LINUX Unplugged - 346: The One-Click Trap

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

We debate the dangers and advantages of one-click deployments. Then Dan from elementary OS shares an AppCenter for Everyone update. Plus a big batch of feedback that kicks off some wide-ranging discussions. Special Guests: Danielle Foré and Neal Gompa.

All right, we got to get started. Our pre-show of work from home war stories could have, we should have put it all on the show, but I wasn't recording. I am, I'm sorry, guys. I've been doing a little bit of tech support for family members. Have you, have you run into this? Oh yeah. It's, it's rough for them because like their wifi networks were designed for just casual

browsing, you know, looking, looking stuff up on the phone, maybe a YouTube video here and there. I mean, my mom's at the kitchen table and the Wi-Fi is on the other side of the house. Yeah. So now they're doing video calls and it's a whole different ballgame. That's something that we've gotten down, but other people are struggling with. The biggest fail I heard about recently is my buddy. He's a political science professor. He's had to take his lectures online and that's a lot for him to figure out. I don't think he's got a lot of guidance from the university. So I recommended some microphone thinking he's going to record a video that he's working on. I asked what he was using to record, and you won't guess this.

So he's making it available for YouTube or just for students? How's he distributing it? I think he's uploading to Blackboard, the education software. Oh, okay, so like an internet kind of style thing. All right. Got to guess OBS. OBS, that's a good guess. I mean, that's classic, right? Yeah.

I'm going to say he's using... He's on a Mac here. Zoom. I'll say he's using Zoom. Oh, yeah. Okay, that's a good guess, too. No, it's PowerPoint. What? What? Excuse me? Why? Come on. Who knew PowerPoint could record audio? No!

So is he uploading, like, 100 megabyte PPT files? It's going to be a giant PPT file on Blackboard. Did the students have to download? Is his voice just going to pop up on the slide? Oh, man. Hello, friends, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Oh, I cannot believe this. I'm cracking up at that PowerPoint story. Well, Wes, we have a really fun episode today. You and I are going to get into some turnkey Linux solutions and then share our thoughts on those types of tools a little bit and some of the things that we played around with. But more importantly than that,

you went trolling through the old mailbox and we have a ton of really awesome feedback. So that's going to be a great, I'm like, that's the part that we're going to do the rest of the show so we can get to that part. It turns out we've saved up an excellent batch. A good batch. It's a great batch, you might say. We also have, of course, some community news and all of those goodies.

But before we get to there, I'm going to say in the morning over there to Mr. Cheese Bacon. Hey, Cheesy. Hello, everybody. How's it going? How are you doing over there in the Texas? Doing all right these days? Yeah, getting my 80-year-old father set up on his Wi-Fi network,

which he doesn't know the password to. Yeah, it's been about my story, too. And then, of course, a very hearty, time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lung, to the virtual lug, time-approves greetings to that virtual lung. Time, to the virtual lug. Time-approves greetings, Mumble Room. Hello.

Greetings. Hello. Holy smacks. You see all them people in there, Wes? Oh, and Tyler just gets in right under. So hello. Sneaking in. This is just in the on-air.

Of course, we have quiet listening, too. But on-air, we have 17 folks. 2-Bit, Ace Nomad, Big Daddy Linux joining us. Bruce, Carl, Computer Kid. Neil's in there.icleNate, Dan the Rabbit, nice to see you, Dan, Frank's in there, John, Carnal, KStress, KStress, I'm going to go with that, MiniMac, hey MiniMac, always great to see you there, Stu, and of course TechMav. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Everybody working from home? Everybody staying safe?

You know it. It's a good time to join your virtual lug. It's sort of the most social interaction you're going to get if you're staying home. I'm glad we're all here together. Yeah, we're not socially distancing. Not here. We're physically distancing, but not socially. So actually, while I'm making light of the situation, I want to talk about a very serious response that a community is doing

to help organizations like LinuxFest Northwest and others that are impacted by the COVID-19 related cancels of events. And the group is called FOSSresponders.com. And they write, COVID-19 is impacting the open source industry in many ways. If your community has been impacted, please let us know. We are actively looking for ways to help. Help may come in many forms, such as advice on how to cancel and negotiate your event contracts.

That's great. That is helpful. How to manage digital events, also great. And individual or organizational financial support. So they're obviously collecting funds through their collective as well, which that's at opencollective.com. You can find out more about that. I'll have a link in the show notes. But this got me thinking, I'm going to look in to see what we can do too for this. I don't know

if maybe we work with this organization or we work directly with some events that are essentially, you know, event bailouts or something. So that way these can maybe come back with a vengeance in 2021. And so, yeah, we have to take this year off from getting together and celebrating in person as a community, but maybe we can do it better than ever in 2021. I think this is something I would like us as a team to look into, and I want to reach out to them too and kind of figure out what they're a bit more about.

Yeah, I mean, we don't want these conferences to go away. No, in fact, I was going to save this for the housekeeping, but while we're talking about this now, Carla, there's an update for Texas Linux Fest too. And is it, is it, or is the language you're using rescheduled at this point or is it canceled? The physical event is canceled. We're still going to attempt some kind of virtual presence, maybe just be recorded sessions and things like that. We're working with our speakers now to see who else is interested in doing that. The language we put up on the announcement was rescheduled because we definitely want to still plan for a 2021 event with a physical presence.

Does not running the event cost money in a way, as in like sponsor revenue does not end up coming in, or is the cost savings and not having the event such that the organization as it is around Texas Linux Fest is fine. That's going to vary by event and by venue and by sponsor. It's just a lot of it depends. We got lucky. Our venue worked with us and was able to give us a full refund on the deposits we'd paid so far.

Oh, good. And we just plan on, we wanted to just roll that directly into a 2021 deposit. And that's essentially what we'll do with the refund, but that's the way it worked out. We're kind of under act of God type language in contracts at this point. That's good to hear. I'm glad. Because I do worry that some of these events may be fragile, financial fragile, you know what I'm trying to say, and that something like this could knock them out, and I'd hate to see that. Like this could knock them out. And I just, I'd hate to see that.

Yeah, we're real thankful that for our event, we're backed by the same nonprofit as Scale. So we get to lean on their foundation and their lawyers for any kind of the contract stuff, which a lot of us have no experience with. Yeah, that's very valuable. Well, I also noticed that you guys have set up so that if you've already registered for 2020, that you've basically just rolled that registration over to 2021. So. Absolutely. Here's to having a bigger and better 2021 then. Yeah, the idea is that people will just keep their registrations and then show up in 2021 in the spring.

If anyone actually does need a refund for whatever reason, we can process those as just a little bit of manual work. And we want people to want the default to be rolled over to 2021. That's good to hear. Thank you, Carl. I think I'm going with gusto next year. Colonel, you had a local event impacted as well. Yeah, there's actually two events. One has already been canceled and the other one is in limbo right now because it's completely volunteer and community funded. And so if they cancel the event, it basically means

that the organization that puts it on is no longer and we'll have to reorganize as a brand new event. Wow. Yeah, there's been a lot of plans that have been in place for a long time that are getting impacted by this across the board. And you know, it's significant when even the corners of our community are being pretty dramatically impacted. It's across all spectrums of life. that are getting impacted by this across the board. And you know it's significant when even the corners of our community are being pretty dramatically impacted. It's across all spectrums of life. I was looking forward to getting more information about NVIDIA's plans with the Nauvoo driver.

