LINUX Unplugged - Episode 101: Will Flash Be Trashed? | LUP 101

Episode Date: July 15, 2015

A renewed push to kill flash hits the web & we discuss the possible advantages for Linux users. A KDE user trying out Gnome for a week & the real issues he touches on.Plus your take on openSUSE’s big changes & follow up to our take on it.

Now, Wes, before we start, I've got to let people know, next week we're having a schedule change. Just for one week, because we're making room for OSCON. You know about OSCON? That's a big deal. Yeah. We're going to be at OSCON on July 22nd, which is a Wednesday. You can go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting if you want to join us. We're going to meet up and we're going to be at OSCON itself.

If you're going to be on the floor, you're welcome to come up and say hi to Noah and I, or go out to dinner with us afterwards, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. To make room for that, we're going to have to leave on Tuesday, though, which means unplugged on Monday next week. Yeah, same bat time, just a different bat day. Does that make sense? I think so. Is that a thing people say?

Let's just pretend that it does. And a bat channel, too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we're going to do it Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific, but you go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And I want to put this right here at the top because we love having you guys join us live in our virtual lug. So join us live next week, Monday, at 2 p.m. Pacific, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And come say hi to us at OSCON.

And remember, you can also use the promo code Linux to get a 20% discount off of your OSCON pass, if you'd like. If you want to come down and say hi to us. I think, like, the base pass is, like, $50. And you get 20% off that. It's not bad to come say hi. What a deal. And you get to say hi to all the vendors and all that kind of stuff. It's a great pass.

The Expo Pass is a great one to go. So that'll be next Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Join us live at jblive.tv. And I would be up for the VR debate because I'm back on board. I'm back on the VR train. I'm back on. I got off the hype train for a little bit and I'm back on.

So we've just recorded two episodes of the Ubuntu podcast. Yeah. Unfortunately, Popey's on holiday, but we've just done a segment on Google Cardboard. Yeah, and? Yeah. I think I'm going to get one just to try it out. I think it's a low enough barrier to entry that it's interesting. I think you should, Wimpy, because, and here's why, I'm going to get junk.

People are going to tell me I'm a, no, no. Here's what I think you should do. I think cardboard is the best solution. So having tried the Oculus DK2, right, and having tried that hooked up to the PC, I will say it is very, very clunky. It is not production ready. But if you scale it down and you go with something like the Samsung VR Innovation Edition or the Google Cardboard, it is not as dramatic of an experience. It is not as necessarily

as high powered, but it is so simple and straightforward. And there's already a bunch of good stuff in the Play Store. And in the case of the Samsung VR Innovator Edition, there's an entire Oculus App Store filled full of stuff that you can try that is legit. And in the case of the Samsung VR Innovator Edition, there's an entire Oculus App Store filled full of stuff that you can try that is legit. And in the case of the S6 Innovator Edition, because the screen on the S6 is like 544 ppi, it actually has a higher resolution than the Oculus. So you can actually get smartphones

that have a higher resolution now than the Oculus and Google Cardboard, too. Yeah, yeah. And it's, like you you say it's low low cost so it's almost zero risk so mark who was discussing google cardboard he bought you know the cheapest cardboard version he could find for four quid and he tried it out and from that he's decided actually it's quite good and it's good enough and there's enough content that he'll probably buy a slightly better headset to use more frequently. He's more into games than I am.

My use case is a little bit more disturbing, but just as much fun, I think. What is it? Well, so, you know, if you get a new cat, you know, eventually you decide to buy them catnip and you all sit in a circle and give the cat catnip and then, you know, you all enjoy the cat wigging out on catnip for the first time. No, I've never done that. No, no, of course. I'm just wondering, you know, what would Google Cardboard do to four and five-year-old girls? I'm kind of interested to see what it does to children. You know, I put Dylan in the DK2 almost a year ago.

And about two weeks ago, he brought it up to me and he said, Dad, can I wear that headset again and ride that roller coaster again? And I haven't talked to him about it in that entire time. And now he's six. And it left enough of an impression on him that he brought it up on his own to me. And so our conversation that, Wimpy, you and I have had, and Popey has been involved in too, about VR in the pre-show here, and then Dylan's sort of, like, it really made an impression on him

and it made an impression on me. I decided I wanted to revisit the VR topic and not maybe, because after Oculus abandoned Linux, I kind of was like, I'm done. Screw these guys, right? But, you know, I kind of was like, I'm done. Screw these guys, right? But, you know, I did end up with a Galaxy S6. And the thing is, is once you have the Galaxy S6, you basically have the most expensive component to getting the Galaxy VR setup. Because once you have the phone, it's basically, you just need the headset. So yesterday, I received the Galaxy VR Innovator Edition headset.

And it's pretty, guys. Yeah, and Wes has had a chance to play with it, too. And there's some things that are awkward about it. Like you have to have your phone on and unlocked before you put it in. But once you do that, it has a USB port built into it, the mini USB port, that the phone clicks into. And then it snaps in. And now it's in virtual reality mode, and it has a light sensor in the headset, so it detects when I have the headset on.

And right now I'm in a Samsung Gear VR theater room where I have an Oculus library in front of me of different games that are built on the Oculus platform that I can pull from. I also have movies that I can watch. And what's truly, truly, truly amazing and thrilling is what I expected to be really fascinating about this was the gaming and sort of the tourism element of it. They have, like, amazing photos. Like, there's a tour of London and a tour of Paris.

And they have uh of course they have space travel which is virtual but wes as you saw it's very impressive oh yeah definitely and so i'd be interested to hear more from wes given that you know you're in the studio and you can actually see this thing and you're an impartial observer so you can play with the way and it might be hard with the headphones but yeah so wes you got to you got to, let's see, you did the, and it does work a lot better if you have headphones, so Wes is going to have to kind of compromise on that for this part of it, but what was your impressions of it? Actually, I was very impressed. You know, it's sturdily made. Clearly, they had at least one industrial designer on this thing. It's like, you know,

kind of the opposite of the cardboard in that respect. Lightweight. It does feel really well built, huh? It does feel really well built. It's solid. It fits well. It's interesting. It's got a touchpad built into the side of it. It's got an Android back button.

And then on the other side, it's got a tiny little fan that you don't really hear. No, I didn't hear it at all. What did you think of the graphics? You know, it was a little blurry at times. A little screen door effect at times. A little screen door effect at times. A little screen door effect, but otherwise it was very smooth. It was very engaging. It fits really well on your head, and so just being able to look around and

we were sitting in the restaurant having probably a million people gawk at us. Yeah, we did. I really had no idea. That's how geeky we are, you guys, is at the restaurant. I was at the restaurant I had Wes try it at. Now, Wes, I want you to try something that you didn't get a chance to try out yet. And this is truly one of the most incredible experiences I ever had for virtual reality.

This is going to put you on stage during a Coldplay conference. Now, I don't know if you're a Coldplay fan. And this is going to be a little hard for you to see. But they have a 360-degree camera. Yeah, so now what do you think of that? Oh, wow. Now you can look all around. And I want you to go until they launch the paper on the stage.

Isn't that amazing? Look at him dancing there, and you see all the different bands playing. Oh, yeah. You know, the resolution's really not bad. Yeah. For real video, it's quite good. Yeah. Smooth. Yeah. for real video it's quite good. Yeah, smooth, very little blur.

Not surprising that the two largest install bases so far are Cardboard and Gear VR. Experience-oriented. You can look around and see all the people dancing in the crowd. Yeah, yeah, isn't that a... Sounds pretty cool, except for the Coldplay part. Yeah, the Coldplay part's a bit rough, but it's a pretty neat experience to see these guys and, you know, to see them dance right in front of you. You can even see his man boobs jiggle. Yeah, it's very much so.

Yeah. Oh, wow, yeah, here comes the paper. Yeah, isn't that neat? Oh, wow, yeah. The confetti is really something. Cool, cool, cool. Kind of surprises you, honestly. That's awesome.

Yeah, and so what's great about it is in theater mode, you get a full 3D experience. It's better than any kind of movie theater experience because you're truly immersed in the whole thing. Here, let me... Honestly, I would rather watch something on a TV. Hold on, I'll turn your mic on. Sorry. There you go. Say again, Wes?

I would probably rather watch some things on that than on a TV. It's way more engaging. I watched some movies last night on this, and if you want to watch something 3D, screw a 3D television. This is where it's at. And way less of an investment. If you have an S6. It runs off the power of the phone,

which is good and bad, because it does drain the phone, but it means that all you have to do is take the phone and this, and if you're going on an airplane for traveling or a train, this would be... Wow.

Yeah, it's a theater wherever you go. So what do you think, Wimpy? Are you impressed? I'm interested. I don't know if I'm impressed yet. I've got some more questions for you. Can you plug an external charger into the phone whilst using it? Yes.

There's a little mini USB port on the bottom of the VR that you could plug in, and then that would supply power to the phone too. So if you're doing your train journey or your flight, you could power the thing as your staircase. Or maybe even just run it off like a portable battery. And for those of us that have not seen these, is this the shutter effect 3D, or is it polarized glass effect? I don't know if it's either, to be honest. That's a good question. Yeah, I don't know exactly how they do it.

It may be a shutter effect. So, you know, what's happening on a technical level is the Galaxy screen goes into like a stereo optical mode. And then there's lenses in the VR that tune those in. And I don't know how it does it, but it is a very immersive 3D experience. You know, it's full. So is it half the screen for one eye and half the screen for the other eye, effectively, that then the lens filters?

I don't know. I don't actually think that is the case. I don't think so, but I don't know how it works well enough. The fact that you don't know bodes well. Yeah, and I think part of it is the screen resolution is so high to begin with, right, that it's way higher than, it's like a, I forget what it is off the top of my head, but even if you

had to bring it down, it would still be probably higher than 1080p. Both Cardboard and Gear VR do have a divider, so it must be splitting the screen in half. Yeah, every now and then when I pull the phone out, I've seen it in sort of like stereoptical mode, and it's kind of funny looking on screen, and then the screen snaps out of it.

And, you know, if you run it for about 45 minutes to an hour, it'll start to say, ah, it's too hot, depending on what you've been doing. Take the phone out for a while and you got to take the phone out. So you need two. Yeah. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 101 for July 14th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that just finished a virtual tour of the solar system. And man, Jupiter was beautiful.

My name is Chris, and joining me in studio, Wes is back. Hey, Wes. Hey, guys. Hey, how you doing, buddy? Oh, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Good, good. You don't have food coma, right? No. Good. The beer's helping a lot. Yeah, how you doing, buddy? Oh, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Good, good. You don't have food coma, right? Oh, no. Good.

The beer's helping a lot. Yeah, the beer helps, right? It's the opposite of caffeine, but for some reason it wakes you up. I don't know how that works. We'll just keep telling ourselves that. Well, I don't know about that, but coming up on today's episode of Linux Unplugged, I'll tell you what I do know about. There is some big news happening in one of our most beloved things to hate. That's Flash. We're going to talk about the big changes coming to Flash and how it's going to affect Linux users. Also coming up in the show,

a really, really, really well done write-up about a KDE user who spent a week in GNOME. And he was able to put his thoughts in a way that really resonated with me and a lot of people in the audience. We're getting a lot of feedback on this write-up. And I want to talk about it today with our virtual lug. And then after that, OpenSUSE. So've talked about it a little bit on the Linux Action

Show. We've talked about it a little bit on this show. OpenSUSE 42. It's a big new proposal, big dreams, a lot of changes coming. The success of Tumbleweed has made OpenSUSE re-evaluate the OpenSUSE project, and we covered that on Sunday's show. But I think maybe some people didn't like our opinion or have a different opinion.

