post show that I want to play for you. But if you're getting out of here, I just got a couple of bits of advice, some pro tips for you. Go to linuxunplugged.com. You can go to slash 304 for this episode or any of the episodes in the past. Slash subscribe for all the ways to

get links and slash contact to leave us your thoughts, comments and things like that. And then you can catch this show live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv. Thanks so much for joining us. See you back here next Tuesday. I gotta get everybody to go over to jbtitles.com and vote, but I did save two bonus clips from the talk that I liked a lot

that I wanted to play in the post show for those of you that were savvy enough to stick around. jbtitles.com. Everybody go vote. Cheesy, you see any titles over there? I'm going. I'm heading. Get your vote on. All right.

So I thought this one was a fun story. This was the moment where Thomas realized, screw this Windows NT crap. I'm leaving Microsoft and I'm switching to Red Hat. This is the moment. So playing around with Linux, you know, one of the things that actually blew me away, that made me convinced that maybe Tim was right, was, and it's silly, was, and it's silly, echo1 greater than slash proc slash sys slash net slash ipv4 slash ip underscore forward. I could turn on and turn off routing in the kernel from the command line. And to really appreciate this, and I can appreciate this because I don't know if you know this, Cheesy, but I am NT4 administrator certified.

Are you? I am. Well, you know what I did learn about you? What? That you are also Citrix. I'm a Citrix certified engineer as well. That's right. Citrix.

Look at you. So anyways, you have to keep the context in mind. You have to keep the context in mind. On my NT machine, if I had two network cards, or I had a network card and a modem, because back then we were working on modems, if I had to turn routing on, it said, I've accepted your changes.

Now, reboot. I know it's silly, but that was one of the things that made me go, holy crap, this is pretty cool. I know exactly how he feels, actually. Mine was, and I've told this story before, my holy crap, I'm switching to Linux moment, was when I was first trying it out and I deleted my file system that was from a running computer

and it took me a solid few minutes before I even realized it. Like, it was GNOME 2, like early GNOME 2 or whatever, maybe even something else. It might have been CDE for all I remember. Anyways, the desktop environment and my running programs remained functional for a few minutes after I deleted the entire file system by mistake. I don't know if somebody told me to do it or if I was just, I think I just fumbled the RF command, but this was.

Did you say fumbled the RF command? I mean, clearly you have no idea what you're doing. RM, RM, RM-RF I think is what I did. And slash instead of like, you know, like maybe I thought I was in my, maybe I thought it was relative to my home directory. I don't know what I thought. Or maybe you thought you were in that directory or something. I mean, I don't know. This was probably

in your home. This was 97, 90, you know, ish. So I have trying to force that one directory that didn't want to delete to delete and you deleted everything. And I just sat down at this dude's computer. It wasn't my computer. Wow. I know.

Did you ever send him an apology letter? No, because he was cool with it, because he wanted to rebuild it anyway. Okay, okay. But that was the moment where I went, holy crap, this thing can delete itself? I'm switching to this. This account's legit. This root account stuff is legit.