LINUX Unplugged - 310: All Roads Lead to Linux

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

What’s surprised us, what we got wrong, right, and what the biggest game changers have been in 2019 so far. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Jim Salter.

I was trying to come up with an excuse for doing this episode. Like, I was going to blame it on, like, oh, it's summer solstice time. And then we kind of missed that. And then I was just kind of trying to come up with ideas. Like, what's the hook for doing this episode? And then I realized we just kind of want to. I think the hook is you need a vacation, son. Oh, yeah, that's true.

I will be in Montana when this episode rolls out. But it's with three kids in an RV. Is that really a vacation? Have you ever seen any of the RV family trip movies? They're pretty close to reality. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, episode 310. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hi there, Wes. Nice to see you again. Hello. Hello, Cheese. Hey, how's it going? Hey, buddy. And hello, Elle. Hey, hey. Hello, hello. Good to have you here.

Well, this is another one of these specials that we've been doing recently. We thought we'd look back at this point in the year at some of the stories that I would say surprised us, the ones that really stood out. really stood out. And then we've brought a collection of our own personal, let's call them favorite stories of the year. And we'll tell you what those are and then tell you where we think they're going. It's kind of a, it's a fun special edition. And we had sort of the perfect opportunity right here in the middle of the year. Often summer is a hit and miss news week. It's been actually a pretty crazy busy summer. Actually, it really has. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a couple of things that have already sort of stood out and so our crack research team put a few of these together so we'll go through theirs and then we'll go through ours and then uh we'll see where we end up honestly i'm glad we're doing this because as has quickly been revealed a lot has happened this year and it's interesting to see which trends are continuing on a personal note we were looking uh

at some of our data, and it's interesting, you can watch my journey in the data for our show. So, towards the end of last year, we were talking a lot about Plasma. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then towards the beginning of this year, and through this year, which we'll talk about more later, we start talking more about GNOME. And now here I am sitting here, and I'm using Fedora. So it's been personally really interesting transition of a year for me going from all these different desktops to

a completely different distribution. Fedora with XFCE of all things. Yeah. Well, I've always kind of wanted up-to-date user land applications like Firefox and Chrome and Gwake and up-to-date drivers because I tend to want to do a little bit of gaming. But there's certain aspects of my desktop I don't need to change very often. And I think that's what happened for me this year. I found the sweet spot in something that is updated, a fairly regular clip, but also allows for me to have some staticness where I need it. That was an interesting journey for me.

Starting really a couple years ago when I switched to Arch and just stayed there for a while. And then once I left Arch, I had like this meandering. You haven't settled down. This is feeling like a real stick though. Feeling good. All right. So here's something that has really stood out. I think a lot of you would agree with in 2019

is this battle to block ads and these different takes. And Mozilla's really stood out here. Google hasn't come across looking great, as there's been the debate about shutting down how many sites could be in this list that could be blocked. You know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. And it's still up in the air as we record right now. But I would say definitely, I agree with the team, one of the standout stories, this whole battle for global ad blocking. Plus, you also have on iOS and Android built-in blockers now.

And it's all really at the core of it about how people are going to make money. Yeah, right? It's an important driver of economics all over the place. And as more people use devices, use mobile devices, ad blocking's gone from something that was kind of, you know, for the niche, for the nerds, for Linux Unplugged users,

perhaps to something everyone needs because ads are everywhere. Cheesy, what do you think about Mozilla announcing, let's say, I think it's around $5 a month. I don't know what the exact is after all fees and stuff, but $5 a month for ad-free news. When you look at how hard it is to find trusted news and you look at how ad blocking is really putting pressure on what is already a super tight market for modernization. Maybe Mozilla has an actual strategy here? Well, I mean, I will say, first off, it kind of popped up out of the middle of nowhere, it seemed like.

I personally like the idea. I'm a newshound myself. And for anyone that's ever gone to any other news site, The Sun, you know, just anywhere, and you see how inundated you are with ads, so just to have that clean news reading ability, I'm in on it. I do like that. I like that idea. But I'm curious how you feel, Elle, paying per month for access to news, which is out there for free.

I mean, there's ways to get free news. How do you feel about it? There's bills to pay. There's water heaters to fix. Is $5 a month for news worth it? You know, I'm starting to wonder if they can just give me bulk pricing because they keep coming up with more things to kind of $5 a month me on. But then there are times that I'm trying to read a news article and I can't even get to the X on the screen because there's so many pop-ups and I try to use ad blockers and it just won't give me the site. It says, hey, we see you're using an ad blocker.

