LINUX Unplugged - 437: The 2021 Tuxies

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

It's the second annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, desktops, and services of 2021.

Hello, friends, and welcome to a very special edition of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Looking very snazzy for today's special edition. No doubt everyone out there has been waiting all year for this episode. It's the second annual Tuxes, as voted by our community.

The votes have been coming in for weeks, and it is indeed time to reveal the results. So before we go any further, before we get into that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room! Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. I didn't want to bring down the show with a little bit of bad news, but I just want to get this done real quick, and then we'll get back to the tuxes. I hate to say this, but I think we are going to postpone the january 2nd meetup

we're still going to go ahead with the moving lup we're still going to have a big live event we're going to have brent and wes in studio we're going to go ahead with the server thing but what i am going to do just because the numbers are not looking good right now when it comes to the omicron variant is i'm going to punt the meetup until the end of january which also happens to be my birthday so we'll just have a birthday party here at the studio on january 30th unless things are looking even worse and i thought about this and i asked our get together group and you know everybody felt pretty comfortable coming i don't i don't think anybody was really too concerned, but there are elements of this that feel a little bit like end of December, 2019, early first couple of months

of January, 2020, where we didn't really know, but things just kept getting worse and worse. And I thought about it. And if somebody came here and they got sick while they were here, I would just feel really awful about that. I mean, our audience means a lot to me and I just don't want that to happen. So we'll play it safe for a little bit longer. And I feel so embarrassed about it because I've already punted this once, but I think it's just,

it's the way we have to just kind of be a little extra careful these last couple of years. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a big live event on January 2nd for the first LUP on a Sunday. We're going to launch the new server event on January 2nd for the first LUP on a Sunday. We're going to launch the new server. And then on January 30th, which I believe is a Sunday at the end of the month, which will be just around the old birthday, where if I'm doing my math right, I think that's the big 4-0 for me. So it's going to be a special event.

So hopefully we'll have fun. Hopefully things will be looking better and it'll be safe. And, you know, just to make things a little less down, birthday presents are no longer strictly required for entry. Yeah, right? Yeah, there, there you go. Suggested, encouraged, but not required. No, no, now everyone's off the hook. That's a great point.

And I think we'll still have a good event. We'll still be a lot of fun we'll have things ready to go in fact in some ways because we won't be launching the server it means we actually have when I thought about it

it means okay well then that means we'll have more time to focus on like socializing and making food yeah you don't want to see like stressed out LUP crew

instead of the happy-go-lucky LUP crew they're very different but first we must thank our sponsor Linode outlup crew instead of the happy-go-lucky lup crew. They're very different. But first, we must thank our sponsor, Linode. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and you go there to support the show. Linode is fast and reliable cloud hosting.

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it's like I'm connecting locally. I know, right? What I love about Linode is when you jump on there and you go do an update. You know, you go do the old app get update or DNF update. It pulls down those updates faster than your SSH screen can really give you the information. And the nice thing, too, is like I know Linode's all over this log for J vulnerability. They've been tweeting about it. They've been updating their post. Their security team has been watching it from day one, and they're keeping people apprised. So if that's something

you're concerned about right now with uh you know your infrastructure linode's on it they have fantastic customer service they have the best customer service they don't do that escalation thing you call in you got a problem you got an email a ticket a social or or a call they're going to stick with you until it's solved and they're rolling out mvme pci storage to a lot of their systems so like the iops per gigabyte are just mind-blowing now because on their high-end CPU systems, they've also got AMD EPYC processors. With 11 data centers around the world, you're going to find something close to you. A dashboard that's so straightforward, you're going to be impressed

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And I am too. So go try it out. Linode.com slash unplugged. Get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And of course, you support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. It's the second annual Linux Unplugged Tuxes. And this year, we've had a tremendous response with over 1,500 unique respondents.

Helping us determine the best of the best. Your favorite Linux distro. The best desktop environment. The newcomer that impressed you. And the server distro that beat them all. And yes, the best open source service as voted by you. It is the 2021 Tuxes from the world's largest Linux podcast as voted by our community. Brace yourselves.

Year two begins now. And we're going to start with our best newcomer project. This is probably the most controversial one, so we're going to get it out of the way right now. The best newcomer open source project, or the project that became well-known in 2021. Last year it was WireGuard. Third place this year is going to Garuda Linux.