We're going to cover that feedback and discuss the nuances there. And I think it's going to be a really fascinating discussion. But Wes, before we get to all of that, we actually have some really great emails we're going to read this week. Since in 100 we didn't read any feedback. Yeah. So let's get into all of this. Let's invite in the virtual lug. Time appropriate

greetings. Mumble Room get into all of this. Let's invite in the virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. And it's the evening. So, guys, we have so much to cover today.

And maybe it's the beer. Maybe it's because we just started the show, but it's starting to get warm in here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Roasty Toasty. You know I'm not making it up either. It is warm in here.

It's nice to have somebody who validates it. Like, yeah, Chris is not making it up.y. You know I'm not making it up either. It is warm in here. It's nice to have somebody who validates it like, yeah, Chris is not making it up. All right. Earl writes in, and I love this. Do you guys remember the conversation we had around Linux Mint? Last week we had the review, and the week before that we had a conversation. Is it too boring for us Linux users? Is Mint going the direction that maybe long-term is going to kind of leave it behind? Or is that exactly the sweet spot?

Well, Earl writes in, and he has a very interesting perspective. He says, hi, Chris, in the mumble room. He says, I'm a 70-year-old Linux Mint user. He says, I started Linux in early 2003 by installing Debian on a Savage Spark 64. What a chore and a lot of fun. I installed Debian on a Savage dual processor P2 later on, and that was an awesome experience, but yet another challenging task. Then I discovered Ubuntu 4.10.

By Ubuntu 5.10, I'd switched to Linux completely, and in 2007 I bought a Dell laptop with Linux installed on there, and I used GNOME 2. When Ubuntu moved to Unity, I moved to Linux Mint. I've been running Linux Mint with Mate ever since. Not a real tech geek, but I still feel I have some

knowledge, and I wanted to comment. Mint Made Edition doesn't get in my way. It just works. It's not about the desktop. It's about the programs and what I can do. I like the desktop, and I like the fact that it doesn't change every month or so, other than maybe a few improvements when a new release comes out. I like that it doesn't keep changing things underneath me.

It just keeps improving, and it works. Maybe it's boring, but it works. It also is about the community. I love this point. Clem keeps the users informed about what he and the team are doing and why they are doing it. He responds to user input. He addresses user issues personally. I've had some users on Linux Mint.

I've had some users on Linux Mint, I guess, as you pointed out. He says, I'm a brand. All the computers are savage. No latest and greatest. They all are just great desktops. I keep experimenting with distros, but nothing's replaced Mint Mate for me for reliability and ease of use. So he says, and a lot of users in this respect need this. So if, you know, and I completely agree.

He says, I watch all the shows, and the Savage HP has a crappy video card. So he downloads and then watches what he calls his Linux soaps later. His friends called him that. I love it. That's great. So Earl writes in with his perspective on why Linux Mint for a 70-year-old is just the right distro. That makes sense, right? Totally makes sense.

And we kind of said that. What distro do you use? I use Arch. Oh, really? Well, there you go. I do have Mint deployed at work, though, and I will say it does, you know, when I just need to use an application, it's there. You know, it has very similar key bindings.

You can do a lot of things you can if you're coming from Windows or you're coming from Linux. So when you say you have Mint deployed, like Mint is your desktop at work? Yes, for one of my machines. And then at home you run an Arch? Yes. Ah, I got you. And Rotten Corpse, you're running Mint right now? Yeah, I actually dropped Arch and went to Mint.

What? Tell me about this. Yeah. Well, okay, so I've been using KDE for the past couple months, and I was trying to test it out because I'm a huge GNOME fanboy, and I wanted to stop talking out of my butt about KDE, so I started using it, like deep dive, full in, everything. Oh, you're going to be perfect for today's episode then.

I guess so and i've actually um changed my opinion of kde a lot and i am now a huge fan of kde there are certain things that i can't stand but kwin for example is fantastic yeah that's not the point yeah we'll get to that though yeah the reason why is because when i was using arch and in february arch destroyed kde like unusable breakage so i did some updates i did some bugs fixes i sent some uh some some workarounds and things like that and after about 20 of those i got sick of it and just left uh so i wanted to see maybe Debian. Debian is the de facto standard of not breaking anything. Good old, stable, steady, true

Debian. I actually went to SID because I wanted to get the latest versions of things. Technically, Debian has really good rolling compatibility. It's actually more stable because even though their stuff is rolling, they take longer to test things, even in the unstable branches. So then when I get the update for KDE, I was like, let's see if Debian has messed anything up.

I'm curious now. So when I check it, I see if there's any bugs, no bug reported. Then I pull in all of the KDE's new stuff, and it destroys pretty much everything. Like to the point where system settings, the most important application, doesn't work. Oh, geez. Wow. Like it doesn't even show you any of the settings. All of them are gone. And now, when I went back like a week later after I was laughing about it, because now it's just hilarious that all of these transitional things are just breaking everywhere.

I went to look at the bug reports, and it said, completely unusable is the report of it. So then I was like, okay, well, Kubuntu. Kubuntu is like the – they don't update that much. Yeah, it's also broken because they went to 5.2, which is not ready, and they broke it. So Kubuntu right now is just a mess. So this is why you ended up on Mint?

Yeah, because Mint hasn't broken anything because they haven't updated much of it in a long time. Funny how that works. Yeah, they haven't broke anything for the core. So this transitional phase between 4 and 5 is just crazy to the point where right now it's not a reasonable solution. Unless you stay on 4 and you don't update to Framework 5, or you just go straight to 5 and deal with the bugs, trying to do this weird combination thing, it does not work. So I'm on Mint 17.1 because they don't have a KDE version for 17.2 right now. I am perfectly happy with stuff not breaking. I think it echoes what Linus says a lot, his views on his kernel.

Get out of the way, let people run the applications they want to run. Yeah, Mint is very much a distro like that. You know what? My argument mostly wasn't around that there isn't a place for it because I don't argue that at all. My argument was more if I was going to cold recommend a distro to somebody and I felt like they were the type of user that wanted that environment, which would be a lot of new users, Windows switchers, enterprise users, a lot of people, or like Earl, right? I think I would recommend Ubuntu Mate. I do not think i would necessarily recommend mint necessarily mostly because i would i if i if it was a perfect world i would like to be able to

just recommend vanilla ubuntu just go download the ubuntu iso and use that however i'm not convinced that unity 7 is something i want to start switching people to right now at this point in time and also the search scopes are still embarrassing. Like, we actually had a problem this week when we were trying to shoot a screen cap for the Linux Action Show, and the first time through, like, bra and underwear came up in the search scope. And it's like, really? We don't really want to put bra and underwear? I mean, you know, it's kind of funny, but at the same time, it's like, really? Like, we're trying to have a professional demonstration here, and bra and underwear is coming up in our search results.

And I just don't want to recommend that to somebody, but I want to stay as close to the Upstream Distro. So an official flavor, to me, seems like a pretty logical choice. And the Mate desktop environments, classic desktop environment, people are very familiar with it. You can get the LTS version. When I stack that up against Mint, I'm not quite sure why I would recommend Mint over the other, other than they do take care of some of the other niceties. I'm not quite sure why I would recommend Mint over the other other than they do take care of some of the other Niceties and like Earl said you know Clem's Like I really as if

My if I was in Earl's position I would like to be able to Have a community leader who was also Very clear and very transparent and that would Be something that would appeal to me too But yeah mumble or many other thoughts on that Before we move on to our next email which is really kind of A one that made me think going once Yeah I'd like to I'd like to say

I agree with the official flavor thing. The only reason I'm using mint right now is because the Ubuntu thing's weird. But if somebody wanted mate, absolutely Ubuntu mate is the better option. I think the only other reason for mint right now would be if somebody wanted cinnamon. That's what I'm using.

Yeah. Okay. My work machine has a graphics card. It handles it very well, actually. Yeah. Three DisplayPort monitors, hardly ever a glitch. Yeah, and Cinnamon's a pretty good environment for sort of a parallel to somewhere between GNOME and KDE. Yeah, a lot of the people I work with kind of come from a Windows background as well. And so, you know, you can split Windows up on the four sides.

It has a start bar. Yeah, yeah. It has some graphical niceties that they're used to yeah Mumbleroom, any more? Chris, I was wondering, are we getting to a point where anybody that's just a casual user or

interested in getting work done should be on LTS and the only people that we recommend rolling to are people that are looking for the latest and greatest teacher or have a specific hardware support issue that's a great question I don't recommend rolling to are people that are looking for the latest and greatest teacher or have a specific hardware support issue? That's a great question. I think we should answer that question. I think we should see if we can answer that question when we get to the OpenSUSE follow-up

because that's exactly the question OpenSUSE says. So you're going to have Tumbleweed, which is a rolling release. They claim it's going to be the world's first stable rolling release because only things go into the rolling release after they've been fully tested by our magic testing system. That's according to them. So they're going to have rolling releases. Then they're going to have OpenSUSE, which is going to be somewhere in between a real steady enterprise distro, but it's going to be sourced from an enterprise distro.

So that's kind of going to be somewhere like in the CentOS range of type products, somewhere between CentOS and Fedora if I'm following. And of course, we're going to talk about all this in a minute. And then you're going to have, of course, the SLE, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Editions. And what you just said, that could be where SUSE, OpenSUSE is going to fit very, very

nicely, potentially. So we'll just have to, but maybe not. And maybe I have that wrong. Let's talk about that in the SUSE segment. First, I want to get to Stefan's email. This one got me thinking. Long-time listener. He says, huge fan of just about all of the shows. I'm sure he meant all of them, not just about.

Of course. He says, I'm writing because the conversation around privacy and trusting your data and information, especially with companies like Google, seems to always result in, and this is his quote here, we shouldn't because that's just creepy. We feel that it's not morally right for companies to sell or use our data in order to serve free products and services, to which I do agree, or at least I think I do. Could it be possible for you to talk about why exactly this is not okay? What are we afraid of? Why should we take so good care of our privacy and personal information in the first place? Is it all just aggregated? Isn't it all just being aggregated and impersonalized by a bunch of computers anyways and grouped

together with thousands of other people's information? Has this just become a principle that storing user data is wrong? Why is this fight so important to fight? We want technology to engage with us in every aspect of our life, yet the companies developing these technologies are not allowed to know anything about us? That doesn't sound about right. Why is my weight, age, sex, height, favorite food, most used train station,

travel history, et cetera, so damn important that I should know them and only I should know them? And again, is that really privacy? Best regards, Stefan, and keep up the amazing work. What a fast... Wes, what do you think? Do you ever get creeped out about Google? You know, Stefan, and keep up the amazing work. What a fast – Wes, what do you think? Do you ever get creeped out about Google?

You know, they are somewhat integrated. I do appreciate his argument. I was installing Telegram on my girlfriend's iPhone the other day. You know, I've been using it with some of my friends, and she wanted to use it too. And I was telling her about some of the encryption. I'd used TechSecure before. And whenever I mention encryption, she does kind of just laugh. You know, she understands, but – Not a priority for her. Not at all. I don't think she has any problem just laugh. You know, she understands, but...