There was an event at GDC that we were, or GTC, sorry, that we were going to cover here on the show. And we were going to keep our peepers out and see what NVIDIA had to say. And there was talk in their announcement about working upstream with the project more and all of that. As GTC has transitioned to a virtual event, NVIDIA has not picked up their slot where

an engineer was going to talk about NUVU, including signed firmware behavior, documentation and patches and plans for future NVIDIA kernel drivers. So it's going to be a really juicy talk by John Hubbard, but unfortunately it looks like it's been canceled and because only a small handful of the original talks are going to get picked up and recorded, NVIDIA's won't be one of them. Boy, I hope some of this information comes out another way

because if it's true, if this development and work upstream is happening, I want to hear about it. We'll put an invite out to John Hubbard if you want to come on the show and just tell us right here on the pod. Let's do it. Let's do it. I'd like to know, too. I am pretty happy to say that System76 has responded to one of the areas of criticism in the past,

and that's battery life with a brand new Lemur. I believe it's pronounced Lemur Pro, and it starts at just over $1,000, just over $1,000. But here's the big, big pitch for this one, battery life. They're saying you can watch all of the Lord of Rings in 10 hours, read Wikipedia articles for 16 hours, and write code and Vim for 21 hours straight without plugging in. And it's not giant. I mean, it doesn't seem like it has an oversized battery. It's a slim, nice-looking laptop. Yeah. It's got a 73-watt-hour battery in there, USB-C charging, and it's 2.2 pounds.

The screen is 14.1 inches. It's a 1080p IPS matte finish display. You can get it with an i5 or an i7 are in there. And that i7 turbos up to 4.9 gigahertz. And up to 40 gigs of memory. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, 40 gigs. That's going to make me pretty happy.

Two M.2 drives in there, so you can get up to 4 terabytes of storage. This is a monster in a tiny package. This is going to be a seller. I think this one's worth reviewing. This looks like it's a really nice box.

It arrives, they say, in early April. This one, I think, is a ThinkPad competitor. I mean, it's thinner than our T480s. It just seems like a good machine to get some work done. Yeah. Big trackpad, too. Fits in your bag. You can easily bring it to and from work.

Mm-hmm. What I like about their default disclaimer for this battery life that they're claiming is that it's default level brightness. So it's not like you're turning your screen all the way down. There's no hidden marketing lingo in there. Legitimately, that kind of battery life is pretty incredible it's got one of those screens too that folds all the way down you know all you can fold it flat yes and that matters i mean whether you're trying to use it in the car or

on the plane i mean it's way better to throw that way i kid but i mean it would be yeah it looks really nice. It looks like they've really got something here. So I want to take a look at this one. I think that one is. I think that's the type of laptop they'll sell in a high quantity for probably a couple of years. So nice to see that coming. I mean, I think they heard the feedback loud and clear on the previous laptops of this lineage and said, okay, battery life it is. And they delivered.

But they delivered in a way that is, in the areas I find competitive. Just my final thoughts on this. I really appreciate full-size USB-A, full-size HDMI, USB-C, and it looks like it still has traditional barrel charging too. So it looks like you can do both if you want.

It's just a flexible, nonjudgmental machine. That's perfect. When are you going to give me one of those? Huh? Well, I mean, it's not Christmas yet. You want to do a little housekeeping there, Mr. Westpain? Oh, please. We've been trapped inside.

We got to keep things tidy. I can't wait to get to the feedback either. That's part of it. That's part of it. It's kind of early for the housekeeping, but we got some really good emails. So first and foremost, here at the top of the housekeeping, I want to mention last week's Brunch with Brent. Stuart Langridge from Bad Voltage and Plug Radio fame sits down for brunch, and it was a fantastic chat. If you have not heard Stuart talk about the command line and Google

search, it's going to blow your mind. It's going to blow your mind. And then you come back and you listen to everything Chris has been saying for the last couple years and go, oh my god, Chris was right. I know. But no, really seriously, I joke. But it was a really thought-provoking episode because he has a really, really great piece

about the command line and the UI of the command line. But then also, towards the end, he has such a killer point about the way we put our expectations and morality onto others. And we judge people for using this distro or this hardware platform. But he just says it in such a beautiful, eloquent way. I invite you to check it out. It's Brunch with Brent, and it's extras.show slash 65. way, I invite you to check it out. It's Brunch with Brent and it's extras.show slash 65.

And, you know, there's been tons of good brunches, so if you haven't been listening recently... Now is a great time to catch up on that. Start with that one. That's the great thing about brunch. You can just listen in any order. Pick your favorites and then go back and fill in. If you have a little extra time,

you're working from home and you want to join us, Linux Unplugged is live on Tuesdays. You can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time. You can just add it to your calendar. And of course, our chat room is irc.geekshed.net pound jupiter broadcasting. That's the chat room. Maybe you've recently set up a microphone now that you're working from home when you want to join our mumble room. We'd love it.

Also, the conversation continues in the old Telegram room. And that's at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram. It's rocking in there. So check that out as well. If you haven't tried out Telegram before, you know, all you got to do is just sign a contract to the government of Russia and then install it. It's totally easy. It's a reasonable contract. Yeah, it's totally reasonable. Now, a bit of bad news here in the housekeeping. Yeah, it's totally reasonable. Now, a bit of bad news here in the housekeeping. Unfortunately, FOS Talk Live 2020 has been canceled. It was planned for June, but with all of the things going on right now in the world.

Understandable. Yeah. It's very unlikely that London's going to be back up to full operation by then. But it's possible, but it's unlikely. So it's just best for everyone for planning purposes that it gets moved to next year. It's unfortunate, but that's happening everywhere. You just have more time to plan your trip for next year. Yeah. Now, but the good news,

Unfilter's back. The Unfilter program, unfilter.show. There's a lot going on in the world that is not Linux-related right now, but we don't need to make our Linux shows about that. We're trying to create a space for you that's not really focused on that, because you can get that anywhere else. Unfilter is that place, unfilter.show. It's a reboot.

It's tighter. It's quicker. It's more on topic. It is not part of Jupyter Broadcasting. I am doing this on my own. My opinions expressed in the Unfilter program are my own, just something I'm doing because, honestly, the audience has forced me into it. So you buy all that bacon yourself. I do.

I finance all bacon. But really, seriously, I joke, but daily, multiple times a day, I'm still getting people asking me to relaunch the show because they don't know I relaunched it. That's the best part because they're so excited when they find out. Yes, it's been really something. So unfiltered.show, there's like three or four episodes out now. And that's really all I'm probably going to talk about here

because I want to keep that stuff out. I want to keep JB focused on Linux, open source, free software, and I want to keep these shows focused on that. There's other places you can get that stuff. So do. Anything else? I don't think so. All right.