If you want to see it, disable it. So at some point it's going to be picking, hey, do I use their ad blocking service or do I use their VPN? Because that $5 is going to add up quickly. That's a great point. I think Mozilla should offer some kind of bundle for like maybe it's $14.99 a month and it's everything they're about to roll out. The's a great point. I think Mozilla should offer some kind of bundle for like, maybe it's $14.99

a month and it's everything they're about to roll out. The Firefox suite of services. Because you really get the sense they're just getting started too. Right, absolutely. You got the news, you got the VPN, there's going to be other things that will roll into that. Honestly, a bundle would be pretty appetizing. I like the idea. I mean, I already fund some news organizations myself. I

generally like what Mozilla's doing and I wouldn't mind giving Mozilla some cash also. Yeah, I wonder what the Mozilla's doing, and I wouldn't mind giving Mozilla some cash also. Yeah, I wonder what the news site's revenue share is on that. I'd be keeping my eye out for that. How do they choose which partners? Yeah, because with Apple News, there's a RevShare deal there. I'm sure Mozilla's working that out. Maybe it's their partner that does it. So there's that news story, which has been an interesting trend, and it's obviously going to continue through the rest of 2019, no doubt about it.

Then we had a couple of unexpected losses. Some friends that discontinued their projects in 2019 that I don't think we saw coming, number one, that I didn't see was Scientific Linux. I think it makes sense. Maybe it's time. Now we know a little bit more, too, about what was involved in maintaining it and how much

work it was. It seems pretty clear that if there's other means to do it, if they can do it through software modularity and containers. Yeah, that's why this one kind of didn't surprise me. I think it was time, and a lot of them, I think a lot of the surprise came from communities outside of Scientific Linux.

People that were, it was interesting to have. It made sense that a Linux distribution would be there to fit that niche. We all know there's a ton of Linux used in scientific work. It turns out most of that's just the tools, though. And having a specific distribution, now that we have better tooling available to make these things, it's just too much work. Okay, what about Integros? That one caught me off guard. I'm a, you know, Arch, well, maybe not quite by the book, but doing-it-yourself kind of Arch user. But if I wanted a nice little GUI to have an Arch

environment to install from or to push on to others, Integros, that was my go-to. There's Antigross. That was my go-to. I think the best thing about Antigross was it was an easy way to show someone how freaking great Pac-Man and the AUR is. Right, because it's not like it was super customized, but it looked good out of the box, and you had all the Arch goodness. So you didn't have to show them, oh, well, here's the console you'll be installing. And with the exception of four packages, it's mainline Arch. So that was the other part, too, right? So it works for when you're starting out,

but it was also still easy to understand, still simple, stupid, and so you could use it as an advanced Arch user. And developing habits like following the Arch news and watching the Arch updates was worthwhile because it was the same thing you were going to get in Anagross. But the thing is, getting someone that hands-on, and Mandross. But the thing is, is getting someone that hands-on, and Mandro does this too,

but giving someone that hands-on with Pac-Man and AUR and things like that, that is such a great experience that it kind of makes it worth doing the whole thing. Like later on, you'd be like, you know what? Now that I know how great it is once it's all set up and how powerful it is and what all the flexibility and options are and the software availability, well, now it's worth going through the process of installing it.

Yeah, right. You're excited and you know there's a good end goal at the end. And let's not forget Endeavor OS, which is some of the original developers of Antagross. Nice. Which, thankfully, we won't have to hear you butcher that again all the time. But Endeavor OS has their first beta release. And I think the 15th of July is when they're trying to have their first stable release out.

So you can check that out over at EndeavorOS.com. I'm looking forward to it. I think, I think it's cool. So I think I'm still mourning the passing or the death of Aurora. You know, it was a really easy distro for me to get started when I was just starting out because the graphical interface was just so user friendly. I think the developer had a lot to do with keeping me on Linux when I first started out. And I'm kind of afraid that with

these other Linux distros kind of going away, maybe I'm missing out the chance to get the same experience with Arch without, you know, having to go through and actually compile everything myself. Yeah, there is something to both losing Antegros and Corolla in the same year. I wonder if Manjaro would work for you in that scenario, or maybe in a release or two, we should all just give Endeavor a go and just kind of see what we think. Maybe, you know, it could be possible. Like, you already have a lot of the work done by the Andergross folks,

and you're following Upstream Arch, which is moving fast, but it does seem like it's a possible job. It does. You know, I wonder if these are a little different to at least seeing your rise in Fedora usage. I wonder if there's just things Fedora has now. Like Fedora's changed a lot and maybe there's less need for Aurora to exist. That could be it too because like the drivers are super easy to install right now. You have H.264 is there, right?

And with RPM, with the certain RPM repos, which are becoming less and less important to me, and flat packs, it's kind of like everything's available now. I really don't have any software availability issues. It doesn't look bad by default. No, no. It's come a long way. Okay, so there's just a couple other, like, got to talk about stories before we get to our personal favorites.

Elephant in the room almost with this one. Just this really rocky, slow death of 32-bit. LibreOffice 6.3 dropped 32-bit Linux builds at the beginning of June. Obviously, we just recently had a hoopla about Ubuntu 19.10's 32-bit i36 architecture support.

And other projects are looking at dropping 32-bit support. Some projects are just as dependent on it as ever, like Wine and others. We didn't talk about this much at the time of the coverage, but elimination of 32-bit would really impact us. A lot of our plugins for audio processing, gosh darn it, are 32-bit. And some of them, what's this system called where it kind of actually runs them through Wine? What's that called? Do you remember?