Not a priority for her. Not at all. I don't think she has any problem with Google, you know, knowing every little bit about her. I waffle on this. I go back and forth. At times, I think it's really a great service. And how can you have Jarvis and Star Trek Enterprise computer system and all these things without that data collection? At the same time, though, I think I have put my finger on what creeps me out about it,

but I'm going to hold on to that for a second. I'll let Wimpy jump in. Wimpy, you go first. What do you think? What's your take on this topic? Well, I live in the U.K., and the U.K. is doing some crazy things at the moment. So our government believes that the UK citizens have no right to electronic privacy anymore. And I would say that this is important because if your civil liberties and your privacy are eroded bit by bit, piece by piece, and you don't think it's important.

These are just stepping stones. And it might not be this thing or the next thing, but maybe the thing after that or the thing after that is the thing that you think is too much, too far, that encroaches into your life. And certainly in the UK, if they're going to ban, in air quotes, some of these encrypted messaging messaging platforms which we've now concluded is basically anything that's encrypted then that gives people the right to or gives the government the right to potentially um siphon and archive uh your message streams that you're using

over encrypted channels such as like facebook messenger so if your family is using facebook messenger to send photographs of your family is using facebook messenger to send photographs of your family members and your children backwards and forwards and the government is taking a feed off that and doing flesh percentage of flesh tone analysis is your account now being flagged up because you've got young children that are prone to taking off all their clothes and running around in the garden naked um and do you now look like a suspicious individual and should you not have a right to privacy i have i wonder about that same thing like if my wife sends me a picture of our daughter's butt in the bathtub and you know that goes through hangouts

and they reckon they're analyzing everything that goes through hangouts is there some algorithm analyzing my daughter's butt and flagging my account for having nudity in my... That's a good question. How do I know? I think that's a big part, too, is, you know, for right now with the technology we have, maybe there aren't that many ramifications, but we don't know what kind of retention policies may be able to affect, you know, the huge part of it. You can recognize people based on iris scans, face profiles, you know, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but...

The computing power just keeps getting better and better, though. We map-produce these things, and you can learn a lot. Wimpy, also, there's a certain amount of power a company like Google has when they know everybody I'm with, every location I'm at all the time. Does that concern you? To some extent. More so if now governments are wanting to put hooks into organizations such as Google and Facebook,

because there's a proven track record of people that work for the security services to not be discreet in the way that they access this data for, you know, lulls and giggles. You know, so, you know, your stuff isn't private anymore because they're, you know, just perusing over it when it takes their fancy. And that seems to be the only papers I've seen published about that were from North America, but it seemed to be an alarming number of people that abused that privilege. Yes, yes, that's a good point, is the people that are in that position sometimes abuse that. Ubi, you wanted to take the other side of the fence,

as somebody who's not quite as concerned about privacy, right? To be honest, I am quite concerned about privacy, but I know people who aren't, as a lot of people do. And a point that I find hard to argue against, maybe there can be some ideas here, is why care because there's so much data they're collecting that they won't be interested in looking at mine. Because it's not individuals looking at your data, it's computers looking at the data in aggregate and computers are flawed and so my my example of you know flesh tone analysis is a real example where your legitimate and legal use of a service could flag your account as being suspicious and

now you're under observation for doing nothing wrong. So it's not that you've got nothing to hide, it's that you shouldn't have anything that people are prying upon. I mean, if the UK government suddenly want to conduct all of their communications in the clear, then I'll back their proposals, but until they do that, it's a nonsense.

Yeah, that's interesting. Just as easily as computers can anonymize the data, they can also de-anonymize it. Yes, very good point. And here's, okay, so here's kind of where I come down on it. And I think about like the long-term picture here, and I think what Wessa was kind of touching on is like computing power is only going to get better. Storage is only going to get greater. And they can keep this stuff for years and years and years. And sometimes what you find when you read through history is what we find to be sort of totally acceptable and okay today will not necessarily be totally fine and acceptable 20 years ago.

And when I think about my son and my daughters, my son, for God's sakes, already has like a children's Google account. Oh, wow. Yeah, because of school and he's six years old and now he can get on YouTube and look at like a kid's version of YouTube. He already has a Google account. Now, I know they have different policies for how they track children, but in a large sense, my son at six years old has already begun getting just about everything he does online logged. And will 20-year-old him feel that he really consented to do that? Right.

I don't know. And will 20-year-old him really want to be, you know, like once it's recorded, it never goes away. Exactly. And people change a lot, and it's just to have all of that on file, and then to have this AI that can sit back there and analyze it, and determine what kind of person you are, so that way they can better target dick pills at you, I just don't find it to be a valuable trade. It's not worth it for me. Sunsel, you think the convenience does trump in the end? I mean, it appears to be so far, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, let's just be frank. Like, when you get a cell phone, your privacy is out. You know what I mean? Like, once you turn on that phone, like, you've almost given a lot of your privacy away. That's true. I mean, not trying to, you know, be the devil's advocate here, but it's just that, like,

users really love convenience. You know what I mean? Like, just whether it's your Siri iPhone, whether it's, okay, Google on your cell phone,

whatever it is, like, just having that convenience to get data at your fingertip is what users really like. Yeah. Or, you know what,

you could zoom out. I mean, phones is what's on our minds, really, but it's, if you use a credit card, you know, a bank account, all of this stuff, there's data brokers that are aggregating all of it.

But that's a great point. Wimpy, I want to give you the final word, and then we'll move on to some other Linux-y feedback. But I want to give you one last chance to jump in. So cryptography allows us the facility to have non-repudiation, which is to prove that i sent something and it hasn't been tampered with in the meantime uh hacking team were beautifully hacked last week the delicious irony of that is not lost upon me yeah but one of the products that they sell is a product that deliberately injects false evidence into a um a target's computer system so that they can be tried in a air quotes court of law and if we are now in a position where you have no expectation of privacy and encryption is

not a tool that's open to you then what's going to happen in some of these oppressive regimes or even in the UK if if they decide that they don't, you know, you're not flavor of the month anymore, it makes it all the easier to actually inject false evidence into your system. Yeah, and Corky makes a great point in the chat room. He can't join because of his ping spike, but he says, when data is permanent, you have to hope that every single executive or CEO or government that has access to that data does not use it against you. One government gone wrong could have a large leverage to prosecute you or prison you or to destroy your reputation or to silence you.

That's a big part, too, is being able to silence you. Corporations go bankrupt and sell off their assets. You might trust Google to have that, but maybe the person who buys Google in 30 years, you don't like someone. Or when Larry and Sergey step down, does the new guy that runs the place have a different concern about how much privacy users get to enjoy? Well, I think this is fascinating.

You know, I see North Ranger has a topic. We'll pick it up in the post show, too, if you guys want. It's a fascinating topic.

But I want to get to some of the other Linux emails we've gotten. But it's one that, you know, privacy and security is a huge reason why we use

open source in Linux. So I don't think it's a conversation that is not worth having. I just think we have to bide our time. But we use open source in Linux, so I don't think it's a conversation that is not worth having. I just think we have to bide our time, but we'll do more in the post show. That sounds pretty fascinating. I wanted to get to an email that came into the show about, well,

about Flash, to be honest, in a sense. And sometimes people that want to watch our show have to use a proprietary technology to do so. Like, maybe you're going to watch an H.264 encoded video, or maybe you're going to watch the live Flash stream. Well, some big, big developments are happening this week, really big actually today, that may finally change this for good, I hope. And a very public company and two very public browsers

are taking a very public position on all of that. But before we talk about hopefully the final death of Flash, I want to mention our friends at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. Now, when Wes got here earlier today, he was like, geez, Chris, how many phones do you got? And I was like, Wes, man, I got plenty of phones. Why?

Because it's $6 a line. Yeah, I love Ting. So I've got right now in my hot hands right here, I've got the Galaxy S6. And it's been a really great phone for me. It's recently available on the Ting network. And here's what's fantastic about Ting. You only pay for what you use.

Ting takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes, and they add them all up. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you've got to pay. And it's just $ fantastic about Ting. You only pay for what you use. Ting takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes, and they add them all up. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you've got to pay. And it's just $6 for the line and then the taxes. So it makes it very economical to have several lines if you've got like a family or maybe you have a small business and you want to give folks in your business some lines. Or in my case, when we had a nanny for a short period of time, I got her a phone. And it sounds like, oh, my gosh, you're such a baller. Well, no.

You can get an unlocked phone for under $100, and it's $6 for the line, and you just pay for your usage on top of that. And then what's really fantastic about Ting is the way their business is structured is they're really able to focus on the customer. And so they're able to build out additional functionality that most carriers wouldn't bother with. Like they have really great mobile applications, a fantastic web UI to manage all of this. It's really good stuff.

And they have no hold customer service. You can call them at 1-855-TING-FTW and a real person answers the phone. Now here's the core essentials that I love about Ting. Unlocked phones, you own them outright and you're only paying for what you use. Like hotspot tethering, it's all built in. So no more like prepaying for like, oh I

might use 800 minutes so I better buy the thousand minute plan. Like that kind of crap. Or like I might need three gigs of data but they only offer six gigs if I need that much data. That is done. And really, it is so liberating when you realize that once I get the phone and I do all that, that's done. Like, that's the hardest part.

I'm easy. I'm ready to go. And here's the best part. When you go to linux.ting.com, you're going to take $25 off an unlocked device. And if you've got a Ting-compatible device, and there's a whole S-ton of Ting-compatible devices, because check this out, they've got a GSM network and a CDMA network, and if you get a fancy phone, you can swap between the networks.

I've done that with the Nexus 5, for example. So you get these phones. They're unlocked. Anything from a feature phone to a high-end like Nexus 6 or Moto X2 or, I don't know, the OnePlus or the S6 or iPhone 6, whatever you want to get, Ting's got it. And then you're on the plan and you're done. The hard part's over.

And that's not even that hard. $6 a month, pay for what you use, call them anytime you've got an issue. It's really slick. Go to linux.ting.com. That supports the show and gets you the discount. Also, this is a really slick way to go if you want a MiFi device. If you're in any kind of job or if you just have a need for a high level of connectivity,

what a great way to do this at an incredible value. Because you're only paying for what you use with Ting, so go get a MiFi device. You buy it once and then it's just $6 a month and then any data usage. As an independent contractor when I was doing IT,

I had this really expensive MiFi device from one of the Duopoly mobile providers. And I lived with the guilt. Every time it sat in my drawer for like a couple of weeks and I didn't use it, I could hear Angela in the back of my mind. That's a waste of money. That thing costs us $60 a month. How come you're not using it right now? And I would just like bring it with me just in case I might need it because I am paying so much money for it and I wouldn't use it. Now this

is gone with Ting because you're only paying for what you use. If you don't use the MiFi device it's just $6 for the line and here's the even better part. I can't even believe Ting lets you do this. You can just turn the line off for a while. You just turn it off. How slick is that? Go to linux.ting.com to get started. Check out their dashboard. They have a savings

calculator there. Also while you started. Check out their dashboard. They have a savings calculator there. Also, while you're there, peruse their blog. They've got great app picks. They have an unboxing of the Moto E 2nd Gen Edition. And they also have app picks there, as always, and tips for Google Maps. Really cool stuff. linux.ting.com. And a huge, huge thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program.

linux.ting.com. And thanks to everybody who visits that, because for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. And thanks to everybody who visits that because that supports the show and lets Ting know that you appreciate them keeping us on the air. Right, Wes? Oh, yeah. Hey, thank you for grabbing me another beer, sir. I really appreciate that. My pleasure. All right.

