LINUX Unplugged - 334: Particularly Poor Predictions

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

We review our predictions and own up to what we got wrong, and what we got right in 2019. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

Hey, guys, I got into a bit of trouble last night. Uh-oh. Last night, huh? Well, it started during daylight hours and then went deep into the night. And it all started when one of my power supplies blew up while I was trying to use it. And you know that electronic smell we've all smoked? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

You know instantly that something's wrong, right? And I was like, oh, no. It lingers for hours as well. I think Brent's getting a new power supply for the holidays is what's happening there. I got a cascade of telegram messages from Brent as the evening progressed, they got progressively worse.

More panic. Alex may have woke up to some pretty sad Brent. So I've got some computers to fix over there. I suppose we should ask if you're okay, but all we care about is the tech. I have a few nickel scrapes from frustrated screwing and unscrewing and screwing and unscrewing, but other than that, I think I'm going to get some new computers this year. Oh, hey there. Welcome in to Linux Unplugged, episode 334.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello. How are you feeling about today? Oh, I'm a little nervous. I don't think I did so well last year. I don't think I did very, very well either, Wes. But, you know, there's no shame in learning from our mistakes. There's a lot of shame, but we will still learn from our mistakes.

And to help keep us on the straight and narrow, the judge has returned for his annual judging. Hello, Joe. Hello. I'm going to keep you all in check. That's right, on the straight and narrow. And then, of course, to help us really kind of pile on to our mistakes, Alex, Cheese, and Brent are here as well. I mean, we need people to roast us. Hello, gentlemen. Hello.

Hello there. Hello. Happy holidays. Thank you for joining us on this very special episode here of the old program. We are doing this one offline to make a special treat for those listening at home in the feeds. You know, Wes brought a piano. Oh, it's lovely.

God, you got so many talents. Listen to this. Good idea putting the mic on that, piano. Oh, it's lovely. God, you've got so many talents. Listen to this. Good idea putting the mic on that, Wes. So, isn't he talented? It's so impressive. So before we get started, it's nice to spend a moment with friends. Here we all are at the end of the year, and we're about to make fools of ourselves. So why don't we just get a couple of business items out of the way? Because there's some, you know, there's things we

gotta talk about. There's always a few things. As we record this here and now, next week will be our actual predictions for the year of 2020. We decided to get the reviews out of the way, own up to our mistakes before the next round of predictions, in part to incorporate

some of that learning into our next predictions. So I don't think it will help. No, it turns out this is just not really very easy to do, is it? This is like my hardest year to make predictions ever. Despite it being, it's been a great year. Yeah, oh yeah, no, for sure. There's just been so much going on. First of all, I haven't really had my head in the game.

And second of all, after listening to previous year's prediction episodes, I mean, it's just such a crapshoot. Like, you really have no idea. That's part of why it's fun. Yeah, yeah, except for every time you kind of sound like a fool. So I decided to have a little philosophy change this year for my predictions. For this episode, I'm going to go a little more out there. I might be going for a little more on the entertainment side

than I am the actual prediction side. This is going to be more like, let's go for pie in the sky kind of stuff. Are you just saying that so you have something to sort of soften the blow next year? No, no, it's because I'm keeping all my serious predictions for Linux Action News where I really get competitive with Joe. That's what's going on there.

I realize, oh, I've got to keep all the really good ones for Linux Action News because Joe's going to get serious about this. So I've got to blow all of my crazy out there wild ones right now. But I've got some ones that I really hope turn out. But you'll have to wait and see. The Predictions Linux Action News is coming out soon in the feed, and our predictions, all of ours, will be out in the next episode. But this one, this one we own up.

And before we do that, just a spot of housekeeping, as our friends across the pond would say. I'm not positive, but I think that's how they would say it. It's a spot of housekeeping this week. Number one, you may have heard recently about our big news. We have been acquired by a cloud guru, and they have big plans to make everything bigger and better for everyone. And a Q&A, including their commitment to future Linux content, has been posted. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. Go read up on that. It's pretty cool. Big, exciting news. The future is going to be very bright and exciting. Stay tuned. Now, these programs here, they're not live right now. We're doing the

holiday thing. So if you want to keep talking to us, keep the conversation going, you can find us in the Telegram, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram. That's where you get that. Get on that business. It's not just the releases. And then I want to make everyone aware, because I've gotten several questions, that live stream I did making Plasma basic to brilliant, where I was really kind of not sure how that was going to turn out. It turned out great. and it's been posted. I'll have a link to that in the show notes if you want to try out Plasma and go through some of the tips and steps

and tricks that I use to make my workstation pretty usable. Why not give yourself the gift of a beautiful desktop? That's right. From basic to brilliant. Super neat side note about that. The Plasma team and Jonathan Riddle watched the video and said they're going to implement a couple of those suggestions of mine

as defaults in future releases. And that some of the things I was tweaking are already fixed in the next version of Plasma. How cool is that? What a great desktop. Yeah, so they took some of that feedback in, even though it was a little rough on the defaults. And they took that in and they're going to implement some of it.