Oh, well, there's multiple things. Carla has a bridge, but LinVST. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah, LinVST. There's a lot of, let's say, black magic hackery going on to integrate things over to the Windows world just enough to get this stuff to work. Yeah. And so it would have an impact on the production industry as well. And I guess maybe I should have talked about that because people did not like my take on it. Because my take was, all right, well, let's look at it. Let's start pulling it out and then see if we can't use something like snaps or flat packs or cheroots or containers or, I mean, I don't care. Just update the Steam runtime library with 32-bit libraries.

Like I just felt like there was ways to solve the problem. However, at the end, I think they came to a pretty good compromise. And now we just see which other distros push it next. Do you have any guesses? Oh, hmm. Guys, do you have any guesses on which distro might... I kind of think it could be Fedora, to tell you the truth. That's who I was thinking.

I mean, at this point, what do they really have to lose in this battle? You know, they don't. And don't you think Rell's going to go 64-bit at some point? Because, I mean, I would think. That's the future, bros and broettes. We're going to have to deal withbit at some point? Because, I mean, I would think. That's the future, bros and broettes. We're going to have to deal with it at some point. If they're ever going to take RHEL to 64-bit only, which would

in theory make it more secure, don't they kind of have to take Fedora there first? They have to start with Fedora, right? I would think so. I think it could be Fedora. So I may be dogfooding this very soon, if my prediction's right and I stay on Fedora. Is this ever going to come to Windows? Because that's part of the reasons we need it, right?

If we were only using open source stuff and not messing around with Windows things, would we care about 32-bit? I don't think so. It's like games and Windows legacy, right? The Mac ecosystem, it's jumping right over in a faster way than we are.

And mobile mobile too. Is Microsoft only keeping 32-bit around because they're getting the same pushback from devs that have been writing 32-bit code forever and are still writing to 32-bit code? I mean, they've got a whole other approach to legacy and compatibility with the past, you know? Yeah, that's got to be part of it. That's got to be part of it. The amount of customers that we had as of two years ago still running RHEL 4 makes me think, no, they're going to keep these things alive for a while. Is this when you were at Rackspace? Yeah, when I was still there. And they were still being supported.

They paid enough money to have support when they needed it. Yeah, see, that's just it. Every time I've, as a contractor, had gone into a client's, like, super old systems, there's software updates and support by the vendor are not what drive, like, from operating systems to custom-created, industry-specific applications that are two or three releases behind that don't have any support.

They're still running them for whatever reason. I think with this decision that Canonical has made, and because RHEL hasn't made any changes yet, I think it's pretty easy to bet today that there will still be systems that you can load with 32-bit support by 2030. I think you're right about that, yeah. That's so crazy. We might not be using any of these systems, but they'll be sitting in boxes and closets somewhere. Oh, for sure.

But I mean, I think there will still be vendor-supported operating systems by Red Hat and Canonical that support 32-bit. Like, that'll still be like like, the OS still officially supports it if you get the LTS or if you're shipping RHEL. I just think that's, I mean, at what point, but it is what it is. It's the slow fade of technology. And then the last, like, and there's a whole list. Like, we're just really kind of picking from the highlights here.

The other one that I think we just all have to talk about is obviously, in a word, you could say Microsoft, but I think specifically the subsystem version 2 that is running an actual Linux kernel. The new big Linux distribution in the room. I was so sick of that joke. I was so sick of people calling like, it's the best Linux desktop. I didn't say best.

I didn't say best. I know, but you know people have been saying that. Mr. Dominic. Right. The thing is, you're still booting Windows, okay? You're still loading a Linux kernel in the VM. It's not like you're booting a Linux kernel. Yeah, the NT kernel gets to do all the real work there.

Yes. And it's still Windows with its Windows things and millions of little paper cuts here and there. But it's still a huge win for Linux. Huge. and people trying to use it and target it as a platform, even if it doesn't do much for the desktop user. Yeah, well, so we were just cracking jokes about Michael Dominic from Coder Radio, but he's in a situation right now where he's shipping a couple of Windows applications in production that he's actively maintaining.

It turns out people use that operating system and want to buy software for it. And the backend software is on Linux. So he's able to maintain and support the front-end on Windows, which is a Windows application, and still continue to develop and push to production and testing from Windows, using Visual Studio Code into the subsystem for Linux, out to a Docker container. I mean, like the whole workflow for both sides of the app. Unfortunately, fortunately, I don't know. It's probably more seamless that way, right?

Because Microsoft's spending a lot of time getting their hooks into this little minimal WSL2 VM. There are some solutions for running Windows pretty well virtualized on the Linux side, but I don't think it's going to be nearly as slick. Man, the future tie-in between that system, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio itself, as well as GitHub and Docker and Azure. It's your cloud workstation, buddy.

Ooh, wow. I mean, that is what we are witnessing in 2019 is just the beginning. That is what people want, right? It seems like a pretty smart move. Is it? Michael Dominic does. Yeah, and I actually totally understand. If I was stuck on Windows, I'd totally understand.