So we got a little bit more feedback. I kind of want to pick up the pace just a tad because I want to get to some of the big topics today. But let's talk about this huge, huge, huge story. some of the big topics today. But let's talk about this huge, huge, huge story. And I want to start to kick it off with a piece of feedback that I get almost at least a weekly basis, more often in the chat room on a daily basis. So this came in from Yellow Mango, which is kind of funny. He says, while setting up my new Fedora install,

I went to add my favorite podcast to Rhythmbox. Oh, thanks, man. And however, when I went to play the video, I noticed I needed to download a decoder. The decoder just happens to be a non-free one. Why in the world is an open source focused podcast using a non-free encoding? Maybe there's a legitimate reason. I just don't know

about it. And this comes in in a couple of different phases or different ways. Like you guys have a Flash player, for example, like our live stream. And Wes, have you ever, what are your thoughts when it comes down to this codec stuff? Do you have a hard line on this at all? I mean, I definitely follow the people over at Ziff.org, you know, Monty

and his wonderful demos, and I would love for open source and free codecs to rule the world. But I think the top commenter in this Reddit post does have a certain point. What did he say? I didn't see that. He said, because he wants to actually be discovered and watched by 95% of the world who live in proprietary prisons. Which, which unfortunately many people do.

Oh, there is sort of a sick truth to that. There is definitely a sick truth to that. So, yeah, we do actually pretty – we make every show available in WebM. Yeah, which is awesome. But we don't necessarily make it available for direct download. We, in most cases, make it available via torrent, which is linked in the show notes in most cases. The thing is, is we've not been very happy

with WebM, so it costs us a lot to store it and distribute it. It actually costs us more to distribute a 420p version of a show in WebM than it does to distribute a 720p version of the show in x264. Oh, wow. Yeah. it's it is only because

we want to see open standards progress that we actually pay webm is the most expensive thing we distribute wow yeah so it is kudos to you guys well i mean it makes html5 playback work so that's another reason why we have to do it uh and then reEye can attest to the fact that it is by far, by far, by far the slowest file to encode. We can crank out four HD versions almost of a show in the time it takes one 420p WebM version to come out. Wow. Almost four versions of the HD version in the time it takes one WebM version to be encoded. Almost that long. And so this, though, often comes up in terms of our JBLive.tv live stream, which is powered by Flash because really live streaming, we have other options.

In fact, by the end of this segment, I think we should all just disable Flash in our computers for a week and see if it works. Amen. And go to JBLive.tv and grab the RTMP or HLS stream and watch it MPV or VLC. So I'll say that up front. But we do have one Flash player on the Jupyter Broadcasting site, and that's our live player. Well, today, depending on which browser you're in, you may have had troubles loading the live stream because Mozilla and I think Google Chrome, too, today have started blocking Flash just as Facebook's security chief calls for its death, all in light

of the hacking group that Wimpy was just talking about getting hacked, and zero-day Flash vulnerabilities being splashed all over the web. Adobe's been scrambling to patch these new zero-day vulnerabilities, and in response to that the Facebook security chief has taken up the Steve Jobs mantle of saying, kill Flash, kill Flash, and is proclaiming its death.

He says the time is now, and in response Mozilla is disabling Flash because the zero day is affecting Flash installations right now as we record this show. There's a lot of stuff happening here. Do you think the web is ready for Flash to die, Wes? I really wish that it was. Personally, I am. I don't think I need it. But I recognize there are a lot of users with random use cases, like, oh, my one banking company requires me to use Flash for this login form, or who knows. But I feel like we hear a lot about those one-time excuses. Wimpy, I bet you have a few of those use cases in mind, don't you?

Mr. Wimpy? Oh, sorry. Oh, there you go. I do. So can you hear me? Yeah, we got you. Yeah, can you hear? Yeah, okay. Yeah, in the UK, Amazon Prime, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5,

and catch-up TV services all use Flash. Some of them even use the DRM module in Flash, which is no longer supported on most Linux most linux systems because um hal went away that used to provide that little crypto stub um so if flash goes away then all of the major uk streaming services cease to be relevant for um linux users because there is no other option wow you know the only one that continues to work is Netflix using Google Chrome, which is also proprietary. But this is not about Flash on Linux.

This is a Flash in general, and that Mozilla and Google are blocking it cross-platform. Yeah, but the same is true. These services, with the exception of Amazon Prime, which you can use Silverlight for on Windows, all of those other streaming services require Flash regardless of whether you're on Windows or Linux. Right, but I'd rather Flash die and those services not work and make them actually use something that isn't garbage

for a downtime of like a month or two than to just throw your hands up and give up. Let's just, just for fun discussion purposes. If anyone was going to move away from Flash, people have started doing it more aggressively. But don't you think now, Wimpy, with them disabling it in Firefox and things like that, don't you think that's going to accelerate?

Because this, like Roden said, this isn't a Linux thing. This is everybody. And plus, the iOS platform and Android platforms are not Flash-friendly still, so there's incentive to get off there. Maybe this push could do it. Hopefully. I mean, if it was just Mozilla doing it, then, you know, you couldn't guarantee it.

But the fact that Google is joining the force. And Facebook, I think, too. And it's going to put a huge dent in Flash and hopefully even kill it. So I think here it's very obvious. The streaming services are the ones still relying on Flash. Yes, yes, yes. But if you access the streaming services through a mobile phone nowadays, you already see that they don't really require Flash.

So currently Flash is there for convenience. Well, I'll tell you this. It has always been required. Unfortunately, so the way it works currently, and man, Alan, it would be way better explaining this. He does a great job explaining this. But the way it works on mobile currently, most of the time, I think every time, it is delivered, live video is delivered via HLS. And HLS, and I'm sorry, I'm not going to explain this as well as Noah, or I'm sorry, as well as Alan would,

but HLS, what it essentially does is it takes H.264 video and MP3 or AAC audio, whatever your audio is, and it wraps it in tiny M3U playlist files. Yeah, oh, you know how this works? I've streamed from it before. So HLS is about as proprietary as it gets because it's using H.2644 and it's really very clunky. Because what the player

is doing on the other end is it's constantly cycling playlist files. It's pulling the playlist file, pulling the playlist file, and then loading down the player and playing it as fast as it can and pulling down the playlist file and loading the player and playing it as fast as it can and it's really dumb. Easy to lose the stream too. On a mobile, you get a little hiccup there and

you lose some of that playlist file, one of the playlist files, and you just drop the whole stream. And so you get and on mobile you get a little hiccup there and you know you lose some of that playlist file one of the playlist files and you just drop the whole stream. And so we don't really have a solid ready to go live flash replacement yet.

And anybody who watches this show in VLC sometimes notices that MPV handles it a little bit better but yeah. I honestly used the flash player

when I first started watching because VLC couldn't keep up. It's definitely better now. I will say that. But MPV is great too. I heard somebody in there. I don't like VLC at all, actually.

I think that its streaming features are so clunky that it gets way more hype than it deserves, at least on Linux. Maybe on Windows there's nothing better, but on Linux there's a lot. I have not had experience. Oh, go ahead, Daryl. I was just saying that I haven't had that experience regarding to VLC. I'm pretty sure that that's a discussion for another show. Yeah, we could have a topic on that.

Wimpy, are you joking or do you really think that if we prematurely kill Flash, which I can't even believe I'm going to say that, but let's just argue that maybe it's too soon. If we prematurely killed Flash, do you really think people would jump to another proprietary alternative like Silverlight or is it like H.264? Are we just going to lock in some other proprietary garbage if we kill Flash right now? That was for you, Wimpy, if you're still there.

I don't mind proprietary garbage. Yeah, I am. I think there's a bit of lag on the line here I'm not sure if it's me or someone else anyway I'm not sure I don't mind which proprietary solution people pick so long as it's one that runs on multiple platforms

so I don't have a problem with H.264 because Cisco are backing the licenses for that being embedded into Firefox, for example. So our Royal Gabe, I'm not pro-proprietary, I'm just pragmatic. If the only way Linux users are going to have access to premium content, which is going to be DRM encumbered, then at least give us a level playing field so we can all access it.

But there is a new streaming service, a Netflix-like service in the UK that launched on Silverlight, and that was only nine months ago. So, yes, there are organizations that still go for Silverlight solutions, even on new products. I know, just it's crazy, isn't it? I would say I want to take the DRM discussion. I just want to table it. Yes, I agree DRM is bad, and I also agree proprietary garbage is bad. And if you don't want to watch DRM content and proprietary garbage, the solution isn't in what the browsers are implementing. The solution is in

the customer stop paying for it and stop watching it. So if you want DRM to change and you don't want proprietary garbage, you've got to change what you do and let the market follow. And that's a hard thing to ask. It's easier said than done when you say something like that. But I think that's the silver bullet to DRM, not convincing these companies. Or just cross-platform proprietary garbage.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That gives us everybody a chance to at least play. Until we stop using it. Yeah, I agree. I do have to say that potentially in the near future, the new copyright directive on the EU level will actually kill DRM with copyright legislation. Because it's currently seen as breaking the exceptions to copying your private copy. So it will have to be dropped. That'll be fascinating to watch. Thanks, guys.

All right, so let's shift gears and talk about this gentleman who was a hardcore KDE user, and he tried out GNOME for a week and then wrote up about it. And I saw this article, and I thought, oh, here's some clickbait. And I read through it, and I went, that was really well done, really articulate, and I want to talk about it in the show. And I know we're going to have some differing opinions here, but we've got a lot more to get to. And then we also got the OpenSUSE discussion. So let's take a quick moment and thank our next sponsor, Linux Academy.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplug. Go there, get our 33% Linux discount. Linux Academy is a platform set up by people who are truly passionate about Linux and open source, and they really follow the content. They really follow the material, and they've got step-by-step video courses to help you learn. They've got downloadable comprehensive study guides. The courseware comes with its own server. It spins it up in the lab for you on demand.

The seven-plus distributions you get to choose from refresh topics that you care about all the time, Docker, OpenStack, virtualization, all of the technology around Linux as well. Everything from like Ruby on Rails development to Android development to Linux basics. They've got over 1,500 self-paced courses and I love the way the interface works. You log in, you get a great map of how long something's going to take you. You can download the guide for that

before you go jump in. You can tell they have availability programming so you can go and say, I have this much time available. It'll automatically generate courseware that matches your availability. This is all really high-tech stuff. Of course, they're using all Linux on the back end, too. Their virtualization platform, I learned a little bit about it when they became a sponsor. They were just

finishing building it out. It's so, so slick. There is obviously a passion for the technology over at Linux Academy, and I think that when you're learning from somebody, that passion truly makes a difference. It's almost like CG in a movie. When you look at a CG character, you're like, oh boy, that Uncanny Valley, that passion truly makes a difference. It's almost like CG in a movie. Like when you look at a CG character, you're like, oh boy, that uncanny valley, that is just enough creepy that it's not a real thing.

That's how I feel like a lot of these online training course systems are. Like it's real close except for, well, they needed to have a couple of check boxes in the Linux and open source. Let's get the Apache course in here. Let's get the Linux course in here. Let's get the engine. You know, they check the boxes and that's their commitment to Linux and open source. That's not Linux Academy. Linux Academy

is truly people passionate about this stuff, and that closes that uncanny valley gap. That makes it real. That makes it people that are truly living it and breathe it and trust it, and that's what they base their life around, and that's who you want to learn from. That's why you listen to podcasts made by people who truly love Linux and not a podcast made by

Engadget talking about Linux. That would be awful, right? It's that same kind of disconnect and that big difference and that closing the gap that Linux Academy makes. They've just refreshed their OpenStack course where they just really updated the Red Hat certified stuff. It's great. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged

to get our special 33% discount that supports this show. Also, shoot, while you're over there, see if they've updated any of their nuggets. I think these nuggets are the greatest thing ever. Oh, look at this one. So these nuggets are like anywhere from like 2 minutes to 60 minutes, like deep dive on courses that just show you like, hey, you want to know how to do X? Just do this.