Not all of it, but some of it. That's a pretty great outcome of that live stream. It really is. So it's actually an hour right on the nose. But at the beginning of the video, I lay out sort of the format. So if you just need certain parts of the video, it's pretty easy to jump around. So you go get that at the show notes,

linuxunplugged.com slash three, three, four, and that. That's our housekeeping. Nice slash three, three, four, and that. That's our housekeeping. Nice, tight, easy, clean. Very easy. You guys have been keeping it tidy, so there's not a real, there's not a need for a lot of Don't make a mess for us now. We're going to make a mess today. Oh, Wes.

Okay. Are you ready for this? As ready as I'm going to be. Okay. So last year, we made a bunch of bold predictions. And right now, it's time for this? As ready as I'm going to be. Okay, so last year we made a bunch of bold predictions, and right now it's time for us to own up. And what do you say you and I will go back and forth? So I'll do one of mine and we'll do one of yours.

Yeah, that sounds fair. And then the judge will tell us if we got it right or not. Uh-oh. You ready, judge? I'm ready. All right, here is my first prediction from last year. In 2019, Google announced that you can start testing your Android applications

on Fuchsia using their handy generic emulator. I didn't see that announcement, I don't think. No. No.

I can't believe, that should have happened, right? I mean, come on, that's such an obvious move. Sort of less Fuchsia news over the year than I expected, really.

Other than just recently with the Flutter conference stuff. True. But yeah, what's the word, Judge? I'm afraid that is a fail. All right, that's good. That's fine.

Do you still think it's going to maybe come around soon? I do. Oh, I do. I totally do. I don't actually have it down as a 2020 prediction, but maybe I should. That's all right. I'm sure one of these other ones are going to be winners.

So are you ready for yours, Wes? Yeah, let's have it. I wish this one would have happened. In 2019, BcashFS will enter the mainline kernel and be shipped in a distribution like Arch. No dice on that one, that's for sure. It's kind of a shame. I mean, we've just pivoted back to using Butter again,

so maybe we don't need it, but it's a project I like. I continue to support it, and I hope to see it in a kernel sometime soon. But it is pretty easy to get it going on Arch, right? Yeah, you can just build the module and load it in, no problem. It's almost halfway there, but it's not mainstreamed. No, I'm afraid it's got another file.

It hurts my soul. This is going to be rough, I feel like. And, like, that should have happened, but I think it's just still too early. We didn't even get Wirecard. As we know, it takes a long time to get things there, and rightfully so, once it's in, it will stay there. Forever, yeah. I'm sure this next one I got right. Are you ready? Oh, let's hear it.

In 2019, I thought it was all going to be about the virtual desktop. Turned out it was about virtual game streaming. In 2019, Microsoft Azure, or DigitalOcean, launches a Linux-based virtual desktop. How did that not happen? I don't know. I'm actually kind of a little surprised. Come on, come on. Somebody come to my defense on this one. This should have happened. It's so

obvious. Oh, it feels like something so easy for them to do. Maybe that's because I don't realize what's going on in the background, but this would be so amazing to allow so many people to get advantage of machines that are maybe more powerful than their own, but you can just use like, it's almost like a thin client. It is, for sure. I could definitely see it in terms of distance to storage. That's where I think it gets used a lot on Amazon is you're doing something that's with a large data set. And that data set is on S3 or it's on Digital Ocean Spaces or whatever it might be. And so instead of having to download it to a LAN somewhere and then process it on a desktop PC, people just get a cheap desktop PC and then they remote into the virtual

instance on Amazon, and it's essentially LAN access speeds to the data set and plus the CPU scalability of AWS. Well, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit too with Stadia. I mean, it's obvious that Google has the power to do these types of things. And it's really surprising that with Chrome OS and the popularity of Chromebooks, that this didn't come true, at least with what Google is now offering with Stadia. Right. They could totally stream a Linux desktop. Yeah. So there is Windows on Azure, a Windows desktop. Is it just that, I mean, Linux is command line friendly. You don't need the GUI in the same sense?

It seems to be a very viable product for Amazon. Like it's a thing they're selling. And that's why I made this prediction as I thought they would just sort of get emulated by other providers. Does Shadow count? Linus Tech Tips covered a service called Shadow that does. I mean, it's aimed at gaming, but it gives you a fully fledged Windows desktop.

I guess that's the problem here, isn't it? Really? That sounds kind of handy for people that don't want to bother with VMs or dual booting. That's kind of neat. No, no, I was really thinking it'd be one of the major providers. I'll let the judge decide.

What do you say, judge? I'm afraid that it's a fail. I'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it. But why am I not surprised that Alex wants to self-host his own desktop? Come on, it's all about the cloud, man. Yeah, man.

I've done this. Over the year, I did it. You know, it was self-serving for me. I wanted to see it because then I could travel with the thinnest, smallest laptop possible and do all my work somewhere else. Aren't you already doing that? When you're traveling is when you have the worst internet. Not when I go see you, Alex.