Well, then that, gentlemen, wraps up the old housekeeping. All right, before we get into the feedback, Wes and I wanted to just do a little bit on the one-click style deployment of software. You've seen this any time you've spun up a DigitalOcean droplet, or there's different ways you can get this here distro or that distro, and it gives you a quote-unquote app store where you can deploy software. But there's some classics. There's some kings and titans in this segment.

And the go-to is Turnkey Linux. Turnkey Linux, which is roughly based on Debian. There's Turnkey Linux Core, which is a virtual machine image, typically, based around Debian that then you can build on top of or utilize images that others have built on top of. And there's a lot of them. I mean, kind of all the classic applications you could think of, right? WordPress, a whole bunch of stuff for monitoring and setting up DNS, or maybe even you want Active Directory running. There's a turnkey solution for that. Yeah, the idea would be if you kind of all of a sudden need infrastructure.

If for some reason you have an urgent need for infrastructure, you could one-click deploy this VM. It would be, in theory, set up with good practices, which from a Coursera glance, it does actually seem to follow. Yeah, I mean, they've got tools and some services you can use, and they've made it very easy to integrate with things like AWS. So they've got a link to set up. You can go set this up right up, spin up a new EC2 instance

using their pre-built images. It's all open source. You can see how it's done. You can go set this up right up, spin up a new EC2 instance using their pre-built images. It's all open source. You can see how it's done. You can customize and build on top of it if you want. But if you're not particular, you don't care, you don't have a bunch of requirements that you need to integrate with for corporate, you're just a small business that suddenly needs a GitLab instance to store some documentation in, this seems like it might work really nicely. Yeah, I could see the other useful scenario being

you're working from home now and you need some on-premises resources like a great one would be an on-premises GitLab instance or something for notes or chat. You know, you want to stand up a local chat. That's where this comes in. And like Wes said, you can deploy it on EC2 or you can download a VM and run it in VirtualBox

or run it on KVM or whatever, which is kind of what we played around with. And the idea to me now is funny, like download an entire VM just to run WordPress. Like that seems... It's almost outdated. It does almost seem outdated. It seems like a older way of doing things. But there is a nice sort of traditional management aspect to VMs that I can really get behind.

It's a really well understood problem. There's a lot of rich tooling around it. Easy to snapshot, easy to just make it production grade. You can roll back really easily. You can download new ones. So there's some nice aspects of it. But if you do want something a little newer, there's projects that are more built around deploying to cloud instances,

other cloud services. Some of these make it so easy within seconds to send up a Mattermost instance or a RocketChat and Matrix, and it's really super straightforward. I noticed that the two you seemed to bring up first when we were talking about this was Sandstorm, and then was it Bitnami is the other one? Well, that was just in my mind because they got acquired by VMware last year. So it seems like that sort of prepackaged and Bitnami's word for that

is stack, is a popular idea. I guess that speaks to some of the things we've been talking about recently as Linux is the runtime. It's just this environment to run your applications on. But for a high-level purpose, do you really care what or how it's running? And then there's Sandstorm.

They seem to really be going after key things. They have a really well-designed website and they're like, hey, do you want to set up chat? Are you looking for project management? Are you looking for collaborative document editing? They're very focused on people that are trying to get work done, which is a pretty

clever approach. Fundamentally, all of these share one property, and that is they are one click setups that are implementing a lot of lower level stack for you that you never really have any full operational knowledge over. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, you can go figure out the systems. And I suppose if you really use this a lot, you probably have to. But unless you set it up, you don't understand it. Well, okay. I think you're going a little further than that. I wanted to just stop at that level.

So if we all agree, even if it's good or bad, that when you use one-click software deployments, you're deploying an entire stack that you don't fully operationally understand. It's kind of the value, right? Right. I think that's probably not, nobody's going to disagree with that statement. Now where I think the nuance is is, is that dangerous? Or is it necessary? So my necessary argument is such

people will never discover the reason to run these really great applications if they can't get hands-on experience firsthand of how good they are. Like, it's almost not worth learning the plumbing if you never get to use a sync. Right, I mean, if there's just this huge barrier to even try out the software or use it, you know, say for a week or a month or something, why would you invest all the time to figure out how to,

especially if you maybe aren't a Linux user, haven't deployed software before. Okay, so we all agree on that, right? That seems pretty safe. Okay, now here's the part I think is a little controversial. We should be telling people that doesn't necessarily mean they should use something like this in production. Right? It's almost like they should come with an educational labeling saying, while yes, this is production-grade software, it's a powerful enough tool software you could also it's like it's a powerful enough tool that you could also get yourself

screwed by compromised security or not doing something properly or not fully appreciating what exposing something like this to the web does and so the rest of the system gets exploited I mean there's a litany of issues that once you publish something like a chat application or a collaborative document editing application

online publicly that if you don't fully appreciate all of the operational aspects of that machine, and now you're hosting up to a thousand plus employees, I mean, I think this is, I think this is reckless. Reckless. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, you hit on a lot of key topics there, like how do we vet the security of these one-click installs? How do we know that our RocketChat one-click install doesn't have something in it that shouldn't be there? I think it's a great solution, like you said, for somebody that's interested in working at a university in the IT department and I wanted to check out Rocket Chat, then I might spin it up just for the IT guys just to kind of check it out to see if it was worth it and then do further research into spinning this up on my own with a container and orchestrating it that way. Yeah. Well, it's one thing if you're learning or it's a proof of concept. And I don't want to make it sound like these things are bad because I would absolutely use these

like you just were talking about. If we wanted to see, hey, could we switch over to Mattermost? Well, let's proof of concept it really quick before we sit there and spend an afternoon setting it up. So here's, I was kind of impressed playing with Turnkey in that if you use their service, you have some access to things like backups and migrations. Like if you want to set things up,

destroy a server, rebuild it later, you can just restore from their backups already. And they enable security updates by default. It seemed like there were a lot of nice defaults. And I wonder if we're accurately measuring this sort of awkward middle ground of between learners

and professionals of people that know enough to configure apt or add a PPA and set things up but might not know enough to properly configure security or set up a firewall or do know and just don't bother to whereas something like this, if done

appropriately, and that's really where the stick is here may take some of those extra steps that somebody wouldn't normally be willing to do. Now, it's only as good as do those updates keep happening, and is the configuration updated, and that's really where a lot of these services fall down in the long run. Sure. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, I want to give a couple people a chance to jump in here. Colonel, let's start with you, because I think the awkward sort of automated elephant in the room is, isn't this kind of what system management does, like Ansible? I mean, isn't this kind of what a really good Ansible setup would do is one-click deployment of your entire infrastructure? And I think a lot of people would argue that's a good thing, right? Yeah. DigitalOcean, and they provided you basically the Ansible scripts where you spin up a server, you run the Ansible script, and it's essentially a one-click deploy. Is that any different than just pressing a button and having them spin up the server? And they're probably using something

similar on the backend to deploy those one-click apps. Yeah. although I don't know if we can really compare an infrastructure provider like DigitalOcean or Linode or Azure or AWS to open-source projects online that have varying amounts of contributors and people dedicating their time. There is at least a little more onus and, in theory, resources to sort of continue those updates. But I do think there is a core nugget here. Bruce, you were making the point that this has kind of been an issue in security for IT for a while.