How about that? Ooh, you know, I definitely had some good time on the show this year. I mean, you sort of sneakily dove in and revealed it to the world, and I just had to follow suit. And I've still got it running here on at least one machine at home. And I would say we have heard from a pretty solid trickle of people after that episode that have been trying. What's funny about it is it's like everything's turned up to 11 with Garuda. The theme, the pre-config, like the patches, it's like Arch turned up to full mode, like crazy mode, right?

It's ultimate Arch, really. Yeah, it's funny because in some sense, it's like too much. It's not really the customize everything stage of the Linux desktop that I'm really in right now, but at the same time it did rekindle a lot of that spirit, and it's really pleasant to use. Yeah, it's fun.

It's like when you just, you know, realize every now and then it's OK to have fun. You know, I have it set up on a machine and it's fun. And that's totally OK. OK, the second place winner for the best newcomer project. This was the only free form submission. So we got a lot of submissions to this category, a lot. And what we did, we extracted all of them. Wes did.

He extracted all of them to a CSV file, parsed it all, got all of it. And then we did another refresh this morning to make sure we have the absolute latest numbers. And I am really impressed by our second place because i don't remember the timeline exactly but i'm pretty sure it came in around midpoint in the year at best and our second place winner for the best newcomer project of 2021 is quick mu from our buddy wimpy can you believe it quick mu second place it makes a lot of sense. I find this super impressive, and I got to say, it brings a smile to me,

I think because, you know, he's our friend, and he always works hard, and it's nice to see him get some recognition. But also, on a personal level, I've been using this so slick, and it just makes me all fuzzy. I don't know if you guys have spent much time with it, but it's just darn nice. That's true. It's come together really quick. You've seen a lot of support for it.

The graphic environment's being created under Flutter. It took off on Hacker News. So congratulations to QuickMU. But the first place project, this is impressive because we had, like I said, a lot of free form submissions. NTFS3 from Paragon Software made it in the honorable mentions for this category. Silverblue and KinoNite also got a lot of submissions. Yeah, really just a lot of Fedora in that regard.

I mean, regular Fedora, some specific Fedora 35, but those immutable variants. A lot of love out there this year. Some love, too, for Asahi Linux and Alma Linux in there. A lot of people trying out Alma Linux this year. And Podman. Podman got a lot of mentions, and some people in the comments said they felt like Podman really came into its own this year. But none of them, none of them received as many votes as our first place winner

for the best newcomer project of 2021, or the one that changed things for you in 2021, it goes to Pipewire. Pipewire is the best newcomer project of 2021 by a big number, right? I think, Chris, maybe you were just like late at night voting on this one while people were sleeping. It impresses me that such a, I don't know, seemingly specific tool like an audio subsystem is at the top of the list. Tell me, why is this plausible? You know, maybe in part because pulse audio issues were always a bit of a meme and Pipewire is the solution to those problems for a lot of people. It seems to me like the Pipewire project doesn't really expect average Linux users to really know what's happening or care what's going

on. Like, I don't think they realize the broad recognition the project is getting. These votes, they show people recognize the work being done. Okay. I mean, part of it has got to be the fact that we're a little obsessed, right? I mean, we talk about the thing just about every chance we can get. But no, I mean, just, you know, in our Matrix chat, in Telegram, I feel like we've definitely seen folks who have solved issues that they had with Pulse Audio just by adding Pipewire. Plus, okay, we've been following the Pipewire story.

We've built it up. Everyone knows the complicated background of audio on Linux, right? So I think there's just a lot of community hope around Pipewire. And this year, well, with Fedora's help, like Pipewire's in the hands of a lot more people. Well, thank you, Pipewire, for this year, well, with Fedora's help, like, Pipewire's in the hands of a lot more people. Well, thank you, Pipewire, for making our shows even better. And now we go from probably the most controversial category, because a lot of people, there was a broad spread there, to probably the category people are the most passionate about. And that, of course, believe it or not, is the text editor of the year. This is the one people always feel strongly about.

And last year, Vim won. We'll start with third place this year. Nano came in at third place. Ooh, hiss. Ooh, bias. What? Shh. Nano, my Nano peeps are repping a second year in a row.