For now, yeah. Yeah, there's some spots where you can get pretty good connectivity, but you would still want some local. We're just not quite there yet. How about another Wes Payne prediction? I think this one, you may have had some insider knowledge on the direction things were going. Me never. Wes Payne makes a prediction about my desktop habits for 2019.

I predict that in 2019, Chris is using the GNOME desktop on at least one production machine for 60 days or longer. I sounded confident. What do we consider a production machine? Because I will note all the studio machines are running plasma. However, machines you do work on, not a test machine or a toy machine. Okay, all right. That's what I intended. At 60 days or longer?

Yeah, that definitely happened. Woohoo! I think that's a pretty easy one, Judge. Any issues there, Judge? No, I think that as long as it was on that office machine upstairs at least, then it counts. That's a win. That feels good. That's probably my only one.

I'm going to savor it. That's our first win right there. That's good. You're right. Not only did I run it on my workstation up in my office, which is where I prep many of the shows, but I ran it until just very recently on my ThinkPad on Fedora. And now my ThinkPad is still Fedora, but it is now Plasma because that's how I do. But that was a good prediction, Wes. All right, let's see if I got this one. I had a sense, and I think maybe I got

this one right, that Clear Linux would become a bigger deal throughout 2019. 2019, we'll see 50 publications about Clear Linux. The Clear Linux hype will grow, excluding articles from Foronix and coverage from Linux Unplugged. I shouldn't have excluded Foronix. I don't know why I did that. I was just feeling really bold, I guess. But I, at this time, had no idea that just a couple of months later, Brent and I would be in Portland. I was really impressed when we got to go down there and hear them talk about the product directly.

It was super impressive. And I think you and I left there with some pretty big smiles on our faces. They're doing some pretty impressive stuff. Remind me what Clear Linux is again? Remind me what Clear Linux is again? It's Intel's Linux that has a couple of really unique things other than just a whole suite of optimizations for the Intel platform. They also have a build system

where you can revert to any build of the OS that's ever existed. They keep every version of every package, every build online available. It takes terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of space. And it's extremely fast. And they have this concept of sort of creating your own recipe of Clear Linux

where when you roll it out, it's more bespoke to you using a central automation system. Right, it's still tied into the platform, you just get to have more knobs to turn. It's like solving the problem that Arch and Gen 2 offer while

still being maintained by A, Intel and B, still having a main reference to follow. It's a pretty unique idea for people who want super optimized server systems. And we ended up down there at their Intel campus at what became their first of

a series of tours around the U.S. to talk to different Linux user groups about Clear Linux. So I don't know. This is a tricky one, I think. There's another keyword there that you forgot that they kept mentioning is statelessness. That was kind of the big umbrella that they were presenting. Right. Thank you, Brent. That was one of the big deals about Clare Linux

is the idea that you could just wipe things out and it would be stateless from a config standpoint. And I think it's gotten a lot more recognition, but has it gotten people outside of Pharonix writing about it? That single thing might have been what screwed me on this. I mean, there are a few here and there, but any of the searches I did, it was clearly dominated by Pharonix.

Yeah, and I read a lot of headlines every day, and I've been keeping an eye out. And apart from Pharonix, there's been very little coverage of it. It feels like Michael Larable is really ahead of the game on this. He's been following Clear Linux for what feels like two or three years at least. And every time he does any benchmarks, it always wins. And it does seem to be like a really solid distro. But for some reason, it just hasn't gained that popularity. I did see it mentioned on OMG Ubuntu this week, actually.

Sweet. There's one. There's one. It was in a list of like distributions to look for in 2020 and as voted by the readership. And most of the questions were, why is this in this list? And he defended it by saying, well, tons of people mentioned it. So I think maybe the hype is coming. Maybe. That was the same formula I was using, though, at the end of 2018. Because when you learn about it, there are clear, unique advantages.

There's also strange things about it from the outside, controlled by Intel. Why do we need another distro? Why can't I just use XYZ? Obviously. That's what's hard to predict, I guess. There are advantages, but we see that all the time. That doesn't mean anyone's really going to switch. And sometimes the advantages just are not enough,

perhaps. But when you learn about it, you learn they are bringing something unique. I feel like it should have gotten more attention. Well, it should have got more attention, but unfortunately it didn't, so this is a fail. Yeah!

I tried to help you, Chris. Thank you, Brent. I appreciate it. It's still a good trip. I enjoyed our time. And we got to stay at the Jupiter Hotel, which I get spam from almost on a weekly basis. At least it's targeted. Yeah, it is pretty awesome.

And we got a great photo. All right. Well, maybe a Westpain failure will make me feel better. This, actually, I thought you were probably right about this one, and I really hoped you would get it wrong. We just were really still processing what the IBM acquisition meant for Red Hat, and you were suspecting it might mean a fairly important open source project would get dropped. All right.

I predict in 2019, Red Hat drops support either just explicitly or key people leave for one of these projects. Network manager, Pipewire, Stratus, Bolt, or they just sort of delay any work on GTK4. It just doesn't ship. Now, I feel like that last part there is sort of a wild card. Yeah, true.