Yeah, so people who, you know, mess around with this kind of stuff and, you know, set up servers to try them out and self-host things or, you know, work in an IT department that's like a one- or two-man show and they're trying to, you know, find tools to make life easier or make things more efficient. These are the people that need to know what they're getting into. And one of the core issues is that a lot of them end up not knowing what they're getting into. They don't update or patch. They don't realize the security implications of things.

They don't keep up on the vulnerabilities that come up for different things. So I feel like we're basically dipping our whole leg into the issue of just IT-wide security issues, essentially. Yeah, that's sort of been something I've wondered too. Neil, this argument goes back all the way towards the early days of the command line. I'm curious to know what you think, if it's a messaging issue, maybe we should be setting expectations, or if it's something that could be solved with technology, like Wes is saying, is maybe if the systems are built appropriately, they could be more secure than the humans could ever keep it. Well, I'm never going to be a person who will suggest that we can make a system smarter

than the people that wrote them. So I don't think that that's a good, that's a very dangerous road to go down. But I have some experience with some of these turnkey things. Something that people may not know is I was one of the is I was, I think, the first person to make an externally developed Bitnami module for deploying an application in their LAMP or WAMP stack kind of stuff back before they switched to containers. The project that I was working on back then, the Inano CMS project,

I wrote a module for their Bitnami one-click install application stuff. And it was a fair bit of work to actually get it working. But one of the things that I think we tend to forget is that people have increasingly less time to be able to explore good solutions for what they want to use. And one of the ways that I see these kinds of solutions working out is giving people a taste or the ability to explore and look at these different things quickly to see whether it might fit their needs. I agree that they're actually all very bad at being useful for production deployments. I agree that they're actually all very bad at being useful for production deployments. Some of them, like turnkey Linux, do a few things right to make it so that they could be a little bit more production worthy. But can actually use them for maybe small isolated cases where it's not necessarily internet facing. The complexity is that people keep trying to make the software more complicated, which just keeps pushing forward this desire to have no knowledge deployment strategies for all of these things. Think Kubernetes, GitLab.

Yes, I was just going to say that. I was just thinking that. I mean, Eucalyptus and OpenStack were the first ones that really pulled all this off. And if anybody remembers Eucalyptus, then they'll know why I said that. And there's advantages to that as well. You know, standardization, automation means it's repeatable, it's reproducible, and you know,

that's obviously a good thing in production. So I think, like you said too, in part, it gives access to this software that is so great, like this free software that has been created that is really, really something powerful and useful for people. It's kind of silly to lock it behind these complicated systems you have to set up. At the same time, as a community, we need to not only encourage people to explore, but then be there to help them and guide them to setting up a complete secure system. And sometimes it may never come to that. You know, maybe some people just want to tinker and they put it on their land and no big deal. And that's great.

Well, I think maybe it's useful to compare it to like the container scene. So a lot of times you might use the official container, but in the case of a project like Linux Server, you're going to use theirs. There's a large community of people using that, but it does seem like there's an active community. And with containers, the scope is a little bit smaller. It's not usually a full system. It's as tightly packaged as it can be. Yeah. That's why

I feel like the container model is slightly better, but not much better. And it turns out a lot of those end up being almost full systems anyway. Yes. I remember last year during Linux Fest Northwest having a conversation with Wimpy, and currently I run just a personal NextCloud instance using the Snap. And I told Wimpy, I was like, you know, it's still weird for me to use a Snap. And this is, you know, kind of diving deeper into desktop usage of these kinds

of technologies and these kind of one-click installs. But, and he asked me why. And I said, because I didn't configure it really. Like I didn't get my hands dirty. You know, I just basically snap installed and set up a let's encrypt. And then I was off to the races and, you know, haven't really looked back now. It's been rock solid and I haven't had any issues with it. But did I really learn? I mean, I'd set it up before previously, so I knew what I was doing. But, you know, it's still kind of different for someone that's been using Linux for years and is used to basically screwing it all up by, you know, not knowing what I'm doing and having to go back and read documentation and what should be in the comp file and such.

Yeah, I agree. I experimented with the snap of NextCloud and I had that same feeling. I have kind of a very optimistic outlook on where Home Assistant is going with this. Yes, Home Assistant. Home Assistant recently went through a bit of a rebranding. There was Home Assistant and Haas.io.

Haas.io is more like an entire OS that includes Home Assistant and the ability to install add-ons. I'm not sure I was ever clear on that, so maybe the new definition will be better. So now it's just called Home Assistant. Haas.io is just now Home Assistant. What's the old Home Assistant? Home Assistant Core, which is just the core application. Without all the add-ons and stuff. Home Assistant core, which is just the core application.

Without all the add-ons and stuff. But the add-ons are essentially Docker containers that you manage through the Home Assistant interface. And it's everything that you would expect from Plex to DuckDNS to Matrix and all the great applications. Wow. Yeah. And it's just in the Home Assistant UI. And I think the reason why I like that is it is implicit that this is really something for your LAN. Right?

You're not going to put a Home Assistant instance up for a 2,000-user company. This is implicit to the end users. This is something you're sharing. We're going to give you the options to keep it automatically up to date with just a checkbox. Yeah. It's that kind of stuff. And it's all right in one dashboard for one application. It brings it all into one point, and it's done really well.

And there's a whole bunch of community add-ons, too, for all kinds of stuff that aren't in the main add-on store. It's pretty much every major open-source application you'd want. So you deploy Home Assistant. You get all the niceties of Home Assistant, and there's always something for everybody. And then through that, you can deploy these applications on your LAN.

And I think it's a safe way to do it. They're staying automatically up to date. I like it a lot. So, if you're thinking about doing this and you haven't pulled the trigger on Home Assistant yet, go check out the self-hosted podcast. Self-hosted.show? Self-hosted.show.

I got so many URLs. We need to eventually of course everything you know what we should just really plug the main page. It's all at

jupiterpodcasting.com. Yeah. I remember that one. That one. Never going to forget if I can find my bill. Anyways so yeah

go check out self hosted. We talk about home assistant there. All kinds of great tips. We have an instance here in the studio.

I have an instance at home. I love it. I just think it's one of the greatest. There's so many integrations. And it's very easy to get started with. And then now that they're adding those add-ons to get all these great apps, poof, it's magic.

See, I don't even know that I want to use those, but I can see myself just using them because it sounds so easy. Well, like, one of them is MB. One of them is Plex. Just one click install, and you got a Plex server, you know? That's kind of nice. I feel like

I'm kind of with Wes here on I'll wait for it all to settle down and then to choose a name. No, they're done now. That's it. No, they're done. They've set the name. They've locked it in. They've made it official. I mean, I'm not a big fan. It's all confusing, but Do I have to start saying Core?