Well, look at this one. Video conversions on the command line with handbrake. Oh, that's awesome. That's great, right? Virtual box. Start a headless VM on boot. Also genius. They got some AWS stuff in here. They got building a firewall

with IP tables. Just go deep dive on a topic. Right? Just dig in. You know, it doesn't feel like a lecture. It feels like a new toy that you've just got, right? Exactly. I love it. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged and support the Linux unplugged program. It's a really good setup, and I also just love that they've built it around the Linux environment

in such a cool way with those virtual servers. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Okay, guys. So I couldn't believe it. I thought for sure there was no way I was going to get sucked into this article, but I did. A week with GNOME as my main Linux desktop, what they get right and what they got wrong.

And I'm just going to read a couple of bits from it, and then we'll get into discussion here. It says, yeah, I have a couple of points I want to touch on, but let's start on the article itself. An important distinction between KDE and GNOME, the author writes, GNOME feels like a product. It feels like a singular experience. When you use it, it feels complete and that everything you need is at your fingertips. It feels like the Linux desktop. In the same way, Windows or OS X

have the desktop experience. What you need is there, and it's all written by the same guys working towards the same team goal. It feels like the Linux desktop. Now, Wes, KD, GNOME user? GNOME user myself. Do you agree? Does GNOME feel more like a Linux complete desktop to you?

Well, you know, I think what we were talking about earlier, a lot of things, Qt does feel much more, you know, wider world. It runs on so many things. People really love the framework and to code with it. Maybe not so much GTK. But you're right. GNOME really fits in with Linux, you know, especially the hardcore support that they get from Fedora,

how well integrated it is. So it's right on top of SystemD? Exactly. Yeah. So the author spent five days of his week logging into GNOME manually, not turning on automatic login. And I love this observation. It's the small things in GNOME. It really is.

In fact, the alternative article title was a death by 1,000 paper cuts for KDE. So here's like an example of something that bugs me under KDE that I like under GNOME. And it's like this times a hundred. He says, I spent the first five days of my week logging into GNOME manually, not turning on automatic login. On the night of the fifth day, I got annoyed with having to log in by hand, and so I went into the user manager and turned on automatic

login. The next time I logged in, I got a prompt. Your keychain was not unlocked. Please enter your password to unlock your keychain. That's when I realized something. GNOME had been automatically unlocking my keychain, my wallet in KDE speak, every time I logged in via GDM. It was only when I bypassed GDM's login that GNOME had to step up and make it do it manually.

It was at that moment I realized something simple, something that made the desktop feel like it was working with me. When I log into KDE via STDM, before the splash screen is even finished loading, there is a pop-up over that splash screen animation, thereby disturbing that splash screen, prompting me to unlock my KDE wallet or GPG keyring. And then it goes into the dysfunctions in creating those. And I thought that was an interesting point. It is the small things about KDE that bug me. He also talks about the login manager and the way that looks. But this point, the KDE, when you log into the KDE desktop and you have to unlock your wallet,

and this dialog box pops up before you've even finished logging into your desktop. It just feels disoriented. It feels disconnected. It feels jumbled. Which is a big criticism of Linux in general, right? Yes. A hodgepodge of different tools. GNOME doesn't feel that way.

Here's another hodgepodge. Software Manager. Something that's been seeing a lot of push in the recent years and will likely see a bigger push in months to come. Unfortunately, it's an area where KDE gets close but then fell on its face. GNOME Software is now his new favorite software center, minus one gripe. But Muon, which is the KDE one, it's a design nightmare. And he's got some examples in here.

I mean, I'm not bashing KDE, but he's right. There are wiggles in the software center, like the fact that the updates in software in two different applications, the fact that software discovery is a total, like, you look at this, it is, and what's really kind of a tragedy about it, and he goes on to point this out, is that KDE knows about this. That's why they created the visual design group. And the visual design group had mock-ups for the software center that looked totally different than what shipped. Wow.

He says someone must have gotten drunk when they coded the UI. That's the only guess he has. And then we're almost done, and we'll get to jump in. But I just want to get through his major points here. When we bring up an important distinction between KDE and GNOME, GNOME feels like a product, right? That's what he says. It feels like a product. But KDE doesn't feel like a cohesive experience.

He says KDE doesn't feel like it has a direction it's moving on. It doesn't feel like it's a full experience. KDE feels like it's a bunch of pieces that are moving in a bunch of different directions that just happen to have a shared toolkit beneath them. Right. I think this speaks a lot to what we see in general, where a lot of people gripe about GNOME, they lose customization, all that kind of stuff. And I think there's very diverse camps within the Linux group. Some people want to be able to tinker. They're okay if it doesn't work for the first 10 hours, but afterwards it works great. But GNOME really does feel like a product where it's been integrated, it's been considered, it's been designed.

It looks like, you feel like a lot of elements were painstakingly thought about. Exactly. I thought this was a final conclusion here, and you'll have the whole article linked in the show notes, which is a good read with lots of good screenshot examples. He says, will I still use GNOME after this week? Probably not, no. GNOME is still trying to force a workflow on me that I

don't follow or abide by. I feel less productive when using it because it doesn't follow my paradigm. So at the end of all of this, he's not switching back to GNOME. But this hit a lot of pieces for me. And Rotten, do you want to open up? Because I know you just mentioned at the top of the show that you've been running KDE for a little while now. And as you switched from GNOME to KDE, do you detect this sort of –

I thought this line that he put here, a bunch of different moving software pieces and going in different directions that use the same shared toolkit beneath them, that really struck a chord with me when I think of KDE. It's like, everything does talk super well together, but at the same time, it is a bit of a mess in terms of, like, jumbled together. Like, man, look at, like, the sound. Like, you can look at the sound settings, right? When you're looking at the sound settings in KDE, it's really, isn't, don't you think

it's really bizarre that they have, like... In fact, you know what? He has a screenshot. So here's a screenshot right here of GNOME sound versus KDE sound. Now, here is what blows me away about KDE sound, the sound settings. You see what's at the very top of the GNOME... What's that very top slider right there, Wes? What is that right there?

Output volume. That's the output volume. You know what's missing completely from the KDE Sound applet? There is no effing volume slider. But you know what there is? There is a left-hand list of device priorities for application notifications,

music, video communications, audio recording, video recording, and in each one of these categories I can move around which sound card takes priority. Pretty neat feature. Probably not used as often as the volume slider in the volume control panel, though. 10 to 1 right there, yeah. Right. This is what I'm talking about.

What kind of sense does that make? For developers and advanced users, that's a really slick feature, and I bet even advanced users and developers set that once or twice when they set up the KDE desktop, and they never go back and change that priority list. I never mess with that priority list. I just want to set my default audio device and set the volume. I just want to do two things. And this GNOME system lets me set my output device and set

the volume right there. And it's like that everywhere. The defaults are crazy in KDE. Now, Rotten, have you noticed this as you've moved over from GNOME to KDE, or to you, is it refreshing in a sense? As far as the way the cohesiveness of KDE? Yeah, does it feel like a bunch of different stuff just share the same toolkit?

No, I mean it feels like a cohesive unit. It's just a messy cohesion. The example of the sound says the sound slider does exist in KDE. It's just not in the settings section. It's in the applet that's on the panel or taskbar, as they call it. I know, I know. Which is fine. And you would say, well, these are settings,

so you want to change the different devices and stuff like that. So it's nice and it's more polished the way GNOME does it, but it's not necessarily a complete necessity for kde to do that way because they already give you the slider and they give you k mix gives you a ton of control over the different sliders for the different applications and the different uh outputs and stuff like that it's and it's really nice because it's all right in that one that one widget so you don't have to open up like for example with uh with if you want to change stuff based on a particular application or a particular output for say a plug-in, you have two different YouTube channels playing.

Yeah, that's neat, but why not? Okay, so this is a use case scenario. Let's be honest. How many people are doing this? Probably not very. And those people that could do that could just install Puva Control. Yeah, but my point is that it's not really that polished if the aspects of what you want to do are available in KDE, but they're not available at all in GNOME. I would disagree.

I think what they have struck is such an imbalance between polish and options that it's a mess. It's not polished at all. And I think if, you know, yes, there is a sound slider. GNOME is the polished one. Yeah, okay. I just, I think it is a little, I think it is a little, the sound settings here is a little indicative of the whole problem. I know there's a sound slider in the menu bar,

but like every other desktop environment, literally made every other desktop environment, like Windows and OS X included in that, have the slider there for a very good reason. Because when you're changing your different output devices and you're changing your different alert settings, you want to be able to adjust the volume to see what... I do this all the time. This is a very, very common function.

And it just makes sense to have it there. Anyway... But to be fair, they're still porting a lot of stuff to 5, and he's showing a screenshot from Plasma 5, but that's not really a fair screenshot considering that's KDE 4 version of that application. So just because that's how it looks in Plasma 5 doesn't mean that's what it's going to be when it finally releases the new port. Well, here's what I was going to ask. This is also true with pretty much most of their applications. Does it matter? Like, is the KDE. Well, here's what I was going to ask. This is also true with pretty much most of their applications. Does it matter? Like, is the KDE approach necessarily wrong?

It's sort of, I mean, what's the Unix philosophy? A lot of little tools working together to build something great. Is that necessarily, if you could have a nice desktop environment, a lot of different tools that use a common toolkit and a common design language, which is what the visual design group is supposed to be pushing, but it depends on the projects adopted, then is that necessarily the wrong approach?

I think a lot of times we see two different approaches to something and we just assume one is right and one is wrong. I don't necessarily think that's the case. I think for me, I like it. So I said this a long time ago. I really like the fact that GNOME feels like the Linux desktop. For some reason, like from just something about the whole thing, it feels like GNOME is sitting directly on top of more fundamental Linux technologies than, say, KDE is.

And so to me, the whole cohesiveness feels like a really good desktop environment. That's what I want out of my environment. But like Rod was saying right now, there's a whole other group of people who want those other things. Doesn't mean that's the wrong approach. I think it enriches our ecosystem to have both being actively developed. Were you going to say Rodin? No? Okay. Rodin has

nothing to that. No, I totally do. I always have something to say. So, I just posted a screenshot in the IRC of KDE, what my KDE looks like now. I'm not done, but you'll see it kind of resembles something, right? Wow, it looks a lot like GNOME, to be honest with you. Yeah, that was actually the purpose.

Yeah, it looks actually like GNOME. Yeah, it does. So the reason why is because I think KDE is atrocious looking. The default for 5 is actually to the point where it's reasonable to say that I might actually try that. But the default for KDE 4, which is the current stable release, is atrocious. the current stable release is atrocious um so i the reason why my kde looks good and it looks like like a lot more cohesiveness is because i changed a crap load of things i've done that too it just seems like such a waste of energy it almost feels like you use kde to make a gnome so yeah but i did actually but my point is that you could that you can take KDE to any direction you want, and that's the power of it.

The design group is actually going to fix the overall cohesiveness of it. So eventually it will be a very good solution. I'm actually starting to doubt the design group will actually have much influence. I mean, they've had some great influence on the desktop itself, but then other projects outside of the Direct Desktop don't really seem to be like Dragon Player, for example, or Armor Rock, for example.

Not seen a lot of changes there. Well, they haven't been ported. They haven't gotten to the point of actually starting to port those. Like, even Dolphin is one of the most important applications for KDE users, and it hasn't it's only had slightly started the porting process right now.