Because it definitely did not ship, but I don't know if they ever— I don't think it's stagnant, right? Yeah. I don't know if it stopped. And Pipewire didn't necessarily ship the way we expected, but they sort of changed course a bit and still are on track and have a release schedule and seem to be hitting it. I think the other test here is that none of our coverage over the year did we ask that question. We were concerned right after the merger for that, I think the other test here is that none of our coverage over the year did we ask that question.

We were concerned right after the merger for that, I think, but I don't remember really being concerned much this year about it. I think we need to cut live to our reporter on the ground in Raleigh. Alex, is Red Hat still there? Yes. Are you there, Alex? Does Red Hat still exist, and are the projects still alive? Well, Chris, I hate to say this, but, you know, the winds are coming in strong and the rain's beating down hard, but it's looking good over here and back to the studio. I think that's a fail then. Thank goodness, right?

Yeah, I'm happy on this one. Yeah, that very much is probably the one that I'm the most happy about us getting wrong. You know, the biggest news of this whole IBM Red Hat thing, and I'm going to be very careful because it obviously pays my mortgage here, is that nothing's really changed. They haven't done anything. The only thing I've seen is more collaboration between the two companies. So it's been a net positive so far as I've seen so

far. We might be witnessing, and I'll check back in with me in about a year, but we might be witnessing a new era of mergers where not disturbing the community and the user base and the fans around the product is priority number one. And when you merge, you maintain what you've committed because keeping your most loyal user base happy is what keeps value in the product. And if you start losing customers and users or listeners or whatever it might be, you end up devaluing the very thing you just spent all your money on. And so I think maybe we are witnessing a new era of mergers, but probably not. But it does seem like that's the case, Alex, from

an observer standpoint. Good. Alright. Are we ready for one of mine? You ready? Oh yeah. This is the one I have enjoyed all year long. Hopefully I didn't mess it up in one of the details, but I think we've all been watching this one happen right in front of our very eyes.

2019 will be the year of the web going dark mode, and a major property like Google.com or the New York Times will roll out to fanfare a dark mode. Now, Gmail has gone dark mode. Several Google products have gone dark mode, including YouTube now has a dark mode option. But the big things that I didn't include in there that I should have, iOS 13, all about dark mode. Android, all about the dark mode. Cassidy and his friends at the free desktop

are pushing hard on a dark mode free desktop standard. In the meantime, every single application, even Electron applications like Slack, are scrambling to implement dark mode free desktop standard. In the meantime, every single application, even electron applications like Slack, are scrambling to implement dark mode. Dark mode, dark mode, dark mode. Web browser extensions have come out to enable dark mode for websites that don't have dark mode. Like, it's just...

Although we had those. We mentioned those last year. Okay. All right. Very good. I'm sure we did. It was a thing, for sure. I think we need the judge on this one. because you were kind of specific at the end there.

Stupid Chris. Yeah, I'm just looking at Google.com now, and it's blinding me with the bright white. And the New York Times, again, yeah, that's bright white. Oh, you're not, you're going to rob me of the dark mode? The way you were specific about it was that you said it was on the web. And, okay, there are some web properties that have gone dark, but it's been much more about apps and OSs. Yeah.

I did say properties like Google, which I did not specifically mean google.com. And I think YouTube and Gmail. But I did also say something like the New York Times. I was pretty specific there, but also vague at the same time. I switched my telegram to dark mode. Does that count? Oh, yeah. Oh, everybody did. I mean, everybody that doesn't mind dark mode. There clearly has been people that have come out now this year that are like anti-dark mode, more power to them. Different things work for different people, so have at it.

But I defer to the judge, even though it clearly was the year of dark mode. I admit I was too specific. So it's judge discretion. I think that because he said properties like, I'm going to allow it and it is a reluctant win. No way. I did not expect that. I was totally braced for a total failure. All right. Okay, I'll take it. I'll take it. You know what's funny is when you see a screenshot from Telegram and they're not using dark mode and you're thinking, what, what's wrong with you? I know.

It really is something looking at screenshots just from a year ago. How many things have switched to dark mode? I was, this is silly, but I was looking at screenshots at GNOME Files this morning. As one does. Reminiscing. I was going all the way back to when it was Nautilus built by Easel, and I was looking at different iterations to see when things went away via screenshots.

Oh, yeah. It was actually pretty interesting. That's great. And it's clear that like in the last year, screenshots are like dark, dark, dark, dark, dark. Everybody just went dark theme. It's been pretty intense. For those that don't like it, it probably hasn't been a great year.

I feel bad for them. But thankfully, light themes are... Right, and most of the time, you know, you get an option at least. Mm-hmm. Also, a lot of different platforms have introduced a night shift or color change mode for reducing blue light at night or full-on automatic night mode switching. My Vivaldi browser does that. Right. I mean, clearly there's

recognized that we're not going to get off of our devices before bed, so they're going to help a little bit. All right, Wes, are you ready for your last prediction of the year? Lay it on me. I really, really hope this one's true, but I have a bad feeling. And we still, we've managed, we've pushed forward.