Yeah, call it Core. Yeah. Well, before we get to the feedback, I thought maybe we'd check in with old Dan the rabbit there in the mumble room. I think he is probably fresh off of a virtual sprint or sprinting virtually. I'm not sure how we've, what we call it. How's it going, Dan? It's going good, man. How are you doing? Good. I'm healthy. Are you staying healthy? Not sick? I am. Yeah. I just, you know, I work from home always. So just continuing the quarantine. Yeah. So you've already got the Wi-Fi that works. You've got an internet connection that's good enough for you and the wife to be home and

for work to still happen. This is what a lot of the audience is struggling with is maybe they only worked from home, but now the entire family's home. And so like they don't have the bandwidth anymore. We have coworkers struggling with the same thing. So thankfully, that hasn't impacted you. So I assume then the virtual sprint was productive? It was definitely a challenge because we kind of stated in our campaign that it's important for this kind of product to be working together in person because there's so many stakeholders and it touches different disciplines and areas of expertise. So we did our best to try to build what we could. But at the end of the week,

it was pretty clear that we didn't build the product we wanted to. There were quite a few times where because people are in different time zones or people are unavailable who have a certain expertise that we ended up working in a direction and then someone would come online and we'd have to throw it all away because it was the completely wrong direction. So we did make progress on a lot of good prototyping, like a lot of good user flows. We've got some little throwaway server implementations and an idea of how API should look. But we still need an in-person sprint to actually deliver the final product. Yeah. So it's sort of something's done, but definitely gonna have to reschedule an in-person event down the road type situation. Yeah, absolutely. And you know what was crazy too was like, not only do we have all this stuff going on with like, okay, you know, plans totally disrupted.

We're trying to do a remote sprint now. Right. But on the second day of the sprint, our container that auto-deploys Voladoc was pulling from somewhere wrong and the build server got jacked up and so we lost documentation on the second day. So we had to spend all day trying to debug this so we could get our documentation back. Before you could make any more progress.

I bet so many people are having tech issues in the last couple of weeks. So do you feel like it is not very doable in this setup for just the spread of the team? It's just too much. Because the other thing I would think in the back of my mind is not only is it all these different tech issues and whatnot, but it's just not a very good time to be focused

with everything that's going on. Yeah, exactly. It's like people are worried about, oh crap, do I need to get to the store before it opens so that I can get food and toilet paper? People's minds are in other places than like building this thing right now. So, um, it definitely seems like, uh, our kind of path forward right now is to pivot and, and not focus on trying to deliver this product, but we're going to work on flat packing all of our first party stuff and setting up like an internal repo and kind of like go a little bit of a different route there.

And so we can still kind of work on developing a little bit of a flat pack environment for ourselves. And then when like travel starts up again and people aren't worried about getting sick and everything looks OK, then we can reschedule to actually do this sprint for real and deliver the product we promised. I mean, it seems clever because that's work that would have had to have gotten done eventually, right? Yeah, exactly. So if we can break it up and do like a smaller focused thing to kind of get experience to where it'll benefit us in the long run, then I think that's our best plan. I think that right now our focus is making sure we deliver like all the backer rewards and things like that and like fulfill as much of the promise of the campaign as we can right now. And then let everybody know that, hey, we're going to come back and we're going to build

this thing. Like it didn't happen this week, but it's going to happen. How's the reception been in the elementary OS community? Are they disappointed? Are they understanding? How's that reception? So far, I feel like the feedback that we've gotten is people are super understanding and they've just said, you know, that's good that you guys are staying safe and being responsible and stuff like that.

I haven't really heard anything negative, so that's been really awesome. I think people know that we have a track record of delivering on what we say we're going to do, so I'm really glad for that. Yeah. And nobody wants their favorite distributions developers to get sick. That's not good. I have one question for you, Dan. Do I still get my hoodie? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I'm going to, I'm going to work on fulfilling the back reward. So shipping out like all the stickers and mugs and hoodies and stuff. And we actually spent some time on elementary OS six images, which ended up being a little bit more

a challenge than we expected because there were some changes to upstream libraries and stuff. So we're still planning to make sure we can get those images out for like private beta for backers. And so all the rewards are going to stay on schedule. Well, that's very good of you. I mean, that's just additional work while you're struggling to get work done, but I think the community probably appreciates that. So I'm, I guess it's mixed, right? But it sounds like you guys were able to eventually kind of get your heads into a groove that got some necessary work done. And I got to say, it was now seems like it was a foregone conclusion. You know, when you contacted me the night before and said, Hey, the sprint's off. I thought, huh? Yeah, I guess it's going that way. Yeah. But now today it just seems like that was so

obviously what you had to do. Right. Do you feel that way? Yeah. It was weird when it happened because it kind of was like slowly crept up where it was like, all of a sudden it was weird when it happened because it kind of was like slowly crept up where it was like, all of a sudden it was like a couple of people were like, Hey, you know, um, it seems like it's probably not a good idea to travel right now. And then like countries started locking down and then it was like, okay, so travel is going to be restricted like midway through the sprint. So you don't know what it's going to be like for people to try to get home. And like, this is becoming really obviously a big problem. And it just kind of came out of nowhere. And so it was like the day before we were all like, okay, we need to cancel all the flights, cancel the Airbnb, get as many refunds as possible,

and that kind of stuff. And just focus on damage control and and this is clearly not going to happen right you know crazy enough i decided well i'm all packed up i'm still going to go out for for a ride and a bit of a drive and boy was that dumb and uh long story short because i documented it in the work life rv podcast but long story short i just was pulling the rv into the junkyard this morning to hook up uh because i had to get some work done and as i was pulling the RV into the junkyard this morning to hook up because I had to get some work done. And as I was pulling in, Hadiyah said to me, she said, you know, if we had gone to Denver, we would be pulling into the junkyard right now today. Just as we were pulling into the junkyard, this is the day we would have been got back and I would have come down to the studio and talked

about the trip to Denver and all of that. That would have been today. So it's pretty weird. But now it just seems so obvious it had to happen. So, well, Dan, thanks for the update. And I'm glad to hear that some work was still done. And I can only imagine it must have been extremely challenging. But I hope team morale is okay. Yeah, I think, you know, at first it was kind of like disappointing. Like, oh, man, like everybody's really excited to do this.

And, like, it's a bummer when you think you're going to go hang out with your friends and do some cool stuff. And then it's like, nope, you got to say inside and then, oops, we're not going to actually going to be able to deliver this. But I think that everybody's in a good headspace right now and feeling like that's okay. We got a lot done. We're going to pivot. We're still going to fulfill that promise.

Eventually, you know, it's not today, but it's coming. Yeah. Very good. Well, keep up the good work and keep not today, but it's coming. Yeah. Very good. Keep up the good work and keep us posted on how it goes in future developments. Looking forward to that. Yeah, we'll definitely have more detail on our blog soon. We're working on a blog

post right now, so look out for that. Blog.elementary.io. Excellent. Also, check out Dan on User Air. He's the best host on there, let's be honest. The most reasonable, for sure. Right, for sure. Yeah, error.show.

Those other guys have been loving User Air so much. Thanks for joining us, Dan. Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys, let's do a little bit of feedback. What do you say? Ooh. Yeah, on writes in with the first one on the backup software tips. It says, hey, guys, first, love your shows.