I try not to be that guy who's just reactionarily worried about it, but my take on where Microsoft's at right now with this whole thing, having watched them this year and the last couple of years, is they are legitimately doing what they say they're doing. And they have every incentive to do that as they are in a growth industry right now, where there is lots of opportunity for them to grow and make money. And being open source friendly and standards compliant and interoperable is a great way to get market share. And I don't think there's any evil intent behind it at all. None. I think, I mean, other than the motive to make profit, but then we could condemn every company. I don't know what their intent will be in say 10 years or 15 years when the market is completely saturated and it's no longer easy pickings.

It's much harder to make money. The temptation may come back to start tightening down the screws again. But that's a long ways out. And it would seem silly to forfeit the benefits now just because of something that could happen. Like, it's hard, right? We could also blow ourselves up. They're a huge part of the software industry, field, history, culture. And it's hard to say what companies do, right?

So even if you get open source ingrained into culture and management now, in 20 years, that could be a totally different set of people. You just don't know. Same thing with Google. Same thing with Google. When you get different leadership in, things change. You know, maybe there are certain leaders that won't cross certain lines today.

Future leaders may be in different situations and not have the same background and be willing to cross those lines. And you just have to stay vigilant, informed, and just continually re-evaluate and make your decision. I do think you're right, though.

If anything, Microsoft's a little easier to evaluate because they're being pretty plain actors. You know, open source technology is working. It's what customers want. They can leverage it for business reasons. And it's sort of easy to understand the profit motivation. Well, I think this absolutely makes sense for Microsoft to do this, especially when you look at Red Hat, IBM, Red Hat's new universal base image, Alpine, other kind of base images that people can develop from and to have it within the desktop that you're doing your work in.

I mean, that is pretty handy. But to say it's the best Linux desktop, I mean, first we have to start at it being a desktop, which it is mediocre at at best. Say it, baby. Well, I'm just saying. I mean, look, I've, I've, I work on all of these. I have all of these operating systems on a computer on actual metal in my house and really Microsoft could step it up a little bit in their desktop game and their consistency and just the look and feel of the OS in and of itself. I mean, if you want to look up all of your development questions in Bing,

go ahead, right? Hey, have you tried Edge? It's really fast. That's what I hear, but no. Oh, Microsoft, it's been a good year. I mean, it's been a good year for them, really. The GitHub acquisition's done. I do need to spend some time playing with that terminal.

You know, it's another one of those things where sometimes you have to use Windows, so these are nice things to have when you're in that situation. Sometimes you do have to use Windows. It happens. I recommend when you use Windows to use safe practices and run it in a VM if possible. Boy, not a ton in housekeeping today, but there's a few

items. I've been mentioning this for a couple of weeks. Linux Academy is hiring. I just recommend going to linuxacademy.com and scrolling down. They got a careers link there. There's quite a bit of positions open from a range of development to training to some admin stuff. A lot of it's remote full time with full benefits. Some of it's also at certain offices. So just check it out.

Linuxacademy.com. Scroll down to the careers section there. Maybe get some work. Also, I think System76 is still looking to hire for their tech support team. So shout out to them. They're doing some hiring right now. Now, I just want to make a quickie plug for the Friday stream. If you haven't listened to the Friday stream yet, it's like a bonus version of this show.

A lot of the same caskets on that and plus. Everybody has like a plus one sometimes, I swear. Somehow it's even more fun. We've been doing some fun stuff. And in the show notes, we should put this in there, Wes, because we don't have it right now. We have a link to a form you can help us fill out. We're going to do some Linux quiz questions on the show and test people's Linux trivia knowledge. All kinds of interesting things like commands, history, anything you could think.

And we need different levels of hardness, too, like easy and hard and all that kind of stuff. We'll have a link if you want to help out with that. It's a Google forum that goes into a spreadsheet and we track everything about you. No, not really. That's not true. Check out youtube.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting for some of our more recent meetups that we've been holding, the virtual ones, different kinds of study groups on many different topics. I really, really like that burnout one that was just posted a few days ago. There's a lot going on. In fact, we got a whole new batch just on the horizon, don't we all? Yep, we are getting AWS certified.

So this is a great certification, even if you aren't really sure what the cloud is all about. If you want to find out more, join us at meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. Yeah, they'll have the details there, including some stream info and all of that. meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting, where we also schedule our in-person events as well. I also just gotta give

a hearty plug to Mr. Wes Payne over there, rocking the TechSnap. We don't mention enough on the show, techsnap.systems. Go check it out with him and Jim Salter from Ars Technica. I'm the one, the only. I love Jim. You guys are great on that show. So much better than when I was on that show. So much better. So check it out with him and Jim Salter from Ars Technica. I'm the one, the only. I love Jim. You guys are great on that show. Well, thank you. So much better than when I was on that show.

So much better. So check that out. We're just taking it to the next level. That's all. You guys are like a good pair, too. You guys balance each other out really well. Check that out. TechSnap.Systems.