In 2019, a Linux distribution older than three years will ship a pre-compiled ZFS Linux kernel module. Older than three years, you said? As in the distro's been around for longer than three years? Right, we were trying to not let it, you know, have to be an established, legitimate distro, not some tiny new startup. Okay, so...

And obviously, I guess it wasn't. Okay, so... And obviously, I guess it wasn't captured there, but having listened to last year's episode, Ubuntu doesn't count. Why? Because that had already happened. This is like a new distro.

Had it? Yeah. Really? Mm-hmm. It was experimental in 1804? Well, they just had it in the kernel. It wasn't like being used

necessarily, but you had access to the pre-configured driver. I thought you got this, because I was thinking 1910 was really Ubuntu's ZFS moment, but you're right. They shipped the ability to use ZFS in 1804. They just didn't bake it into the installer.

So I was really hoping that, you know, after them not getting sued this whole time, some other distribution might step up and also offer a pre-compiled. What the hell happened? Is everybody so chicken-ass that they won't do it? It seems like what everybody wants. There does seem to be demand,

and BSD in the meantime is going to roll in and just deploy it everywhere. But it also could be, in part, because it is a legal gray area, A, and B, it's really not that hard. Yeah, I mean, you know, ZFS on Linux is doing great. It's easy to get going. Basically, any mean, ZFS on Linux is doing great. It's easy to get going. Basically, any distribution, you can get it going within 15 minutes.

Remind me how long it takes to reboot that Arch server of yours? Next episode, we're going to do a live update in the episode just to see, so you'll find out. How long does it take? Well, the problem is those cards. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The HBA cards take a long time to initialize, don't they? Yeah, so just, I'll tell you the yeah, yeah, yeah. The HBA cards take a long time to initialize, don't they? Yeah.

So just, I'll tell you the answer, just enough to make you extremely anxious. That's how long it takes. That's a good answer. So, Judge, what do you say? Did Mr. Payne get this one or is it a miss? I'm afraid it's a miss. So that's only one win each. It's not good odds.

No shutout, though. That's true. I actually was braced for a full fail. Yeah, and you would have got half a point for clear Linux if we were counting. Okay, that's all right. Yeah, half a point. Yeah, all right. So I thought what we could also do here is since we're doing this as sort of an offline holiday special,

sipping on our hot toddies, we don't have the mumble room with us. We miss them. It's a big part of the show. It's just not the same. So we collected a few predictions that were kind of a sum of a couple of other, like a few along the same lines, you know what I'm saying? Like people that predicted essentially the same thing. But you did hire three people from the mumble room this year.

That's true. Yeah, that's what we're doing. We're just slowly hiring the mobile room. That way we're here all the time. It pays to be in the virtual lug. All right, so speaking of that virtual lug, Popey made a prediction about MacBooks that I heard echoed by a few other community members.

Let's give this one a spin. In 2019, Apple will announce and launch a line of laptops called MacBook Air, which will feature ARM-based processors and no x86 processors. Wow. Well, as our resident Apple guru there, Chris, did that happen? Hold on. Let me check my backpack of MacBooks here, Wes. Let's see. X86, X86, X86, X86, X86, X86. I got a lot. Yeah, they're all X86 there, Wes. It's a very specific prediction though, because the MacBook Air is an existing product line. I think they'd probably, if they're going to switch to ARM, come up with some new product line. Yeah, I think what was going on here was the iPad Pro had just been announced.

And everybody was like, whoa, they really put a lot of performance into a tablet. That actually could go into a laptop. So then the foregone conclusion was if they were going to move an existing product line to ARM, they'd probably start at the most portable battery conscious line, which would be the Air. And so I think Popey's line of thinking was just a whole new generation of Air MacBooks would land and they'd feature their in-house ARM processors. A lot of people were thinking that at the time.

At the end of 2020, what they've ended up doing is shipping a massive x86 monster called the Mac Pro. Ironically, it's the exact opposite. Apple have had a really killer last quarter to their Pro customers, haven't they? With the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro. Ironically, it's the exact opposite. Apple have had a really killer last quarter to their Pro customers, haven't they? With the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro. Yeah, they seem like they're doing a much better job with the hardware than they were this time a year ago.

It's still very locked down, still extremely expensive, and I think macOS is limiting. But as far as responding to what Pro users want from a hardware platform, I think they're doing a lot better. Yeah, Pro users definitely want to spend $400 for a set of whales. No doubt. And don't forget $1,000 on a monitor stand. Yeah.