Thanks so much for teaching me so much about Linux. It's a lot of O's there. And open source software. And, of course, the community in general. I've followed many of your excellent advice. Okay, wow, he's really laying it on thick here. So here's my question. I've heard you talk multiple times about backup strategies

and the software you're using to take them backups. But I can't remember what episode it is. So could you just please point me to the episodes or just tell me the answer real quick so maybe I could just get to work? Thanks in advance for your tips and et cetera. Well, Jan, however you say it, that is a great question. And my current backup love affair is with duplicity, just gosh darn love duplicity i have it going to two different cloud services it does the old encryption as a nice web ui i make sure that my container configurations and my docker compose files get backed up every single night on my main

servers and then the uh the data itself is a little more ephemeral in this case because it's media that is, I guess, could be re-ripped or re-retrieved somehow. It would not be ideal, but it's just too much data. And so duplicity just takes care of all the configurations. And any time I change a single line in a Docker Compose file, it gets iterated with duplicity. What about you? What are you using for backup these days, Mr. Payne? I mean, it sort of depends on where I'm going. Sometimes it's just good old rsync.

Where are you going? I know, right? Or rclone, excellent. If you're going to go sync to some sort of cloud storage provider, so I'm using that as well. I also really like borg-backup. I found it to just be simple, easy to understand, and it's got a great name.

That's the tech snap in you. All right, good enough. Did you want to make a mention for, what was it, that both Alan and, what do they love? What's it called? What's their backup program? Bacula. Yeah, Bacula. Now there, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of backups, by the way, used to run quite the Bacula setup back in the day.

I mean, it's an impressive system. I had a real cool system going. Cheese, do you got any backup hot tips? For Linux? No, I just live just wild. I don't back up Linux because I can replace it so easily on my laptop or something like that. I do snapshot droplets and things like that that I have just to have backups of those, and then I pull them down. But other than that, not really. With my work machine,

which is a Mac because of the Adobe Suite, I just use Time Machine. Sure. Oh, yeah, we've talked about back in time before, and we're going to talk about time, was it time shift? Yeah, time shift. Time shenanigans. You don't want to be messing around with the timeline. If Star Trek has taught me anything.

Yeah, alternate reality, Chris writes in, speaking of Star Trek, regarding Chris's, whoa, Chris talking about Chris being read by Chris, regarding Chris's comments related to his Mac experience on a recent episode. I was a Mac user for years and ultimately dumped my Mac hardware and switched to GP hardware? What is that? General purpose, maybe?

Ah, I bet. Yeah. General purpose hardware and Linux. I'm now a happy man, Jero user, although I use many distros. Wanted to share a comment regarding, though, Mac applications that I wish were available on Linux. There's a firewall application for macOS called Little Snitch that only blocks inbound traffic, and actually, I'll make a clarification here, blocks outbound traffic, I think is what he meant to say. And then it gives you a notification of all applications

that are attempting to connect to the internet, the domain name they're trying to connect to, and the port. That's a very simple GUI and dock indicator. And you can find, if you just Google search Little Snitch. There's been attempts, and I've used some of them to recreate it for Linux, but nothing comes close, he says, to the functionality and ease of use for Little Snitch for Mac. Enjoy the shows.

He also enjoyed the post show where we talked about old hardware. I agree. We should do that more. I think this nicely encapsulated a lot of what you were trying to say, honestly, because it's true. I've used Little Snitch, and it's excellent. And on Linux, we have all the tooling. All the kernel primitives are certainly there. It's just that we don't have a competitive, nicely wrapped up,

rich UX experience application that's been continually updated and developed. Right. There are a couple of them out there. I'm sure people will link them to us, but they're not really at the same level. Although, to be honest, I have not used Little Snitch in years. For all I know, it's unusable on Catalina. That wouldn't surprise me. That's a thing. Let me tell you.

Matthew writes in with Life at Microsoft. He says, hey, y'all, I'm one of the Microsoft employees you described in your Linux episode, last episode, which was, I think he's talking about our time with Windows 10 and WSL2. Yeah, I think so. He says, I only started as a regular employee last year. Oh, right. I'm sorry. I don't mean to, but I just want to give people context. I don't mean to keep stopping.

But he means when we talked about employees that have joined Microsoft recently, and they've only known this new version of Microsoft. They haven't been there in the launch days of Windows 95 and 98 and Exchange, right? They've been there since, you know. After Microsoft loves Linux. Yeah, since Visual Studio Code was a thing and, yeah, all that. So he says, I'm one of those employees. I've been a huge open source enthusiast and a full-time Linux user for a while now. When I took my first internship, I expected to gain some experience and go elsewhere. But once I saw how much the internal culture had changed to embrace open source and be more

collaborative, I got really excited to come back. It's certainly not perfect, but it seems magnitudes better than it used to be. He says, by the way, WSL makes it much easier for me as a Linux guy to do some command line things like grep through files, so I don't have to re-look up how to do it in PowerShell. Okay, yeah, I'd probably do the same thing. Totally! I mean, PowerShell

seems like it's a great tool for a lot of people, but I already know Bash. Exactly. That'd be great. Alright, here comes another one. We're doing a whole bunch. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact if you want to send yours in. I'm going great. All right, here comes another one. We're doing a whole bunch. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact if you want to send yours in. I'm going to make you read a couple in a minute. But I'm just banging through as many of these as we can. I feel good about this.

I've been waiting to do this for a while. Mike writes in. He says, I got a Mint success story. I just wanted to thank you all for having such an amazing podcast. Wow. This is so nice. You're welcome. No wonder I like doing this. I'm a longtime Mac user,

has flirted with Linux for fun over the past 10 plus years, but never done it for my primary machine. Wow. I really thought Mac users would be a tiny, tiny percentage of our audience, and yet we keep hearing this. This is pretty cool. However, now that my MacBook Pro has gone in for yet another keyboard repair, I purchased a cheap AMD Ryzen

laptop to put Linux and test it out. I had issues with hardware support on this and almost gave up until I remembered your episode on Linux Mint. I had avoided it, assuming it was some watered-down Ubuntu for beginners. But after listening to your Mint episode, I gave it another shot, and I'm so glad I did.

Not only did Mint boot and install easier than any other distro, it's been so easy to set up, and Cinnamon has come so far since I last saw it. I'm kind of in love. So while my $2,000 flashy MacBook is in the shop, I've successfully run my SaaS company from a $250 Walmart laptop running Mint.

Thanks for all you do. That's awesome. How amazing is that? Is that not one of the definitive Linux success stories right there? When we talk about new users coming to Linux, these are the exact kind of users I like to target. Exactly. Right there.

Mike, thanks for sending that in. That's really encouraging to hear that. All right, SexyTux writes in with a really poignant email. Make a Mastodon account, please. And, okay, I thought we could talk about this one for a second. I don't really use Mastodon account, please. And, okay, I thought we could talk about this one for a second. I don't really use Mastodon much. I may have one, an account. Do you have a Mastodon account?