I got you. I mean, I think that, okay, the noteworthy thing there are, and all props to Nano. I'm glad it's useful for folks. Emacs has seriously fallen this year. I mean, like, Nano did not beat Emacs last time around, but Emacs was down at seven or eight, I think. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Well, them has fallen to second place. How about that? Did you ever think we'd see this? So here's the deal. Here's the way it works on the show. If a project wins two years in a row in a category, they go into the Hall of Fame. So if Vim had won Best Text Editor of the Year, it would be in the Hall of Fame.

And it's essentially enshrined forever as a two-time winner. And then we vote on the Remainers. It was a close one this year, that's for sure. It was. It was. So in a way, though, by them getting second place, it stays in the game for a little bit longer. So it does have a chance to be first place next year. But our first place winner for your favorite text editor of the year,

I bet a lot of you are guessing it, it's VS Code. It's been a good year for VS Code. It's wild to me that this is a Microsoft project that's at the top of our list. It was a very, very close. It was by just like a couple of votes between Vim and VS Code. But I think it's official.

And I just got to sit with that for a moment. I've contributed to this. I didn't actually vote this year on the tuxes, but I have been using VS Code all year long. Oh, dang it. I didn't vote either. I meant to, but I didn't vote at all. See, we didn't, we did not impact the results. But you're right. I mean, yeah, you've been using it. VS Code is my day-to-day editor writing Python at work. I mean, I know Alex is using it. Brent, are you using it? I'm using it via Alex. He's teaching me some things and he said, you must use VS Code. You can't use anything else for playing around. So I've gotten to maybe have it as an appetizer. Okay. I would say keep an eye out for the Tuxies next year if you disagree with these results. But in a way, Vim not winning this year does keep it in the game. Of course, the spread here is huge and wide.

My K-Write and Kate editors did not get the representation I thought they should this year, unfortunately. I agree with you. Kate is my daily everything. So I don't know where it is. Come on, year, unfortunately. I agree with you. Kate is my daily everything. So I don't know where it is. Come on, Kate, folks. I think it's just the people who have adopted VS Code are just really passionate about VS Code.

If you're curious, though, take a look at those Hector Martin live streams working on Asahi Linux, because, boy, he pushes Kate to the limit, I think. Hector Martin, the guy that's porting, well, him and the Asahi Linux team, that's porting Linux to the limit, I think. Hector Martin, the guy that's supporting, well, him and the Sahi Linux team, that's supporting Linux to the M1, he makes, is it KWrite or Kate that he uses, Wes?

I'm sorry. I thought Kate, but we'll have to double check. But it's definitely a KDE text editor. Well, it's basically unrecognizable when you see it because he's essentially turned it into an IDE. That's what he's done. It's very impressive. So I don't think those projects get enough attention, but I think right now VS Code is, is solving problems

for people is what it is. And people are, you know, they're still adopting it. All right, let's move to one of my favorite categories. This is one I always look forward to the best desktop distro for 2021. Last year, Fedora came in strong, as after a good, strong year of releases. So let's start with third place this year. Is anybody surprised? I think this sounds pretty reasonable. It's Pop!OS.

Congratulations to Pop!OS. You guys got third place, and they've done a lot. You know, this was even after that Linus video, so, hey, good work. True, yeah. That's true. It did not hurt them in the numbers when they had the Steam issues. Now, our second place goes to OpenSUSE. What's interesting about that is that has shot way up in the charts. Wes, you might double-check, but I seem to recall it performed fairly poorly. Like, it was way down in the charts. Wes, you might double check, but I seem to recall it performed

fairly poorly. Like it was way down in the charts last year. And now OpenSUSE is in the number two position. Wow. Even above Ubuntu. And after we gave it a somewhat not so nice review earlier in the year. I was wondering if there's a correlation between how our opinion of OpenSUSE has changed throughout the year and the voting near the end of the year. Just saying there might be maybe some influence there, I wonder. There could be, but this is Desktop Distro. And I've kind of all the whole time been like, I'm still not really sold on the desktop for SUSE, but it seems the audience is. I got to say, for my little dive into desktop OpenSUSE, I've been really loving it. And we've gotten a lot of feedback in the last few months of folks