I think it was right, though, for them to announce a new Mac Pro just because there was such a demand for it after the trash can failure that they had. They had to reinvent themselves and provide something that pro-level users would want to use. But yeah, at a $1,000 stand for a display and $400 wheels, I could literally buy four tires for my small pickup truck for the price of the wheels of the MacBook Pro or the Mac Pro. No kidding. I went out Christmas shopping, and I was looking at artists and furniture, just because there's

this great store in a local town where this guy, his whole life is making this beautiful wood furniture. And so we just go in there to gawk at it because it's so gorgeous. Handcrafted furniture for less money than one of these Mac Pros. I'm going to need the address of that after the show. Now, let me tell you something. We make fun of it, but I actually think it's a pretty decent value when you get towards the higher end of the configuration,

excluding the monitor, excluding the wheels, obviously. But a couple of things Apple has done here is they've shipped a machine with a metric ton of open RAM slots. You can actually put third-party GPUs. They even included the power headers so you can properly power them. a metric ton of open RAM slots. You can actually put third-party GPUs. They even included the power headers so you can properly power them. I mean, they've really made something that is a decent product.

It's built well. It's specced well. It's extremely expensive. But let's say... If you're in the market for a computer that costs as much as a car and is that powerful, you're right. I mean, it delivers on that.

I fix it rated it as their most repairable computer in years yeah and it's silent even under massive load it's silent have you been watching you know all the youtubers that got sent them uh like justine and uh linus tech tips just bought one apparently um but also jonathan morrison he has been doing a lot of tests with the afterburner stuff. He's done a bunch of really cool videos around audio editing, which I know you've watched. I haven't seen anyone try and install Linux on it yet though. So this is where I was going to go with this. That's why we're talking about this. Let's just, let's accept a couple of premises. Number one, let's just say whatever employer

you have, whatever work, quoteunquote is paying for this machine. So it's not coming out of your personal pocket. And work quote-unquote comes to you and says, alright, Wes Payne, you can have a Thalia workstation or a Mac Pro workstation. And let's also, as part of this conversation,

let's just say Linux is running on the Mac Pro at this point. which would you choose? That would be a tough call. I'd have to spend some time playing with the configurations but you're right. If it ran Linux well I don't see why I wouldn't have the Mac Pro as a contender.

I think that's it. What about you Alex? Red Hat comes to you and they say we're going to buy you a workstation. You can have this configuration of Thaleo. You can have this configuration of Mac Pro. They're both pretty nice. They're both going to run Linux equally well,

which obviously is not the case, but just for the sake of this conversation. I said, I don't know. I mean, can it dual boot? That's your question. Well, see, I try to look at things from a pragmatic standpoint. Can it run the Adobe suite

for all my personal photography drone footage editing needs can it do um pass through of a graphics card and that kind of stuff uh i i settle on a nice system at the moment that can do pass through a linux system that can do pass through i don't know like mac os is kind of close, but there's no one operating system that fulfills every single one of my use cases, so I've just accepted long ago that I have to triple boot. What about you, Brent?

If, quote-unquote, which is kind of a funny situation for you, work came to you. That's me. I know, that's why it's funny. But for the sake of argument, somebody came to you and said, we're going to get you a computer. I think that choice actually is really easy for me. I would choose Thaleo a hundred times out of a hundred. Really? Yeah. And the reason is that I'm totally okay to have, you know, slight performance hits or whatever, if it means that I'm supporting a project or a business that is based on

Linux. You know, the stuff System76 is doing for Linux and the open source community is massive compared to what Apple has done recently, right? So I feel like those would be dollars that I would be happy to put

their way. They're different. WebKit, Swift. I would say the scale, right? The proportion is better for System76. The area we're interested in, too. All right, Joe, what about you? Audio production might be really nice on a Mac Pro. I think I would go for the Mac Pro just to check it out, just because I'm genuinely curious.

I've seen Athelio in the flesh, but I haven't seen the Mac Pro, so just out of curiosity, I'd go for that. Fair enough. Yeah, I think that would be an interesting experience, especially all the things you'd have to buy, different cables and whatnot. All right, Cheesy, you and me are the last here because I feel like you and I have a similar conflict.

Every now and then, it's nice to get After Effects or Photoshop for some work. You know, you can get 95% of the work done on the Linux platform, but every now and then, there's somebody on the wider team that needs support, and that's an After Effects file. So what would you pick? And here's what's even harder for you, is you've been to System76,

you've got a Thalia, you know how great it is, but somebody comes to you and they say... You're going to have to tell Emma that you got the Mac, bro. Yeah, and Emma finds out, whatever your choice is,

she finds out. What would you choose? You know, that's a really tough one. The reality, though, is as much as we talk about the repairability and the expandability of the new Mac Pro, which is, like Alex stated, probably the best when it comes to adding additional drives, adding additional graphics, car power, and things like that. The one thing that it doesn't have going for it that the Thaleo does, in my opinion, is the Thaleo is actually fully open. So all of the CAD files are there. If you

wanted to make your own and you owned a laser cutter, you could. So as far as repairability, expandability, you're not going to get that from Apple. Ain't got nothing on the Thaleo. Absolutely not. And not that I would necessarily want to with my Thaleo, but if I did need access to the Adobe Suite, I could always dual boot the Thaleo, though I feel that would just taint the Thaleo and make it a little dirty. Your buddy Alex would probably help you set up some pass-through VM action if you ever needed it. Absolutely. Your buddy Alex would probably help you set up some pass-through VM action if you ever needed it.