They still have a lot of work to do, and it's actually impressive how much work they've done in only like nine months. Yeah, I... They've essentially rewritten 70% of the code of KDE in order to do Plasma plasma 5 and it is very impressive

it's it's not ready by any means but it is it is getting to the point where the fundamentals seem there it's like you can see the potential of it but that's but rotten that's where it's been since before plasma 5 was even a thing it's where it's been and and like you talked about one of the you do well uh like there's a couple of there's always been a couple of constants qt's always been badass and kwin's always gotten well kwin's gotten extremely badass right and in fact martin's just recently been he's recently been talking about all the work on his you know to get kaelin working k when working on wayland it's getting really close it's really exciting so kwin is actually fantastic and it's more fantastic people know because kwin has this built-in feature for window rules, which is basically like saving features of how you actually lay out your windows.

So if you don't want window decorations, you can turn it off and save that. If you want your windows to be a specific size, specific location on your screen, which screen you want it to be on, what desktop you want it to be on, different things like that. which screen you want it to be on, what desktop you want it to be on, different things like that. You can control it to ridiculous degrees that there are certain settings that I would never even bother because they're so specific. The coolest one right now

is that 4 does not have it, but Plasma 5 is an example of the design group seeing how this is going to be a benefit is that the Rendo rules in 5 allow you to change the colors per application. Well, okay, that is kind of cool. I was going to do that and then I'm like, well, maybe you would, so it grabs you.

Yeah, okay. I mean, I love this stuff. Functionally, KDE is amazing. Visually, right now in 4, it is actually kind of hurts my eyes most of the time, but it is getting to the point where they

actually have improved the icons they've improved the window decorations and they improved a ton of things and it has potential to eventually you know even visually compete against gnome but right now gnome is definitely the more visually appealing but it's also not as powerful functionally as kde is here's the thing depends on which one you want at the end of the day i think the big problem the more visually appealing, but it's also not as powerful functionally as KDE is. Here's the thing, though. So it depends on which one you want. At the end of the day, I think the big problem, KDE's biggest problem is that there might be too much desktop

for what people really use today. I think a very common use case scenario for the Linux desktop is a couple of applications running all the time, like a web browser, a chat program, email probably. Throw in a terminal, please. Absolutely. And you're pretty much done. Yeah.

And you don't need a lot more functionality from your desk. That's why so many people are able to use Tiling Window Managers. Yeah, exactly. Now, that said, I too, Rotten, have gone down the path you had where I, I mean, I really spent some time. I got the icon-only launcher sidebar going for a dock. I got a, you know, a top bar going with the clock i mean it really made it look nice but it just still didn't feel as one cohesive product but i like i mean i i just i don't think that gnome feels like a cohesive product that's got certain pieces that are broken like and just to point out i'm a i'm a gnome fanboy. I've been using GNOME for a decade, and I actually love GNOME Shell and GNOME 3.

It is the reason why my current KDE setup looks like GNOME is because I actually enjoy the workflow of GNOME. So the guy who wrote that article said he hated that workflow and didn't want it anymore. I was like, well, I actually love that workflow. Yeah, it works for me too. And I will use it on either KDE or GNOME. It doesn't matter. I love that workflow. Yeah, it works for me too. And I will use it on either KDE or GNOME. It doesn't matter. I love that workflow. Yeah, me too. But the point is mainly that if I set up something in KDE, it will remember it.

It will save it. It will do exactly what I tell it to do. With GNOME, if I tell it to – I have to install an extension in order to get it to load an application on a particular workspace. But if I put it on a different monitor it won't remember that monitor yeah it's loaded i have to move everything i know i know i agree i agree there's and dolphin in my opinion dolphin is a better file manager than nautilus too in my opinion i would say dolphin is the better for linux just in general so that's that's that's gosh it kind of making me want to try kd out for like a week again kind I know, I'm actually kind of feeling dirty about

saying all this stuff as a GNOME fanboy. I even, I've released, I actually released updates and patches to extensions for GNOME because I used them and someone wasn't maintaining it, so I started maintaining it and stuff like that. And I still do it even while

I'm running KDE, so it makes me feel a little weird. But I have to acknowledge the fantastic features that KDE provides. I agree. Yeah, and you made it look pretty good. It didn't take so much effort to make it look good. Exactly. If it didn't take so much effort to do that, it would be a fantastic desktop environment.

How long do you think it took you? How long do you think you spent? To actually make it look right? Well, for me, it's not fair to comparison the time. For other people, it would take a lot longer because I'm a graphics artist. I know how to modify SVGs and everything like that, which, by the way, KDE is dependent on SVGs for the desktop shells themes. So if you don't know how to do that, you're pretty much hopeless. It is hopeless for you to do it because you have to learn how to modify SVGs to do that.

But you have to figure out what widgets fit. The very first time I did it, it took me probably about a week and a half. And this time it took me about two or three days because I had to first teach myself how does KDE do all these different things. And it was a lot more effort than I expected, but it was still possible to do it. But I think the majority of people who don't have the skill set I do would not have as fast of an experience. And even though it's still a couple days and it's not fast, I think it would be much worse

for them. Yeah, it took me a couple of days to get it the way I want. I might, gosh, dang it. But I actually have it. Yeah, I'm going to have to install it again. I'm going to have to give it a go. I can show you another, I actually have a whole. The very first time I made my GNOME-like KDE setup,

it looked different than what I have now. But I did a full layout of, here's a screenshot of what it looks like in here, because I finished it. It took me about a week and a half to do that. I don't know what I get. I mean, GNOME works for me, and I don't have sound issues.

That's what I keep coming back to. But I want to try it. When I try KDE for a little while, I mean, Gnome works for me and I don't have sound issues. That's what I keep coming back to. But I want to try it. I keep wanting, when I try KDE for you for a little while, I usually really enjoy it. So here's the other, here's the first last thing I'll say. The reason why I actually got really annoyed at Gnome, and I love Gnome. I got really annoyed by multiple monitor support. Because it is, it is like, not only does it not remember the applications where they're supposed to be, it actually wouldn't remember which one I wanted to be primary. And it would start breaking in the point where one monitor would want to take over to the primary, and then it would swap back and forth.

Weird things started happening. But so it just – it got so – it happened so many times that it just – I just kind of threw my hands up. I was like, well, let's see how KDE handles multiple monitors, and I haven't had a single problem with it at all. Yeah, we were talking at lunch. KDE does have pretty good monitor control. Yeah, all right, Rod, you convinced me.

Anybody else in the member room want to jump in on the topic of GNOME versus KDE when they switch between? Any final thoughts? I really want to recommend everybody go read the article. I thought it was a particularly good one, though. Alright, going once. Going twice. I think, as you mentioned before, there's definitely a spectrum

from the bare-bones GNOME, very polished, but not a lot of options, to KDE with all of its options. I'm curious to see over the last year or so that the GNOME community has come back or

learned their lesson from the initial GNOME 3 days. I hope so. I'm curious to see as time goes on if GNOME plus extensions are going to continue to be supported enough to eat into the user base of KDE users

that want all the options. Yeah, I mean, when... The extensions are actually very solid. This is actually a misconception I like to clear up about the GNOME extensions because I've been maintaining some and this is just... It's a problem with the GNOME version software checking

that it doesn't do it very well and it doesn't have, like, for example, Firefox does a much better solution. It's this version plus future versions. With GNOME it's this version or nothing. So if it doesn't detect in your metadata

that you are using that particular version you are currently on, it just breaks the extension. That's a really bad way to do it but that's their current solution for making sure that you're not running stuff that's broken. So people think that every single time you update, you're breaking

an extension, when really it's just because the version number's not telling it it's the right one. If you just go in and change that version number, almost like 90% of them work immediately. And it also means most of them, it's a quick update by the author to make it work too. So that's been happening like dash to dock is getting turned around immediately these days like that plug-in is getting fixed all the time now wes have you noticed um a change in

tone towards gnome 3 in the linux community yeah i would think so i mean probably two years ago a year and a half ago mostly negative yeah right at least in you know publicly facing yeah okay that's what i observed too but now it feels it feels like it may not be everyone's favorite. I usually use a tiling window manager at home, honestly, but I'm always happy to stick GNOME on something and use it. What's your favorite tiling window manager? I'm using Awesome currently. Nice.

Interesting. I think I'm going to try KD on a secondary machine, but I'm not planning to switch away from GNOME anytime soon. I just keep getting happier and happier with it. Probably just about in time to start hearing about the next GNOME 3.18 release too, which could be pretty cool. All right, well, if you guys have any thoughts on that story, we'd love to get your opinions,

especially if you've been recently trying one of the other desktops and have a good perspective. Go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com and look for the feedback thread for episode 101 of the Unplugged program. Now, on Sunday's Linux Action Show, we talked about the big changes coming to this OpenSUSE project, and I know several people wanted to give us some feedback on that. Before we get to that, I've got to thank DigitalOcean, sponsor of the Linux Unplugged program. And DigitalOcean is great.

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And pricing plans are only $5. That's where they start, $5 a month. And the pricing structure goes up from there. Really nice. Makes a lot of sense. And they even have hourly pricing available if you just want to do some testing. For $5, though, you're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD because they're all SSDs, one CPU, and a terabyte, a terabyte of transfer.

And DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. And they got a brand new one in Germany, which is a great location. Now, what I love is all of this is backed by Linux. It's all running on top of KVM, and all of the disks are SSD-based. So you're going to get really, really good performance. You log into DigitalOcean's interface. It works on your tablet. It works on your phone, it works on your desktop, you get HTML5 console access. So if you want to watch the machine post and all the way up to the login screen, you can do that. It is a slick system. They've really taken the best open source Linux technologies and wrapped it around in a package that makes it very presentable and very easy for you

to use. And I don't know if you've ever tried it, Wes. Oh, yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah? Oh, of course. So one of the things I love about DigitalOcean is, it's like, I know that if I want to go over and start getting working on something, the delay isn't going to be the creating the server or deploying the software. Like, that's no longer

the barrier anymore. Getting started on that stuff, which, ten years ago was like a two-week process to order the server and install the operating system, configure the firewall, rack it. Wait for the ticket to get updated. Yes, right. Talk to support. And now with DigitalOcean, you go over there and it's like, well, it's under a minute.

You have a Linux virtual machine deployed. And if you use our promo code DEO Unplugged, you'll get a $10 credit. And you can try out the $5 rig two months for free. And you can do one-click deployment of applications. Like I've done one-click deployment of Ubuntu 14.04 with Apache already just ready to go on there. So I don't have to bother with that.

And the nice thing is it's already subscribed to the repo, so it's going to get all the updates from Ubuntu. And I'll do local mirrors of the Ubuntu repos04 with Apache already just ready to go on there. So I don't have to bother with that. And the nice thing is it's already subscribed to the repo, so it's going to get all the updates from Ubuntu. And I'll do local mirrors of the Ubuntu repos too, so you can pull it down at like tens of megabytes a second. It's great. It's so cool to watch that. I love watching the updates go boom, boom, boom, boom. It feels like it's supercharged. Their interface is so great for managing all this.

Very intuitive. But the best part is they have an API to let you replicate it, which is really nice because there's some great apps around that. They have really, really good tutorials, too. In fact, go over to DigitalOcean. Remember, use the promo code D1Plugged. Check out that community section. They're updating this all the time.