saying the exact same thing and giving us tips and tricks. So I could see how those who are listening would definitely throw some votes in. I think there's a strong audience there, and I'm glad to see this actually. Something tells me that in 2022, with us using ever more open suits on the server, we'll probably be drawn back in to play with the desktop a little bit here and there as well. I suppose that could happen. All right, well, then let's reveal our first place winner. As voted by our audience, we had 200 votes last year, and I was hoping to get to about 800 votes this year

just to grow the number a little bit to widen the base of selection. And this year we had 1,500 votes. So our community, this is starting to get a pretty good representation size. So 1,500 people voted, and the number one best Linux distro for 2021 is Fedora. For a second year in a row, congratulations, the Fedora project. This was a big win for you. And it also means you are now

in the Tuxes Hall of Fame. We have our first Hall of Fame winner right here. It is Fedora, which means next year, the first place position is going to open up. Seuss could claim it, or something else might fill that spot. Arch got more votes than Ubuntu this year, though. What is going on for Ubuntu on the desktop? I think that's been one of our questions across the year. I don't know. We've got, you know, got a big LTS coming up. I guess we'll see what 2022 will bring. Hmm. That might change things.

You're right. That LTS could be a big win. It does seem like Fedora had a great year. I mean, we almost were talking about it every other show that they were doing something kind of neat. Wasn't ButterFS by default included this year? Or am I? That was last year. I think that's what started kicking off. Well, that's what I think kicked off the win last year. And they've held that included this year, or am I? That was last year. I think that's what started kicking off.

Well, that's what I think kicked off the win last year, and they've held that momentum this year. The notoriety they got for that, they've kind of built something into each release that is building on top of that, and I think they've done that really well. And we should point out this was not like a squeaker win to get into the Hall of Fame.

Okay, second place OpenSUSE had 11% of the votes, with like 162 votes. Fedora had 46. That's 680 votes for Fedora. So yeah, they won. Yeah, I know. It's a strong vote of confidence from our audience. And I think that's telling that, you know, there's people out there recognizing the engineering work that's going into Fedora. SUSE also, pretty interesting. And now Fedora in the Hall of Fame, that position opens up for others. So that is the desktop. And of course, we all know it's not where Linux makes its bread or its butter.

No, no, it does that in the server market. So this is the category that really hits Linux in the pocketbook. The best server distro as voted by our community for 2021. So this is the category that really hits Linux in the pocketbook. The best server distro as voted by our community for 2021. A lot's changed in this space. And last year, Ubuntu was our number one winner. Third place this year is Debian. Not too surprising.

But what is surprising, I feel like there's kind of an upset in the mix. A newcomer comes in for best server distro of 2021. First time on the list, Alma Linux. Congratulations, Alma Linux. Jack, I think the community is recognizing the hard work over there coming in at second place after just getting started. What? Really? At the beginning of the year? We've never seen this happen before. Yeah. I'm we're flattered. Uh, thanks so much to the community. Uh, we do everything for you. So I'm, I'm glad that, uh, you know, people like what

we're doing. Absolutely. It's very impressive. Now we do have the first place to give away this one. I don't think it's going to be too surprising because there's been a big shift in the market. People have moved around in response to the traditional CentOS release coming to an end. CentOS Stream got a very good showing, but it didn't get first place this year. But it does seem like people are really impressed with Stream. Now our first place winner for the best server distribution for 2021 is Ubuntu. Congratulations, Ubuntu Project. This is your second year in a row that you win. But I think Ubuntu had an even better showing this year because the feedback was, I thought about switching to CentOS Stream. I thought about switching to this or that.

And I just decided to go to Ubuntu. And when Red Hat announced the transition for CentOS, I came on the air and I said, nobody's going to go from a RHEL base to an Ubuntu base because of this change. It's just too much work. Well, apparently, there's a lot of stubborn bastards out there in the audience because they've been making the switch this year. And they showed up in the voting. And it gave Ubuntu the win for the second year in a row for best server distro.

Yeah, it's interesting that maybe it's a different track that has been followed on the desktop. You know, I'm not surprised that Ubuntu remains dominant here, but it seems like that's one area that Canonical has continued to invest in, right? Like it feels much less stale on the server side than some of us might feel on the desktop. Yeah, I think that's it, Wes. The Alma initial release, Alma Linux initial release was eight months ago. How about that?