All right. Well, now let's get into our favorite moments, the things that have really grabbed us. And joining us now as we get into this segment, Perfect Timing, Alex is here. Hello, Alex. Hi, baby. Hey there. Thank you for joining us. And I think you're going to have some input on some of these. So let's start just really a quick acknowledgement. 2019, we saw Elle l cheese and drew join the team and um that's that's kind of amazing because it's like a variation drew was in the community but he was new l was in the extended community and now is like been the perfect fit and cheese had been in the community for like

a decade basically forever and i'm curious i kind of'm curious, I kind of want to take, I kind of want to take like, L's first impressions of like, what it's been like to podcast and then Cheez's since he's been on the outside for so long. So let's start with you, L, like, first impressions now that you've joined this team of like, podcasters. How's that gone? What do you think? I asked cautiously. Yep, I think you were scared to ask that. No, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a big learning curve that I wasn't really prepared for. You know, everybody has a podcast. That's what everybody wants to do. And nobody, I think, really realizes if you're doing quality podcasting,

how much work, how much research, and how many things you have to learn to do it right. Yeah, to do it right, it does take a lot of extra work. Turns out Chris doesn't just give you the script and then you read it on the microphone. I thought that's how it worked. Sorry about that. That's an option? And then Cheesy, I'm curious,

your impressions having watched it from a long time from the outside, and now you've been brought inside the sausage factory, seeing how we put everything together, you know sometimes the meat hits the floor. What is your before and after impressions? Well, you know, very much like Elle said, I've been listening forever for a decade or more. And then, you know, never really,

I guess, respected how much work went into it. But it was it was definitely interesting, especially whenever you were doing the video, how much work was going into that. I can only imagine. But being on the inside, it's great, man. I love it. It is a lot of work. There is a lot of research to do. But it's all stuff that's right up my alley.

So I feel kind of privileged now because I get to find some of these news sources and some of these little tasty, juicy morsels of the Linux community before they drop for everyone else. And so to me, that's one of the coolest parts of this job. Yeah. Plus the community is just great, man. Best. Just a great group of people to work with. The best. Linux Academy is great.

My team is wonderful. I mean, it's been a great experience for me. I love it. Alex is also a new member of the community and to the team. And Alex, I think one of the interesting aspects of your story is you are new to the United States. Like it's, that's a moving from London to the United States is it's a fundamental life change. And you kind of found your people almost immediately. I can't thank the community enough.

So my wife and I came on holiday or vacation to America last year. And we met you at Texas Linux Fest for the first time. And I met Cheese also. Props to him. And we stayed in touch, you know, on Telegram as part of the JB Texas group afteras group after that and when i went back to texas linux fest this year it was like meeting a group of old friends genuinely i mean and the community is just how can you describe it other than wonderful it's it's really like there's these rings of community there's people that are lightly involved they listen and they kind of follow

there's folks that get more engaged in the different interaction mechanisms like telegram or irc or email or whatever. All kinds of different ways to communicate, yeah. Yeah, and that's a little bit more of a niche. And then there's like that niche of a niche where it's the people we see in person a lot and we talk to a lot. And as people kind of filter into that smaller inner circle, like they do become lifelong friends. Like it's really something. And we've just got through this massive push of events, which we'll talk about in a moment.

But it has really kind of been, we've been like pressure cooker of events recently. So we've gotten a full dose of it. But before we go there, Wes, let's start with your big standout items of the year so far. We've got to do this now. If we did this at the end of the year, it'd be like a four-hour show. So we've got to do it now. And I think I would have forgotten half the stuff. There's already a lot to keep track of. Yeah. Yeah, big time. You know it in here, and I agree, it has been an impressive year for gaming

on Linux. Technically, Proton launched August of 2018, but it's really hit its refinement phase in 2019. You also got Wine 4.0 in 2019. And that's all great. But the story that really got my attention while I was doing some research for this show, that's the story of AV1. Because, Chris, I'm sure you remember the dark old days of media playback on Linux when MP3 was still super-duper patent-encumbered. And you had to go to extra miles to just find the right

codex to install. I paid hard-earned money for the Fluendo codex, so that way I could legally watch movies and play MP3 files. You good citizen, you. Thanks to things like AV1, that's just not happening anymore, right? I mean, even H.264, we're in a good place now, but it hasn't always been that way. I think AV1 is a wonderful success story of, you know, different actors in this space recognizing that this is a shared layer that they can all develop in the open with open source. They don't have to compete there, and they've done it in a great way. So one example is they needed a faster decoder for AV1, right? And they have a reference one, but it's really just designed as a reference for the spec. It's not for performance. They reached out to the non-profit

behind VLC and contracted them to develop one. And now that's chipping in Firefox, and it has amazing performance. Yeah, and they're seeing some adoption. I think they, you know, early days, like 12% of media playback is not a lot, but it's 12%. And you also see,