Oh, thanks. You know, I've definitely had one in the past. I don't know if it's current. I should check. And it seems like because I have a Twitter account, that because I am a guy who enjoys some free software from time to time, that I should probably have a Mastodon account. Just like using that same logic, it would seem like as a guy who likes himself a

little open source software from time to time, he'd be using something like Mattermost over Slack. However, here I am using Slack and using Twitter. Why is this? This seems like some sort of moral incongruity. And I just want to talk about this for a moment. I'm ashamed to be sitting next to you. It really boils down to the fact that I despise and hate social media for the most part. I don't derive very much value out of it. The main value I manage to eke out of social media with a high cost associated with it

is interacting directly with the audience. I have my bookmark set to just go to my at replies on Twitter. That's generally my interface to Twitter is I go directly to the notifications page. I interact with Twitter there. And then unless I'm sharing something, I pretty much don't use it. Not because I don't like and respect people on there, but there's often other things on there that just send my ADD mind into a rabbit hole that doesn't need to go. It's a crazy place. I find it to be of low substance and high drama. And that is the exact opposite ratio that I would like. And that just seems to be inherent to social media in general.

It's also why I'm not in 100 IRC chat rooms. I'm only in a few. It's why I'm not in a thousand Discord rooms. I'm only in a couple. I'm not in a dozenC chat rooms. I'm only in a few. It's why I'm not in a thousand Discord rooms. I'm only in a couple. I'm not in a dozen slacks. I'm in like four slacks. I don't want any more than I absolutely have to. And I feel a certain obligation to be available. And Twitter is the highest return on my time because that's where the largest network of people is.

It has the network effect. So I use Twitter. If I could snap my fingers On my time, because that's where the largest network of people is. It has the network effect. So I use Twitter. If I could snap my fingers and still maintain the same level of connection to the audience and not use Twitter, I would probably take advantage of that. But I think we all have seen friends who have very publicly quit social media in this space. Generally, if your career is on the internet, it generally behooves you to be on social media in this space. Generally, if your career is on the internet, it generally behooves you to be on social media. I think we've all seen our friends quit and then come back.

Some of them have then quit again. It's just an expectation, really. Yeah, and it's just, okay, I'll see you in three months. It's just the reality of this business a little bit. So what I have done is I try to have a balance here. If I had a Mastodon account and I had an Identica account and I had an app.net account and I had a Friendster account, I would have to be checking all of these accounts constantly. Additionally, thank the heavens, every platform has to have a messaging

system. So Instagram has messaging, Reddit has messaging. Facebook has messaging. And if any point I have ever existed on one of these platforms, people are messaging me there. And they absolutely expect me to respond. Oh, you mean you haven't been getting my Instagram DMs? Yeah, exactly. And Twitter DMs and Facebook messages. But also there's the email, right? And then there's Telegram. And there's Twitter.

There's a lot of ways to get a hold of Chris. And I just don't need Mastodon. I just don't need it. You're laughing, but I really don't need that. There's Telegram and email. And if you don't want to use Twitter, those avenues are perfectly fine. Yeah, that's great. And that's my personal philosophy.

I'm curious why you don't have it. I mean, obviously, there's a lot there to why I don't use Mastodon. It's no judgment on Mastodon itself. And if I could snap the old fingers and have the world use Mastodon instead of Twitter, I'd be there. Yeah, I think I agree with that. You know, honestly, I should probably spend some more time playing with Mastodon, and maybe I will after the show. I don't use Twitter that much. There are people on there I like, and I sometimes find things of value

or conversations that are worthwhile, but it's just so much noise. Yeah, you use it less than I do. Yeah. Yeah, so social media is just not a big part of what you do. Or at least find myself in smaller communities. I could probably do a better job

of managing and pruning through Twitter, but I don't. Anybody in the Mumble room have thoughts on this? I know to some people it seems like maybe I should just drop Twitter for moral reasons and switch to Mastodon. I don't find that to be a valid argument because the whole purpose of these platforms

is to communicate with people. Honestly, I would love to see Twitter stay a closed source and make horrible decisions and have the world stop using it. So I'm kind of all for it. I think that'd be a best case scenario. But I'm curious if anybody in the, like Dan, have you thought about this or do you go the other direction

because you're trying to get as many users as possible? What's your thoughts? I just went to the app store and I'm downloading a new Mastodon client right now. Really? So you do kind of try to go to where the people are as much as possible. You know, I haven't been using Mastodon in a while.

I'm one of those lame people that has a bot that pushes my tweets to Mastodon. Yeah. But I want to give it another chance. I haven't checked it out in a while. There's new clients out. Why not? Let's do it. There is also, I tend to get a little too into things. I feel like I get to the stage where I have to pick a server.

And then I want to know, how do I pick a server? And which one's the best? And I know I can talk to anyone on any server, but where do I start? And Twitter, it was just like, oh, I'm already there. I do take Dan's point, though. It's like, you do kind of need to check in. You have to reconsider these positions from time to time.

Yeah, that's very true. Of course, but I'm still in this, I want to reduce a little bit, because I feel like I get so many notifications out of nowhere and stuff from so many places and apps already. It's too much, but you know, maybe technology

will save me or maybe technology will make it worse. All right, we're going to get through a couple of more here. Mike writes in, I'm enjoying all of the chat on the show about WSL, but I've got a perspective on this. I'm surprised you haven't heard elsewhere. I work as a web developer on ASP.NET and MS Azure, and I have to run Windows for this. I do this in a VM using KVM and QMU running my preferred Linux distro, which is currently Arch and GNOME.

It seems to me pretty clear that Windows must be more of a burden than a benefit to Microsoft at this point. The OS, as a concept, is pretty much 100% commoditized by now, and Windows offers negligible benefits to anyone except a way of running apps such as Adobe. More than that, Windows is an absolute nightmare. The architecture is creaking all over the place. The registry, the installation subsystem, the file system, the whole thing must be an albatross around Microsoft's neck at this point. They make almost no money from it. Profits are from Office 365 and Azure.

So it almost certainly costs them more to maintain than the benefit it now brings. For several years, MS has been facilitating running their own crown jewels like SQL Server on Linux. I see WSL as the vehicle, the Trojan horse, if you like, that will, over time, turn Windows into a Linux-based OS from the inside out. Hmm. He says it's not too hard to plot a trend line.

We all laughed when they first came out with the name WSL. But we're not laughing now. And to be clear, he says I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theories about Microsoft trying to subvert Linux in some evil way. I just think this is common sense business for them. And it's just a little too early to make a public announcement to that effect. Just my two cents, loving the show, keep it up. Well, thank you, Mike.