Here's one, how to update the scaling of your web application on DigitalOcean. That's genius when you think about the fact that DigitalOcean is hourly pricing, so if you need to scale for a little while, that's cool. Oh, buddy, buddy, buddy, I've been waiting for this one. How to create a blog with Ghost and NGINX on Ubuntu 14.04. This is it. If you're going to do a blog for yourself or for your company, WordPress is great.

Mad props to WordPress. Check out Ghost. And they have a community tutorial on it right here. Or how to use ArangoDB. Are you familiar with Arango? I am not. I don't know what Arango... I like it.

It has avocados as it's a... I know where we can learn more though. Yes, exactly. DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code D-O-unplugged. They've also got FreeBSD if you're a masochist, CoreOS, Fedora 22, Debian, Ubuntu. I'm kidding about the FreeBSD thing. I think it's really cool they have support for it. It's actually

no technical joke either. They got that working in KVM. They worked upstream with the FreeBSD project. Same with CoreOS. They got that working in KVM. They worked upstream with the FreeBSD project. Same with CoreOS. They worked directly with the projects to make this stuff happen. It's really cool. And you can try it out two months for free when you use the promo code DOUnplugged. Go get yourself a Linux rig. You want to try de-Google-fying

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One lost user wrote, I don't really get why Chris and Noah are puzzled by SUSE and what OpenSUSE intend to do. The new distro will be SUSE Linux Enterprise to what CentOS is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There will be Tumbleweed, the bleeding edge, always rolling distro. They'll be in much better shape than Rawhide because OpenSUSE actually expects people to use it as a desktop OS as opposed to Rawhide is always porking. There will be OpenSUSE 42, which is going to be based on SUSE Linux Enterprise sources. People will be able to use it as such. Others do with like CentOS. It would be extremely easy for OpenSUSE and SUSE to switch between 42,

to switch to the Enterprise version and back and forth. It looks like a very smart move, he believes. Now, Rotten, you were watching live and we covered it, and you said you wanted to jump in on the feedback. So I'll open it up to you first, and then we'll kick around to other people. Rotten, what was your main takeaway from the coverage and your opinion on the setup well the first thing is that this guy is wrong the guy you just read wrote in it's that's wrong yeah it's not a centos to red hat i agree with that too i don't think it really

is a centos to red hat enterprise thing either yeah so basically what they're saying they've even specifically were asked if if they did this, was OpenSUSE going to become like an OpenSLE thing? And they said, no, definitely not. They're going to be doing their OpenSUSE is just going to be based on SLE, so it's going to have all the

same packages for SLE, but it's not going to have the, you know, it's not going to be the exact same thing. It's going to have SLE packages plus their own packages to create the OpenSUSE desktop. The goal was to have, like, an integration with SUSE and OpenSUSE, which they didn't used to have. There was a huge gap between the two. But also, sorry, my dog's actually drinking water. That's all right.

So we got a lot of different feedback riding on it, and some people like this a lot. So here was a response we got from R. Brown from Seuss. He says something like this is what he wanted to do. He gave us a couple links. He says, what we realized is we were building here doesn't fit into traditional models anymore. We find that for us, that we're not really serving the purpose they used to, traditional release models do, for a community-based distro or even enterprise distro perspective. With all the testing we do for Tumbleweed in our open QA process,

we've managed to make a rolling release that only rolls when we know the test, the thing isn't broken. So they test it first. Given the motivator for so many people for traditional community releases is I want the latest shiny new stuff, but I only want it when it works, Tumbleweed managed to do that without a 6-12 month waiting period.

Is that possible? Yeah. They actually had Gnome first before Arch. That doesn't mean that it's flawless. It wasn't flawless. I think it's an exaggeration to claim flawless, but it was it actually was it wasn't flawless i think the exact is an exaggeration to claim flawless but it was it was very stable and uh i tried it out because i was you know being

impatient and it actually was really good it didn't i didn't notice any huge breaks or anything and just i mean i noticed some like gnome specific things but that was just gnome things but the uh the point about tumbleweed though is they kind of explained in a weird diagram of what the initial goal is, is that Tumbleweed will be like the sources for Slee eventually in snapshot form. So Tumbleweed will be constantly being updated and maintained. And then at some point in like every couple of years or so, they would take a snapshot of Tumbleweed, throw it into SLEE, then SUSE would do their stuff to it. Then they would become the core base to OpenSUSE, which then does their own stuff on top of it. So basically what Noah was talking about last, how he wanted a desktop enterprise solution, that's pretty much what OpenSUSE is talking about on last how he wanted a desktop enterprise solution. That's pretty much what OpenSUSE is talking about.

Yeah. It seems to me, though, that OpenSUSE is essentially going to be just about as, and I think that's where the comparison to CentOS comes in, it's going to be just about as stale as Sluice Enterprise Linux, right? No. Because you think they'll replace certain components as they need to? Yes. They've already said that they've they were even thinking about having updating the desktop environments uh away from uh slea they haven't specified whether they're going to or not but

they said that there's a potential that they will so that there could absolutely be um like the core fundamental packages are not are going to be the same you I guess, stale, if you want to say it, like with SLE stuff. But the user space on top would be pretty much not as fast as Tumbleweed, but a lot faster than their current structure. So it would be kind of like an LTS base with a… Right, okay, that's what I was going to ask. Am I picturing the right thing when it's like... I guess, here's what I... And Richard, I really appreciate him responding in the subreddit too.

I guess what I don't quite understand is... How... I still don't... Why would I choose... Why would I choose... I guess I would have to wait and find out what components they're going to individually choose to replace and upgrade apart from SLEE before I know if OpenSUSE is going to fit for me.

Because right now it sounds like there's a lot of what-ifs. Like if they – well, no, hear me out. If they decide to update the desktop environment and the web browsers and things like that, all those user land applications, that's pretty slick. Kind of sounds like what Mint's doing. user land applications, that's pretty slick. Kind of sounds like what Mint's doing. But if they decide, well, we don't really have the manpower to do that, then it seems like it could get to be just a basic CentOS

kind of clone. And here's why I am concerned about that happening. A, I don't believe that OpenQA is going to catch all this stuff. I think the way you catch stuff in Linux a lot of times is just a function of a lot of people use it for a while, they eventually find a bug and they fix it it and then somebody patches that bug

and then a distro finally ships it. Otherwise... Right, because otherwise you could just use rolling all the time. So I think... I don't know if unit testing is really going to make a rolling distro that much stable over another one and I think you could have a bit of a reputation burn there. Okay, but that's point number one.

Now let me make a second point. Second point, the reason why I'm concerned more about OpenSUSE and what components they're going to replace is because I think if we're totally honest with ourselves, why are we in this position right now? Why are they making OpenSUSE 42? Why are they doing Tumbleweed? Why are they going to base OpenSUSE off of SLEE? Why? Because only a couple of people are working on the project anymore, OpenSUSE. Nobody's working on it. Nobody cares about it.

They're all working on Tumbleweed or SUSE Enterprise. They said so themselves in their own presentation and in their own blog posts. The fundamental problem with the last release of OpenSUSE is nobody wants to work on it. They all want to work on Tumbleweed or the big dog. And so if that is a problem today, how is that not going to be a problem two years, a year down the road when they have this thing that's based on something that's already done, but now they have this pain in the neck where they have to replace certain components and stay on top of that and ship it all the time? It seems like they'll eventually just be right back in the

same position they're at today. Tumbleweed will get all of the current active attention and Slee is going to get all of the stability and-focused attention. How does this solve their fundamental problem? Okay, so to answer one about what is the reason to use this, you use Arch, so everything is rolling anyway, so you would be Tumbleweed. The exact transition, you would just move to Tumbleweed, and you'd have the same stuff. Yeah, and I get that. Tumbleweed makes sense to me.

I get it. I don't know if I believe it's going to be as trouble-free as they say, but I bet it's going to be more trouble-free. But I saw Tumbleweed makes sense. SUSE Enterprise makes sense to me. And I also see from a business standpoint where they have the dedication and resources that it all makes sense. Okay. So the second one, you don't understand why they would do this.

Well, what do we – so OpenSUSE to me, 42, sounds like what it's going to be is a pretty cool product based on some pretty nice stable enterprise upstream source code. Now, then they're going to go, well, this chunk and this chunk and this chunk. And they've explained they've made it very easy to modularize and replace these chunks. They're going to say this chunk, this chunk, and this chunk we're going to swap out, and we're going to maintain this ourselves on top of this SLE base. KDE, GNOME, Firefox, whatever. We're going to maintain this on top of the Slee base ourselves. Well, then aren't they just getting right back on this treadmill that they've been running this entire time that they all jumped ship from?

I mean, I'm mixing a lot of analogies here, but isn't this, what is different? What changes? Isn't the core issue the focus for the distro? Wasn't the core issue that sort of prompted this was that nobody was working on OpenSUSE? And I guess what this sounds like is it sounds like we're trying to manage OpenSUSE a little bit. We need some, you know, Red Hat has CentOS and Fedora. They're doing Fedora Core. They're making Fedora Workstation and Fedora Cloud.

They're getting very serious with the Atomic project about making Fedora an actual cloud deployable system. You're seeing places like Rackspace. You're seeing places like DigitalOcean deploy Fedora, an actual cloud deployable system. You're seeing places like Rackspace. You're seeing places like DigitalOcean deploy Fedora. You're not seeing them deploy OpenSUSE. That's got to bother them. So they want to get OpenSUSE into a place where it could be part of a VPS package. It could be something that's installed on demand. It's kind of embarrassing, isn't it?

That one of the biggest, for a long time, well-known distributions has had very little game in the whole cloud space. Like Ubuntu just came and ate their lunch by surprise, and now I agree they have to do something to make OpenSUSE relevant in this space. It would be great for them. And I think this could do it. I think this would do it. If I knew OpenSUSE was based on an enterprise source code, man, I'd feel a lot better about deploying that on a production VPS for sure.

I still don't see, though, why they are incentivized to maintain these individual layers of it and keep those competitive when they're not incentivized to do it today. That's the part I'm not seeing. Okay, there's two things. There's the gap between SUSE and OpenSUSE. For example,

with Red Hat, they have the code in Fedora. They have code in CentOS that they can take improvements from Fedora and CentOS and easily put them in the Red Hat if they deem worthy to be in there. SUSE and OpenSUSE don't have that. They don't have the integration that Red Hat does. So for one, it solves that integration problem because the core structure of OpenSUSE is going to be based on SLEE, and then Tumbleweed would eventually become snapshots for SLEE. based on SLEE, and then Tumbleweed would eventually become snapshots for SLEE. So they would get this integration level back into

the benefits of SUSE with the backing and funding of everything, and actually have a lot of work that's not just on the OpenSUSE side. So right now, the reason why, your example, that they didn't have much attention in OpenSUSE because they wanted to Tumbleweed, well, it's a community effort in that case, and

the people choose what they want to work on. And Open SUSE didn't have a lot of people working on the Open SUSE stable release because they wanted to be on tumbleweed, and they didn't have a base that they could build on to actually make that work. So this is actually solving that problem. So it doesn't matter what they want.

Because they're not going to have to put that work in. Because the whole point of Open SUSE right now, the reason that was a problem, is because they only had going to have to put that work in because the whole point of open sucer right now that the reason that was a problem is because they only had a few a handful of people working on because because fundamental thing that they're they're handling everything now they don't have to handle because they're going to pull it in from tumbleweed because they're going to do the work in tumbleweed and and from sleep and then they'll use like a hybrid and then plus i'm sure they've i and maybe you could tell me if this is true or not, have they finished development on LibMagic that totally resolves all of

the library issues between major versions when you're going from a stable enterprise distro to something rolling? Does LibMagic just handle all of that? I don't know. I mean, because we've, I mean, like, let's look at Cinnamon. Why has Cinnamon had so many problems landing in Arch when it's a rolling distribution?