you know, big names getting involved, people like Intel and Netflix this year who are working on improving the encoding side, which might be something we'll have to play with as well. That's going to help a lot. Oh, let's give Elle a chance here. Elle, what kind of stood out to you this year so far in 2019? The one that stood out the most to me

was the one that affected me coming, before I came here, I came from an OpenStack background. So when OpenStack Summit announced that they were going to be turning into the Open Infrastructure Summit, I didn't think a lot about it. And now looking back, I really wish I would have because I think it really would have outlined what my year was going to look like. It really has gone from having several different types of conferences to almost every conference that I go to being focused around containers and more

specifically Kubernetes. Yeah. I think the moment when you reported back from DockerCon and you're like, ah, Kubernetes has basically taken over. It's like a Kubernetes conference now. That's when it hit. That's when it really hit us. It's like it Kubernetes conference now. That's when it hit. That's when it really hit us. It's like it is that the Docker hype has been superseded by the Kubernetes hype, and it's taking over these different events. It's like maximum hype mode now. Hyper hype.

Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud hype. Now, there's also the community aspect for this year, too. And I think that's something that I don't know if I just kind of took it and ran from it, or it's something that you guys were doing before I came here. But when I went to scale, and it was my very first scale I've ever gone to, you guys hosted a dinner after the event. And it was different. Like you get to meet people at conferences and you have short talks during, you know, during the halls or when you're waiting for talks to start,

but you don't get to really know someone. And when we were sitting there having dinner, people start talking about the projects that they were working on. You know, you'll hear somebody just kind of like, well, you don't know where I work at, but hypothetically, and you kind of get to find out what people are really doing on their spare time. Yeah, I love that. So I just kind of kicked off with that. And then I have what I call hacker family dinners where we just get together and it's NDA is understood. And we just come, we break bread and we get to really know one another. And it's been amazing experience. It really is a great way to get to know someone sharing a meal. Yeah. Yeah, it has been. It has, like I was just saying, cheese, it's been like the pressure cookers section of events. Like we've just been doing event after event, a lot of stuff going on in 2019 so far. Absolutely, man. The first half of the year, uh, right before I came on and

Ella had mentioned it, you guys were at scale, super jelly that you guys just missed it. And I really, really, really, really, really wanted to go. But, um, you know, and then on the family dinner thing, we should, we should do a potluck. That would be interesting to see what everyone would bring, right? That would be good. So Scale was the first part of the year, and then moved into LinuxFest Northwest, which is kind of the Jupyter Broadcasting home base conference. So fun.

Wow, LinuxFest was so crazy. I hope it wasn't peak LinuxFest. You know, the thing about LinuxFest this year is we just said, Chase, just take care of the video for us. Just, I'm done with video. I am so glad we did. And then we used that extra time to start up that room, and it was packed.

Amazing. I think that's going to be something I have to repeat. Absolutely. I think the room was, we had to end up turning people away from the room, and they still came in anyway. But Elle had a talk there. Alex had a talk there.

Jim had a talk there. I did. Jim just joined us. Hey, Jim. What's going on? Oh, you know, just doing some podcasting. We were just talking about TechSnap a little bit ago. Yes, Jim did talk.

Anyways, continue on, cheese. Can't forget Alan. Alan was there, too, doing his talks. Oh, yeah, Mr. Jude. That was an amazing JB family turnout. That was really good. It was really awesome. It was really awesome. It was really awesome.

And then right after that, two weeks after that, Chris, myself, and Wes were all off to Boston for Red Hat Summit, of course, where all of that news kind of trickled out.

I shouldn't say trickled out, but all that news kind of came out of that. Bursted out. And that was the release where the new Rel was out, new version of OpenShift was out. Satya Nadella up on stage.

The Red Hatter over here was very jealous that he wasn't there. Yeah. Ironically, you weren't there, but we were. Red carpet treatment lasers. Like it was a real show. And we have blog posts of all of these that we were at. So if you'd like to go back and look at some of these and read and kind of look at some of the pictures and kind of check out the event, you can do that at LinuxUnplugged.com. Also, Clear Linux, you and Brent went off to the Intel campus to check out Clear Linux.

Yeah, down to Portland. And you all had an interesting stay at, I think it was the Jupiter Hotel or something like that? Yeah, we stayed at the Jupiter Hotel and made good connections with the community manager for Clear Linux. That was really nice. And got unique swag from the Jupiter Hotel, which we actually still have in the studio with us right now. Oh, do you? You'll have to listen to the episode, though, to find out what it is. Because, let's just say, I don't want to bring the episode down.

And then after that was KubeCon, where Wes and Elle were off at KubeCon. Oh, yeah. In Spain. I was super jealous of that one as well. Not jealous of your travels per se, but that it looked like a blast. Work is so hard. Yeah. Yeah, but that flight, you paid for it with that flight.

That sounded awful. Yep. Yeah, but that flight, you paid for it with that flight. That sounded awful. Yep. And then after that, Texas Linux Fest, of course, where it was pretty much a big chunk of the crew there. Elle gave a killer talk at Texas Linux Fest. She gave her confessions of a sysadmin talk.