So what do you think of this idea that Windows is a burden and that it's going to be WSL from the inside out? Interesting. Can you imagine it? Somehow Windows slowly morphs into basically a thin skin over Hyper-V just to run Linux? I kind of love that idea. Start relying on services inside there? Yeah. You launch Photoshop and it starts a traditional Windows Hyper-V VM

in the background, sort of like it does for the subsystem now. It's the Windows subsystem for Windows. Does this mean that we get better game support under Linux? That's what I'm interested in. Yeah, great question. What do you think, Neil? Is this a long shot? Man, Chris, you know how much I wish this was going to be a thing. So I see it kind of a little bit of two ways the first way is that microsoft has

um sort of realized that on the server and cloud front they've lost in a very very big way and they just they need a way to um to add relevance to them as a as a platform company the second thing is that, first and foremost, what a lot of people have forgotten is that Microsoft started out as a company that made quality-of-life tools for software development. And when you look at it from that lens, the WSL actually is a huge quality-of-life improvement for any contemporary software developer

because you need to be able to work with Linux-y tools. I'm not even saying Unix-y tools. I'm saying Linux-y tools. And that's a very, very big deal. On the flip side of it, it is also to their benefit that they keep WSL as tightly constrained as possible into what it's capable of doing because it means that people remain

dependent on Windows for the bulk of their user experience. And what a lot of people don't get is that Windows tends to feed that outgrowth of ecosystem stuff. So nowadays, Windows is a loss leader, but it is still a very important component for Microsoft's strategy to make sure that things like Office and SQL sure that things like Office and SQL Server and things like that remain successful. The fact that Hyper-V doesn't exist with the Linux counterpart says it all. If Microsoft really didn't care that much, Hyper-V would have been integrated into KVM years ago. I completely agree with all of that assessment. I think that Windows plays an absolutely

crucial part to their overall strategy and the WSL system, while it does make it possible, like you said, to do Linux-y things, will keep people predominantly workflow focused on Windows. Like, that's going to be their main day-to-day bread and butter. And then this Linux system is something they can shunt to

to do certain things or maybe to use a tool that they are more effective with. Right. And also have a similar system to what might be on their cloud server. And I think it's a very clever strategy, and I think it's going to be very successful for them. I know when I was using Windows, I went into Windows with this in mind when I tried Windows 10 for a week,

and at the end of it I thought to myself, still too much Windows for me, for me. Right. But not necessarily for somebody else. Some people like that or are used to it, yeah. Mm Windows for me. For me. Right. But not necessarily for somebody else. Some people like that or are used to it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So I think they nailed it. And I think it's not a burden at all. In fact, I think they've got Windows humming along better than they ever have. And they've got a real update cadence cycle now with, like, different rings that you can get into and insider builds and stuff. And, you know, it's not something average Windows users want, but if you're a Windows quote-unquote power user,

that stuff's neat. The one thing I failed to try in my week with Windows that I really regret is they have a tiling window manager power tool. Oh, right. Dang, I didn't try that. Do you still have the 10 partition on your machine? No. Okay.

I mean, we can set it up again. I would like to see their tiling window manager. I think that would be pretty neat. And it's kind of funny that Windows 10 got there before GNOME Shell. System76 is working on it, though. But it's pretty funny. Anyways, I know we mentioned it earlier, but this show's live on Tuesdays, jblive.tv. It's 2 p.m. Pacific.

No, it's not. It's noon Pacific. Noon. And it's more fun live. Man. on Tuesdays, jblive.tv. It's 2 p.m. Pacific. No, it's not. It's noon Pacific. Noon! And it's more fun live. Man, you do something for a long time. It's just built in. Yeah, and then you don't do it anymore and you realize, I am more of a habit of creature than I realize. Right.

So it is noon Pacific, but jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Links to all the stuff we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 346 go get more Wes Payne at Wes Payne on the Twitter and techsnap.systems go get more of me at chrislast.com that's my new site with links to my new projects and go get more of the show at linuxunplugged on Twitter see you next Tuesday Thank you. JBTitles.com, let's go.

I like you just rubbing it in there with the Twitter handles at the end. Just like, nope, Twitter, jamming it down. Oh, I kind of was, huh? I didn't think about that. You're right. What would be, what, toot me on Mastodon? No, I'm not. They're called toots, right?

They are called toots, and that's weird. Guys, I'm getting a little old. I'm with you. I mean, I've got a Mastodon account, and actually one of our friends, Mr. Omnipotence Berdaza, has set up, I think it's linuxrocks.online. Yeah, yeah. That'd be the one I'd use if I was going to jump on.

But I don't really utilize it. I mean, I checked it out. It was cool, but it wasn't – it was just like chatting with everybody kind of in IRC, right? It was still such a closed, small group of people that I could still do that same correspondence on Telegram. I mean, I exist on Twitter and Telegram and Discord primarily, if we're talking social networks. But I do also have a Mastodon presence on Fostodon.org. And there, the conversation's mostly dead. There's not a whole lot going on in theadon.org. And there it's, the conversation's mostly dead. It's, it's, there's not a whole lot going on in the global feed. And I get more, I get more return being on Twitter than I do on

Mastodon. I am there because there are some people that are exclusively there, but otherwise I just, I mostly don't pay attention to it. You know what I didn't say, but this actually played a big role for me in this decision was Google Plus going away. Because what you just said there, Neil, about how there's some people that are on Mastodon, so you go, that's how I was about Google Plus for a long time. And so I continued to use it and respond to people and post and continue to kind of try to keep it going and link it in, you know, wherever I could, like on links on pages and stuff. And it, it just totally crapped out and died and went nowhere. And then I realized, what is the point? It's just, you know, I just, at that point decided

I'm going to minimize my social media usage. And I'm on Twitter. I'm occasionally, I post, you know, things there and I occasionally post on Instagram, but it's mostly just to have conversations with audience, not really to like I don't go there to like, oh, and sometimes for like I like Twitter for like breaking news events to see what people are saying or during debates and stuff, whereas the other platforms are just kind of dead. I enjoy seeing some folks that I follow, you know, seeing what they're working on, project updates, that sort of stuff can be nice, too. Well, I have a Mastodon account, but let's face it, there's only so much time in the day and you can only be on so many platforms and really put your time into it. That's just it, if I was going to do a Mastodon account or something else, I think I'd want to do it the right way. I'd want to try to be active there. I mean, I know some people like Dan want to do bot posts, but I'd want to do unique individual active there and i mean i know some people like dan want to do bot posts but i'd

want to do unique individual posts for each platform because usually they have different restrictions and limits and you could format posts differently and you know it tweets you yeah how messed up would it be if it turned out in order for a social network to be successful it needs a little bit of that evil algorithmy, all kinds of put crap in your face so that you want to clickbait stuff. Like, is that what it's missing? Is that it's like pure? And so that's why nobody uses it?

Oh, man. That's pretty much it. Oh, no. The only other platform that is even remarkably successful that doesn't have this is Slack. And that's because it has corporate force function.

Yeah. Like if you, if you, I wouldn't be on Slack at all if it weren't for the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 individual workspaces that forced me to be there. Yeah, that's just it. Oh my gosh. So Dan, what you're essentially saying

is that social media inherently has to be evil. We need a little bit of evil in there, I guess. Just a little bit. I don't think it's not, So it's important that the algorithm isn't necessarily about being evil or good or whatever. It's about enabling discoverability about related people, interests and things like that. It can be bent towards evil as Facebook and Twitter have done, but it can also be used as a way to help people discover each other, like how Google Plus used to do it. Yeah, you got to find each other.

Maybe it doesn't need to be like lawful evil, but at least like chaotic good. Like it can't be like lawful good.