To get second place in eight months in the server distro market vote? Wow, that's super impressive. And to see Ubuntu capitalize on the situation as well, double down on what they do best and have it represent in our vote, I think it's also, you're right, Wes, it kind of underscores their focus, doesn't it? This is where they're putting their attention. Well, it's that or people just run stuff in containers now

and the server OS doesn't matter. Maybe also that, I'm not sure. All right. Well, we've talked about distros, but what about desktop environments? So it's the best desktop environment of 2021. I don't care what distro you're running on. What desktop was the MVP for you, our audience this year? This is always interesting to watch the transitions. Last year, Gnome Shell won this category. Pretty interesting. I mean, I think you hear

a lot of anti-gnome sentiment in the general, like, chattering social layer of the Linux community. But when it comes down to people actually getting their work done, last year they said,

well, at the end of the day, it's Gnome Shell. And that does represent in the default desktop environment for a lot of distros. The upset this year is the third place position for a lot of distros the upset this year is the third place position coming out of nowhere like a rocket it's cosmic cosmic not even a full-fledged desktop

environment yet this year whoa isn't that something it might show some of the excitement for what's going to come i wonder yeah like people sort of a vote of we like this direction, I guess. Yeah, it's sort of closest in the runnings with XFCE, but those are opposites, I think. Yeah. So isn't that something, too? When you look at the numbers, XFCE and MATE are basically slugging it out in the numbers, and it's been that way for a little bit.

It seems to be that sort of an area where people are kind of split. There's an XFCE camp and there's a that way for a little bit. It seems to be that sort of an area where people are kind of split. It's some, there's an XFCE camp and there's a Mate camp. And so the numbers really get split between those two desktop environments. So the traditional desktop paradigm sort of has a split vote there.

That does change things a little bit. So that brings Cosmic up to third place. But I wonder too, if there's not a split between Gnome Shell and Cosmic, one is born of the other. And so I'm curious if we have the numbers from last year's Gnome Shell ranking versus this year's. Has it lost a little despite still getting probably, I would imagine, good votes? Sure. It was Gnome 40 this year, right? It was a big transition year for Gnome. I could see that reaction in some of the votes a little bit. And I would imagine too, like you could see it change next year as people settle into the changes. That's going to be really interesting to watch. So Plasma came in at

second place again this year. And I really thought it was going to win it this year. I thought Plasma would have it for sure because of these changes in the GTK GNOME ecosystem. I thought it was really going to be Plasma. And it does have a solid contingent that shows up and votes for it each year. And I do think that gap has closed a bit in 2021. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good point.

It's getting, see, that's interesting. Let's talk about that because I think Plasma has been getting recognized in that chattering class a lot more. And if you look at the trends, it's possible Plasma could take first place, especially when you consider what our first place winner was this year. So the best desktop environment of 2021, the MVP for our audience as voted is Gnome Shell.

Gnome Shell wins it and enters the Hall of Fame. We've got a few Hall of Fame enterers here. Congratulations, Gnome Shell, and enters the Hall of Fame. We've got a few Hall of Fame enterers here. Congratulations, Gnome Shell, for entering the Hall of Fame. We acknowledge your popularity, and thank you for a fantastic year from the team. And it opens up the possibilities for next year's tuxes as well. That's really something, Gnome Shell. You guys did it again.

I thought plasma would catch up to you this year, but the gnome heads, they still showed up for you. See, pressure's off now for 2022, so you can fix all the stuff, maybe multi-threaded. I don't know. And then in a few years, you can come back for another shot. Oh, my God. No, I'm kidding.

Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. All right. Okay. We got to move along, maybe get a little more meta here. What was the largest impact in open source this year? What project changed the universe for open source? There was a wide range here to pick from.

A lot's going on in our community. And last year, our audience voted the Linux kernel. Now, looking at the very, very, very fresh numbers, we have an interesting situation. So I'll tell you what got third place this year. WireGuard. WireGuard got third place this year. People are still very excited about WireGuard.