Absolutely. But, you know, that being said, I'm fine working on a MacBook. I don't produce 8K movies. Right. So I don't need this ridiculous display. I don't need the power that one might need for rendering out video like that or doing anything like that. So to me, the MacBook still works fine for my needs. Right. Maybe in the future, if they drive down the price from the maxed out Mac Pro, which I

think was like $56,000, $57,000, I might consider it. But for me, and along the same lines with Brent, you know, I'm happy to support System76. They do good work. And all the work they do, they throw it out there for everyone to grab onto and improve and make it better. So I think going forward, we'll see new Thalios, better Thalios. And I'm anxious to see what the community ends up coming up with, too. I kind of see it a similar way. The power of that Mac Pro is clearly for people that are in the industry of creating very high resolution video.

Not an area I'm into. Even if I was making 1080p videos for YouTube, it'd be too much. It would be way too much. And I've got a really nice system upstairs that I barely even take full advantage of today. I'm just not there. And I noticed now in comparison, the Thalia looks like a fantastic deal. Like I specced out a Thalia last night. Not that I've been, you know, comparing them.

But I specced out one last night and it was like $4,300. And it was like multiple drives, nice GPU, upgraded CPU. Yeah, that's cheap. That's cheaper than the starting price of the cheapest Mac Pro. But the reason why I wanted to have this conversation is as they continue to improve their hardware, I think more people will be asking themselves that question as they get around to buying their next computer. If Apple is able to maintain decent hardware, even if it's a few select models in the line, and the rest are all kind of sleepers, stinkers, I guess,

if Apple is able to maintain this Pro line, the iMac Pro, the MacBook Pro 16-inch, maybe a Mac Mini Pro, I think it will cause more consternation in the community trying to decide. Because right now, you kind of just were tapped out with their hardware. Like, if you wanted a Mac that could run macOS and it was an official Apple box that wasn't a Hackintosh, you just didn't have a lot of options in terms of anything that was all that

good. Easy answer now. You have the FIO, you buy the Dune Pro case off of Indiegogo, the clone case that the Verge covered, and then just whack a couple of Xeons in there and you're good to go. I like it. Okay.

How about we get to another kind of common prediction from the community that Drifter put into terms. Everybody, everybody thought something would happen with SUSE. I think that in 2019, SUSE and TPG in specific will begin discussion with Microsoft and the purchase of SUSE. Microsoft purchasing SUSE and TPG in specific will begin discussion with Microsoft and the purchase of SUSE. Microsoft purchasing SUSE. Now, SUSE may have gotten passed around again. I can't keep track anymore.

I don't think anyone can. No, but I know it didn't get bought by Microsoft. What do you say, Judge? No, I'm afraid this is a fail. The Microsoft buys X, though, is like in the back of everyone's mind. It came up a lot last year. I mean, they're doing a lot with Linux. Might be handy to have a provider of it.

Kind of along that same line, another one that was on people's minds a lot was something happening with Canonical, either a purchase or, bitten thought, perhaps an IPO. So my prediction for 2019 is that Canonical will get IPO'd. Never happened. It did not. Canonical did kind of reform into a meaner, leaner beast and evolved that over 2019.

But no IPO. No purchase. This might be our worst batting average ever. Is it because I made you all be so specific last time?

Well, that doesn't help. You know, I mean, maybe it just means we got to up our game a little bit. But Chris talked himself out of the

dark mode one. You didn't make him do that. I feel like I did over-specify with that one. I really did. There's a trick to

getting the level right there. Gotta get the balance right. It really shows you how hard it is to nail down this community. I predict on the third Tuesday of April that Canonical will be acquired. Yeah, right. Very good. Well, you gotta save that for next episode. Oh, yeah.

Do you think that Seuss wasn't acquired because they were kind of passed around this last year? They weren't acquired by someone like Dell or some larger company similar because they're just not maybe as stable as Red Hat or Canonical? They just don't have a container play. I think they're not sexy at the moment. Yeah, they've tried. They've definitely tried to make noise about their Kubernetes distribution. They've given it a real go, but it's not gaining any traction.

It seems like it's a steady approach. The users that have a need to run SUSE are sticking around with it, but I don't really see them growing. You don't really see very many cloud providers that make it. There's more now. There are, yeah.

There are more, but not many. And when they do offer it, it's usually not exactly the version of SUSE you want. It's kind of a funny, like I've noticed, it's a kind of mix of implementations. And I think that hasn't helped. It seems like it would turn off larger companies like Dell if this one company that they're potentially looking at acquiring has been bought and sold and invested in and different things have gone on throughout the year,

that they might take a step back from that and pause from making an acquisition like that just because if it's been bought and sold and passed around, then something isn't working, right? Well, and isn't the reality, unfortunately, a little bit that the world really does kind of settle into Coke and Pepsi? iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Red Hat, Ubuntu. It's just easier. It seems to naturally gravitate to those two. And then when you have markets that are outside the US and other areas, it can vary, obviously, a bit, but those areas

aren't large enough where it really makes a big impact on the overall global conversation. Maybe we'll see something change in 2020, but that was devastating, guys. Let's pick it up. Let's do a bonus round of picks to make us feel better here, because these are fun.