Alex has done his talk again there, his home automation talk at Texas Linux Fest. And then right after that, the week after, because Elle is like a machine, she was down at B-Sides in San Antonio. She is a machine. So it's been busy, busy, busy season for us so far. And I expect we're going to have a few more coming down the pike. Yeah, we're not done yet. Little Birdie tells me we may be at Texas Cyber Summit in October. See, what? Leak alert, leak alert. Little Birdie tells me that. We know those Leak alert, leak alert. Little birdie tells me that. We know those little birdies, if they're talking about October, they got to be talking about all things open in Raleigh, right? Oh, maybe. We could do both. Are you coming to

Raleigh, Jim? Oh, I'm absolutely going to Raleigh. I'm at all things open every year. It's a huge show. Oh, awesome. I'll have to buy you a beer. I live like four miles from the tower, so. Oh, yeah, cool. Awesome. Look forward to that. I kind of want to be there. I want to be at that table. I want to be sharing those beers. So Jim, what's struck you about the news so far in 2019 in Linux and open source? Well, I mean, for me, it's a no brainer, man. ZFS 0.8 coming out. It's huge. Yes. Yeah. Also, I mean, the rebase, right? On ZFS for FreeBSD and other projects rebasing on ZFS for Linux? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, you know, all the new features in 0.8,

like native encryption and, you know, encrypted send and receive, those are all like, those are the big sexy things, right? But the rebase is really cool because it means that all the platforms get to get more tightly integrated in the future, you know? We're moving BSD and Linux are going to be kind of one happy family in the same GitHub repositories. And OpenZFS is going to become more of a thing rather than like a concept that ZFS on Linux and FreeBSD ZFS and on down the line are just sort of adhering to, you know?

I'm really glad you joined to point that out, because that wasn't on any of our lists for some reason. That's a big oversight. Despite us having had some great ZFS on Linux success just in the recent past. We take it for granted because it's so awesome. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Just to highlight the value of community and things like that, Jim, you gave an excellent talk along with Alan at Linux Fest Northwest about ZFS. And ever since

I have been using it, and we exchanged some messages on Twitter and things like that. And yeah, I just want to, you know, when people talk about community, that's the kind of thing that we mean, right? That you meet these people in meatspace, in the real world, you exchange messages on Twitter afterwards, and you end up changing your workflows and adopting new technologies as a consequence. Absolutely. So Alex, if you hit up changing your workflows and adopting new technologies as a consequence. Absolutely. So Alex, have you hit the point now where you're like, I don't know how I ever got by

without ZFS? I kind of did recently. I did that when we switched from FreeNAS over to Fedora, and we could keep the same pool, and we just swapped out the operating system, and we installed a radically newer, more updated operating system, and we were able radically newer, more updated operating system, and we were able to reconnect those pools and everything worked just fine. I was like, okay, that's legitimate. I must admit, my mind blew a little bit

when I started using ZFS Send over WireGuard this weekend, though. That was cool. Yeah. I mean, the remote replication, there's just, unless you're spending $100,000 and using some proprietary system, there's just nothing else like it. Yeah. Yeah, it's been really cool. All right.

I've got a couple just to wrap us up here. And just the flurry of improvements since now multiple different teams like Canonical and LIS and obviously Red Hat and whatnot are working on it. As well as just the rapid pace of improvement in general. I had a couple of call outs. Number one, going back to Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft is now publicly admitting, and I use that word intentionally, that Linux is the dominant OS on Azure. I've been hearing that for a while. I'd heard 60% a year ago. Whoa.

From somebody who would know. So I think it's been that way for a while, and I think it's a lot more now. And that kind of tells you the direction their compass is pointed right now. The story that surprised me, Pi 4 in 2019, expected I'd have to wait. Who'd have thought? And I got one. I ordered it. It hasn't arrived yet, but I got the 4 gig desktop pack. Oh, I'm excited. Did you see the news about the USB-C flaw on the 4s, though? That really bugs me, Jim.

I hate that crap. Like, USB-C has already been a hot mess as it is. We didn't need this complication. Yeah, I did order with a power adapter, though. I suppose nothing can be perfect. And hey, winter is coming, so you've got a free space heater right there. I might try one of those water coolers. I've seen a couple of water cooling solutions pop up online, and that's just adorable. It's just adorable, so I may do that. And then if they launch an

8 gig next year with the USB-C fix, so it can take any power adapter, then I'll buy that too, because you know what? It's 30 bucks. So the other thing I didn't quite see coming, but it makes sense, is Mozilla's hard shift into services. There's been a lot of different things around this recently, but I just, I think it's time. It kind of makes me sad a little bit on the inside. This is the way it has to go. But if this gets them off Google sauce, good enough. And then the last two. Number one, I got to admit when I was wrong, Pop OS has had a damn good year.