It came out last year. But this was the year people implemented it. And I think this is the year it started changing people's workflow. And that showed up in the numbers and gave WireGuard a good showing into its second year. Yeah, right. I mean, like, not only can you just use it by itself, but there's projects that build on it, like Tailscale and even a whole bunch of commercial VPN services now offer it just right along with OpenVPN. and even a whole bunch of commercial VPN services now offer it just right along with OpenVPN. Now, we got a situation, you guys,

because we've got a tie at the first place. Just, of course, we had to go get the most current numbers and screw this up because we did have a clear winner. But I actually like it. So initially, our first place winner for the open source project that had the biggest impact this year was Pipewire. Clearly, our audience is very hyped about Pipewire because it's already won a category.

Right? It got the best newcomer already. Yeah, in the most competitive category with a whole bunch of different entrants. Right. Where things like the Linux kernel won last year. Right? So we're talking, this is a category. And so Pipewire was our winner.

But when we check the votes right now, as we go live, it is tied neck and neck. Twenty six percent between Pipewire and the winner for this category, Proton. Three hundred and eighty three votes. Twenty six percent of the votes for Proton. Since we have a tie here and Pipewire won the last category, I say we give it to Proton in this category because this was a big year for Proton. Pretty much no question about that.

It's really nice to see WireGuard and Pipewire on this list. That's great. But no doubt, Proton should be somewhere somewhere on this and right before we went live g hacks tech news ran an article that says now 75 of the top 100 games on steam now run on linux in fact that's the top 1000 games if you zoom in at the top 100 games, it's actually 80%. Ironically, if you go to the top 10, it actually gets a little bit worse. It's down to 40%. But looking at the top 100 games, it's an 80% coverage now. And that is in big part because of Proton.

That's today, right? That's right now as we record. The deck launches in just a few months. And I think Proton is an absolute linchpin for the deck, right? Like the deck wouldn't exist without Proton. And this could open up a whole new category for Valve. So unless you guys disagree, I think we give it to Proton this year. No, it seems fitting, right?

Like this sets things up as a category to watch for 2022 because, well, one, it's deserved now. But the next year, that's going to be the test. And it could either be an amazing Hall of Fame entry if things go well, or a dramatic shakeup. Yeah. Or it may show up in the numbers next year as the deck because I would imagine the Steam Deck

is going to be one of the entries that's going to be possible. So congratulations to Proton. You get the tiebreaker this year as voted by our hosts. And I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be a good year for Proton next year as well. We have two more categories left. So let's do the second to last category now. This is a new one for the Tuxes.

There is no last year winner because we decided to kick it off this year. There is no last year winner because we decided to kick it off this year. It is the best hosted or self-hosted open source service of the year. Third place went to GitLab, which makes a lot of sense. That is an absolute winner of a tool. So third place goes to GitLab. Second place. Now, this doesn't have to be something you self-host. This could be

something that you go subscribe to, but is powered by open source software. So second place went to the Matrix ecosystem and the Element chat app, which I totally agree with. First time they've showed up here. Congratulations to them. We've got a thriving Matrix community right now. Yeah, we sure do. And I mean, there's just a lot of developments and updates. And I'm sure if we went back a year, the element and matrix ecosystem experience would have been fairly different. And I'm sure a year from now,

that'll remain the same, you know, like it's going to see more improvements. It's going to be a better service, a better system. And hey, maybe we'll even have some new backend servers that perform a little better. Yeah, we might be on that new one. We might be off Synapse by this time next year. All right.

Well, we do have a first place winner. It was a very close call between Matrix and the Matrix ecosystem, so we did kind of make it broad. And our first place winner. But our first place winner did edge out just by a bit, so it's a fair win. Ladies and gentlemen, the best service of the year, as voted by our audience, FlatHub.

FlatHub wins first place as one of the best services for the community. And I completely agree. This was the year that I started going to Flatathub to discover what new apps are out for the Linux desktop. That's massive, man. That's a high watermark for me because that is a job I have been doing for 15 years, right? I've been looking for places that always give me the latest application updates. And I've switched over the years to different places as like my source and Flathub is now one of them. And it, them. And it's great to see somebody collecting and getting adoption like that too.

It's just so great. Well, and we've seen more and more app stores on various distributions and variants sort of tie in directly or automatically with Flathub or just make it simpler to do so. And I think for many of us, it's now, if not the default, one of the default ways that you're acquiring software.