Because GTK underneath changes, and Cinnamon depends on an older version of GTK, and then all of a sudden, you can't install Cinnamon on a rolling distro anymore. Now, is Tumbleweed going to make the decision in this case to hold GTK back, or am I going to be able to replace the entire GTK installation using the OpenSUSE build service? How are they legitimately going to solve these real-world problems that have plagued every other Linux distro since the invention of a rolling distro? How are they going to solve that? They're not going to roll everything.

Tumbleweed will roll everything, and you're not going to have any kind of connection with the stability issues whatsoever. The part where they're going to pull stuff from Tumbleweed when it suits, for example, application of like firefox and things like that yeah we'll not have any kind of that makes sense but it seems like it seems like then there's going to be limitations like there's going to be a certain pressure to uh to keep open susa at least in somewhat compatibility sync with tumbleweed so that way they can move more stuff over because

the further those two drift the less and less things they should be able to pull over from tumbleweed i would think well yeah but like fundamental things yes that'd be the problem but they also are saying that it's not just tumbleweed that they're pulling from they're also going to be as the community of open susa not just the tumbleweed yeah sure but why isn't that happening today see that's part of the argument i don't get yeah sure they can custom develop that stuff they can make that stuff keep working on OpenSUSE. They could be doing that today and they're not doing it. I mean, they are doing it, but barely. They're barely getting it out the door.

That's because they are doing everything. You know, that could be, right? Maybe this will be enough of a pressure release. Yeah, boy, that'd be great. Good point. That'd be really cool if this could... I have these questions that I've raised and I guess sometimes when I ask these kinds of questions,

it sounds like I think it's a really dumb idea, or it sounds like I don't think they should do it, and that's not the case at all. I'm just wondering, like, how are they going to... I guess what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to identify what I perceive to be challenges they're going to have to overcome, and I'm really glad somebody's trying this approach, because I don't really think the Fedora one's going to

necessarily resonate for a lot of people on servers. I just think that there is a great space in here for OpenSUSE to fill with this sort of SLE-based upstream source codes that give me a sort of assurance that it's based on a really quality enterprise product. I think this could be a killer. I'm not saying

it's going to be a flop, but I am saying I think there's going to be significant challenges that I don't quite see all the solutions to. So I'm not trying to poop on it. Well, I mean, I just think that the fundamental changes is that the people who were working on the stuff to improve the user space in OpenSUSE and they also had to deal with the core fundamentals as well, but now they don't have to do that. so they can do a lot more even in the open SUSE stable release level without the tumbleweed. So they can – like the pressure release is the biggest benefit of this,

but you also have the people who want a stable base with the rolling top or not even necessarily rolling but just more up-to-date than a regular release of most distros. I got it. Oh, man. I think for me, I think, like, because I don't really care what happens with SLE or OpenSUSE so much as I think Tumbleweed is going to get really appealing to a user like me. So not only do you have some really interesting technologies there, but I also find the technologies around SUSE or OpenSUSE to be pretty sexy. Like the OpenSUSE build service and the images where you can go custom machine

and crank that out and download that as an ISO. And it's like, here's my machine already pre-set up. Like all that stuff really makes me hot. I think that's super great. And so you build a really great distro around that. And, you know, I actually think Zipper is a pretty decent technology. And I like that they're bold enough to back ButterFS, even if I think it's currently a train wreck that makes people lose data.

But, you know, like Martin from the Netherlands wrote in. And Martin said, what makes OpenSUSE unique is that it's easy enough to understand for anyone with a Windows technical background. You kind of have the Windows paradigm when you use their KDE desktop. Yes, it's a lot like the control panel. All system settings can be configured via a GUI, unlike Fedora. And at the same time, it remains fully focused on open source, where everything is contributed back upstream, unlike Ubuntu, which is... They have a corporate backing, giving me a feeling that the distribution

won't disappear anytime soon. He says, and I love this line, Martin says, it's like the Toyota of Linux distributions. It's a bit boring to drive, but from a technical and reliability standpoint, it's the best. That's not bad. That's not a bad way to put it, really. And I don't think that's a slam at all.

I think it's a really good spot to be in as a distro, especially if you want people installing your servers. All right, guys. Anybody have any closing thoughts before we close the books on this one? Well, finally, just the OBS is another example of the updating software. So, like, the PPAs that Ubuntu have, OBS are going to provide a similar thing, but a lot more organized way to do it. And more approachable.

The cool thing is not only is the sources from Slee coming to OpenSUSE, they're actually going to the OBS. So really anybody who wants to get a source can do it. You can actually, if you wanted to, maybe. This is just like, I'm completely talking out of my butt right now, but SUSE Studio plus the OBS plus the SLE releases,

maybe you can make your own SLE. Yeah, I think you definitely could. I think that's a definite, wow, yeah, especially with the build service, that's going to be a thing. That's definitely going to be, and that could be great for enterprises. Oh, yeah, definitely. Ah, good thought, good thought. Well, Wes, man, thank you for joining me in studio today. My pleasure. It's good going to be, and that could be great for enterprises. Oh, yeah, definitely. Ah, good thought, good thought. Well, Wes, man, thank you for joining me in studio today.

My pleasure. It's good having you here, and thank you, everybody in the Mumble Room, for joining us and giving us your thoughts. If you'd like to join the Unplugged program, hang on our virtual lug, go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. You get the live times over there. We do it over at jblive.tv where you can have your Flash player armed and ready to go. No, disable Flash this week.

That's our mission. Disable Flash. Use HLS, RTSP, disable Flash this week. That's our mission. Disable Flash. Use HLS, RTSP, RTMP. We've got it there linked. Or go to jblive.fm and listen in audio. Now, we do it over at jblive.tv. You don't have to use Flash if you don't want to, but we do it at 1 p.m. or 2 p.m.?

2 p.m. 2 p.m. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Because we've got to have time for lunch, guys. Right? Got to have time for lunch. And beer.

And beer. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com for feedback to this week's episode. And join us right back here next Tuesday. and another show is in the bag. All right. Any post-show topics we wanted to get to before we skedadds? I got a meeting I got to get to in a little bit. I feel like I talked just as much as you did. Yeah, you did talk a lot.

But it was good because it was a good thing you were here today because it was topics that were up your alley. I'm glad we got it covered. First-hand Susie experience. Great topics and great conversation, were here today because it was topics that were up your alley. I'm glad we got it covered. First-hand sushi experience. Great topics and great conversation, guys. Yeah, it was. Thank you. And it's great having Wes. It's fun having somebody I can look over to and talk to because otherwise I'm just standing here by myself.

Now, there was a privacy topic I wanted to retouch on. But maybe, I don't know, since we don't have a lot of time, maybe it would be better to address it next time. We can actually spend some serious time on it. Mumble's got an update that's coming out soon for the next version of 1.3. It's not going to have the stupid lips.

What is it going to have instead? It's actually replacing the theme with an actual good theme from this guy named Xpoke, and he made something called Metro Mumble, which looks pretty slick. Is that the skin you and I were already using?

Metro Mumble. It does look pretty though, doesn't it? So, a thing to note though, if you have a custom theme already applied, and then you update, it will unapply your custom theme and default to the light new theme.

So if you're using the dark theme, like I was, it'll just go away randomly and you wonder why, and then you go and see that, oh, there's new options in the look and feel section. Not only is it new options, they've completely rebuilt the system, so the skin structure where you can control what you use is gone.

You have to change a new arbitrary folder structure that you have to place the themes in, and they don't tell you on Linux where your stuff is. They tell you on Windows and only Windows. So I had to figure out where everything was. And it's like a stupid arbitrary location that even in its own selection is just absurd. Because it is...

I'm going to type it in the chat right now, actually. Okay, so I'm so close to jeopardizing my mumble setup here. Is this just a theme that you could apply to an existing mumble? Yeah, I just applied it. Yeah, yeah. You can apply it to your existing mumble right now. But in the new version... Go ahead, if you want to download and play it, you can. It's up to you. All you have to do is restart the mumble. Yeah, I just applied it. Yeah, yeah. You can apply it to your existing mumble right now, but in the new version. Go ahead. If you want to download and play it, you can. It's up to you.

All you have to do is restart the mumble. Oh, I didn't even have to restart it. I just hit apply and then bam, I had it like a boost. I think. Well, some of the icons. Oh, yeah, you're right. I'll do that. I'll restart. I posted the location of the themes folder now. It's local share mumble mumble themes. And the mumble mumble themes. And the mumble

twice is important. And also the themes folder does not exist. You have to create it first and then put the theme in there. So hey, would you mind, Mr. Corpse, if we reset just really quick so we can put this in the pre-show since a lot of people listening to this show use mumble. If you wanted to say,

how can we do this? Actually, why don't we make this the mumble pre-show? the uh yeah so maybe the theme where to get it and how where to put it on linux while i go grab this printout and that'll be like the pre-show all right i'm muting my mic there you go have it okay so mumble is um they're actually updating to a new version it's this currently you can get in a ppa or in the in a snapshot version, and it's 1.3. They're instituting a new default theme, which is actually really nice looking. But you can get it right now.

It's for use in 1.2 to add as a skin. And you get it from the GitHub thing I posted in IRC. And put it wherever you want. And you can just go into your settings for configure and then choose the QSS file inside

of the skins structure. This is how you do it in 1.2. In 1.3, it's automatically already available and you can choose between the light and the dark. The problem with that is that in 1.3, it's automatically already available, and you can choose between the light and the dark. The problem with that is that in 1.3, the theme is embedded into the program, so you can't change anything. And one of the reasons this theme is actually awesome is because the majority of the icons are SPGs. So, like, for example, when you open this theme by default, the non-talking icon is red and I think that is hideous especially when it goes into my

system tray and it just falls. So you can change that in the SVG code which is a slight hex file or hex value. Change it to white or gray or whatever fits best on your theme and it's good to go. So the problem with the 1.3 is that you

can't do that unless you download this theme, and it's good to go. So the problem with the 1.3 is that you can't do that unless you download this theme and put it in the correct themes folder. And the correct theme folder is an arbitrary location that actually does not exist. You have to create the folder there. It is the location I just posted in IRC. It's.local slash share slash mumble slash mumble. Then themes folder does not exist.

You create the theme folder. Then you put this extracted theme into that folder. And then the new 1.3 snapshot will notice that theme has been added, and you can select it from the dropdown. And it will save all of your modifications and things like that. So I just applied it and lost all my audio.

That shouldn't make any difference for the themes. And I've just switched back and the audio came back. That's very weird. It's just skin. It shouldn't change anything. Yeah, it doesn't change anything whatsoever.

I got the new theme installed and working. I'm running the new theme on 1.3, so... Yeah, I've been... The thing that was annoying to me is that when I had the theme already and then they updated and it went to the same theme, but it turned into white. And it also essentially ignored all the modifications I did because it wasn't looking for the right folder anymore. And when I went to ask them where it was, they had no idea.

had no idea the the developers or maybe not the developers that actually made the change but the the people who are the support team in mumble for the irc had no clue where the stuff was located in linux they sent me a link that said here's here's where it is like well that's windows only and that's not very helpful uh so essentially i had to figure it out myself and it took me about 30 minutes but that's the folder structure where it is now. So at least, you know, no one else has figured it out. And I'm going to edit their wiki so it actually displays it properly.