Two guys. That was, let's pick it up. Let's do a bonus round of picks to make us feel better here. Cause these are fun. Two really, really fun picks to impress the neighbors, your friends at work, and I don't know, maybe your spouse with your Linux terminal. Two really great picks. You found no more secrets, Mr. Bacon. Tell me about this. You know, I'm a huge fan of these older hacker movies and even Mr. Robot that's out there today. But in 92, the Sneakers movie was released, which some of you may remember. Some of the young listeners out there may have no idea what I'm talking about. No More Secrets or NMS is a command line tool that recreates the famous decryption effect that was used in the movie Sneakers. So, you know, if you just want to impress your fam, yeah, you could definitely throw this on and pipe, you know, NMS out to basically anything, an LS or anything else, and really look like a legitimate hacker and impress the fam. So do that. Check it out.

Jeez, for those of us who may not know what you're talking about, could you give us like a description of what's going on? What? You don't know, Brent? Brent, have you seen The Matrix? Alex and I watched it this month, actually. Yes, we did, Brent. And it was glorious. You two are so freaking cute.

We watched it together. Have you seen the screensaver for Linux that is the Matrix-inspired screensaver? Yeah, that was real hot like 10 years ago, right? Well, that's kind of where this is from. This is from the 90s, yeah. Imagine all of the text on the screen slowly decoding. It starts out as a total jumble of characters and weird symbols, and then over time, it all kind of renders into text on your screen. It's like a super cool, nerdy, as if this is how decoding worked when really it's just happening in the background and then outputs. But in Hollywood, it happens in real time,

and it all kind of comes in on the screen. That's what this does. I just fired it up right now. My CPU's jumped to 75%. Well, that's a lot of work to decrypt this. It is actually encrypting a little bit. There's actual encrypting happening. It's just doing it in like a quick little buffer.

Please tell me someone's tried to pipe in this into LOLCAT. I tried to run HTOP through it. Yeah? How did HTOP look? It just sat there. I think the interactive application's weirded out. It has to be something that's giving standard output. Right.

So you could make it work, but it was really cool. Now, there's another command line application along these lines. It's a little more effort to get going, although it's probably in the AR. And it's called Hollywood. This is made by Dustin Kirkland, formerly of Canonical. He made this back when he was at Canonical, and it actually has starred in television programs like NCIS and others. And there's a snap of it too, a Hollywood snap.

I don't know if it works anymore. It appears to be in the Ubuntu repos as well. Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, that's so great. And this just sets up a totally fake, like you would see on television, terminal screen that makes it look like your computer is doing all kinds of cool stuff. So cool, in fact, that like I mentioned, it ended up on TV because it does what it says. It's that good. Have you installed it?

You should totally install it, Wes. I kind of want to install it too and just have it up on the screen so then when our, you know, like. If anyone stops by the studio. Yeah, when any of our visitors stop by, we'll have this up on all of our studio screens. They'll be like, wow, that's a high-tech studio. So it's called Hollywood. Oh, yep, here we go. Got it going.

Can I see? Look at that. That is legitimately freaking awesome. Look at how busy I am. You are doing so much stuff right now. You're a real multitasker, Wes Payne. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash lucky334.

Those are, you know, that's what Linux is for right there. Right there. Not all this other stuff. You know, I love that we still really love having fun. That's the spirit of Linux that I really appreciate. It's like we can get all this work done, obviously, and do some impressive stuff, but there's always a little hint of some fun in there.

So I love it. It's kind of one of the first things you find, right, when you come to Linux. You're like, oh, look at all this weird stuff and all these repos I can find. It never stops. Can I give you a tip to zhuzh it up a little bit? Run those, those two picks, under cool retro term.

Oh, yeah. Cool retro term and those picks together, full screen, you're welcome. That's all I have to say on that. And, gentlemen, with that, it brings us to the end of this special holiday edition where we all walk away as sore losers. I guess we both got one right, Wes. We better practice our skills before we have to make the next set of predictions. Well, okay.

Better keep practicing because that's coming up next, Wes. Thank you everyone so much for tuning in. Hope you had a great 2019. This show will continue on. We're not live, but there's still new episodes in the feeds at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Thanks so much for joining us. Check jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for when we are back. Why don't you make it a 2020 goal to join us? We'll see you in the future. Thank you. well that stings a little bit that's a humbling experience you know what i really hope man i really hope that somebody takes this nms and this uh hollywood

script and is working in it and they run it across the room. One of their co-workers notices and is like, what in the hell are they doing? Man, if I were in IT, I'd put this up on a virtual desktop, and whenever the old Boskies walk up, swap it. Boss mode. Absolutely. Do you remember an MSN messenger back in the day?

Control space to hide all your windows. Boss mode's still a thing in a few apps, yeah. It still exists out there. I mean, how many different ways can you browse Reddit? Boss mode or parent mode, take your pick.