You know, I load a new machine, I get Flatpak set up, I go over to Flathub and install some of the apps that I know that I just need by default. And it's always there. Like, okay, I don't have stats on this, but it works whenever I need it there. And I think it's nice to be a little grateful that there's, you know, this is a service being provided to us for free. I wonder if we'll see them monetized. That may be a hint at one of my future predictions, which is next week. But I think also for a lot of us,

obviously in Linux, there's never consensus 100%, but for a lot of us, it feels like Flatpaks really just kind of became the go-to solution for desktop software. I mean, maybe that kind of correlates with the Fedora adoption and Fedora trend. It just becomes so simple to install so many things. Like a lot of the crap stuff I have to have

to interact with humans and do work stuff is just in Flatpaks now. And I'd actually prefer for some of those things to be in a Flatpak, if you know what I mean. Like Zoom, I'm looking at you. So I think it's good to have Flatpak and Flathub, you know, as connected to Flathub. I think it's good to have Flatpak and Flathub, you know, as connected to Flathub. I think it's nice to see that represented on this list. So I'm actually really glad they got

this win, which brings us to our last category. This is a special category. This is something we open up to the audience. You send in your recommendation to uncle Brent's mailbag at linuxunplugged.com slash contact he reaches in that mailbag and rifles through and gets a few honorable mentions for us so Brent what do you got in your honorable mentions bag yeah we got a whole bunch of stuff and uh we may not have been able to mention all of them but I gotta say most of what we got in there were text editors which I don't know maybe you're surprised by, but it just shows to me that there's such a love for where we spend our time writing maybe the simplest stuff that ends up being quite strong for us. So one of the mentions was Fertildi, which I hadn't heard of, but it's a terminal text editor

that tries to be super intuitive. It says on their website, the main audience for Tilly is users who normally work in GUI environments, but sometimes require an editor for a console or terminal environment. So I thought of you right away, Chris, and myself, actually. I'm a huge Nano fan like you, only because I don't spend that much more time in any of the other ones than, and I don't necessarily want to. And you're a gentleman who recognizes quality and elegance. Well, thank you.

Makes sense. So that was Philip that wrote in and he suggested the following when he wrote in. I just love it, he says, not because it is the most efficient or anything, but Tildy looks and functions a lot like the old DOS edit.com. And it transports me back to when I was a kid and all our computers at home ran DOS. Somehow that makes me happy, he writes. And so I love using Tildi just because it makes me nostalgic and has become one of the first programs I always install

when setting up a new Linux machine. I thought that was a really nice anecdote. That's a good angle, too. Like, if you connect with a piece of software that you like using, there's something about it that just, like, clicks with your monkey brain, and just go with it. You know, just roll with that, because then you're going to open that thing up, you're going to be more inclined to take notes,

it just reduces friction a little bit. So, I love it. So, that was Tilde, T-I-L-D-E, right? Which is a terminal text editor. We've got a couple others, though. A couple other text editors, that is. We had Aiko and Robin write in suggesting Micro Text Editor. Supposed to be a modern and intuitive terminal text editor.

And I've got to say, the screenshots that I saw looked super nice. So I have not used it. Wes, have you given this a try at all? No, you know, I've seen it floating around. I've not tried this one, but it does look pretty nice and I'm glad to see support out there in the audience for it. Heck yeah. Perhaps I'll give it a try over the holidays. Glenn wrote in about CUDA text. So you got to give that one a try if you're a cross-platform

person who likes to have a code editor written an object Pascal. Okay. And then, you know what? Sway. If this wasn't on our list, probably should have been. Joseph and Robin wrote that, and they're right. Sway should have been on there. That, we should probably make sure that gets on there next year. A bit of a miss on our part, I think. Also, we got some text in suggesting that for Best Distro, we missed something as well. We missed listing NixOS.

Robin said, it should be on the list. They seem to have had a year of growth. Ah, you know what? Let's give them an honorable mention right now because that's true. NixOS gets an honorable mention in the tuxes this year because they have had a great year. I've heard more people talking about them than ever. I feel like this is, I don't know, greatest hits of 2021. Right. You know, greatest hits of 2021.