You know what? Part of it has been hustle on System76's part. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Part of it has been a keen, consistent design language that has connected with people. And then making those easily available online, which helps sort of spread the hype. connected with people and then making those easily available online, which helps sort of spread the hype. And then part of it has been good media coverage because they positioned their desktop OS in a way that made it presentable to certain individuals and it got good coverage. And when you combine those things, it's been a, it's, it's been a pretty good year for Pop! OS. I didn't see

it coming. Just in the last two weeks, you've had Linus Tech Tips do videos on Pop! OS. You've had Wendell from Level 1 extolling the virtues of Pop! OS with PCI Pass-Through. So yeah, whatever they're doing, they're doing a good job. I'll say this too, you know, I think in retrospect, my biggest concern was a lack of time to work on it. You know, just because they have so many other initiatives. There's a lot going on, yeah. You know what though? There are popular distros out there that are much smaller teams, when you think about it, and they're not even full-time employees of a company, where there's no consistency story.

I think when I first came over, I kind of wondered, all right, well, is this just a slight customization, you know, a distro for their machines? But no, I mean, it's grown into much more than that. I am glad I always couched it with, I'm curious to see where they take it, because they could add more stuff. And when they switched up the installer, when they worked with the elementary OS team to do their own pop shop and stuff, I think they added a few key differentiators there, and they're continuing to build on that. We'll see where it goes.

I'm not running it yet, but I'll probably give it a go soon. And then last but not least, this one didn't surprise me. I'm just, I guess I'm impressed with the very, just sort of like everybody showed up to this game, which is streaming, game streaming. Stadia is sort of the forefront in our community, but Microsoft has a solution. NVIDIA has a solution. Sony has a solution.

And then Apple has their subscription service, which is not game streaming per se, but it's sort of like all-you-can-eat games that download to the iOS device as you need it. So kind of like game streaming except for it's offline. On-demand games as you need them. Yeah, those have been sort of my eye poppers or surprises or, like I said, sometimes corrections I think I need to make. That PopOS one. How did you not see gaming as a service coming, though, Chris? Not so much I didn't see it coming. I think you're right, because I actually was an on-live,

you know, like beta user back in the day. And I actually have an NVIDIA G4 streaming service active subscription. So I actually do some gaming streaming. But I think what I didn't expect is that everybody would show up. It kind of popped all together right at the same time. Yeah. Like Microsoft, Sony, and Google all just like, hey, by the way, boom. But you know, it's really, when you look at it in the term, like the services world where everybody's trying to grow their services revenue, they're got to do everything they can, right? Everybody's got to get that reoccurring revenue. So it does make sense in that context quite a bit. I hate to admit it, but I bought the Stadia Founders

pack thing. Why do you hate to admit it, Chris? Because it's $180 for a Google game streaming service that is probably going to get shut down

in four years. Well, it could be more expensive. You just divide it by four, it's fine. Yeah, yeah. Actually, but you know what? I do it for the people.

I am very curious at least you still end up with a chromecast right you know a good point and probably a bluetooth controller i could probably use for something else exactly well and let's not pretend any of us hasn't wasted more than 180 dollars on some project that didn't pan out touche man thanks guys you're making me feel a lot better about my impulsive decisions we just all bought it too and want to play there with you. Yeah, that's what it is. I'll have it set up here at the studio. I compare those kinds of media boxes to the Nvidia Shield.

I bought one four years ago for £150. And yeah, that thing's still my main media machine. So if you get four or five years out of it, I think for that kind of money, it's good. You know, the future of this technology is all, you know, I think, for that kind of money, it's good. You know, the future of this technology is all, you know, virtual GPUs and that kind of thing. So they're not, it's not a one-to-one relationship with the hardware they have to have in their data centers. And they're using some of the, you know, pass-through type technologies we talked about in LAP a couple of weeks ago to make this a reality. It's, this technology is just super

duper cool. And these are the use cases that happen as a consequence. It's a lot of fun. And Stadia could have longer term ramifications for Google's other platforms, obviously, Chromebooks. I mean, that's a given. But you could imagine a future where game developers could accelerate a portion of their Android game on a Google GPU cloud if they're on an Android client that doesn't support, you know, those GPU extensions or isn't fast enough or the battery life is low. Why not just sort of offload some of that and have some bits of it just stream back down to the client?

I like that. You break your phone, you switch to your backup phone, you keep playing all the games you have. Not if you're Huawei, though. No. Oh, too soon. Too soon. Way too soon.

Go get some Jim and Wes over at TechSnap again, TechSnap.Systems. It's a great there. No. Oh, too soon. Too soon. Way too soon. Go get some Jim and Wes over at TechSnap again. TechSnap.Systems. It's a great show. Go check out Elle over at Choose Linux. She joins Drew and Joe on a new, revamped, refreshed, and better than ever, Choose Linux. Love the last couple

of episodes. Go check those out. ChooseLinux.Show. And maybe we can get them to try Endeavor and report back to us. I like you delegating, Wes. Look at you. Whoopsie. That's some management level thinking right there. All right. In the meantime, go to linuxunplugged.com for all of our links, subscription stuff, and whatnot. And join us live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv, where we'll see you then. Thank you.