Right. You know, it's a double album, and we just get to sit back and enjoy the whole thing. This is, I'm loving this. I mean, we used to, like, do recaps of the year and stuff, but then I realized this is way more fun. Isn't it? Yeah, and NixOS is going to have to be on the list next year. Also, Tim wrote in to let us know that NextCloud wasn't on there, even though we were doing the entire survey in NextCloud, which actually turned out to work really good. Yeah, that's kind of embarrassing. And one of the great things about NextCloud is we hemmed and hawed about this because, like, well, we don't really want to make our NextCloud instance public.

Then Wes was like, well, I could just go spin one up in like 30 seconds and we just could do it because it's free software. Right. And it takes no time on Linode. So we did just that. We just spun up a Nextcloud for the tuxes. And it was something that, you know, was safe and on its own island. And it's really nice for that kind of stuff. And for, you know, now we've been using it for over two years as our way of syncing our editing stuff and all of our clips and stuff between the hosts and the editors and all that kind of stuff. So honorable mention to the next cloud

project as well, I say. What do you guys think? No, yeah, I think that's definitely true. Look, we've complained about it a fair amount and there are things that it could definitely still improve on. But at the same time, it really has kind of become this background infrastructure. It doesn't take a huge cost to

keep it up to date or maintain it or any issues on that side. And it has enabled the team to collaborate in many real ways. Yeah. I kind of feel like the magic bullet there was using object storage on the back end. So that way we're not running out of disk space on the regular. Well done. Good choice. I got to say for myself personally, it's like the underpinning of my whole digital existence. It keeps me organized and keeps me connected to people, especially if you're trying to do the de-Google thing. It feels maybe like NextCloud has become a bit boring in the last year or two, only because they become stable and everything just works as expected. And I think that's actually a really good thing.

They've come out certainly with some features, but for me, it's just like it just works these days. And that has I was thinking about it. I think that's maybe one of the pieces of software that's the most important for me in an everyday lifestyle, if I can put it that way. Wow. Well, then let's make it official. Honorable mention locked in. Next cloud. Thank you, guys. That's really I agree.

I'm glad we got those in. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact if you have feedback about the tuxes. We'll start collecting them and really what we should do, and I meant to do it this year, but time always gets the better of me. Yeah, it's a gradual process to improve this.

Yeah, yeah. We're going to continue to refine it. So your feedback is appreciated. And then one of the things I'd love to do is put an early version of the list out and maybe get some feedback on it. We did workshop the list a little bit with the virtual lug. So we did get, we did run some passes over, but I'd like to do one with a general audience too. That requires that we're way ahead of the game, right? Because you think you got to start thinking

about that kind of thing, like solid couple of months before, but we're going to try. Yeah. End of summer, maybe we get started. Yeah, probably, right? It actually also feels like a good problem to have that there's so many projects that we're sort of losing track of even some of the best ones. So I think that speaks volumes

for the open source community. It's pretty great. Also, I want to say thank you to our members on PluggedCore.com. Some of the best bits are the stuff that we stream live that don't make it in the final edit. It's just the way it goes. It's human nature.

If I could do one thing, it would be capture those things just natively in a show. But what happens is when you stop recording, people relax. And they know we're streaming, but it's just different when the disk space isn't being burned. And that's what goes into the member feed. It's pretty great. You can support the show directly at unplugged core.com,

or you can get a totally ad free. It's still got all the great Joe production on it, but it's just 100% ad free. Now that's new. And we've also launched a network wide membership. So if you're already listening to a couple of shows, why not just get the membership? Because for right now,

until the end of this year, for less than the cost of two show memberships, when you go to Jupiter dot party, you can sign up, support all the shows, and get access to all the special feeds from every single show, including this one. And it's the only way to get Linux Action News totally ad-free. So that is jupyter.party for that one. And thank you, everybody, who's been signing up. That's been really nice to see. And I hope that as we add more content down the road,

you'll just get more and more value out of that. But that does wrap up the 2021 Tuxes. Don't forget, our Le Plug is every Sunday. And we'll be going on Tuesdays. Details at linuxunplug.com slash mumble. We have one more live Tuesday. It's our predictions and our results from this year. Join us for the last Tuesday. It's our predictions and our results from this year. Join us for the last

Tuesday, then we're moving to Sunday, 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. LinuxUnplugged.com for our links. Thanks so much for joining this week, and for one last time, we'll see you next Tuesday. Thank you.